- Foreign Policy Formulation

Catalog description

Foreign policy formulation is concerned with how internal factors shape a state's policy toward the outside world. Traditionally, foreign policy analysts considered the state as a unitary actor. Today, we are more appreciative of the multiple domestic inputs in foreign policy making, and more sophisticated in the use of analytic tools to facilitate our understanding of the foreign policy formulation process. The class is structured around four distinct “sources” of US foreign policy formulation: institutional; role; societal; and, individual. While we cover each source in distinct units for purposes of analytic clarity, throughout our study we will observe that no one decision can be explained fully without some overlap of sources.