Foreign policy analysis (FPA) has become a popular subfield in the past decade in international relations, with its own large section in the International Studies Association (ISA), the Web of Science indexed journal, textbooks, and dedicated courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. However, it remains largely an arena in which U.S.-trained scholars dominate. Klaus Brummer and Valerie Hudson’s edited volume is a refreshing corrective to this U.S. dominance in the study of FPA. It is divided into nine chapters. Following an introduction by Hudson, Chapters 2 to 7 look at FPA in China (Huiyun Feng), Japan (Yukiko Miyagi), India (Sumit Ganguly and Manjeet S. Pardesi), the Arab world (Raymond Hinnebusch), African states (Korwa G. Adar), and Latin America (Rita Giacalone), respectively. Chapter 8 by Amelia Hadfield and Hudson compares North American and European approaches to FPA. Brummer concludes with a chapter on the implications of the previous chapter for mainstream FPA and a way forward for the field.
Putting together a coherent edited volume in which the chapters coalesce around a common theme or method is a hard feat to achieve. This volume succeeds in that regard reasonably well. Apart from the first and last chapters, the remaining contributors adopted one of the two approaches. They either discussed the FPA literature and the way FPA is conducted in their respective countries/regions or applied the tools of mainstream FPA to the foreign policies of the countries they analyzed. Chapters by Feng (China), Ganguly and Pardesi (India), and Giacalone (Latin America) adopt the first approach, while Miyagi (Japan), Adar (Africa), and Hinnebusch (Arab world) adopt the second. I find the chapters that discuss the way FPA is done in a particular country more rewarding as they provide a window into an academic literature that I do not have access to for various reasons, language barriers being the most prominent.
It is not possible to do justice to each chapter in a brief review; therefore, I will not attempt to analyze individual chapters’ arguments. However, I want to highlight three chapters, on China, India, and Latin America, as exemplifying what this volume tries to achieve. Each provides an extensive summary of FPA scholarship in its respective country/region, discussing the scholarly and political traditions that shape the study of foreign policy in that place and highlighting the methodological, educational, and political difficulties of utilizing mainstream FPA. All three are informative, well written, and worth your time.
Brummer’s concluding chapter synthesizes the previous chapters and makes suggestions for a way forward for FPA. Three patterns stand out in his analysis. First, FPA generally is not considered a distinct field of IR outside North America. Instead, the grand theories of IR (realism, liberalism, constructivism, etc.) are commonly used in the analysis of foreign policy in most places outside the United States. Second, there is a method gap between North American and non—North American FPA. Outside North America, quantitative and formal methods are almost never used in FPA. Graduate students in political science or IR outside North America also receive little or no training in such methodologies. Lastly, the availability and accessibility of relevant data outside North America and Western Europe remain a major obstacle in carrying out mainstream, actor-centric FPA. My personal experience as a scholar working in Turkey also corroborates these three patterns identified by Brummer.
Any good scholarly volume raises new questions as much as it provides answers. Reading all of the chapters leaves me with three general questions. First, to what extent is mainstream American FPA applicable outside the United States? Some of the problems, such as data issues, methods training, and different political institutions, have been identified by the contributors as possible reasons why this has proven difficult. I agree with them. However, I also want to suggest that, especially in the case of non-Western countries, there is also less room for foreign policy autonomy compared to the United States. Therefore, scholars in those countries look at structural or systemic factors in explaining their countries’ foreign policies, as the agency of their states is constrained by the external environment.
Second, what can these diverse non—North American literatures learn from each other? They share similar limitations and concerns compared to mainstream FPA, and I believe there is an untapped opportunity for cross-fertilization and dialogue, especially in non-Western FPA literatures. A project, perhaps undertaken by the FPA section of the ISA, whereby major works of FPA in other languages are translated into English could contribute to such exchange and dialogue.
Lastly, what can non—North American modes of FPA teach to mainstream literature? Brummer highlights some of these possibilities in his chapter, including the use of the foreign policies of non-Western states for probing the scope of the mainstream FPA theory, as well as the attention paid to the role of regional organizations in African FPA or the extensive literature on European Union foreign policy. But little is said about the possibility of non—North American contributions to FPA theory. Is there nothing in Chinese, Indian, or African FPA literatures that can advance the FPA theory? Or does this subfield fall back to the familiar patterns of the dominant West doing theory and the rest just applying it and/or being objects of analyses? This question remains largely unanswered.
Finally, some minor criticisms. First, although this volume aims to increase the diversity of perspectives on FPA, with two exceptions (Adar and Giacalone) most of the authors are based in universities in the West. No doubt they are well-qualified scholars, but it would have served the disciplinary diversity better if the editors had included more non-Western-based scholars in the project. Second, there is significant diversity within European scholarship on foreign policy. Lumping all European literature together in one chapter oversimplifies that aspect. Including several more chapters about different European traditions would have enriched this volume. Lastly, there is the matter of formatting and organization. The editors use in-text citations with a combined bibliography at the end of the volume. One of the purposes of this work is to introduce non—North American literature on FPA, and I find myself regularly checking on different sources cited in the text for future reference. This makes it a bit cumbersome to go back and forth between the chapters and bibliography. Bibliographical footnotes or endnotes at the end of each chapter, or at least separate bibliographies for each chapter, would have made this task much easier and more reader friendly. The volume has a great potential to be used in graduate-level FPA courses; thus, it would also have been helpful if the authors had provided a list of classical and major texts on FPA in their respective countries/regions at the end of each chapter for those who want to explore the subject further.
Nevertheless, these are minor issues that in no way should distract the reader from the valuable contributions of Foreign Policy Analysis. It is a great resource for scholars and students in IR who would like to expand their horizons and delve into new literatures beyond North American FPA.
