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The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) was developed to explain policy processes where contentious coalitions of actors seek to translate competing belief systems into public policy. Advocacy coalitions may include interest groups, members of the media, scientists and academics, and government officials that share beliefs about a public issue and coordinate their behavior. These advocacy coalitions engage in various strategies using resources to influence policy change or stasis. As part of this process, advocacy coalition members may learn within and/or across coalitions. This framework is one of the most prominent and widely applied approaches to explain public policy. While it has been applied hundreds of times, in over 50 different countries, the vast majority of ACF applications have sought to explain domestic policy processes. A reason for the paucity of applications to foreign policy is that some ACF assumptions may not seem congruent to foreign policy issues. For example, the ACF uses a policy subsystem as the unit of analysis that may include a territorial dimension. Yet, the purpose of the territorial dimension is to limit the scope of the study. Therefore, this dimension can be substituted for a government body that has the authority or potential authority to make and implement foreign policy. In addition, the ACF assumes a central role for technical and scientific information in the policy process. Such information makes learning across coalitions more conducive, but the ACF can and should also be applied to normative issues, such as those more common among foreign policy research. This article introduces the ACF; provides an overview of the framework, including assumptions, key concepts and theories, and transferability of the ACF to foreign policy analysis; and discusses four exemplary applications. In addition, it proposes future research that scholars should explore as part of the nexus of the ACF and foreign policy analysis. In the final analysis, the authors suggest the ACF can and should be applied to foreign policy analysis to better understand the development of advocacy coalitions and how they influence changes and stasis in foreign policy.

Much of the literature on international democratic diffusion appeals to mechanisms—competition, learning, emulation or socialization, and coercion—that typically are treated as competing and theoretically separate. All four, however, fit within a coevolutionary framework, that is, one integrating the concepts of variety, retention, and selection of traits (in this case, regime type). Competition, learning, and emulation are not mutually exclusive and all find support in the large literature on cultural and social evolution. Coercion may seem anti-evolutionary, inasmuch as it implies design and implementation by a powerful rational actor (state, international institution, etc.), but co-evolution can accommodate coercion as well. In co-evolution, agent and environment evolve together: an agent shapes its environment (engages in niche construction), and that reshaped environment alters the fitness of the agents’ traits. A powerful democracy can alter its social and material environment so as to increase the fitness of its own regime. Co-evolution can provide a framework to integrate mechanisms by which democracy and other regime types spread and contract across time and space, and hence can aid empirical research on the effects of global power shifts, including the rise of China, on the fate of democracy in various regions around the world.

The interplay between states and international organizations has received a lot of scholarly attention, largely because the number of international organizations has increased considerably within the last century. State-of-the-art scholarship on the foreign policies of international organizations and states is presented here, as are rationalist and constructivist accounts of how the foreign policies of states impact international organizations (bottom-up perspective), as well as how, in turn, international organizations impact member-state foreign policies (top-down perspective). Thereby, the polity, politics, and policy dimensions of both states and international organizations are examined in order to explain the changes states’ foreign policies can induce, under what scope conditions, in the international organizations’ structure (polity), procedures (politics), and policy outcomes. Vice versa, also explained are the changes international organizations can induce, under what scope conditions, in the foreign policy apparatus of states (polity), foreign policy decision-making procedures (politics), and states’ foreign policies. As is illustrated, the theme “International Organizations and Foreign Policy” is not an established foreign policy subfield per se but is covered here in multiple approaches and theories. In line with the development of international relations, the bottom-up perspective has received much more scholarly attention than the top-down perspective. Furthermore, bottom-up research evidences a tendency toward the strong influence of states’ foreign policies on the policy and polity of international organizations, while the top-down influence of international organizations on states’ foreign policy apparatus, procedures, and policies is usually much more limited. Finally, an outlook into fruitful future avenues for research is outlined.

A structural understanding of the contextualized behavior of states is introduced and operationalized. Context is a central theme of the discipline of geography and identifies context specific, rather than universal, social behavior. Social behavior is both defined by and creates contexts in a constant recursive interaction. Context is defined through a geographic perspective on world-systems analysis, and we focus on the behavior of states. States are central actors because, through territorial sovereignty, they are able to define key social relations and economic flows. The idea of context is developed in a way that extends the key International Relations (IR) concepts of milieu and opportunity and willingness. The recursive interaction between agency and context is conceptualized in a relational way as maneuver, the process by which the aggregate behavior of elites define state-level choices and behaviors that are made by considering the contextual position relative to all other states in the capitalist world-economy. In turn, the decision by any one state changes the behavior of other states so that context and state-level decisions interact and are constantly in flux. The elements of context include the position of a state in the hierarchy of the capitalist world-economy as well as regional and local interstate relations, some of which may display path dependency. The operationalization of maneuver requires an understanding of states as signaling and learning entities and a set of modeling techniques that identify: (1) the degree of change within the system as a whole—or the degree of stability in the number and identity of states within particular positions in the hierarchy of the capitalist world-economy; (2) the maneuver of particular states—or which states change position (or not) within the hierarchy; and (3) the explanatory power of variables measuring political and economic interstate relations in explaining the maneuver behavior of particular states.

The way militaries learn has evolved over time, and the first two decades of the 21st century once again see military learning on the cusp of change. Since the start of the modern era in the early 18th century, military learning has evolved from a focus on technical, tactical skills relevant to specific combat branches to a generalized study of war and warfare that blends theory and practice. These changes have come about in response to developments in human capital, battlefield technology, and warfare, or how military forces fight. The early 21st century has witnessed a new shift in warfare, from networked warfare—in which information is synchronized across location, targeting, and precision guidance systems to find, fix, and destroy the enemy with deadly efficiency—to unconventional information warfare—in which non-state actors have access to many of the same information resources and, combined with cyber capabilities that rely on anonymity and occasional state support, negate many of the advantages of networked warfare. This portends a change in how militaries learn, to patterns of learning that can cope with a battlespace that is potentially omnipresent, where states must incorporate all elements of national power coherently in order to achieve success in war. These changes are evident not only on the battlefield, but also in military schools. The theories of Napoleonic warfare born at the dawn of the modern era seem increasingly inadequate for the realities of modern combat. This calls for the generation of new bodies of knowledge by military officers and other specialists in the field. The notion that war itself is politics conducted by other means is increasingly under threat. Likewise, curricula at military schools bear an increasing resemblance to curricula at academic civilian programs in security studies, leadership, and international relations, and more and more civilians are sitting side by side with military officers in the classroom. Since the end of World War II, the bounds of the battlefield have bled into the traditionally civilian space of information, so the study of war and warfare is no longer the unique province of the military officer. This process has accelerated in the 21st century, and a range of defense analysts, scholars, and policymakers have commented on how military forces prepare to fight.

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.