Ryan K. Beasley’s research while affiliated with University of St Andrews and other places

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.

For now, this Special Issue is one of a kind. Each piece grows directly out of the cross-institutional network between the University of St Andrews (STA), the University of Glasgow (G), and the University of Edinburgh (E)’s Security studies (S) programmes. Together, we have created the acronym STAGES to capture these ongoing collaborations. In August 2018, we, as a small group of colleagues working at each contributing university started to discuss how our master students can learn more about security beyond the confines of their separate classrooms. As Jorge M. Lasma writes, ‘In many cases, classrooms have slowly come to be seen as the only domains for learning. Other forms and channels of learning and knowledge are viewed with suspicion and sometimes even discouraged for fear of higher costs’ (2013, p. 369). Challenging this idea, we set out to create a collective project to allow different students, with their own unique opinions and viewpoints on security, to meet one another to share their ideas in open, honest and lived ways.

The international roles states play in world politics are bound up with the ways in which sovereignty is constructed within the international system. While scholarship on sovereignty has recognized its social construction, and role research emphasizes social interactions as shaping roles and role behaviors, little work has explored the relationship between sovereignty and roles. Linking roles and sovereignty offers a distinct perspective on the social construction of sovereignty, providing a broad conception of socialization, emphasizing agency, and bridging domestic politics and international relations. We develop the concept of a “sovereignty–role nexus” through an examination of Brexit, revealing, through processes of role contestation and role socialization, multiple and competing constructions of the nature and value of sovereignty. While Brexit is unique, we suggest that these dynamics will affect other cases where states face role changes linked to sovereignty concerns.

While international relations scholarship has taken a “temporal turn,” foreign policy decision-making (FPDM) research reveals little explicit theoretical attention to time. Time is an important aspect of several prominent frameworks, yet these either fail to make explicit their conception of time or fail to reflect upon the implications of their temporal assumptions and understandings. We address this lacuna by developing a timing perspective on FPDM. We present the central features of this perspective, including the nature of timing agency, temporal motivations, the timing of decision-making processes, and timing as a foreign policy tool. Illustrated with empirical examples, we show how timing plays out in FPDM and helps to shed new light on our understanding of crises and ways decision-makers may grapple with them. We conclude by considering the theoretical and empirical benefits and challenges of bridging FPDM with theoretical approaches to time.

British foreign policy stands at a turning point following the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum. Drawing on role theory, we trace the United Kingdom’s efforts to establish new foreign policy roles as it interacts with the concerned international actors. We find that the pro-Brexit desire to ‘take back control’ has not yet translated into a cogent foreign policy direction. In its efforts to avoid adopting the role of isolate, the United Kingdom has projected a disoriented foreign policy containing elements of partially incompatible roles such as great power, global trading state, leader of the Commonwealth, regional partner to the European Union (EU) and faithful ally to the United States. The international community has, through processes of socialisation and alter-casting, largely rejected these efforts. These role conflicts between the United Kingdom and international actors, as well as conflicts among its different role aspirations, have pressed UK policies towards its unwanted isolationist role, potentially shaping its long-term foreign policy orientation post-Brexit.

This article examines international reactions to Scotland’s 2014 bid for independence as an instance of socialisation of an aspirant state, what we term ‘pre-socialisation’. Building on and contributing to research on state socialisation and role theory, this study proposes a nexus between roles and sovereignty. This nexus has three components: sovereignty itself is a role casted for by an actor; the sovereign role is entangled with the substantive foreign policy roles the actor might play; and the sovereign role implicates the substantive foreign policy roles of other actors. The Scottish debate on independence provides an effective laboratory to develop and explore these theoretical dimensions of pre-socialisation, revealing the contested value and meaning of sovereignty, the possible roles that an independent Scotland could play, and the projected implications for the role of the UK and other international actors. Our analysis of the Scottish case can provide insights for other cases of pre-socialisation and is more empirically significant following the UK’s 2016 referendum to leave the European Union.

Why do multiparty cabinets in parliamentary democracies produce more extreme foreign policies than single-party cabinets? Our paper argues that particular institutional and psychological dynamics explain this difference. We test this argument using a global events data set incorporating foreign policy behaviors of numerous multiparty and single-party governments. We find that more parties and weak parliaments promote extremity in coalitions, but parliamentary strength has the opposite effect for single-party governments. This study challenges existing expectations about the impact of democratic institutions on foreign policy.