Discussion of some representative work from the scholars of foreign policy provides a review of the literature that can guide researchers in examining the separate yet interrelated stages of the decision-making process and that can demonstrate the importance of sequences in the process of foreign policymaking.
Article
Guy Ziv
An improved understanding of foreign policy learning necessitates a clarification of what foreign policy learning is, who learns, and how such learning occurs. Cognitive and social psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists situated in a variety of subfields have contributed to the understanding of foreign policy learning, a multidisciplinary area of inquiry. Learning theorists seek to show how a change in an actor’s beliefs due to experience or observation can lead to changes at other units, such as organizations and within the government. This cognitive dimension is important because actors may pursue a new course of action for politically expedient reasons rather than having genuinely “learned”—a distinction referred to as “complex” vs. “simple” learning.
Foreign policy learning can be internal or external. The former type of learning entails what individuals, governments, or organizations learn from their prior experience. Learning theorists who focus on the individual level of analysis borrow insights from political psychology in an effort to shed light on the personal characteristics, the belief structures, and the cognitive psychological mechanisms of political actors that can better inform policymaking. Leaders whose cognitive structures are described as relatively open and complex—like Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose learning brought about the dramatic changes that ultimately led to the demise of the Soviet Union—are more likely to alter their beliefs than their cognitively closed and simple counterparts.
Yet external learning occurs as well. Policy diffusion studies show that learning can result from demonstration effects. Foreign policy learning via diffusion is not instrumental, but instead occurs through osmosis. Privatization in the former communist states, China’s Foreign Direct Investment liberalization, and the diffusion of environmental norms in the European Union are examples of learning that is contagious, not chosen. A more conscious mode of learning than diffusion is policy transfer, which entails policymakers’ transferring ideas from one country and implementing them in another. Technological innovations, unlike lessons that involve political ideology, are generally easier lessons to transfer—for example, Japan’s success in applying lessons from the West to modernize its army in the second half of the 19th century.
The constraints to foreign policy learning are formidable. Decision makers are not always open to reconsidering views that challenge their beliefs. Leaders tend to resort to, and misuse, analogies that prevent learning. Even a change in a decision maker’s beliefs may not lead to foreign policy change, given the myriad political pressures, bureaucratic hurdles, and economic realities that often get in the way of implementing new ideas. Indeed, foreign policy learning and foreign policy change are not synonymous.
Scholars face significant obstacles in studying foreign policy learning. There is no consensus on the definition of learning, on what constitutes learning, on how actors learn, when they learn, or on how to assess whether learning has taken place. Despite attempts to make sense of the confusion, scholars face the daunting challenge of improving understanding of how learning is shaped and funneled through the interaction of agents and the structures in which they are situated, as well as the relationship between learning and foreign policy change.
Article
Marijke Breuning
Role theory first emerged as an approach to the study of foreign policy with the seminal work of Holsti, who argued that decision makers’ conceptions of their state’s role on the world stage influenced that state’s foreign policy behavior. Holsti’s approach was ahead of its time. The potential of role theory to contribute to the agent-structure debate has not always been appreciated. In fact, early research employing role theory often maintained a close connection to structural theories of international relations, especially among U.S.-based scholars.
In the last decade or so, there has been a renewed interest in role theory that differs from earlier work in that it more clearly connects with psychological approaches to foreign policy analysis. It also takes more seriously the domestic sources of role theory through inquiry into horizontal and vertical role contestation. Much of this new work intersects with constructivism, although it remains grounded in empiricism.
As foreign policy analysis increasingly seeks to understand the foreign policies of a broader array of states—including smaller states that face significant constraints on their ability to act in the international arena—role theory provides an attractive framework. Its focus on decision makers’ conceptions of their state’s role in international politics enhances the ability to make sense of the foreign policies of a wider array of states in the global arena. In essence, role theory allows foreign policy analysis to move beyond a U.S.-centric or global-north-centric field to become more broadly comparative.
Article
France turned to European integration out of an awareness of the weakness of its international position in 1950. In particular it was conscious of the way in which it had been marginalized in the debate about the treatment of postwar Germany, forced to watch as a much stronger Federal Republic re-emerged than the French were comfortable with. But it was this defeat that spurred the radicalism of the Schuman Plan—the bold announcement by the French foreign minister in May 1950 that his country was willing jointly to operate its coal and steel sectors with Germany and whichever other European states felt able to join. The idea of building a strong European structure to control both French and German heavy industry was not an idealistic move, but something that would help avoid the likely triumph of German industry and the damage it could do to French recovery. In the process it would save the Monnet Plan, the economic blueprint for French postwar reconstruction put together by the author of the Schuman Plan, Jean Monnet. But it also would advance the wider goal of establishing a European framework within which Germany’s re-emergence could be controlled. That same framework, furthermore, appealed to Adenauer’s Germany as one that would both facilitate the new state’s international rehabilitation and bind the country securely to the Western bloc. To this central Franco-German bargain four other European countries would rally, partly out of enthusiasm for the wider goal of European unity, partly through fear of exclusion from a Europe built exclusively by their two largest neighbors. But crucially for future developments the United Kingdom would choose to abstain principally because it was too content with the European status quo of 1950 to need to embark on institutional experiments. This constituted a choice, the repercussions of which have endured into the early 21st century. The Schuman Plan thus constitutes a vital formative episode in the European integration process: it inaugurated a key French tactic and German response, it determined the cast list of the early integration story, and it introduced an institutional structure and modus operandi that, significantly modified, still lie at the heart of the 21st-century European Union.
Article
Dan Bulley
Ethics and foreign policy have long been considered different arenas, which can only be bridged with great analytical and practical difficulty. However, with the rise of post-positivist approaches to foreign policy, much greater attention has been paid to the way that ethical norms and moral values are embedded within the way states understand their own actions and interests, both enabling and constraining their behavior. Turning to these approaches raises a different question to whether ethics and foreign policy can mix, that of how best to understand, analyze, and critique the role that ethics inevitably play within foreign policy making? What are required are perspectives which, instead of constructing an ethical theory in the abstract and applying it to a concrete situation, start from the ethics of the foreign policy arena itself.
Two ways of looking at ethics are especially useful in this regard: a virtue-ethics approach and a relational-ethics approach. These can be best explored by observing how they work in a particular foreign policy context, such as the highly controversial U.K. decision to join the invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003. This was a policy where ethics came particularly to the fore in both the decision-making process and its justification. The case study can therefore help show the types of questions virtue and relational ethics ask, the way they work as analytical and critical frameworks, and the problems they raise for the role of ethics in foreign policy. They also point toward important future directions for research in the area.
Article
John Barkdull
International agreements on environmental issues are the result of the coordination of states’ foreign policies. To understand the international politics of the environment requires attention to the institutional, social, economic, and cognitive factors that determine foreign policies. Although nearly every foreign policy bears on environmental concerns, the focus is on the policies that states adopt centered on humanity’s relationship to the natural world and ecology. Scholarship on environmental policy and foreign policy has not developed distinctive schools of thought. However, organizing scholarship according to a theoretically grounded typology reveals affinities among various scholarly works: systemic, societal, and state-centric approaches can be grouped according to whether they emphasize power, interests, or cognitive factors. Most studies of environmental foreign policy are oriented toward problem solving—identifying discrete problems in existing institutional arrangements and pointing toward solutions to these problems that do not question the institutions fundamentally. This orientation may not be adequate if crossing planetary boundaries leads to environmental challenges so severe that current institutions cannot cope. Climate change poses just such a challenge, and the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere means a future crisis is predictable. Thus, scholars might be best advised to orient toward critical theory, which seeks feasible alternatives to existing arrangements. The study of foreign policy toward the environment would be most useful in helping scholars and policy makers to identify and surmount barriers to transformational changes that would enable humanity to cope with future environmental crisis.
Article
Charles G. Ripley
Critical discourse analysis continues to remain a valuable method for understanding foreign policy. Situated in the broader interpretive methodological approach to the social sciences, it challenges the ontological and epistemological assumptions of more positivist methodologies by observing that the world is not pregiven, but socially constructed. In essence, we live in an intersubjective world where discourse serves as a powerful tool to set agendas, produce meaning, legitimize interests, and enforce power structures. Scholars devoted to discourse analysis enrich our understanding of foreign policy by highlighting the powerful role that discourse ultimately plays.
One useful way of understanding its value is through representational practices. Relying upon the study of discourse from a wide range of sources (politicians, policymakers, scholars, journalists, and film), this research program emphasizes discursive representations. Far from being neutral representations, the United States constructs a U.S.-centric view of the world based on its own images, identities, and interests, while marginalizing the voices and experiences of others. U.S. foreign policies are described as positive. Those of other countries, particularly U.S. so-called enemies, are negative.
Our knowledge of the world comes from these representational practices, which in turn has serious implications for foreign policy. Ultimately, discursive activities are used not only to frame and define foreign policy initiatives, but also sell such policies to the broader public. U.S. military interventions help illustrate this point. Interventions in Panama and Iraq become “Just Cause” and “Iraqi Freedom,” whereas interventions by, say, Russia are “acts of aggression.” Discourse often develops into binary oppositions that inform policy and create and sustain a dominant world position. Compared to the Global South, the United States is “developed” and “civilized,” while other nations are “underdeveloped” and “uncivilized.”
Discourse analysis is not limited to military intervention. Scholars have applied the approach to a broad array of foreign policy initiatives, ranging from foreign aid and diplomacy to international economics. Nor is the approach limited to the United States; it has evolved into a far-reaching research program that offers insight into the foreign policy of any state.
Discourse analysis stands in stark contrast to the more rationalist approaches, such as neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism. These approaches, related to scientific positivism, emphasize self-interest, rational actors, material factors, objectivity, and causal hypotheses. Academics related to this scholarly community have expressed dissatisfaction with discourse analysis. Most important, critics point out that there is an objective reality, and therefore, research has little relevancy for the real world. But scholars who focus on discourse concede that there is a reality; however, reality has no value until we attach meaning to it. The deadly attacks of September 11, 2001, happened, but they remain neutral until discursive activities (enemy, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, and so on) frame them and inform foreign policy. Consequently, such representations have real-world relevancies, justifying war and surveillance, among other courses of action. Critical discourse analysis, as a result, has significant value for understanding foreign policy in the past, present, and future.
Article
David Houghton
Most constructivist work in IR has attempted to account for very general outcomes in the international system, most notably the well-known research of Alexander Wendt. Whether we live in a “Kantian,” “Lockean,” or “Hobbesian” world, for instance, is in a sense a socially constructed thing rather than flowing from some inevitable structure or theory of human nature. Nevertheless, some important constructivist work has focused on more specific foreign policy outcomes, research that is examined here in depth. Constructivist analyses tend to focus on “how possible” questions rather than attempting to “explain” particular decisions, and this offers a useful addition or corrective to more traditional analyses of foreign policy. They also attempt to understand the general foreign policy orientations of states, often relying on notions of culture, role, and identity.
But such approaches have not yet fully matured into comprehensive approaches to foreign policy, in at least two senses. First of all, current constructivist approaches are somewhat limited by a focus on the social dimensions of foreign policy rather than individual ones, being sociological rather than psychological in nature. This is sometimes not an issue, but it becomes a problem when variation between decision makers with the same social identity is the object of interest or where norms are in conflict with one another. Secondly, there have been relatively few attempts to turn constructivism into a normative theory. Arguably, in order to become a fully rounded theory (as opposed to a loose framework), constructivism needs a mechanism by which it can influence actual decision makers, very few of whom currently describe themselves in opinion polls as being constructivists, as opposed to realists or liberals.
And yet both of these problems can potentially be remedied. Firstly, constructivist approaches may be combined with psychological approaches that supplement their sociological focus. Both constructivism and the psychological approach to decision making are ideational in nature rather than material; in other words, they share the belief that what people think is “out there” is often more important than what actually is. Indeed, the psychological approach to foreign policy provided a major source of inspiration for the early constructivists. Secondly, constructivist approaches can offer policy makers prescriptive advice as to how they should or ought to behave. After reviewing the literature on understanding foreign policy outcomes, this article suggests the outlines of an applied constructivism that decision makers in government would find positively useful. There is a Realpolitik and an Idealpolitik, but can there be a “Konstruktpolitik”? At least six principles might guide the development of normative constructivism. Chief among these is the axiom, “if you can’t change the physical, change the social.” Other principles include the effort to initiate “norm cascades,” the encouragement (or discouragement) of self-fulfilling beliefs and self-negating beliefs, acceptance of the role of agency, and the conscious use of argument and language as tools of persuasion.
Article
Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens
In recent years, significant effort has been applied to understanding and empirically testing the concept of policy entrepreneurship in a range of different settings. Despite these efforts, studies to date have tended to focus on policy entrepreneurs in domestic policy settings. Few have articulated the potential role that policy entrepreneurs play in understanding foreign policy decision-making. Coupled with theories and evidence from the field of foreign policy analysis, the concept of policy entrepreneurship lends itself to analyzing how actors in the foreign policy space draw attention to problems, advance workable proposals, and link outcomes to symbolic values. This article introduces and applies a framework for the analysis of policy entrepreneurs seeking to influence foreign policy decision-making. This framework is then used to underpin illustrative case studies of foreign policy entrepreneurs. The variety of recent scholarly contributions regarding policy entrepreneurs and foreign policy suggests that many more opportunities exist for such work to be conducted in the future. This is an exciting prospect. Valuable, generalizable insights are more likely to emerge from such a collective research enterprise if the various individual contributions are informed by greater conceptual coherence.
Article
Frédéric Charillon
As a transdisciplinary puzzle, between international relations and public policy, foreign policy analysis (FPA) owes much to the study of decision-making processes and its early pioneers (Richard Snyder, James Rosenau, Harold and Margaret Sprout . . . ). Formulated and implemented by state agents, foreign policy fully belongs to the field of public policy studies, whose approaches have proved relevant to analyze its formulation. Still, it remains singular for several reasons. In constant interdependence with extraterritorial and mostly unpredictable actors or events, it is more reactive (or at least less proactive) than most domestic policies. Vulnerable to various transnational linkages, foreign policy also leads the analyst to rethink several pillars of public policy studies, such as the role of public opinion, the nature of elites, or the feasibility of evaluation. Its implementation, in particular, depends on the leeway resulting from foreign processes initiated in remote states or societies. Because what is at stake is national identity, reputation, or status, the national interest, and war and peace, the possibility of nonrational, psychologically biased, or even passionate responses to a political problem is higher. The emergence of nonstate actors (nongovernmental organizations, companies, religious groups), substate entities (regions, federated states), and suprastate organizations in international politics is a compelling factor that urges us to rethink foreign policy as public policy. The fading boundaries between domestic and international dimensions, as well as between public and private strategies, have a deep impact on the analysis. The theorization and practice of new kinds of policy networks are likely to be at the heart of future research agendas, both in international relations and public policy studies.
Article
Andrea Grove
Why do leaders make foreign policy decisions that often appear irrational or engage in major reversals of previous policy to the extent that observers wonder at their calculations? The field of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) offers multiple ways to approach questions of decision-making. Many kinds of variables are explored, in the general areas of elites, institutions, and ideas. The focus on leadership and decision-making is especially rich for comparative purposes, because it is open to specification of different contexts within which leaders operate. The poliheuristic theory (PH) and other work emphasizing the importance of the domestic context have provided explanatory power about the factors affecting leader decision-making. Extensive application of PH has shown that decisions about foreign policy are often made according to a noncompensatory principle (the acceptability heuristic): Leaders use a shortcut in which options that threaten their political position are ruled out. Generally, the metric is about domestic politics—an option has to leave the leader in a good position with his or her domestic audience. But much of FPA work has been based largely on case studies of Western or other developed states, or at least not approached in the context of non-Western or Global South states theoretically—in a way that recognizes it as governed by generalizable principles different from the Western context. What we know from scholars of Global South politics is that in fact the considerations of non-Western leaders can be quite distinct. They focus more on regime security than the Western notion of national security. We must question whether position in domestic politics is the primary noncompensatory guide. Further, threats to that security come from both inside and outside the state’s borders and encompass economic concerns too, not only military calculations. In order to comprehend foreign policies around the globe, frameworks have to take into account how leaders conduct “intermestic” policy (where lines are blurred between the international and domestic). For these states, the models for intermestic policymaking differ from Western models.
The analyst needs to understand two aspects: the threats the regime faces and the constituencies the leader sees as crucial to sustaining survival and controlling those threats.
Analysis of how a leader uses a “framing threat” strategy and a “broadening audience” strategy can be used as tools to indicate the two criteria (threats the regime faces; internal/societal groups and external constituencies). By focusing on the analysis of the intermestic uses of threat, we gain insight into the most crucial priorities for the decision-maker and thus how the noncompensatory decision rule is applied. “Acceptable” policies must address these threats. Second, examining how a leader uses the broadening audience strategy shows us on which constituencies the leader calls as supporters and provides an indication of how the noncompensatory decision rule is applied. Indeed, we cannot only ask if the leader has legitimacy; we must answer the query, “legitimate to whom?” These audiences often cross borders. Integration of several FPA perspectives with work by Global South scholars provides a rich framework that sheds light on previously “puzzling” foreign policy decisions. If we keep domestic and foreign policy separate in our models, we are missing a key dimension of LDC politics: Underdevelopment of regime security and the legitimacy that helps provide it are tied to interests and identities that are transnational in nature.
Article
Diversionary explanations are a key FPA approach to understanding how domestic politics shape foreign policy and, in particular, the resort to force and risk of war, arguing that increasingly vulnerable leaders manipulate foreign policy in order to enhance their domestic political position. This literature has emerged in major ways since Levy’s early critique in which he noted wide disparity between the lack of theoretical rigor and empirical findings in political science research and the richness of qualitative research by historians offering compelling cases of diversionary wars such as the First World War. Nearly three decades later, however, this situation has significantly changed. A vibrant political science literature has emerged that provides significant empirical evidence based on, first, longitudinal studies of mostly the U.S. case and the presidential use of force since World War II (WWII); and, second, cross-national studies that capture variance in the diversionary resort to force across regime types (and subtypes) and different international contexts. In contrast, historical literature on the origins of World War I (WWI) has come to view the German case as more complex and has placed it into comparative perspective with the other four great powers. Historical research suggests that leaders in all five powers faced rising domestic opposition in the prewar decades; that they subsequently adopted new (yet varied) political strategies for containing opposition; and, at the brink of war, that diversionary and other political motivations played out in indirect and different ways. This article reviews these literatures and suggests that there has been some convergence of themes in the research of political scientists and historians. Consistent with FPA approaches, these literatures point to complex patterns of domestic oppositions across different institutional arenas, contingencies affecting the willingness and ability of leaders to resort to diversionary force, the role of agency stemming from leader beliefs about political stability and the consequences of risking war, and the importance of decision making dynamics in the ultimate resort to war.
Article
Mark Schafer and Gary Smith
How do the beliefs of leaders affect foreign policy decision-making processes and outcomes? This question has been central to the study of foreign policy decision making (FPDM), yet it receives scant attention in the broader international relations literature. Although many controversies and debates surround the issue of specifically how political leaders’ beliefs affect foreign policy decisions and outcomes, there is one key assumption in this literature that is universally accepted: leaders matter. Individual leaders, their unique beliefs, and their distinctive cognitive limitations affect both the quality of the decision-making process and the direction of the foreign policy outcomes. The beliefs and images leaders hold act as powerful frames and limitations to incoming information. Despite the rich history of the field, scholars who study beliefs still have much more work to do to expand the generalizability of the qualitative findings in the literature. Scholars need more data, deriving from more sources, for more leaders, so that they can generate larger and more comprehensive datasets. Indeed, there is a great opportunity to expand this field of research and to paint a clearer picture of the decision-making process.
Article
Andreas Fahrmeir
Narratives of interesting, remarkable, or exemplary diplomatic and military events have traditionally occupied a prominent place in historiography. Addressed to actors shaping foreign policy, educated elites, or a more broadly conceived public, and varying widely in geographical and chronological coverage, histories of foreign policy pursue two goals. One is to provide comprehensive information, allowing readers to obtain an overview of past decisions and actions in the expectation that this will enhance the understanding of their short-, medium-, and long-term consequences. The second goal is to offer an analysis of factors determining foreign policy and its success or failure either generally or in more specific settings. In doing so, they offer orientation or concrete advice based on an authority acquired by profound knowledge of the past and the recognition of recurrent patterns (or “laws”).
The fact that these goals are not entirely compatible contributes to problems that accompany this intellectual pursuit, and which are distinct from empirical and conceptual difficulties involved in reconstructing past foreign policy. Any presentation of historical developments contains (debatable) hypotheses on causal relationships, even if they are only expressed via the selection of facts and the literary structure of a historical narrative. There are various interpretations of any major turning point, and it is never easy to choose between them. Furthermore, the identification of patterns in the past has rarely resulted in the accurate prediction of future events; in fact, misconceived historical analogies or trust in supposed perennial rules governing foreign policy can contribute to exacerbating political crises.
This problem has created an enduring and perhaps increasing divide between a persistent demand for large-scale interpretations of the history of foreign policy (or the interaction of “great powers”), which make their contemporary relevance explicit on the one hand, and skepticism from parts of the historical discipline toward any form of applied foreign policy history on the other. In particular, it is called into question whether contemporary “states” can be identified with their predecessors—which is a precondition for identifying longer-term “national interests”; whether the focus on a limited number of determinants of foreign policy permits the formulation of general insights valid across time and space; and whether foreign policy can be said to exist in premodern settings at all. Though there are approaches that can reduce such problems, many practical difficulties are likely to remain.
Article
Rose McDermott
There are lots of ways that emotions have been studied in psychology and various ways that their
use has been examined in the context of foreign policy. Perhaps one of the most useful ways to
examine the influence of emotion on foreign policy is through the lens of risk and threat
assessment. Some approaches to emotion tend to categorize emotions as valence-based, in terms of
broad-based positivity or negativity. Certainly, elements of this kind of approach can be useful,
particularly in terms of thinking about the ways in which political conservatives appear to have a
negativity bias. However, an investigation of discrete emotions allows a more sophisticated and
nuanced exploration of the effect of emotion on risk analysis and threat assessment, in particular
the effect of fear, anger, and disgust on decision-making under conditions of risky threat. Genetic,
as well as environmental, circumstances can influence individual variance in the experience and
expression of such emotions, and any comprehensive approach to understanding the influence of
emotion on decision-making should take all these factors into account.
Article
Vaughn Shannon
International norms exist as constraints on foreign policy, yet norms are also the product of the foreign policies of states and other actors. Research has demonstrated how norms restrain foreign policy choice and behavior, and even alter state conceptions of national interests. Other studies point to the weakness of norms in the face of national interests and state power. Others note that the meaning of norms and their obligations are often contested, leading to problems of norm violation and norm enforcement. As social constructions, an important consideration is how and when foreign policy promotes norms and norm diffusion in the broader international community.
Article
Jarrod Hayes
For much of the history of the study of international relations, and of foreign policy as a distinctive subfield, scholars have debated the relative weight of agency and structure in shaping the course of international events. Often, the significance of agency versus structure depends on the scope of inquiry. Efforts to identify broad patterns of social interaction tend to play up the significance of structure, while studies of specific events bring agency to the fore. International relations theory is typically associated with the former, and foreign policy analysis (FPA) is more closely linked to the latter. That association suggests that the question of agency versus structure in international outcomes is settled in FPA in favor of agency. An assessment of the literature in FPA shows such a suggestion to be wide of the mark. Not only does FPA struggle with the question of agency versus structure that pervades the study of international relations generally, but also it wrestles with how to reconcile agency and structure in the context of psychological constraints on human cognition. Thus, rather than resolving the debate between agency and structure, the literature on FPA shows that it extends down to the level of individual policymakers. The debate over the role of agency and structure occupies two axes. The first is the engagement of FPA with broader debates over agency and structure in international relations scholarship. The second is the tension between agency and structure in FPA that emerges once psychology is incorporated into the analytical matrix. In both cases, the significance of structure in the actual analysis of foreign policy is far greater than common conception recognizes. This reality means that FPA represents the cutting edge for theoretical and analytical efforts to understand the relationship between structure and agency in international outcomes.
Article
Carla Martinez Machain, Rebecca Kaye, and Jared Oestman
Great powers have traditionally played a major role in the study of foreign policy. From a variety of work on foreign policy analysis, it is known that great powers are more active in their foreign policy than other states in the international system are. Whether the actions are disbursing foreign aid, creating alliances, conflict involvement, or others, studies will often control for great power status, with the underlying expectation being that major powers will be more likely to utilize these foreign policy tools. In fact, when considering relevant dyads in quantitative studies of foreign policy analysis, states have to be contiguous for the dyad to be considered relevant, but an exception is made for dyads containing at least one major power, given the ability of great powers to project their power beyond their borders.
Key literature on the foreign policy behavior of great powers discusses different ways of defining great powers. In particular, the debate over defining great power status has focused on whether a great power should be defined solely on its physical capabilities, or also on intangible factors, such as its foreign policy interests or whether the state is recognized as a great power by others in the international system. Further, there are questions of whether great powers have to be military powers or whether economic superiority is enough to classify a state as a great power. There is also the issue of regional powers: states that are clearly military, economic, and political leaders within a limited geographic region, but not at the global level. Should these states be considered great powers, or should that classification be reserved for global powers?
The literature on great-power foreign policy also discusses cooperative and conflictual behaviors of great powers in the international system. It addresses great power war, focusing on how they are more conflict prone than minor powers, and reviews the issues that drive great powers to engage in conflict, such as positional issues and the intent to shape the international system to their liking. It also discusses a variety of foreign policy actions, both coercive and cooperative, that major powers are more likely to engage in than their minor-power counterparts. In addition, there is much work done on the relationships between great powers and between great powers and minor powers, stressing the competitive nature of major-power interactions and the trade-off between economic and military security and policy concessions that defines major-minor power interactions.
Article
Amanda Murdie and Sarah Hunter
International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are growing in both numbers and influence around the world. INGOs range wildly in scope, size, membership, and home location. Examples of INGOs include Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; also known as Doctors Without Borders). INGOs have increasingly been involved in the policymaking and the policy process. Domestically, INGOs have access to policymakers and work to influence policy through lobbying efforts and information campaigns. Internationally, INGOs often work with intergovernmental organizations and donor agencies and can have tremendous sway in certain policy domains. Recent works have linked INGO efforts to changes in trade and investment patterns and decisions about humanitarian interventions, economic sanctions, and aid allocation.
INGOs are defined and situated in the international system. The causal mechanisms connecting INGO activities to foreign policy decisions and decision-making are outlined and situated into the larger theoretical literature on foreign policy. The ways in which INGOs have been impacted by foreign policy decisions are explored, especially recent efforts by states to limit the work of foreign INGOs within their borders. There is a need for further research and data collection on INGOs and for more work on how INGOs interact with other actors in the foreign policy arena.
Article
Robert U. Nagel and Govinda Clayton
Mediation is now the most popular form of conflict management, and it has proven to be an
effective means of resolving inter- and intrastate disputes. This article offers an overview of
mediation in foreign policy. We first highlight which actors tend to perform mediatory roles,
emphasizing the relative strengths and weaknesses of individual, state, and international
organization mediators. Next we discuss the supply and demand of mediation, identifying the key
conditions that promote third parties’ efforts to offer mediatory assistance and belligerents to
accept the help of an intermediary. We then discuss the process and varying methods used by
mediators, highlighting the range of actions from relatively soft facilitative mediation, up to more
manipulative approaches. Finally we discuss the outcomes that mediation tends to produce and the
conditions that influence the effectiveness of this preeminent foreign policy tool.
