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.
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Article
Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith introduced the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in the late 1980s to refine the theoretical and methodological tools available for the study of the policy process. Since the late 1990s, the use of the framework has grown in use outside the United States and it is now applied to study a broad range of policy arenas in all continents. ACF scholars have created a core community that regularly synthetizes findings from applications of the framework, giving the ACF the form of a true research program.
The ACF has three principal theoretical domains: advocacy coalitions, policy subsystems, and policy change. The ACF posits that advocacy coalitions and policy subsystems are the most efficient ways to organize actors interested in the policy process for empirical research. The policy subsystem is the main unit of analysis in the ACF, and there are four paths leading to policy change. Expectations about the interactions between and within the three theoretical domains are contained in 15 main hypotheses which have received different degrees of confirmation since the late 1980s. The aspect that has received more attention in existing applications is the effect that external events have on policy change.
The development of the ACF is supported by an active community of scholars that constantly reviews venerable as well as emerging criticisms, introducing adjustments that expand the heuristic power of the ACF in a controlled way. However, some areas in need of further refinement relate to: policy-oriented learning, interactions across subsystems, the theoretical foundations to identification of belief systems, and how the interactions between beliefs and interests affect coalition behavior.
Article
Marleen Brans and Ellen Fobé
Policy advice is a core function of modern bureaucracies. It can be distinguished from closely related concepts such as policy design, policy analysis and policy work – all of which are also conducted by the civil service.
Civil servants remain critical advisory actors in the policy advisory system despite the fact that it latter has become more crowded and competitive. The bureaucracy is well placed to provide political executives with both long term and short-term policy advice. And bureaucrats often garner, even broker, input from other advisers in the advisory system.
The academic community has shown concerns over an alleged decline of the capacity for policy advice because of growing advice competition and a trend towards politicization. While such worries have legitimate grounds, they are also marked by a Westminster bias. After all, advice competition and politicization are nothing new in consensus style polities with a traditional reliance on advisory input from societal actors and political advisers. This is not to say that bureaucratic advisory capacity does not have its difficulties. New Public Management reforms, cutbacks, and the focus on policy delivery instead of policy formulation have certainly had their impact. Yet recurrent meta-policies have also aimed to strengthen policy advisory capacities of bureaucrats. The evidence-based movement swept across the globe and left its mark, for instance, as have government-wide programs, such as policy skills frameworks and guidelines on standards for policy advice. The latter are particularly useful when considering that bureaucratic policy advisers are not the Sir Humphrey Abbleby’s at the apex of the bureaucracies, but include, as evidenced by research, a great number of often invisible and incidental advisers lower down in the bureaucratic hierarchy.
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
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
Srdjan Vucetic
Identity has come to figure prominently in the study of foreign policy since the 1990s when it was first introduced by constructivist theorists in International Relations. Consensus on what identity is and what it does in relation to foreign policy does not exist and is unlikely to be ever forged. Some scholars investigate state identity—how it impacts foreign policy processes while simultaneously being impacted by international structures. Others use the concept of identification to examine what foreign policy means for the constitution of modern political subjectivities. Still others seek to bring together constructivist identity scholarship together with more established approaches in Foreign Policy Analysis. This article considers the contextual emergence and evolution of the “identity and foreign policy” scholarship in its many different and differing streams. The large volume of literature produced on this subject over the past two and a half decades defies an easy summary of its theoretical and empirical contributions, but an overview of the main controversies and debates should provide the reader with a solid foundation for further research.
Article
Because social complexity is rarely defined beforehand, social science discussions often default to natural language concepts and synonyms. Assert a large sociotechnical system is complex or increasingly complex, and notions are triggered of many unknowns, out-of-sight causal processes, and a system difficult to comprehend fully. These terms intimate the potential for, if not actuality of, catastrophes and their unmanageability in the sociotechnical systems. It is not uncommon to find increasing social complexity credited for the generation or exacerbation of major crises, such as nuclear reactor accidents and global climate change, and the need to manage them better, albeit the crises are said to be far more difficult to manage because of the complexity.
The costs of leaving discussions of “complexity, crisis, and management” to natural language are compared here to the considerable benefits that accrue to analysis from one of the few definitions of social complexity developed and used during the past 40 years, that of political scientist Todd R. La Porte. Understanding that a large sociotechnical system is more or less complex depending on the number of its components, the different functions each component has, and the interconnections (including interdependencies) among functions and components highlights key issues that are often missed within the theory and practice of large sociotechnical systems, including society’s critical infrastructures. Over-complexifying the problems and issues of already complex systems, in particular, is just as questionable as oversimplifying that complexity for policy and management purposes.
Article
Micah Dillard and Jon C.W. Pevehouse
Scholarship in international relations has taken a more quantitative turn in the past four decades. The field of foreign policy analysis was arguably the forerunner in the development and application of quantitative methodologies in international relations. From public opinion surveys to events data to experimental methods, many of the earliest uses of quantitative methodologies can be found in foreign policy analysis. On substantive questions ranging from the causes of war to the dynamics of public opinion, the analysis of data quantitatively has informed numerous debates in foreign policy analysis and international relations. Emerging quantitative methods will be useful in future efforts to analyze foreign policy.
Article
Valerie Hudson
The first wave of the International Relations subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis occurred from 1954 to 1994, encompassing a founding period (the 1950s and 1960s) and a period of first consolidation (the 1970s to the end of the Cold War). The early years of the 1950s and 1960s produced some of the defining works that would indelibly shape the character of the field. The work of Richard Snyder, James Rosenau, and Harold and Margaret Sprout molded the field with their focus on decision-making processes, political psychology, cross-national analysis, and actor-specific theory. The subsequent first-wave work, which dealt with small-group dynamics, organizational process, bureaucratic politics, leader personality, cognition and heuristics, culture, domestic political contestation, and national attributes, blended with an understanding of international and regional systemic effects, became FPA classics.
Article
Kyle Beardsley, Patrick James, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and Michael Brecher
Over the course of more than four decades the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, a major and ongoing data-gathering enterprise in the social sciences, has compiled data that continues to be accessed heavily in scholarship on conflict processes. ICB holdings consist of full-length qualitative case studies, along with an expanding range of quantitative data sets. Founded in 1975, the ICB Project is among the most visible and influential within the discipline of International Relations (IR). A wide range of studies based either primarily or in part on the ICB’s concepts and data have accumulated and cover subjects that include the causes, processes, and consequences of crises. The breadth of ICB’s contribution has expanded over time to go beyond a purely state-centric approach to include crisis-related activities of transnational actors across a range of categories. ICB also offers depth through, for example, potential resolution of contemporary debates about mediation in crises on the basis of nuanced findings about long- versus short-term impact with regard to conflict resolution.
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
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
Benno Teschke and Steffan Wyn-Jones
The problematic implications of the long absence of a dedicated encounter between Marxism and FPA (foreign policy analysis) are discussed. This absence has been marked by a series of different starting points and theoretical preferences between both intellectual projects. A paradigmatic turn for the incorporation of FPA and international politics into a revised Marxist research program is needed. Whereas FPA originated within a United States–centric Cold War context, growing out of the subfield of “comparative foreign policy,” which initially pursued a positivistic methodology, Marxism’s European theoretical legacy afforded neither international relations nor foreign policy analysis any systematic place since its inception in the 19th century. Recurring rapprochements were qualified successes due to Marxism’s tendency to relapse into structuralist versions of grand theorizing. While these could speak to general theories of international relations in the field of IR (international relations) from the late 20th century onward, FPA fell again and again through the cracks of this grand analytical register. Marxist FPA has only very recently been recognized as a serious research program, notably within the two traditions of neo-Gramscian international political economy (IPE) and Marxist historical sociology. With this move, Marxism has started to identify a problematique and produced a nascent literature that should bear fruit in the future.
Article
Henry Kissinger once remarked, “As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces. But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make.” It is common sense that a state’s foreign policy cannot be explained without reference to the beliefs of such leaders as Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, or Kim Jong Un, to name a few. It is, therefore, ironic that leaders have mattered little for much of the international relations discipline’s history. Structural approaches with foci on the distribution of power, international institutions and domestic politics have been dominant.
To be sure, scholarship on belief systems has been present since the 1950s. Early key concepts included the decision maker’s “definition of the situation,” the “ecological environment,” and the “attitudinal prism.” This scholarship laid an important foundation; however, at the time, it did not generate competitive research programs. Agent-centered approaches remained secondary and beliefs were seen as residual variables. They were also seen as “unobservable”—difficult to assess and operationalize. Indeed, rigorous methods that would enable the scientific study of belief systems have long been absent.
Over time such challenges were addressed successfully, and these efforts were catalyzed by scholarly advances and also by real-world developments. In the real world, it was mainly the end of the Cold War that illustrated the insufficiency of structural theories. Under Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union took a fundamentally new course, and it gave up power. The dominant structural theories did neither predict the ensuing events nor could they explain them. They were “caught flat-footed,” as one scholar wrote. What really mattered, it seemed, was what these theories did not pay much attention to: namely decision makers’ belief-systems.
Of particular relevance are decision makers’ operational code beliefs. Along with the general literature on belief systems, the operational code research program began in the 1950s. It gained still more prominence with the work of Alexander George and Ole Holsti in the 1960s and 1970s. A decision maker’s operational code is constituted by his answers to questions such as: What is the essential nature of political life? Is the political universe essentially one of harmony or conflict? What is the fundamental character of one’s political opponents? What is the best approach for selecting goals for political action?
The most significant advances in the operational code research program were then made in the 1980s and beyond by Stephen Walker and his students. The progress occurred on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical plane, and through their work the research program has become, (and continues to be) a mainstay in contemporary international relations scholarship.
Article
Peter Slominski
The European Union (EU) migration crisis has been part and parcel of a conglomerate of crises that have affected the EU since the late 2000s, as have the financial and sovereign debt crisis, “Brexit,” the Russia–Ukraine conflict, as well as tensions within transatlantic relations. Scholarship on the EU has devoted much attention in assessing what the migration crisis means for EU integration at large. In particular, EU scholars are interested why the migration crisis has led to political gridlock and a renationalization of border controls rather than a deepening of integration. While they differ in their explanations, these explanations shed light on different aspects of the crisis and are far from mutually exclusive.
Scholars who are more interested in the area of EU Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) largely agree with EU theorists that the field suffers from an incomplete governance design, the dominance of EU member states, and weak supranational capacities. Their analysis also focuses on intra-EU dynamics but offers a more nuanced empirical assessment of relevant EU institutions and decision-making in the course of managing the migration crisis. This growing body of research produces valuable insights and largely confirms existing scholarship, including that on the growing securitization and externalization of EU asylum and migration policy. The EU’s understanding as a norm-based power is particularly challenged by the migratory movements in the wake of the crisis. A small but growing scholarship analyses how the EU is balancing its non-entrée policy with its legal obligation, and what kind of governance arrangements result from that.
While this scholarship has enriched our understanding of the EU migration crisis, it has not generated a major refinement of the standard approaches of EU theorists and JHA scholars. To further enrich the literature on the migration crisis, scholars should go beyond studying the dynamics of EU decision-making and the role of EU institutions. Such an approach should engage more systematically with international actors and institutions that have the capacity to influence EU migration policy. At the same time, global phenomena such as war, poverty, or climate change should also be taken into account in assessing the EU’s room for maneuver in handling migratory pressures. Future research on the migration crisis as well as on migration challenges should thus not only connect with other subfields of political science, such as policy analysis or international relations, but also open up to other disciplines such as law, demography, or environmental studies.
Article
Kai Oppermann and Klaus Brummer
The main contribution of veto player approaches in Comparative Politics has been to the study of policy stability and change. Specifically, the argument is that the possibility and conditions for policy change in a given polity and issue area depend on the configuration of veto players and veto points. Most notably, veto player approaches have introduced a general conceptual tool kit that has facilitated the comparative analysis of the dynamics and obstacles of policy change across (democratic and non-democratic) regime types and public policy areas. However, in Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), references to veto players and veto points tend to be hardly systematic and are mainly used to highlight domestic constraints on preference formation, decision-making, or responses to international crises. Hence, the theoretical and empirical potential of veto player approaches for FPA has not yet been systematically explored. Against this background, the article makes the case that “taking veto players seriously” has a lot to offer to the study of foreign policy. While there are differences between applying veto player approaches in public policy and in FPA (e.g., with respect to the more informal process of foreign policy decision-making or the larger policy discretion of the agenda setter in foreign policy), those differences must not be overdone. Indeed, they point to certain shifts in emphasis and specific methodological challenges for veto player studies in foreign policy, but do not call into question the basic explanatory logic of veto player approaches or their transferability from one field to the other. What is more, the article shows that multiple links between veto player approaches and FPA theories can be established. Generally speaking, veto player approaches have immense potential in reinvigorating comparative foreign policy analysis. More specifically, they can be linked up to FPA works on the role of parliaments, coalitions, or leadership styles as well as on those discussing change, effectiveness, or fiascos in foreign policy.
Article
Simon Willmetts and Constant Hijzen
The events of 9/11 profoundly changed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. To begin with, 9/11 itself was a crisis that came to be regarded by many as an “intelligence failure.” Questions were soon asked about what the CIA had known about the 9/11 hijackers before the attacks and whether they could have done more to prevent them. These questions eventually inspired two separate official inquiries, exposing the CIA to considerable public scrutiny. Soon after, the quality of CIA intelligence was once again called into question. In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq. The Bush administration based its case for war on faulty intelligence that suggested Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. After the invasion, it became clear that he did not. Following another series of inquiries, mounting evidence suggested that not only had mistakes been made by the CIA but also that the Bush administration had exaggerated the intelligence in public and ignored the significant reservations and counterarguments within the U.S. intelligence community, which challenged the conclusion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Ironically, given that these two major scandals in the aftermath of 9/11 focused attention on the quality of the CIA’s intelligence analysis, 9/11 also shifted the main focus of the CIA’s attention away from traditional intelligence work. For obvious reasons, after 9/11, the CIA focused increasingly on counterterrorism. This changed the CIA. Counterterrorism, as opposed to more traditional intelligence work, often involves intervention, and sometimes violent intervention. After 9/11 the CIA led special forces operations and played a leading role in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, and across the globe, the CIA captured terrorist suspects, rendered them to secret prisons in foreign countries, and tortured them. After President Barack Obama closed the CIA’s secret prisons and ended the practice of torture, increasingly the preferred method of dealing with terrorist suspects was to kill them, via drone strikes or through special forces raids. As a result, CIA intelligence collection and analysis became less of a passive activity, where the aim is to understand a particular strategic question, and more “kinetic” in obtaining information that might help target terrorist suspects and mark them for death. As a result, the traditional line within the CIA between operatives and analysts began to blur. Moreover, the CIA’s increasing involvement in these violent, military-like activities exposed them to numerous scandals that became crises of their own.
Article
Baldur Thorhallsson and Sverrir Steinsson
Size matters in international relations. Owing to their unique vulnerabilities, small states have different needs, adopt different foreign policies, and have a harder time achieving favorable foreign policy outcomes than large states. Small states show a preference for multilateral organizations because they reduce the power asymmetry between states, decrease the transaction costs of diplomacy, and impose constraints on large states. Small state security policies vary widely depending on domestic and international conditions. Despite the inherent disadvantages to being small, small states can compensate for the limitations of their size and exert influence on world politics, provided that they use the appropriate strategies.
Article
Thomas Dolan
Increasingly, scholars are recognizing the influences of emotion on foreign policy decision-making processes. Not merely feelings, emotions are sets of sentimental, physiological, and cognitive processes that typically arise in response to situational stimuli. They play a central role in psychological and social processes that shape foreign policy decision-making and behavior. In recent years, three important areas of research on emotion in foreign policy have developed: one examining the effects of emotion on how foreign policy decision makers understand and think-through problems, another focused on the role of emotion in diplomacy, and a third that investigates how mass emotion develops and shapes the context in which foreign policy decisions are made.
These literatures have benefitted greatly from developments in the study of emotion by psychologists, neuroscientists, and others. Effectively using emotion to study foreign policy, however, requires some understanding of how these scholars approach the study of emotion and other affective phenomena. In addition to surveying the literatures in foreign policy analysis that use emotion, then, this article also addresses definitional issues and the different theories of emotion common among psychologists and neuroscientists.
Some of the challenges scholars of emotion in foreign policy face: the interplay of the psychological and the social in modelling collective emotions, the issues involved in observing emotions in the foreign policy context, the theoretical challenge of emotion regulation, and the challenge of winning broader acceptance of the importance of emotion in foreign policy by the broader scholarly community.
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