ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter contains a review of the four major concepts employed in the operational code analysis research program, which were elaborated and applied in previous chapters to analyze foreign policy decision-making and learning processes in world politics. These concepts provide the foundations for constructing a binary role theory of uncertainty reduction and management, which is the central dynamic in world politics. This theory describes how and explains why the two-worlds-ofinteraction proposition operates to integrate the world of mental events (beliefs) at the micro level of foreign policy analysis with the world of social events (behaviors) at the macro level of international systems. Binary role theory’s solutions to the agent-structure and level-of-analysis problems are presented in this chapter as operational code analyses of the dynamics of symbolic and strategic interaction between systems of thought and action within dyads, which are then extended and expanded beyond the strategic dyad to more complex ensembles of world politics.
