"A main axis of intellectual tension in the area of foreign policy analysis over the past forty years is the issue of the importance of "beliefs" in the explanation and prediction of foreign policy decisions and outcomes. The seminal decision-making approach to foreign policy articulated by Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin (1954) at mid-century was partly in reaction to a skewed emphasis by the realist tradition on external circumstances, e.g., the balance of power, and the omission of beliefs in explaining foreign policy decisions. Snyder and his colleagues argued that this strategy of explanation came at the expense of neglecting the definition of the situation represented by the decision maker's beliefs about the external and internal setting for decision...."

"... One of the consequences was to limit insights into the dynamics of international crises, an important area of foreign policy analysis during the cold war and crucial to realist concerns with the question of war and peace among the great powers in the international system. Subsequent research efforts by several scholars attempted to demonstrate the validity of the decision-making approach to international crises over the next several decades (e.g., Paige 1968; Holsti et al 1968, 1969; Hermann 1969; Hermann and Brady 1972; Holsti 1972, Brecher 1974; Snyder and Diesing 1977; Lebow 1981; Brecher, Steinberg, and Stein 1969; Brecher, Wilkenfeld, and Moser 1988). In spite of such efforts, a debate has occurred over whether beliefs are merely epiphenomena or important causal mechanisms in foreign policy analysis...."

Excerpts from:
"Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Analysis: Where We Were, Are, and Should Strive to Be"

Ole Holsti
Duke University

"This essay examines perspectives on public opinion and foreign policy, first during the formative years of the International Studies Association and, secondly, at the beginning of the new millennium. Because of limited space, the essay necessarily focuses on some main currents of theory and research at the expense of drawing subtle distinctions between various perspectives on the subject. The concluding section identifies some areas that should be near or at the top of our research agendas during the coming years...."

"...There are many reasons to applaud the more benign and realistic view of the general public that has emerged from several decades of research, but it is hardly a time for complacency, especially among educators. At what point does "low information rationality" become "no information irrationality?" Perhaps preventing the former from becoming the latter should be the most important on our agenda concerning public opinion and foreign policy...."

Excerpt from:
"Simulation and Experimentation in Foreign Policy Analysis: Some Personal Observations on Problems and Prospects"

Jonathan Wilkenfeld
University of Maryland

"My work in foreign policy analysis during the last decade has increasingly involved the use of experimental approaches to the study of foreign policy decision making. It is my adventures, and in many cases misadventures, in this new realm that I want to focus on in this chapter. I begin with some background on experimentation in political science in general, and in international politics in particular. This will be followed by the story of how I got involved with this approach in the first place. Finally, in order to examine what experimentation can and cannot do for us, I will present a research design and some preliminary data in which both cross-national and experimental approaches are used to extend our knowledge on one particular phenomenon in international politics, the process of mediation in international disputes."

"...At one time or another, we have all bemoaned the fact that foreign policy analysis is plagued by a combination of relatively small n's and relatively large numbers of variables potentially contributing to the foreign policy decision making process. On the surface, experimental work can successfully address both of these issues. With a more or less unlimited supply of willing undergraduates as subjects, our n is virtually limitless. By carefully constructing our simulation models and controlling our experimental environments, we can limit the number of variables we have to consider in any given experimental run. If this is the case, why are there those of us who are having so much trouble?..."

Excerpt from:
"Security Theory: Six Paradigms Searching for Security"

Edward A. Kolodziej
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"This survey of security theory is divided into two parts. The first defines security as a political concept and phenomenon. This discussion provides a point of departure for reviewing prevailing security theories. The second, and longest section, briefly examines and evaluates the claims of six competing research programs, concerned directly or indirectly with security. These include realism, neo-realism, economic liberalism, liberal institutionalism, behaviorism, and constructivism. These research programs can be distinguished on the basis of their ontological, epistemological, methodological, and evidentiary assumptions about actors and their behavior. Given space constraints, the discussion will identify only the principal differences between these research paradigms and their implications for security theory...."

Excerpt from:
"Security and Peace: Understanding, Production and Work Style"

Davis B. Bobrow

"The most attractive accomplishment of security and peace studies and policies would be for them to become historical curiosities akin to alchemy, Victorian era plumbing, or vanquished diseases. A second best would be signs of progress on that road marked by improved understanding and early diagnosis, and—even better—more available and less costly means for prevention and treatment, containment and cure. To extend the medical metaphor, we would then see in the present or in confident prospect reductions in the incidence and severity of insecurity, destruction, casualties and deaths, and the opportunity costs of measures to reduce them.

From the second best perspective, these are in some ways the best of times for security and peace studies and policies. In other ways, they are far from that and leave a lot to be desired. These two aspects of our current intellectual and policy situation suggest lessons which are sobering in their implications for the limits on our understanding of security and peace and even more so for the application of our understanding to produce those collective accomplishments. Of no less importance, this duality challenges us to adopt a work style appropriate to both what we have learned and produced, and to our continuing limitations—and to socialize successor generations of security and peace experts into it.

[This article]... begins with a crude summary of what seems to me to be 'good news' about the point to which we have come, and then turn[s] to a 'darker side' suggesting how far we have to go. These lead me to identify some persistent realities which should be squarely faced up to, and to offer some suggestions on how we should deal with our unfinished agenda...."

Excerpt from:
"Convergences Between International Security Studies and Peace Studies"

Louis Kriesberg
Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"International security studies and peace studies are not a single subfield of international relations. Analysts in security studies and those in peace studies have generally viewed themselves and been viewed by others as working in quite different domains. Some persons in each area have been critical or dismissive of the efforts of those in the other. Nevertheless, many persons across both areas actually share significant concerns and questions, such as how to avoid or to limit wars and other violent conflicts. Furthermore, the work that is being done in each of these domains is increasingly overlapping. To enhance the possibilities of beneficial cooperation among analysts in these domains, the past relations and the current movements toward convergence should be examined. After doing so, I will discuss promising options for the future...."

Excerpts from:
"Notes from the Underground: A Tale of Three Perspectives"

Linda B. Miller
Wellesley College / Brown University

"The invitation to participate in a Millennial Reflection panel on International Security and Peace Studies and to publish these remarks arrived at a propitious moment. The public opportunity to reappraise my own academic career as I was already doing privately myself meant a chance to ruminate in a way that might have value for younger scholars at earlier stages of their careers. And since my own trajectory closely parallels ISA in terms of time, such an overview should be of general interest to the membership....

... [R]ecently, I have added a third perspective to the first two of student and teacher, that of editor of an official ISA journal, International Studies Review. I am struck by the ways in which these three perspectives—student, teacher-researcher, and editor—have built on each other, in part ... because we tend to fit new data into existing categories, and, in part, because we do construct our own autobiographies, perhaps at the risk of not being able to get out of them.

In this supposedly new age of "narratives" and "discourses", we should examine our perspectives periodically to see not only what needs to be discarded but also what should be retained, whatever its origins...."

Excerpt from:
"Reflections on the Field of International Political Economy"

Helen Milner
Columbia University

"... Since [the 1970s], research in the area [of IPE] has grown greatly, and the field has become well established within American and European political science departments. However, a number of the issues occupying the heart of the field have changed. [This paper] argues that hegemonic stability theory has largely faded, and the issues [of the usefulness of military force, the question of US hegemony, the international response to the oil shocks, the possible future peripherality of the lesser developed countries, and the importance of international institutions] have taken on new and different casts in light of the field's current preoccupation with the causes and consequences of globalization...."

Excerpt from:
"Some Thoughts on International Political Economy in the Context of Public Policy Education"

Robert T. Kudrle
Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the Law School
University of Minnesota

"... Nearly all international economic interaction and the policies that condition it can be considered in three categories: exchange, penetration, and constraint. Economists and political scientists have studied the first category mainly by focusing on the way in which trade—in both goods and capital—changes the wealth and security positions of various states. This has been the focus of most of international economics and much of international politics and political economy. In some of [the] formulations of research reviewed earlier, the interactions have no effect beyond changed wealth positions. In sharp contrast, penetration issues stress a broader range of interactions that are epitomized by the literature on the multinational corporation. The social impact of a permanent foreign presence generates issues well beyond those of mere commerce, and much of that presence has been regarded with ambivalence or hostility. Finally, many of the concerns associated with "globalization" involve international factors mainly as they constrain the operation of domestic policy. Concerns about the changing incidence of certain taxes in response to increased capital and labor mobility illustrate those issues. The broader agenda reduces the overall importance of increased scholarly understanding of the domestic politics of purely exchange issues and increases the need to examine much more of the comparative politics and public policy literature in political science. For the same reasons additional subfields of economics are rising in importance for the study of the policy aspects of IPE. Public finance, labor economics, and environmental economics are growing in importance as international taxation, immigration, and the global environment have joined trade, investment, and finance issues as foci of major attention...."

Conflict, Security, Foreign Policy, and International Political Economy

Table of Contents

Foreign Policy Analysis

International Security, Peace, and War

International Political Economy

Excerpts and Abstracts