ABSTRACT
Foreign policy analysis (FPA) is the study of the conduct and practice of relations between different actors, primarily states, in the international system. Diplomacy, intelligence, trade negotiations and cultural exchanges all form part of the substance of foreign policy between international actors. At the heart of the field is an investigation into decision making, the individual decision makers, processes and conditions that affect foreign policy and the outcomes of these decisions. By adopting this approach, FPA is necessarily concerned not only with the actors involved in the state’s formal decision-making apparatus, but also with the variety of sub-national sources of influence upon state foreign policy. Moreover, in seeking to provide a fuller explanation for foreign policy choice, scholars have had to take account of the boundaries between the state’s internal or domestic environment and the external environment. FPA developed as a separate area of enquiry within the discipline
of international relations (IR), due both to its initially exclusive focus on the actual conduct of inter-state relations and to its normative impulse. While IR scholars understood their role as being to interpret the broad features of the international system, FPA specialists saw their mandate as being a concentration on actual state conduct and the sources of decisions. The FPA focus on the foreign policy process as opposed to foreign policy outcomes, is predicated on the belief that closer scrutiny of the actors, their motivations, the structures of decision making and the broader context within which foreign policy choices are formulated would provide greater analytical purchase. Moreover, scholars working within FPA saw their task as normative, that is to say, as aimed at improving foreign policy decision making to enable states to achieve better outcomes and, in some
In the context of David Singer’s well-known schema of IR, in grap-
pling with world politics, one necessarily focuses on studying the phenomena at the international system level, the state (or national) level, or the individual level.1 FPA has traditionally emphasized the state and individual levels as the key areas for understanding the nature of the international system. At the same time, as the rise in the number and density of transnational actors (TNAs) has transformed the international system, making interconnectivity outside of traditional state-tostate conduct more likely, FPA has had to expand its own outlook to account for an increasingly diverse range of non-state actors, such as global environmental activists or multinational corporations (MNCs). An underlying theme within the study of FPA is the ‘structure-
agency’ debate.2 As in other branches of the social sciences, FPA scholars are divided as to the degree of influence to accord to structural factors (the constraints imposed by the international system) and human agency (the role of individual choice in shaping the international system) when analysing foreign policy decisions and decisionmaking environments. However, the FPA focus on the process of foreign policy formulation, the role of decision makers and the nature of foreign policy choice has tended to produce a stronger emphasis on agency than is found in IR (at least until the advent of the ‘constructivism turn’ in the 1990s). Thus, early analyses of foreign policy decision making recognized from the outset the centrality of subjective factors in shaping and interpreting events, actors and foreign policy choices. Writing in 1962, Richard Snyder and colleagues pointed out that ‘information is selectively perceived and evaluated in terms of the decision maker’s frame of reference. Choices are made in the basis of preferences which are in part situationally and in part biographically determined.’3 Indeed, as the chapters in this book show, in many respects, FPA anticipates key insights and concerns associated with the reflexivist or constructivist tradition.4
