Foreign Policy Analysis Course

Course Overview

Foreign policy is the arena in which domestic politics meets the international system, where individual judgement collides with bureaucratic inertia, where identity and interest are simultaneously invoked to justify action, and where the gap between stated purpose and actual outcome is often vast. Foreign Policy Analysis as an academic sub-field exists precisely to prise open what IR theory tends to leave sealed: the black box of the state. It insists that international outcomes cannot be understood without examining who decides, how decisions are made, under what psychological and institutional constraints, shaped by what cultural frameworks, pressed by what domestic constituencies, and wielded through what instruments of statecraft.

This course develops students’ analytical capacity across the full breadth of the field, from its intellectual origins in the behaviouralist revolution of the 1950s to its contemporary engagement with gender, postcolonial critique, neurological decision science, and the governance of global challenges.

The course is structured in four movements. The first establishes the field and its theoretical grammar. The second descends through the levels of analysis, from the individual decision-maker through small groups, bureaucracies, domestic politics, and national attributes to systemic pressures. The third examines the principal instruments through which foreign policy is made and implemented. The fourth applies this analytical repertoire to a series of cases that test, complicate, and extend the frameworks students have developed.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Explain and critically evaluate the history and development of Foreign Policy Analysis as a sub-field of International Relations, including its methodological commitments and its relationship to IR theory.
• Apply the principal theoretical frameworks used in FPA — realist, liberal, constructivist, discourse-analytic, gendered, and postcolonial — to explain and assess specific foreign policy choices.
• Analyse foreign policy decisions at each level of the Hudson-Day framework: individual psychology, small group dynamics, bureaucratic politics, domestic politics, national attributes, and systemic pressures.
• Evaluate the principal instruments of foreign policy — grand strategy, economic statecraft, public diplomacy, aid diplomacy, and global governance — and the conditions under which each is effective.
• Conduct structured case study analysis, integrating theoretical frameworks with empirical evidence to produce explanations of specific foreign policy decisions and outcomes.
• Engage critically with the rational actor model and its alternatives, including cognitive, psychological, and neurological approaches to decision-making under uncertainty.
• Assess the contributions of non-Western scholarship and postcolonial critique to FPA, and evaluate what civilisational narratives, colonial legacies, and epistemic frameworks reveal about how states understand and conduct foreign policy.
• Construct original analytical arguments in written and oral forms, demonstrating command of the FPA literature and its application to specific foreign policy problems.

Assessment

1. Seminar Participation and Analytical Engagement — 15%
2. Analytical Development Portfolio — 35%
3. Applied Exercise and Reflection — 15%
4. Final Research Essay — 35%

Seminar Participation and Analytical Engagement — 15%
Students are assessed on the quality, consistency, and analytical depth of their contributions to seminar discussions throughout the semester.

Strong performance demonstrates:

• sustained engagement with weekly readings
• ability to apply theoretical and conceptual frameworks
• critical discussion of empirical cases and policy developments
• constructive engagement with the arguments of others

Students are encouraged to incorporate comparative perspectives, primary sources, and contemporary international developments into seminar discussions.

Analytical Development Portfolio — 35%
This is a two-stage analytical assignment submitted in connected parts across the semester. Part II builds explicitly on Part I, and students may revise aspects of their earlier analysis in light of feedback received before incorporating it into the second submission.

Part I: Explanatory Framework Paper (Week 5) — 1,000 words — 15%
Students select a specific foreign policy decision from a list provided by the lecturer and apply one of the levels-of-analysis frameworks developed in the course to explain it. The paper should identify and justify the analytical level chosen; apply the relevant FPA concepts with precision; specify what the chosen framework explains well and what it cannot account for; and advance an original explanatory claim grounded in evidence.

Part II: Multi-Level Analysis Essay (Week 8) — 1,500 words — 20%
Building on the Part I paper, students extend their analysis to incorporate at least two additional levels of analysis, examine the tensions and complementarities between the frameworks applied, and develop a more comprehensive and defensible account of the foreign policy decision under examination. The essay should revisit the Part I argument in light of feedback; engage explicitly with the interaction effects between levels; and advance a refined analytical argument that acknowledges the limits of any single-level explanation.

Applied Exercise and Reflection — 15%
Students participate in a structured crisis simulation held across Weeks 10 and 11. Working in assigned national delegations, each student advocates for a specific foreign policy position under time pressure and incomplete information, engaging with competing delegations and responding to developing scenarios. Assessment has three components:

• Delegation briefing document (500 words), submitted before the simulation — 5%
• Participation in the simulation, assessed on analytical quality and strategic coherence — 5%
• Reflective analysis (750 words), submitted after the simulation — 5%

The reflective analysis should examine which FPA frameworks best explain the behaviour observed in the simulation, how the experience of decision-making under pressure illuminated or complicated the theoretical models studied, and what the exercise revealed about the gap between rational actor assumptions and actual decision dynamics. The scenario is distributed at the end of Week 9.

Final Research Essay — 35%
A research essay of 3,000 to 4,000 words applying FPA frameworks to a substantive foreign policy question. Students may develop an argument arising from any area of the course — a specific decision, a state’s foreign policy orientation, an instrument of statecraft, or a comparison across cases — provided they engage with the relevant FPA literature with precision, situate their argument clearly within an existing debate, and advance an original analytical claim. The essay must demonstrate command of both primary texts and the peer-reviewed literature. A one-page essay proposal with a preliminary bibliography is submitted at the end of Week 7 for formative feedback. The final essay is due in Week 13.

Submission, Formatting Requirements and Academic Integrity

• All written work must be submitted as a PDF file, regardless of the word processor used.
• Use font at 12 points Times New Roman or Arial. Pages must be numbered. Include your name, student number, course name, assignment title, and word count on the first page; a separate cover page is not required.
• The word count stated in the assignment brief is a guide to scope and depth, not a rigid threshold. Work within 10 per cent of the stated count in either direction. The word count covers the main body of the text, including in-text citations, but excludes the reference list, any tables or figures, and any appendices.
• All written work must follow APA 7th edition throughout. In-text citations use the author-date format: (Yergin, 2020) or Yergin (2020) argues that… For direct quotations, include the page number: (Yergin, 2020, p. 47). The reference list appears at the end of the document, ordered alphabetically by surname. Do not use footnotes for references; footnotes may be used sparingly for substantive clarifications that would otherwise interrupt the argument.
• Formal policies on academic integrity and the use of AI tools vary by institution and will be communicated where applicable. The question beneath those policies does not change: is the goal to understand, or simply to appear to have understood? A qualification obtained without the knowledge it is meant to represent is a transaction, not an education, and it shortchanges the holder as much as anyone else. I invest genuine effort in connecting students to scholarship, practitioners, and professional networks that extend well beyond any syllabus. Whether that investment meets a reciprocal commitment is, in the end, a question of character rather than compliance.

Literature

Hudson, V. M., & Day, B. S. (2025). Foreign policy analysis: Classic and contemporary theory (4th ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing.
Morin, J.-F., & Paquin, J. (2018). Foreign policy analysis: A toolbox. Palgrave Macmillan.
Smith, S., Hadfield, A., Dunne, T., & Kitchen, N. (Eds). (2024). Foreign Policy: Theories, actors, cases (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Varouxakis, G. (2025). The West: The history of an idea. Princeton University Press.

Students are expected to work across three categories of source material:

• Academic literature provides theoretical frameworks and empirical analysis.
• Policy documents — from governments, international organisations, think tanks, and energy agencies — provide the primary material through which energy geopolitics is actually practised and debated.
• Energy data, produced by bodies such as the International Energy Agency, the US Energy Information Administration, and the African Development Bank, provides the empirical foundations for strategic assessment.

Learning to read across all three, and to identify the assumptions, interests, and limitations embedded in each, is itself a core intellectual skill of the course.

Research articles do not appear in the bibliography above. This is intentional. Each week, students are expected to identify a peer-reviewed article relevant to that week’s topic, bring it to the seminar, and share it with the group. The lecturer contributes selections alongside the class. This practice develops independent literature-searching habits, exposes the seminar to a wider range of scholarly perspectives than any fixed reading list could provide, and keeps the course in sustained contact with current debates in the field.

Structure

Week 1 — What is Foreign Policy Analysis, and why does it matter that states are not unitary actors?

Foreign policy analysis has always been a discipline in tension with itself. It was born from the recognition that the state-as-billiard-ball assumption of classical realism was analytically inadequate: states do not behave; people do, and they do so in institutional settings shaped by bureaucratic inertia, psychological limitation, domestic political pressure, and cultural frameworks that IR theory routinely ignores. Hudson’s foundational argument that actor-specific theory is the ground of international relations, not a supplement to it remains the most powerful statement of FPA’s ambitions. This week establishes that claim, traces the field’s intellectual history from Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin through the behaviouralist revolution and the comparative foreign policy movement to the contemporary pluralism of the sub-field, and asks what it means methodologically to put the human decision-maker back at the centre of international politics.

Key Themes

• The founding challenge: why unitary actor assumptions fail
• The intellectual history of FPA: Snyder, Rosenau, and the comparative turn
• Actor-specific theory and levels of analysis as FPA’s methodological core
• FPA and IR theory: complement or critique?
• The dependent variable problem: what is foreign policy?

Case Studies

• The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: why multiple analytical models are needed
• Brexit as foreign policy: who decided, how, and why?

Seminar Exercise

• Mapping exercise: students position the major FPA frameworks along two axes — rationalist to psychological on one dimension, individual to systemic on the other — and examine what each position implies about where to look for explanations of foreign policy. Groups discuss the dependent variable problem: what exactly are we trying to explain when we explain foreign policy?

Analytical Focus

• Introduction to FPA’s intellectual history and methodological commitments; distinguishing FPA from IR theory; establishing the levels-of-analysis framework as the course’s analytical spine.

Week 2 — How do realism, liberalism, and constructivism differ in what they ask of foreign policy?

The three mainstream theoretical traditions of IR (realism, liberalism, and constructivism) each generate a distinct account of what foreign policy is, what drives it, and how it can be studied. Wohlforth’s realism asks states to calculate power and act accordingly; foreign policy is the outward expression of the national interest under structural constraint. Doyle’s liberalism opens the state, asking how domestic institutions, commercial ties, and shared democratic values shape the possibilities for cooperation. Flockhart’s constructivism insists that neither interests nor identities are fixed: they are produced through social interaction, shaped by norms and discourse, and therefore open to change in ways realism cannot explain. Each tradition generates different predictions, privileges different evidence, and asks analysts to look at different things. This week examines all three in their foreign policy applications and begins the practice of applying them comparatively to the same empirical material.

Key Themes

• Realism and foreign policy: national interest, power maximisation, and structural constraint
• Neoclassical realism: domestic transmission belts and elite perception
• Liberalism: interdependence, institutions, and the democratic peace applied to foreign policy
• Constructivism: norms, identity, and the social construction of foreign policy interests
• Comparing theoretical frameworks: what each explains and what it forecloses

Case Studies

• Germany’s foreign policy after unification: realist predictions versus constructivist outcomes
• The democratic peace in practice: US relations with authoritarian partners
• NATO identity and the social construction of European security

Seminar Exercise

• Theoretical competition exercise: students apply all three frameworks to the same foreign policy decision, to be chosen by the seminar leader from recent events, and assess which framework generates the most persuasive account, which generates the most falsifiable predictions, and where evidence would need to be gathered to adjudicate between them.

Analytical Focus

• Applying mainstream IR theories to foreign policy questions; distinguishing what each framework can and cannot explain; developing practice in comparative theoretical application.

Week 3 — What do discourse analysis, feminist IR, and postcolonial theory reveal that mainstream FPA cannot see?

Post-positivist approaches to foreign policy do not merely add new variables to existing models; they challenge the ontological and epistemological foundations on which those models rest. Hansen’s discourse analysis shows that foreign policy is not merely the implementation of interests but the production of identities — the construction of Self and Other through representational practices that enable certain actions and foreclose others. Guerrina’s feminist FPA asks where the women are in foreign policy: not merely as subjects of representation but as agents, analysts, and critics whose perspectives are systematically marginalised by masculine norms of statecraft. Chacko and Thakur’s postcolonial account demonstrates that the categories through which FPA has historically analysed foreign policy (rationality, national interest, sovereignty, development) carry the traces of their colonial genealogy and apply imperfectly to states whose experience of the international system has been shaped by subordination rather than mastery. All three approaches demand a different kind of reading: of texts, of silences, of the assumptions embedded in official discourse.

Key Themes

• Discourse analysis and foreign policy: Self, Other, and political possibility
• The politics of representation: how enemies, allies, and crises are constructed
• Feminist FPA: gendered norms of statecraft and their policy consequences
• Masculinity, militarism, and the foreign policy mainstream
• Postcolonial FPA: colonial legacies, epistemic hierarchies, and subaltern agency

Case Studies

• The War on Terror: constructing the enemy and legitimising intervention
• Feminist foreign policy: Sweden, Canada, and the limits of inclusion
• Civilisational narratives: India’s foreign policy identity and colonial memory

Seminar Exercise

• Discourse analysis workshop: students analyse a foreign policy speech or official strategy document using Hansen’s discourse analysis framework, identifying the representational claims it makes, the identities it constructs, the threats it names, and the actions it thereby legitimises. The exercise asks what alternatives the discourse renders invisible and what political consequences follow from the representational choices made.

Analytical Focus

• Applying discourse analysis, feminist, and postcolonial frameworks to foreign policy; conducting close readings of official texts; identifying the assumptions and exclusions embedded in foreign policy discourse.

Week 4 — How do psychology, belief systems, and neuroscience shape what leaders actually decide?

The individual decision-maker is where FPA’s claim to distinctiveness is most fully realised. Hudson’s treatment of the political psychology of world leaders draws on decades of research to show that leaders differ systematically in their belief systems, cognitive styles, and emotional responses to threat and opportunity — and that these differences produce different foreign policies. Operational codes, cognitive maps, analogical reasoning, and the misperceptions that flow from motivated reasoning all shape what a leader sees, what options they consider, and what they finally choose. Janice Gross Stein’s chapter in Smith et al. extends the analysis to neurological approaches, asking whether the insights of cognitive neuroscience — about the role of emotion, intuition, and heuristic processing in decision-making — should lead us to revise the rational actor model entirely or simply to supplement it with a more realistic account of bounded rationality under stress.

Key Themes

• Operational codes and belief systems: the leader’s cognitive map of the political world
• Analogical reasoning and historical learning: when precedent misleads
• Cognitive misperceptions: motivated reasoning, wishful thinking, and the enemy image
• Bounded rationality and prospect theory: loss aversion in foreign policy
• Neurological approaches: emotion, intuition, and the limits of rational choice

Case Studies

• Hitler’s operational code and the decision to invade the Soviet Union
• George W. Bush’s belief system and the decision for Operation Iraqi Freedom
• Cognitive closure and the Falklands War: Galtieri’s misreading of British resolve

Seminar Exercise

• Operational code analysis: students reconstruct the operational code of a contemporary leader from a selection of speeches, interviews, and policy statements, identifying the philosophical and instrumental beliefs the leader appears to hold, and then assessing the predictive implications of those beliefs for a specific current foreign policy challenge facing that state.

Analytical Focus

• Applying political psychology to foreign policy decisions; distinguishing cognitive from rational models of choice; evaluating what neurological approaches add to the FPA toolkit.

Week 5 — How do small groups, bureaucracies, and organisations produce foreign policy — and distort it?

Graham Allison’s three-model analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis remains the canonical demonstration that the same event can be explained in fundamentally different ways depending on whether you treat the state as a rational unitary actor, a set of large organisations following standard operating procedures, or a collection of bureaucratic players advancing their institutional interests in internal bargaining. Hudson and Day’s treatment of group dynamics adds the psychological dimension: groupthink, polythink, and the social pressures that distort judgement in small advisory groups. Taken together, these frameworks explain why foreign policy so often differs from what a dispassionate strategic calculus would recommend — not because decision-makers are irrational but because they operate in institutional and social environments that systematically shape what information reaches them, what options they consider, and what conclusions they are likely to reach. This week examines all three models and applies them to both historical and contemporary cases.

Key Themes

• Allison’s three models: rational actor, organisational process, governmental politics
• Groupthink: symptoms, conditions, and foreign policy consequences
• Polythink: fragmented deliberation and the failure to coordinate
• Standard operating procedures and the inflexibility of large organisations
• Bureaucratic politics: who gets to decide, and whose interests prevail?

Case Studies

• The Cuban Missile Crisis: Allison’s three models in direct comparison
• The Bay of Pigs: groupthink in Kennedy’s advisory circle
• US intelligence before the 2003 Iraq War: bureaucratic politics and WMD assessment

Seminar Exercise

• Three-model comparison: students select a specific foreign policy decision and apply each of Allison’s three analytical models in turn, identifying the evidence each model draws on, the explanatory claims each makes, and the phenomena each cannot account for. The exercise concludes by asking which model generates the most analytically productive account of the case and what a synthesis of models would look like.

Analytical Focus

• Applying organisational and bureaucratic politics models; distinguishing groupthink from rational deliberation; evaluating Allison’s three-model framework as a methodological toolkit for FPA.

Week 6 — How do culture, national identity, and domestic political competition shape foreign policy?

Two analytically distinct levels — cultural-societal and domestic political — converge in shaping foreign policy in ways that neither structural realism nor psychological approaches can fully capture. Hudson and Day’s treatment of culture and national identity draws on strategic culture research and constructivist sociological approaches to argue that states’ foreign policy repertoires are shaped by historically rooted beliefs about the proper use of force, the definition of national interests, and the appropriate conduct of international relations. At the same time, Putnam’s two-level game framework and the domestic politics literature show that foreign policy is simultaneously a game played internationally and a game played domestically — and that what is achievable externally is always constrained by what is sellable at home. Khong’s analysis of neoconservatism and Narlikar’s account of India’s civilisational narratives illustrate both dynamics with unusual clarity.

Key Themes

• Strategic culture: historically shaped repertoires of foreign policy behaviour
• National identity and the construction of foreign policy interest
• Putnam’s two-level games: international bargaining and domestic ratification
• Interest groups, public opinion, and electoral politics as foreign policy constraints
• Ideas and ideology as domestic sources of foreign policy

Case Studies

• Neoconservatism and Operation Iraqi Freedom: domestic ideas as foreign policy drivers
• India’s civilisational narrative: how identity shapes diplomatic positioning
• Japanese strategic culture and the limits of remilitarisation

Seminar Exercise

• Two-level game analysis: students apply Putnam’s framework to a current international negotiation, identifying the win-set of each state’s domestic constituency, the constraints this imposes on its negotiating position, and the strategic implications — including the use of international commitments to bind domestic opponents. The exercise asks how the two-level game framework changes the analysis compared to a purely systemic account of the negotiation.

Analytical Focus

• Applying strategic culture and two-level game analysis; distinguishing ideational from material domestic influences on foreign policy; examining how identity shapes policy choices across different state contexts.

Week 7 — How do a state’s size, capability, and position in the international system constrain and enable its foreign policy?

The highest levels of the Hudson-Day framework — national attributes and the international system — bring FPA into dialogue with the structural theories it has always sought to supplement rather than replace. A state’s size, economic capacity, military power, geographic position, and regime type create both possibilities and constraints that individual leaders and bureaucracies must work within. Kitchen’s analysis of strategic assessment and grand strategy shows how foreign policy elites attempt to match means to ends under systemic pressure, and what happens when they misjudge the relationship between the two. Patman’s account of the national security state examines how security institutions shape foreign policy outputs in ways that can simultaneously produce strategic coherence and democratic accountability deficits. This week also introduces the comparative foreign policy tradition’s attempts to establish systematic relationships between state attributes and foreign policy behaviour.

Key Themes

• National attributes as foreign policy constraints: size, capability, and regime type
• Grand strategy: matching means to ends across time
• The national security state: intelligence, military, and the foreign policy complex
• Systemic polarity and foreign policy behaviour: what structure determines and what it leaves open
• Theoretical integration: can levels of analysis be combined without contradiction?

Case Studies

• Small state foreign policy: Singapore’s systemic constraints and strategic adaptation
• US grand strategy after the Cold War: hegemony, overstretch, and retrenchment
• The national security state and the foreign policy of authoritarian powers

Seminar Exercise

• Grand strategy assessment: students analyse the published strategy documents of an assigned state — national security strategy, defence review, or foreign policy white paper — and evaluate the coherence of the grand strategy they articulate: whether stated objectives match available means, whether systemic pressures are accurately diagnosed, and what domestic political pressures appear to have shaped the document’s framing.

Analytical Focus

• Applying national attributes and systemic levels of analysis; evaluating grand strategy documents as analytical texts; examining the relationship between structural constraint and foreign policy choice.

Week 8 — How do economic statecraft, public diplomacy, and aid diplomacy work as instruments of foreign policy?

Foreign policy is not only the choice of strategic orientation; it is the deployment of instruments — sanctions and trade arrangements, diplomatic messaging and soft power campaigns, aid programmes and conditionality frameworks — through which states attempt to shape the behaviour of others. Mastanduno’s analysis of economic statecraft examines the conditions under which economic instruments — positive linkage, negative sanctions, and structural economic power — achieve their political objectives, and the considerable empirical evidence that they often do not. Byrne’s account of public diplomacy explores how states attempt to shape foreign publics’ perceptions through cultural engagement, broadcasting, and strategic communication, and what distinguishes effective public diplomacy from propaganda. Williams’s chapter on aid diplomacy examines the instrumentalisation of development assistance, asking when aid genuinely serves development goals, when it serves donor foreign policy interests, and how recipients navigate that ambiguity.

Key Themes

• Economic statecraft: sanctions, positive linkage, and structural economic power
• Conditions for sanction effectiveness: theory and evidence
• Public diplomacy: soft power, strategic communication, and narrative competition
• Aid diplomacy: development conditionality as foreign policy instrument
• The limits of instruments: when tools fail and why

Case Studies

• Western sanctions on Russia after 2022: effectiveness, costs, and unintended consequences
• China’s Belt and Road Initiative as aid diplomacy and strategic communication
• US public diplomacy in the Middle East: al-Hurra and the limits of broadcasting

Seminar Exercise

• Instrument effectiveness audit: students select a specific sanctions regime or aid programme and apply Mastanduno’s or Williams’s analytical framework to evaluate its design, implementation, and effects. The exercise asks what political objectives the instrument was meant to serve, what conditions would need to hold for it to succeed, and whether those conditions are present in the case under examination.

Analytical Focus

• Evaluating economic statecraft, public diplomacy, and aid diplomacy as analytical categories; identifying the conditions of instrument effectiveness; examining how instruments interact with and are constrained by the levels-of-analysis framework.

Week 9 — How does foreign policy engage global challenges — climate, health, energy — that exceed the state’s analytical reach?

Classical FPA was designed to analyse security decisions made by discrete national governments. The contemporary foreign policy agenda includes challenges — climate change, pandemic governance, energy security — that are structurally transboundary, technically complex, and resistant to the instruments through which states have traditionally exercised power. McDonald’s analysis of foreign policy and climate change shows how states have pursued climate diplomacy through a combination of domestic regulatory commitment, international treaty design, and competitive framing of national interest — and why the result has consistently fallen short of what the science demands. Hadfield’s chapter on EU-Russia energy dynamics demonstrates how energy dependence becomes a security vulnerability and how states attempt to manage that vulnerability through foreign policy. Youde’s analysis of global health governance and COVID-19 examines how the pandemic exposed the limits of existing multilateral health frameworks and the strategic behaviour of states under acute uncertainty.

Key Themes

• Climate change as foreign policy: national interest, burden-sharing, and normative pressure
• Energy as a foreign policy instrument: supply chains, dependency, and leverage
• Global health governance: multilateral failure and unilateral response
• The limits of the state-centric FPA framework for transboundary challenges
• Science, expertise, and the foreign policy decision-making process

Case Studies

• Paris Agreement negotiations: domestic constraints and international commitment
• EU-Russia energy dynamics: Nordstream, dependency, and weaponised supply
• COVID-19 and global health governance: vaccine nationalism and multilateral failure

Seminar Exercise

• Students receive their assigned national delegations, begin preparing their briefing documents, and identify the foreign policy constraints — domestic, institutional, cultural, and systemic — their assigned state faces in the scenario. Simulation scenario concerns a transboundary crisis requiring simultaneous domestic political management and international negotiation.

Analytical Focus

• Applying FPA frameworks to transboundary global challenges; examining where conventional FPA tools reach their limits; connecting energy, climate, and health governance to the instruments of statecraft examined in Week 8.

Week 10 — How do the major powers — the United States, China, and Russia — conduct foreign policy, and what analytical frameworks best explain their choices?

Great power foreign policy offers the richest terrain for applying the full analytical repertoire of FPA because it typically exhibits the full range of determinants — structural pressure, domestic political competition, bureaucratic organisation, leadership psychology, cultural repertoire, and instrumental choice — simultaneously and in interaction. This week focuses on two major powers: the United States and China. Khong’s account of neoconservatism as a domestic source of American foreign policy demonstrates how a relatively small network of ideologically coherent actors can capture the foreign policy agenda of the world’s most powerful state under specific conditions. Ghiselli’s analysis of China’s approach to protecting its interests overseas examines how a rising power that once professed non-interference has developed new instruments — diplomatic, economic, and increasingly military — for projecting influence beyond its borders, and how the FPA toolkit illuminates the domestic and institutional drivers of that evolution. The simulation is held in the first half of the seminar, with reflective analysis begun in the second.

Key Themes

• Domestic sources of American foreign policy: ideas, institutions, and the imperial presidency
• The neoconservative moment: ideology as foreign policy driver
• China’s evolving foreign policy: from non-interference to interest protection
• The domestic politics of Chinese foreign policy: party, military, and economic interests
• Great power competition through an FPA lens: what structure does not determine

Case Studies

• Operation Iraqi Freedom: neoconservatism, groupthink, and intelligence failure
• China’s Belt and Road Initiative: strategic vision, bureaucratic implementation, and domestic critics
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Putin’s operational code and structural miscalculation

Seminar Exercise

• Crisis simulation — Phase I (Applied Exercise component): assigned national delegations negotiate under time pressure in the simulation scenario. Each delegation must manage domestic political constraints (as set out in the briefing document) while engaging constructively or strategically with other actors. The simulation runs for the first portion of the session; the second portion begins reflective discussion of the decision dynamics observed.

Analytical Focus

• Applying the full FPA levels-of-analysis framework to great power cases; examining how domestic ideas shape the foreign policy of structurally powerful states; connecting the neoconservatism and China cases to the theoretical frameworks developed in Weeks 2–7.

Week 11 — How do Brazil, India, the Gulf states, and the EU conduct foreign policy from structurally constrained positions?

The foreign policy of emerging powers and regional actors poses distinctive analytical challenges. These are states with significant ambitions but uneven capabilities, whose foreign policy must simultaneously manage domestic expectations, regional competition, and the normative demands of a global order they did not design and do not fully endorse. Narlikar’s account of India’s civilisational narrative shows how a state can use identity claims to justify both strategic autonomy and selective multilateral engagement. De Sá Guimarães, Silva, and Saraiva’s analysis of Brazil’s trajectory — from regional hegemon ambition under Lula to strategic retrenchment — demonstrates how leadership change and domestic political upheaval can produce dramatic shifts in foreign policy orientation that systemic analysis alone cannot explain. Stansfield’s account of the Arab-Persian Gulf as a subregional security complex shows how regional dynamics generate foreign policy pressures that operate independently of global systemic structure. Aggestam’s chapter on the EU demonstrates that collective foreign policy-making creates unique institutional pathologies and analytical puzzles that conventional FPA frameworks, designed for unitary states, handle imperfectly.

Key Themes

• Emerging powers: ambition, capability gap, and strategic autonomy
• Civilisational narratives as foreign policy resources and constraints
• Domestic political change and foreign policy discontinuity: Brazil’s arc
• Regional security complexes and the foreign policy of middle powers
• EU common foreign policy: institutional pathologies and collective action problems

Case Studies

• India’s strategic autonomy: civilisational narrative meets structural constraint
• Brazil’s rise and retreat: domestic politics and foreign policy discontinuity
• Gulf foreign policy: Saudi Arabia and UAE as emerging security actors
• EU foreign policy and the Ukraine crisis: ambition versus institutional limits

Seminar Exercise

• Crisis simulation — Phase II and reflection: the simulation concludes with a final negotiating round, followed by brief individual reflective presentations in which each student explains, using FPA concepts, which analytical level was most important in determining their delegation’s behaviour and what the simulation revealed about the gap between rational actor assumptions and actual decision dynamics. Reflective analysis submissions are due within the week.

Analytical Focus

• Applying FPA frameworks to emerging powers and regional actors; examining how domestic political change produces foreign policy discontinuity; evaluating the analytical limits of state-centric FPA for collective actors like the EU.

Week 12 — What do foreign policy failures — Syria, COVID-19 — teach us about the limits of analysis, and what does the future of FPA look like?

The course ends with two cases chosen precisely because they resist clean analytical resolution. The failure of diplomacy and protection in Syria is, as Aggestam and Dunne show, not a story of diplomatic incompetence but a systematic demonstration of how competing national interests, institutional dysfunctions, and moral failures interact to produce catastrophic outcomes that no single analytical level can fully explain. Youde’s analysis of COVID-19 and global health governance shows how the pandemic revealed the simultaneous breakdown of scientific advisory systems, international institutional capacity, and domestic political accountability — a multi-level failure of exactly the kind that FPA is most needed to diagnose but has most difficulty integrating analytically. The final session returns to Hudson and Day’s chapter on theoretical integration, asking honestly what the field has achieved across seven decades of research and where the next generation of analysts can make the most important contributions.

Key Themes

• Syria: diplomatic failure, normative collapse, and the limits of international protection
• COVID-19: multi-level governance failure and the foreign policy of pandemic response
• Theoretical integration in FPA: what progress has been made, and what remains contested
• The future of FPA: AI, big data, neuroscience, and the emerging research frontier
• Foreign policy ethics: what analysts owe to the consequences of their frameworks

Case Studies

• Syria: R2P, Russian veto politics, and the failure of protection
• COVID-19 vaccine nationalism: domestic politics, global governance, and strategic communication
• What would adequate theoretical integration in FPA look like?

Seminar Exercise

• Synthesis scenario: students work in teams to construct a prospective analysis of a specific emerging foreign policy challenge — to be announced by the lecturer — using the full levels-of-analysis toolkit developed across the course. Each team identifies the most analytically important level, the most likely instrument to be deployed, the key domestic constraints to watch, and the scenarios under which different outcomes become more or less likely. Teams present their analyses and defend them under critical questioning from the seminar.

Analytical Focus

• Synthesising the levels-of-analysis framework across the case material of the course; evaluating the state of theoretical integration in FPA; connecting the analytical toolkit to questions of foreign policy ethics and the analyst’s responsibilities.

*** This course is designed to be adaptable. The weekly structure, assessment components, and reading load can be adjusted to suit the requirements of a particular higher education institution or the context of individual tutoring, and can be scaled to meet the demands of bachelor’s and master’s degree students alike. The analytical framework and intellectual ambitions of the course remain constant; the format is a starting point, not a constraint.

Updated – May 2026