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This course is to introduce foreign policy analysis as a well-defined sub-field of international relations. It aims to understand the processes by which state foreign policies are made, utilizing interdisciplinary insights to explain specific events and generate policy-relevant knowledge. It will introduce and highlight a variety of theories in foreign policy decision-making and their applicability in various issue areas and under different circumstances by doing a series of comparative case studies of major players in world politics. In doing so, it will explore various factors that may impede rational choice in foreign policy decision making and the possible ways that irrationality in foreign policy decision-making could be minimized.
This book strives to explain war among states and related prescriptions for peace. The author explores works both by classic political philosophers, such as St. Augustine, Hobbes, Kant, and Rousseau, and by modern psychologists and anthropologists. The major chapters cover the topics of international conflict and human behavior as well as the behavioral sciences and the reduction of interstate violence, international conflict and the internal structure of states as well as international socialism and the coming of the First World War, and international conflict and international anarchy as well as examples from economics, politics, and history.
This book offers a survey of the neoclassical realist approaches to states’ grand strategies through 10 essays. It examines the central role of the state and seeks to explain why, how, and under what conditions the internal characteristics of states intervene between their leaders’ assessments of international threats and opportunities, and the actual diplomatic, military, and foreign economic policies those leaders are likely to pursue. Questions reflected upon in this book fall into three groups- the politics of threat assessment, the politics of strategic adjustment, and the politics of resource extraction, domestic mobilization, and policy implementation.
The Israel lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and groups that seeks to influence American foreign policy in ways that will benefit Israel. This book focus primarily on the lobby’s influence on US foreign policy and its negative effect on American interests. The book addresses that the United States provides Israel with extraordinary material aid and diplomatic support, identifies the lobby’s different components and describes how this loose coalition has evolved, and describes the different strategies that groups in the lobby use in order to advance Israel’s interests in the United States as well as case studies of specific US foreign policies.
This book covers models of the mass public and political elites and addresses both domestic issues and foreign policy. Part One introduces broad psychological theories that concern personality, early childhood and adult development, rational choices, decision-making, the study of emotin, evolutionary psychology, genetics, and political rhetoric. Part Two focuses on different areas of political psychological research. Part Three focuses on mass political behavior, including an analysis of political reasoning, political ideology, social justice, social influence, political communications, and political deliberation, and Part Four considers collective behavior, including identities, social movements, racial prejudice, migration and multiculturalism, discrimination, and intractable conflict.
This book introduces agenda setting and policy formation. It is drawn from interview conducted with people in and around the U.S. federal government, and from case studies, government documents, party platforms, press coverage, and public opinion surveys. The book considers how issues got to be issues, rather than examines how policy issues are decided, and attempts to answer the questions: How do subjects come to officials’ attention? How are the alternatives from which they choose generated? How is the governmental agenda set? Why does an idea’s time come when it does?
