ABSTRACT
International relations (IR) favours the study of all that happens between nations and across nations. As a subfield of IR, foreign policy analysis (FPA) goes beyond the traditional IR grounding in states. It premises that foreign policies are above all a social construct determined by the seminal interactions of human decision-makers. Key drivers behind these interactions are the exogenous constraints and endogenous factors that shape the choices and pronouncements of the decision-makers. In this respect, FPA scholarship can either explore a multifactorial assessment of a specific response within a given foreign policymaking context (Allison & Zelikow 1999) or develop comparisons of foreign policy processes, be it overtime or across countries (Karbo 2003; Wong & Hill 2012).
