Talk:Foreign policy analysis

Hi! I just wanted to suggest a few sources that could be useful for the article:

V. Hudson, C. Vore "Foreign Policy Analysis: yesterday, today, tomorrow" Mershon International Studies Review, vol. 39, no. 2 (oct. 1995), pp. 209-238.

V. Hudson, "Foreign Policy Analysis: Actor-Specific Theory and the Ground of International Relations" Foreign Policy Analysis, vol. 1, no. 1 (march 2005), pp. 1-30 (this one is freely available online)

They are both really good review articles: they provide a discussion of the methodology and epistemology that distinguishes FPA from IR theory (in particular the fact that FPA challenges the state-centric approach of IR theory, and the assumption that states can be considered unitary rational actors), and they also give a good overview of the key approaches to FPA, that is:

• Comparative Foreign Policy, based on James Rosenau's work Pre-Theories and Theories of Foreign Policy (1966)
• Foreign Policy Decision-Making, based on a 1960's study by Snyder, Bruck and Sapin
• Man-Milieu Relationship Hypotheses, by Sprout and Sprout

Another good source could be C. Hill, The Changing Politics of Foreign Policy, published by Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. That too provides a good review of theories of foreign policy. It kind of tries to be a handbook in FPA, but of course it faces the daunting task of summarizing an incredibly large body of literature. I don't think a real handbook has yet been published, anyway.

I hope I was helpful. Thanks. SFinamore 13:09, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I undid revision 101189519 by 68.95.199.82

I thought I should revert the page to the previous edit. The reason is that the sentence "a state has a foreign policy goal" doesn't seem to fit in well with the context of the paragraph "goal setting", which talks about the need to prioritise between different goals. Besides, I think we can fairly agree that a state actually does have "multiple" foreign policy goals, sometimes at odd with each other. What should be contested is the idea that a "state" has foreign policy goals: it is actually the governing elites who have goals, and sometimes different people in the government or in the bureaucracy or elsewhere may have different and even opposite objectives, which may sometimes lead to incoherent foreign policies. In fact, one of the peculiar aspects of Foreign Policy Analysis as a discipline is that it contests the "unitary actor" assumption which is so frequently made in the macrotheories of International Relations, especially in Realism: FPA literature generally does not consider states as "unitary actors". One more thing I reverted: "state" (or perhaps State, capitalized) is a more appropriate term than "country" in the study of IR, FPA, International Law and other international disciplines.

SFinamore 16:30, 17 January 2007 (UTC)