Foreign Policy Analysis

Foreign Policy Analysis (upper case, abbreviated as FPA) is a subfield of the academic subject of international relations (IR) that has developed since the 1950s, broadly in parallel with IR itself. Foreign policy analysis (lower case, abbreviated as fpa) is what all commentators on matters of foreign policy do as a matter of routine, for one country or many. (This distinction between FPA [Page 917]and fpa will be used here for clarity.) Whether academics, journalists, or think tank researchers, they dissect the sources, goals, instruments, and feasibility of foreign policies and have thus gained over the years the sobriquet of foreign policy analysts. The term itself, however, is relatively modern in origin and owes much to the emergence of the academic field of FPA, which is the main focus of this entry, given its importance for IR and for political science more widely.

FPA has predominantly become established in the Anglo-Saxon world (i.e., England and her former colonies), including the United States, the United Kingdom, together with Scandinavia and some countries of the Commonwealth, such as Australia, Canada, India, Nigeria, and South Africa. Foreign policy has been long studied elsewhere but more in the fpa tradition and influenced more by history and international law than by political science. Even within the relatively narrow world of FPA, there are important differences of approach. The U.S. scholarly community has produced most of the important work in all areas of the subject, but it has also historically placed much more emphasis on large-scale data sets associated with the specialization known as comparative foreign policy (CFP), which has not attracted much interest (or the necessary resources) outside the United States. Elsewhere the focus has been more on case studies, on the microaspects of decision making, and on the ideas of foreign policy—particularly in the past decade, with the rise of constructivism and its concern with identity politics. But wherever the subject is studied, it is underpinned by the preoccupation with the relationship between process and outcome. Even those primarily concerned to generate events data have been motivated by the wish to discover correlations between certain kinds of foreign policy events and key variables, such as domestic upheaval or degrees of pluralism.

FPA can operate with a zoom or a wide-angle lens, on individual decisions, and on a class of actions—behavior in crises, for instance. Yet even close-textured analysis is set up in such a way as to enable comparisons to take place. In this, it is similar to the study of comparative politics, which can be regarded as its equivalent, or parallel, within mainstream political science. Yoked together, the two subjects constitute a solid bridge between political science and IR. Each also draws on history and area studies, as one cannot understand political culture, whether in the singular or the plural, without a grounding in its geographical and historical particularities. Theory is central to FPA, but it is not, by itself, a powerful tool in this particular context. FPA also looks to the study of international law and organization (more properly to the sociology of law and organization) for insights into the constraints under which foreign policymakers operate. In fact the literature of IR as a whole is useful in this respect. Even Kenneth Waltz's neorealism, which explicitly disavows having anything to say about foreign policy (it being a different level of analysis from his own), provides a clear picture of the nature of the international system, with implied guidance for the actors within it.

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