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Repositioning Foreign Policy Analysis in International Relations
Abstract
The Oxford Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis repositions the subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) to a central analytic location within the study of International Relations (IR). Over the last twenty years, IR has seen a cross-theoretical turn towards incorporating domestic politics, decision-making, agency, practices, and subjectivity—the staples of the FPA subfield. This turn, however, is underdeveloped theoretically, empirically, and methodologically. To reconnect FPA and IR research, this Handbook links FPA to other theoretical traditions in IR, takes FPA to a wider range of state and non-state actors and connects FPA to significant policy challenges and debates. By advancing FPA along these trajectories, the Handbook directly addresses enduring criticisms of FPA, including that it is isolated within IR, it is state-centric, its policy relevance is not always clear, and its theoretical foundations and methodological techniques are stale. The Oxford Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis provides an inclusive and forward-looking assessment of this subfield. Edited and written by a team of world-class scholars, it sets the agenda for future research in FPA and in IR.
... The lack of methodological work in China studies probably reflects the empirically oriented nature of the field, and the lack of metatheoretical analysis on the study of China's foreign policy could be partly attributed to disciplinary priorities and perspectives. In contrast to this state of affairs, the field of foreign policy analysis (FPA) is currently experiencing a flourishing of interest, and a number of hefty metatheoretical (methodologically pluralist) edited volumes on the study of methods in FPA have been published recently (Kaarbo & Thies, 2024;Mello & Ostermann, 2022). These texts offer in-depth overviews of the state of the field, its relationship to IR and other disciplines, and its theoretical and methodological developments. ...
This is an updated and revised version of my current research proposal on a discourse-theoretic approach to China's foreign and security policies. Compared to earlier versions, this draft excludes the section on metatheoretical analysis, introduces a stronger focus on EU-China relations, and thoroughly reformulates the language and flow of the proposal.
Given the US president's leading role in many areas of American foreign policy, one might expect the president to prevail in executive-legislative clashes over economic sanctions. In this paper, I show that, with surprising frequency, US legislators overcome presidential opposition to their sanctions proposals and induce the president to take foreign policy actions that he or she would not otherwise take. My argument explains why the president often signs and implements sanctions legislation despite considering it inadvisable, as well as how sanctions legislation can influence foreign policy actions, the behavior of foreign governments, or international diplomacy in other ways. I support the argument with descriptive statistics based on an original data set of over a hundred legislative sanctions proposals and a case study of the effects of legislative initiatives targeting Iran over a period of two decades. The paper's findings show that legislative activity is more important than some previous research on sanctions and US foreign policy suggests.
In this paper, we analyze citizens’ attitudes toward regional leadership, employing two sets of survey experiments. Using Brazil as a case study, we analyze the first set of experiments with two types of regional leadership—structural and institutional—across three different regional issues—economic integration, regime change, and regional conflict. We found that Brazilians do not support either type of leadership, whether in regional conflict or in regime change issues, but support institutional leadership in economic integration scenarios. In the second set, we included specific South American countries both in regional conflict and in regime change scenarios. We found that Brazilians prefer Brazil to stay away from acting as a leader once neighboring countries are named in the experiment. Our findings indicate that the literature on regional leadership should incorporate the level of domestic support to understand its implications to the exercise of regional leadership. We embedded our experiments within the project “The Americas and the World: Public Opinion and International Politics, 2014–2015.” We used a nationally representative sample of eighteen hundred respondents undertaken in 2014.
The rise of non-state (international, private, and transnational) actors in global politics has far-reaching consequences for foreign policy theory and practice. In order to remain able to explain foreign policy also in the 21 st century, foreign policy research needs to take into account the growing importance of nonstate actorss. A good way to do this would be to engage the literature on globalization and global governance. Both fields would benefit from such an exchange of ideas because their respective strengths could cancel out each other's weaknesses. Foreign policy research on one hand has a strong track record explaining foreign policy outcomes, using a broad range of theoretical concepts but almost completely ignores non-state actors. This is highly problematic for at least two reasons: Firstly, foreign policy is increasingly made in international organizations and intergovernmental and transnational governance networks instead of national institutions like foreign ministries. Secondly, also the latter increasingly open up to, and involve, non-state actors in their policymaking procedures. Thus, if foreign policy research wants to avoid becoming marginalized in the future, it needs to take into account this change. However, especially systemic approaches like neorealism or constructivism have difficulties adapting to the new reality of foreign policy. Not only do they explicitly stress the importance of states at the expense of non-state actors, which are only of marginal interest to them, as is global governance. Moreover, they also conceptualize states unitary actors which forecloses the possibility of examining the involvement of non-state actors in states' decision-making processes. Agency-based approaches such as Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) fare much better, at least in principle. FPA scholars stress the improtance of disaggregating the state and looking at the individuals and group dynamics that influence their decision making. However, while this commitment to opening up the state allows fro a great deal more flexibility vis-à-vis different types of actors, FPA research has so far remained state-centric and only very recently turned to non-state actors. On the other hand, non-state actors' involvement in policymaking is the strongsuit of the literature on globalization and global governance, which has spent a lot time and effort analyzing various forms of " hybrid " governance. At the same time, however, this literature has been rather descriptive, so far mainly systematizing different governance arrangements and the conditions under which non-state actors are included in governance arrangements. This literature could profit from foreign policy research's rich theoretical knowledge in explaining policy outcomes in hybrid governance networks and IOs. Foreign policy researchers should take non-state actors seriously. In this regard three avenues in particular are relevant for future research : (1) comparative empirical research to establish the extent of non-state actors' participation in foreign policymaking across different countried and governance arrangements (2) explanatory studies that analyze the conditions under which non-2 state actors are involved in states' foreign policymaking processes and (3) the normative implications of increased hybrid foreign policymaking for democratic legitimacy.
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 favourable 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 imitations of their size and exert influence on world politics, provided that they use the appropriate strategies.
This chapter proposes that International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) can, despite the differences between them, be seen as different modes of a shared observation of the world political system. More specifically, by drawing on world polity theory in sociological institutionalism, we argue that IR and FPA are complementary ways of generating knowledge on how the problem of order in the world political system is solved inter alia through the construction of agency within that system. We address three main dimensions of agency, or rather actorhood, in world politics, thereby aiming to reinvigorate the debate on the interrelationship between agency and structure in world politics. These three dimensions are, in turn, the construction of actorhood, the emergence of new actors in the world political system and, finally, the evolutionary dynamics of actorhood in international society — or rather political actorhood in world society — at large.
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