Klaus Brummer’s research while affiliated with Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and other places

Paradoxically, research on the international dimensions and effects of populism finds that populist leaders’ politicization frequently portrays domestic and foreign “elites” as intertwined—but that their decision-making tends to be considerably more antagonistic vis-à-vis internal opponents than established external actors. Combining structural and agential perspectives, this paper unboxes the individual micro-factors feeding into this paradox by analytically disentangling domain-specific personality traits. To explore whether populist leaders’ individual characteristics vary or remain stable in domestic politics and foreign policy, we conduct a novel domain-specific leadership trait analysis of eleven populist chief executives around the globe. On the one hand, we find limited and rather heterogeneous variation in most individual characteristics, including need for power and conceptual complexity. On the other hand, the great majority of profiled leaders display higher foreign self-confidence and higher domestic distrust. We conclude that particular tendencies toward fearful blanket suspicions of other powerful internal actors and more self-assured case-by-case judgments of external counterparts matter to understand why populist decision-makers often produce confrontational domestic but relatively cooperative foreign policy records. These personality-level inferences support recent IR scholarship about the international opportunities for populist leadership, personalistic foreign policy decision-making, and the primarily domestic logic of intermestic “people-versus-elite” politicization.

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.

This paper explores the relationship between feminist foreign policy (FFP) and a country’s national role conception (NRC). Specifically, it asks whether countries with ‘masculine’ NRCs are opposed to the pursuit of FFP while countries with a more ‘feminine’ national role conception are advocates of FFP. To this end, the paper conducts a comparative analysis of ‘masculine’ Israel and ‘feminine’ Germany along three domains: normative (with a focus on the Women, Peace, and Security [WPS] agenda), material (in relation to development policy), and institutional (with reference to female representation). Generally speaking, Germany has indeed undertaken broader and more substantive activities in pursuit of FFP goals than Israel. At the same time, Israel has clearly been more active than its ‘masculine’ role would suggest, and Germany less active and vocal than its ‘civilian power’ role would imply. Overall, the discussion suggests that whether countries pursue FFP goals is strongly influenced by the latter’s compatibility with the countries’ overarching NRCs, with party ideology, institutional autonomy, and intersection between gender policy and state interests playing a greater role regarding the specific levels of commitment and intensity shown in the pursuit of those goals.

The Council of Europe (CoE) was among the first Western institutions to open its doors to Russia after the end of the Cold War. However, during Russia’s membership (1996–2022) hopes of socializing the country into the CoE’s standards, norms, and principles in the areas of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law never materialized. While the CoE’s norms and principles nowadays need to be secured from Russia, there might be a point in the (distant) future where Russia should be reintegrated into European structures, with the CoE then again being a likely forum to that end. Against this background, this paper analyses the CoE’s interaction with Russia from the mid-1990s until today, focusing on the accession period as well as the organization’s subsequent monitoring activities and (non-)use of sanctions during Russia’s membership. It concludes with lessons that could guide future interactions between the CoE and Russia.

This chapter approaches shocks from a vantage point that is different from the one commonly found in the foreign policy analysis (FPA) literature on foreign policy change. This literature typically conceptualizes shocks as one of several opportunities for or even drivers of policy change. Contrary to this predominant approach in the FPA literature, this chapter analyzes shocks not as drivers of and opportunities for external reorientations (hence as independent variable) but as consequences of—and potential constraints for the success of—attempted policy change (hence as intervening variable). In so doing, the chapter also contributes to the exploration of inhibitors of foreign policy modifications, which have received considerably less attention in the literature than the examination of possible drivers of change.KeywordsEconomic shockForeign policy changePopulist leadership

Im März 2022 wurde Russland infolge der militärischen Invasion in der Ukraine vom Europarat ausgeschlossen. Die vom Europarat gegenüber Russland verfolgte Einbindungsstrategie („better include than exclude“) ist damit endgültig gescheitert. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass die mit dieser Strategie verfolgten Ziele, in Form der Übertragung der von der Organisation vertretenen Standards in den Bereichen Demokratie, Menschenrechte und Rechtstaatlichkeit, zu keinem Zeitpunkt erreicht wurden. Vielmehr war die Mitgliedschaft Russlands im Europarat, die im Jahr 1996 begann, wiederholt durch schwerwiegende Konflikte zwischen der Organisation und Russland geprägt. Entsprechend stellt sich nicht nur die Frage, ob die „Werteorganisation“ Europarat schon früher von ihrer Strategie hätte abrücken sollen, sondern auch nach den Lehren dieses Scheiterns beim Umgang mit anderen „Problemstaaten“.

The burgeoning research into the impact of populism on foreign policy mostly revolves around polarising chief executives, but has still paid little attention to the personality attributes characterising leading agents of populism such as Chávez, Erdoğan, or Trump. The paper therefore uses leadership trait analysis (LTA) to explore to what extent the thoughts and actions of populist foreign policy agency are rooted in particular individual predispositions. As a theoretical contribution, the conceptual tenets of the ideational and political-strategic approaches to populism are systematically connected to the personality traits contained in LTA. The developed expectations are empirically tested by profiling a sample of eight populist government leaders from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Overall mixed results indicate that conceptual distinctions between populist and non-populist leaders are not fully reflected at the personality level. Even so, some traits such as high self-confidence and high distrust of others could indeed provide fertile ‘individual ground’ for the observable impact of populism on foreign policy making.

Contrary to other subfields of international relations, foreign policy analysis (FPA) has not experienced a “critical turn” yet. This research note suggests that this may be in part because FPA scholarship does already contain certain “critical” features, such as holding decision-makers to account and the incorporation of various “subordinated” actors in its analyses. Having said that, FPA scholarship tends to fall short on other dimensions of critical scholarship. That is, despite its relatively broad analytical net, it nonetheless silences certain actors, places little attention to the effects of foreign policy decisions, and shows a somewhat limited ethical-political engagement. While an outright critical turn is unlikely to be forthcoming not least for epistemological reasons, FPA would still benefit from a further infusion of critical insights.

Using the concept of ‘context sensitivity’ as organizing theme, this article explores different avenues of advancing foreign policy analysis (FPA) scholarship based on insights from the global South. Since foreign policy decision-makers in the global South operate in (at times very) different political environments than their western counterparts, the applicability of FPA approaches cannot be taken as a given, which is why their context sensitivity (i.e., the extent to which core concepts and indicators contained in those approaches travel to non-western settings) needs to be explored. This article suggests that our understanding of the motives and behaviours of individual decision-makers can be advanced in three distinct ways based on insights from the global South. First, several of the FPA constructs that focus on individual decision makers have seen hardly any applications to non-western cases, which is why the latter contributes to ascertaining the analytical scope of those constructs. Second, taking more fully into account the differences in decision-making environments within which leaders from the global South operate can advance leader-oriented FPA approaches by helping to specify certain theoretical assumptions proposed by them. Finally, the aspiration to analyse leaders from the global South can advance FPA in terms of method by, for instance, developing non-English language coding schemes for profiling leaders based on speech acts that are cognizant of the specificities of individual languages, while at the same time allowing for measurement equivalence across different languages.