3 - The Analytical Prism

Summary

Introduction

The construction of the analytical lens applied to this study draws on the field of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) as this field of inquiry employs an actor-specific focus. It focuses on ‘agents of the state’, human decisionmakers, acting in groups or alone. This study acknowledges the fact that FPA employs middle-range theories that only account for clearly defined situations/cases and, consequently, only partially explains foreign policies and actions. However, the advantage of this approach is that its epistemological, unassuming nature is not caught up in ‘dogmatic and sectarian arguments between rival schools of thought’.

The main strength of FPA is the acknowledgement of human agency and its focus on events of which the individual is the perpetrator. As such, it moves beyond the ‘black boxing of states’ approximating all decision-making units as rational, unitary actors or the equivalent of states as frequently exhibited in the field of international relations. The difficulty of attempting to define a group derives from the fact that agency often evolves and cannot always be predefined. Hence, empirical data often illustrate how agency emerges and follows a certain path that becomes instrumental to the outcome.

This study employs the decision unit model in order to track and trace the decisions made by the senior civil and military decisionmakers. The analytic framework allows for to distinguish the variety of ways the decision-makers shaped what happened and acknowledges that decision units are often active participants in the making of foreign policy. The model also has the advantage of conducting comparative research between countries with different political systems. By doing so, it allows for a more inclusive and comparative approach when studying how decisions are made in and between other political systems and it overcomes the American bias in literature about decision-making. It is, however, not the intention of this study to contribute to foreign policy practices by employing this framework to identify which theoretical models are most relevant to explaining foreign policy. The framework is merely employed to identify, track and trace agency and to structure the empirical findings of this study.