Description
We tend to think of foreign policy as a territory inhabited by diplomats, foreign ministers and journalists. It surrounds us, but may not affect us directly. However, there is a whole world of foreign policy literature that has emerged over the past half-century known as Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), a subject area that is increasingly connected to the discipline of International Relations. Foreign policy is a tool by which actors negotiate their place, their interests and their identity in the ambiguous territory between the domestic and the international. FPA is the study of these processes. In this module, we look at the key components of foreign policy as a practice, and use FPA as an academic perspective to understand and critically interpret it. They key word here is analysis: our aim is to dig deep and extract meanings and motivations that are obscured by politicised rhetoric. We will explore international actors, the system they inhabit (both internal and external) and the motivations that inform their individual actions and collective interactions. FPA is not as a single theory, capable of generating an overarching framework that can explain or help to understand actors’ choices in all situations. Rather, every foreign policy event is unlike any other. Equally however, such complexity takes can still be approached in a systematic fashion.The course is split into two sections. The first five lectures look at the key question of what FPA is, how it is distinct from traditional approaches to the study of international relations, and why it is useful as a sub-field of IR. We look at how we may use different levels of analysis to inform our understanding why states have acted as they have at certain points in time, while also spending time on the agency-structure debate in FPA. We explore three levels of analysis: (1) the political psychology of world leaders, group decision-making, and bureaucratic politics; (2) culture, identity and domestic factors; and (3) the international level. In the second part of the course, we move from exploring the concept and approach of FPA to applying what we have learnt to some “real world” examples or case studies of foreign policy. Here we explore some major events or crises, such as the Iraq War and the international intervention in Libya and attempt to get an overview of the foreign policies of different states across international society, such as China, the United States, Britain, Russia, and South Africa. This will help students to broaden their knowledge of international affairs and encourage a greater depth of thinking on both historical events and current affairs.