This chapter is an introduction to applying a postcolonial lens to foreign policy analysis. It provides helpful definitions of key terms and concepts related to postcolonialism and follows it with a brief overview of the history of postcolonial studies. Thereafter, it lays out the key assumptions associated with postcolonial approaches in International Relations in general, and foreign policy analysis in particular. Through detailed examples, this chapter illustrates how a postcolonial lens helps us critically think through structures, policies and performances that shape foreign policy and examine the ways in which colonial and racial histories continue to inform our present.
India under Modi’s leadership has been treated as an almost textbook case to highlight the dangers of illiberalism and democratic erosion associated with "civilizational states". This chapter focuses on the impact that an evolving civilizational narrative has had on Indian foreign policy. Investigating India’s record in global and regional governance, it argues that scholars may have overestimated the impact of Modi’s civilizational narrative: there are key continuities in India’s negotiation positions across different issue-areas. Critics may also have been somewhat hasty in proclaiming its effect as being necessarily detrimental for both India itself and also the world at large. The chapter demonstrates that despite important continuities in its foreign policy, India has, in recent years, begun to take on a role of greater responsibility in global governance. This role, interestingly, is more aligned with the liberal orientation of many western democracies, while also working in tandem with the country’s concerns and priorities.
This chapter outlines how the international community tries to address cross-border health concerns through its system of global health governance. It looks at the historical evolution and contemporary context of the global health governance system. In order to delve more deeply into the strengths and weaknesses of the current system, the chapter looks at the COVID-19 pandemic to assess how various national and international actors responded and where they ran into problems fomenting cooperation in the face of a global microbial threat.
This chapter focuses on the relation between economic instruments of statecraft and broader foreign policy goals and strategies of states. In general, it is difficult for economic sanctions to achieve major foreign policy objectives, despite their popularity as a foreign policy strategy. The end of the Cold War led to an increase in the use of sanctions, but not necessarily in their relative effectiveness. However, even if sanctions do not always succeed, governments still find them useful as part of a broader foreign policy strategy to signal their intentions, send important messages, and complement military action or diplomacy. The chapter also argues that the positive use of economic incentives has considerable promise as an instrument of statecraft and deserves more systematic attention in the study of foreign policy. It concludes with the enduring question of whether economic interdependence leads to harmony, as liberals expect, or conflict among states, as realists expect, and finds that it depends on the future expectations of policy makers, the nature of the military balance, and the form that economic interdependence takes.
Strategy – or grand strategy – is the task of setting out the principles and plans that underpin foreign policy over the long-term. Strategy provides an assessment of the international environment and describes how a state cultivates and mobilises which aspects of its power in pursuit of its goals. This chapter introduces strategic assessment and grand strategy – both in their public and classified forms – as crucial elements of effective statecraft. It considers the conceptual challenges involved in making aggregate measurements of power, and states’ practice of making assessments of the strategic environment they face and preparing and issuing national security documents. It highlights questions of self-identity in constructing national interests and identifying threats to them, and reflects on the most appropriate ways and means of conducting their foreign policy as a result. It concludes by emphasising the importance of long-term strategic thinking as a prerequisite for effective foreign policy.
Membership of the European Union (EU) commits member states to cooperate on foreign policy and speak with a common European voice on international issues. Since the end of the Cold War, the European Union has developed a wide range of economic, diplomatic and military capabilities in foreign policy. The EU has gradually expanded its competencies, power, and actorness beyond what is normally associated with an international intergovernmental organization. This has spurred a lively academic debate about how to conceptualize the EU as an international actor and to what extent the EU represents a deeper process of foreign policy change and transformation. This chapter examines EU enlargement as one of the EU’s most important foreign policy instruments to achieve peace and stability in Europe. EU enlargement is an interesting case for examining the complexity of the EU as a foreign policy actor as it combines both supranational and intergovernmental methods of policy-making. The Eastern enlargement of 2004/2007 moved the EU’s border further east and into the regions that Russia considers its geopolitical spheres of interest.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 remains the defining event of the nuclear age and the most dangerous moment in recorded history. It has become the textbook case not just for nuclear diplomacy but for statecraft in relations between nuclear-weapon states. In the ongoing confrontation with Russia’s President Putin, American leaders have reviewed what President John F. Kennedy did in this crisis for lessons and clues that can be applied to the challenge of the day. For students of international affairs, the Missile Crisis offers the best-documented crisis in history, thanks in particular to tape recordings of most of the White House meetings. This makes it possible to vicariously experience the deliberations of those who considered choices they knew could lead to nuclear war. It also allows us to reconstruct the calculations of both nations as they made choices. Three decision-making models provide lenses for students of foreign policy seeking to understand the behaviour of governments as rational, organizational, and governmental actors.
The Arab/Persian Gulf, a strategic subcomplex of the Middle East and North Africa, is a dynamic region experiencing a wide range of changes. Using the concept of the subregional security complex, this chapter focuses on security, inter-state rivalry and relationships within the Gulf, and how they affect regional security. It explains the regional security complex in the Arab/Persian Gulf through reflection on past and present foreign policy choices and behaviours of states in the region. The regional security complex theory is used to analyse the complex dynamics caused by inter-state alignment and cooperation, rivalry and competition, and foreign penetration. The chapter then examines regional activities, inter-state rivalry and competition, and how these interrelated factors have affected security and stability in the Gulf subregion.
This chapter examines a sector that has long been vital to the progress of human society, but has only recently come to prominence as a significant foreign policy factor. Energy represents a source of control for those capable of accessing and selling it, a security issue for both suppliers and buyers, and a foreign policy area that challenges virtually all international actors. While energy security has the capacity to maintain stability and generate interdependence between exporting and importing states, the January 2006 ‘gas spat’ between Russia and Ukraine demonstrates energy’s ability to generate deep insecurities between sovereign and commercial actors, and in the process reshape the geopolitical terrain of Europe and key actors on its peripheries. As will be explored, much of the current tensions afflicting Europe and Russia are driven by an inability to manage energy security as a potent area of foreign policy.
This chapter traces the development of the national security state as a US foreign policy actor to the early stages of the Cold War. However, the US national security state persisted in the post-Cold War era and after 9/11 experienced a massive expansion in what was called the global war on terrorism. The central argument that emerges from the chapter is that the model of the national security state is not only a potential threat to US democracy, but also constitutes an impediment to a US recognition in the 21st century that key security problems increasingly require multilateral solutions.
This chapter looks at the contributions of feminist approaches to Foreign Policy Analysis. Starting with a discussion of Feminist international relations, it examines the ways in which foreign policy as a field of study and practice is gendered. By challenging some of the assumptions underpinning Foreign Policy, the chapter opens a space for a more detailed understanding of the complex social and political structures that have come to define this field. The chapter covers issues around descriptive representation, leadership, gender mainstreaming, and feminist foreign policy. In so doing, it provides an introduction to key feminist approaches and debates on foreign policy and external affairs.
This chapter examines the role and significance of foreign aid in the foreign policies of both aid donors and aid recipients. The chapter starts by discussing what is meant by ‘aid’, and it goes on to look at the varied motivations for the provision of foreign aid before exploring some of the dilemmas and issues that arise within aid diplomacy, for both aid donors and aid recipients.
Public diplomacy—simply described as diplomatic engagement with people—continues to evolve to fit and reflect the needs of twenty-first century statecraft. Most nations—large or small, liberal or authoritarian—understand that image, narrative and reputation underpin influence in today’s globalized world. Governments realize that to generate and exert this power they must inform, influence, and mobilize public opinion. This means engaging public audiences—including civil society representatives, opinion leaders, journalists, scholars, students, and ordinary citizens—both at home and abroad and increasingly through digital means, in the conduct of foreign policy.
Do ideas affect foreign policy, and if so, how? This chapter examines the claim that neoconservative ideas about foreign policy were decisive in persuading the George W. Bush administration to launch a preventive war against Iraq in March 2003. It identifies the key tenets of neoconservative foreign policy thought and shows that some of its major advocates won key positions in the Bush administration. However, the argument of the chapter is that, by itself, neoconservatism provides only a partial explanation of Operation Iraqi Freedom. A more satisfactory explanation would need to incorporate the following: the 9/11 attacks, the strategic placement of neoconservative ideas by its advocates in calmer times, the assumption that the United States would have no trouble waging a successful war, and the one percent doctrine. It is the combination of these events, ideas, and probability estimates that tipped the balance in favour of war.
This chapter analyzes Brazil’s rise and fall as an emerging global power and regional leader over the past twenty years. The chapter begins by debating foreign policy’s historical role in portraying Brazil as a country destined to have a place among great powers. It then evaluates how the literature on Brazilian foreign policy assesses the country’s rise and fall in global and regional dimensions in recent decades. Next, the chapter traces Brazil’s rise initiated during Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration and the construction of leadership in South America. Then, it analyzes the decline in leadership since the end of Lula da Silva’s first government and Dilma’s administration due to economic and political crises experienced in the domestic and international scenarios. Finally, the chapter discusses the 2020s under the government of Jair Bolsonaro, when Brazil abandons any regional leadership ambitions or great power status. Brazil’s rise and fall elucidate a dilemma typical to emerging powers seeking more significant external influence: building leadership with few resources and domestic instability.
For more than two centuries, liberal countries have tended to maintain peaceful relations with each other. Liberal democracies are each other’s natural allies. They tend to respect and accommodate other democratic countries and negotiate rather than escalate their inter-liberal disputes. This provides a positive incentive to try to preserve and expand the liberal zone of peace. And that is the fundamental postulate of liberal foreign policy. But liberalism has also proved to be a dangerous guide to foreign policy, often exacerbating tensions with non-liberal states. Expanding liberalism can sometimes provoke danger and war. This chapter thus addresses a large and perplexing foreign policy question central to all democracies: Can the liberal peace be effectively preserved and expanded without provoking unnecessary danger and inflicting unnecessary harm? The chapter also addresses how scholars have analysed liberalism’s effects, distinguishing three key interpretations of liberal foreign policy: individualist, commercial, and republican.
We live in a world of states. But arguably the core (existential) challenge we currently face on earth—the threat of climate change—is one that looks particularly ill-suited for the state system. The problem is clearly a global one; unilateral action is insufficient to address the challenge; and any attempt to agree on a cooperative response is immediately beset by complex logistical, institutional, and ethical challenges. Yet we have seen international agreements on climate change, and states have found ways to promote strong action on climate change (from other states and from the broader international community) in a range of ways. This chapter examines the challenges of addressing climate change in a world of states before exploring the means through which states have attempted to promote (and in some cases undermine) action on climate change, in the process reflecting on the success of these strategies.
This chapter looks at the contribution that rational models of choice can make to foreign policy analysis. It then examines cognitive models that identify the boundaries to rationality in decision making. The chapter then looks at new research in neuroscience that recasts the role of rational models and highlights the importance of emotions. It concludes with suggestions for system design that can improve foreign policy decision making.
After the reality of the Holocaust had become clear, the members of the newly formed United Nations promised to ‘never again’ allow the crime of genocide and other crimes against humanity to occur. The war in Syria demonstrated the shallow nature of this promise. How was it that Syria was allowed to spiral into an inferno in which mass atrocities were committed against civilians and millions were forcibly displaced? We begin by recounting how a popular uprising was brutally suppressed by the al-Assad government’s military forces—the result was a ‘new war’ where many of the protagonists had more to gain from war than peace. The chapter then examines the diplomatic strategies regional and global powers pursued. We note that the enforcement of the Chemical Weapons Convention signalled a rare moment, during the conflict, where there was a consensus among the great powers. No similar collective international action has been evident thus far in response to the massive harms being inflicted upon millions of innocent civilians in a brutal war lasting more than a decade.
This chapter provides an introduction to how discourse analysis can be used to study foreign policy. In the study of international relations, discourse analysis is associated with post-structuralism, a theoretical approach that shares realism’s concern with states and power, but differs from realism’s assumption that states are driven by self-interest. It also takes a wider view of power than realists normally do. Post-structuralists hold that states, and other political entities, strive to uphold particular visions of themselves and that they do so through policy discourses. Foreign policy discourse plays a crucial role in the construction of these visions as it draws a line between the state and what makes up its identity on the one hand, and that which is different from, and outside the scope of, the state on the other. Taking poststructuralist assumptions to the study of foreign policy implies a focus on the way that foreign policy decisions are legitimated or undermined within the wider public sphere. Epistemologically and methodologically, to understand foreign policy as discourse implies analysis of texts, and this chapter lays out the most important insights and challenges that come with this form of analysis.
