Intra-African Trade, Digital Technologies and Canada's Foreign Policy Choices

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Olayele
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Policy Choices

Intervention and Intransitivity: Public Opinion, Social Choice, and the Use of Military Force Abroad

1995 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 534-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt Taylor Gaubatz
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Choice ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Public Preferences ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
The Impact

This article argues that the problems identified in the literature on public choice should critically affect our research on public opinion and our understanding of the impact of public opinion on foreign policy. While a robust literature has emerged around social choice issues in political science, there has been remarkably little appreciation for these problems in the literature on public opinion in general and on public opinion and foreign policy in particular. The potential importance of social choice problems for understanding the nature and role of public opinion in foreign policy making is demonstrated through an examination of American public attitudes about military intervention abroad. In particular, drawing on several common descriptions of the underlying dimensionality of public attitudes on major foreign policy issues, it is shown that there may be important intransitivities in the ordering of public preferences at the aggregate level on policy choices such as those considered by American decision makers in the period leading up to the Gulf War. Without new approaches to public-opinion polling that take these problems into consideration, it will be difficult to make credible claims about the role of public opinion in theforeignpolicy process.

scholarly journals Explaining the European Union’s Changing Position towards the Gibraltar Question after the Brexit Referendum

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (4-1) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Uğur Burç Yıldız İ ◽  
Anıl Çamyamaç
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
International Law ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Member States ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Near Future ◽  
First Time

Abstract Having previously remained impartial on the Gibraltar question between Spain and Britain since both were member states, the European Union suddenly changed its position after the Brexit referendum in favor of the Spanish government at the expense of breaching international law. In doing so, the European Union, for the first time, created a foreign policy on the long-standing Gibraltar question. This article explores the reasons behind the creation of this foreign policy in support of Spain. The European Union feared that the idea of Euroscepticism may escalate among remaining member states after the Brexit referendum because of wide-spread claims that it would dissolve in the near future, fuelled by farright political parties. The European Union therefore created a foreign policy regarding Gibraltar in Spain’s favor in order to promote a “sense of community” for thwarting a further rise in Euroscepticism. While making its analysis, the article applies the assumption of social constructivism that ideas shape interests, which then determine the foreign policy choices of actors.

Analysis and Decision

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-186
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Risky Decision ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Over Time

This chapter explains how decision makers can incorporate assessments of uncertainty into high-stakes foreign policy choices. It begins by describing a simple analytic tool called break-even analysis, with which leaders can use explicit probability assessments as a point of leverage for determining whether or not a risky decision is worthwhile. The chapter then explains how transparent probabilistic reasoning is especially important for assessing strategic progress. In some cases, it can actually be impossible to make rigorous judgments about the extent to which foreign policies are making acceptable progress without assessing subjective probabilities in detail. This argument departs from a large body of existing scholarship on learning in international politics that assumes leaders can use a straightforward logic of trial and error to determine how they should update their strategic perceptions over time. The chapter provides examples of these dynamics drawn from the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Policy Analysts ◽  
Bay Of Pigs

This chapter describes widespread skepticism regarding the value of assessing uncertainty in international politics. “Agnostics” argue that assessments of uncertainty in international politics are too unreliable to be useful for shaping major foreign policy decisions. “Rejectionists” argue that attempting to assess uncertainty in international politics can be counterproductive, surrounding foreign policy analyses with illusions of rigor or exposing foreign policy analysts to excessive criticism. “Cynics” claim that foreign policy analysts and decision makers have self-interested motives to avoid assessing uncertainty. The chapter explains how these ideas lead many scholars, practitioners, and pundits to avoid holding careful debates about the risks surrounding major foreign policy choices. The chapter describes how this aversion to probabilistic reasoning appears in several high-profile cases, such as President Kennedy’s decision to authorize the Bay of Pigs invasion and President Obama’s decision to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Psychology and Foreign Policy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Stein
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Psychology ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Group Behavior ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Policy Behavior ◽  
Foreign Policy Behavior ◽  
Psychological Concepts

The use of psychological concepts to explain the behavior of individuals and groups that shape foreign policy is centuries old. Thucydides in his great History of the Peloponnesian War explored the impact of the fear of decline on leaders’ decisions to go to war. Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August demonstrated how misperception and miscalculation by leaders in the summer of 1914 led to an accidental war that no leader wanted or expected. During and after World War II, political scientists began to draw systematically on psychological concepts to explain foreign policy behavior. Scholarship advanced when the International Society of Political Psychology was founded in 1978 along with a specialized journal, Political Psychology. Early scholarship focused on leaders’ personalities and their impact on the foreign policy choices they made, with special attention devoted to decisions to go to war or make peace. A second wave of scholarship drew on the work of cognitive psychologists who had identified heuristics and biases to explore the impact of the way leaders thought on the foreign policy decisions that they made and examined pairs of interacting leaders to explain spirals of escalation. Scholars mined cognitive psychology to explore decisions to cooperate or compete, the success and failure of deterrence and compellence, and bargaining and signaling behavior by leaders. A third wave of scholarship drew on psychological research on emotion and examined how the emotional states of leaders influenced foreign policy choices. Scholars moved beyond leaders to study elite and group attributes to explain foreign policy behavior. In doing so, they confronted the central problem of aggregation; cognition and emotion are embedded in the individual. When they move to explain group behavior, scholars deepened psychological concepts by adding a broader social dimension to the analysis. Research in the last decade situates feeling and thinking in a larger social and cultural context in a more contextualized explanation of foreign policy behavior. Research is increasingly multidisciplinary, drawing on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics to explain foreign policy behavior.

Image Theory and the Initiation of Strategic Rivalries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manjeet S. Pardesi
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cognitive Process ◽  
International System ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Other ◽  
Image Theory ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Domestic Affairs

The assessment of an opponent as a strategic rival is analytically equivalent to evaluating its strategic image. The central decision-makers of states reevaluate the image of other regional states and the great powers of the system in response to strategic shocks, as they have an impact on interstate interaction capacity. Interaction capacity in the international system can be affected by three types of changes—military, political, and economic. A strategic rivalry is a process that initiates when the central decision-makers of at least one state in a dyad ascribe the image of an enemy to the other as a consequence of such shocks. It is important to empirically demonstrate the ascription of these images through a cognitive process because strategic rivalries are a function of decision-maker perceptions by definition. Four types of enemy images are identified here—expansionist states, which are territorially revisionist; hegemonic states, which circumscribe a given state’s foreign policy choices; imperial states, which intervene in a given state’s domestic affairs in addition to being hegemonic; and peer-competitors, who pose latent and/or long-term threats. Once formed, these images are sustained over long periods of time and change only slowly in response to additional strategic shocks. These images also inform the strategy that a given state pursues toward its rival.

Edward Schatz on Manar Shorbagy

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Obama Administration ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Patterns Of Behavior ◽  
Modes Of Engagement

This essay is a response to Manar Shorbagy’s contribution in this book, Global Perspectives on the United States. It argues that Shorbagy is correct in stating that U.S. policy in the region produces the very resistance to its policies that it seeks to undermine, but it also wants to extend the argument beyond analysis of policies. Schatz, for example, insists that ordinary people and political actors form their opinions and pursue their agendas not solely based on policy calculations, and he stresses that this is more important than Shorbagy’s essay presents. He asks several questions in his response to Shorbagy’s analysis of Kefaya: (1) Is Kefaya likely to survive the Obama Administration, the next U.S. president, their different foreign policy choices, and at times very different rhetoric, given its trans-ideological nature uniting Islamists and secular democrats? (2) Will Kefaya need to move beyond critiques of “foreign threats and political despotism” and demonstrate its efficacy to the broader public? And (3) is it possible that the new U.S. administration could engineer new modes of engagement in the region that are much less beholden to old patterns of behavior?

scholarly journals A STRATEGIC PUZZLE OF SAUDI-IRAN STRIFE AND FOREIGN POLICY CHOICES OF PAKISTAN (2013-18)

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (02) ◽  
pp. 195-207
Author(s):  
Yeldaiz Fatima Shah ◽  
Muhammad Adnan Aslam ◽  
Ghulam Mustafa
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Regional Politics ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Middle East Politics

In diverse circumstances of region, Iran and Saudi Arabia have significant part in foreign policy of Pakistan. It is difficult for policy makers of Pakistan to retain acceptable relations and policies towards both countries at the same time because of severe contentions between the Iran and Saudi Arabia including the high interests of the main players in the Middle East Politics. The main objectives of research are to elucidate the different standpoints between Iran and Saudi Arabia and their impacts on policies of Pakistan. Different diplomatic, political and economic triangle developments among Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is discussed during last government tenure of PML (N). For this set out, the qualitative method with historical research design has been used, through argumentation procedure while complex interdependent theory applied to examine the nature of triangle relations and policies including their impacts on regional politics and economy. The study provides significant insights for its implication in the particular context with diverse outcomes.

Neoclassical Realist Analyses of Foreign Policy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michiel Foulon
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
System Level ◽  
Neoclassical Realism ◽  
State Behavior ◽  
Unit Level ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Domestic Level ◽  
Level Of Analysis

Neoclassical realism offers insights into why particular foreign policy choices are made, and under what systemic conditions unit-level factors are likely to intervene between systemic stimuli and state behavior. Neoclassical realism brings a multilevel framework that combines both systemic incentives and mediating unit-level variables to arrive at conclusions about foreign policy choices in particular cases. It sets the relative distribution of capabilities in the international system as the independent variable and adds mediating variables at the unit level of analysis. Variables at the domestic level of analysis, such as the role of ideology, the foreign policy executive’s perceptions, resource extraction, and domestic institutions, add explanatory power to system-level approaches. Neoclassical realism accounts for state behavior in a way that a more parsimonious systems-level theory is unable to achieve. But this rich theoretical framework also faces controversies and criticisms: Is neoclassical realism distinct from other theories and what is its added value? Neoclassical realism overlaps only to a small extent with alternative theoretical approaches. The domestic level of analysis dominates Foreign Policy Analysis (a subfield of International Relations). Unit-level variables suffice to explain state behavior in bottom-up approaches, and opening the structure of the international system for fundamental rethinking is central to constructivism. Neither explains the system-level conditions under which unit-level variables mediate between systemic stimuli and foreign policy. Neoclassical realism analyzes and explains a given foreign policy that more parsimonious or alternative theoretical approaches cannot.

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