ABSTRACT
The end of the Cold War, the events of 9/11 and the globalisation of world politics posed a formidable challenge to the mainstream theories of international relations (IR), reinvigorating the need for the rethinking within the field. One of the implications of this ‘soul-searching in the academic discipline’ of IR (Sorensen, 1998: 83) was the renewal of interest in foreign policy and its contribution to the understanding of world politics in general and the behaviour of international actors in particular (Smith, Hadfield and Dunne, 2008). Traditionally, foreign policy analysis (FPA) has been one of the most conventional approaches to the study of foreign policy decision-making. Yet, FPA was often dismissed by mainstream IR theorists due to its internal incongruities and the lack of grand theory. In turn, orthodox IR itself was subject to serious pitfalls and erroneous applications, especially when applied to the context of weak and failed states. Thus, the growing relevance of foreign policy in world politics encouraged scholars to develop existing literature on FPA within the wider theoretical frameworks of IR.
