Foreign Policy Bureaucracy Research Articles

Populist hyperpersonalization and politicization of foreign policy institutions

Abstract This article explains how right-wing populist leaders in Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey have transformed their states' foreign policy institutions through personalization and politicization. We examine the transformation of foreign policy institutions in the four cases and make two contributions. First, we differentiate between disparate types of personalization by proposing the term ‘hyperpersonalization’—populist leaders' reliance on security institutions in foreign policy decision-making—which distinguishes the populist transformation of foreign policy institutions in Russia and Turkey. We argue that lower levels and speed of autocratization lead to politicization combined with milder cases of personalization of the foreign policy bureaucracy, while higher levels and speed of autocratization lead to higher levels of personalization in the foreign policy institutions. Second, we lay out the steps and patterns of populist politicization and hyperpersonalization that bring ‘deinstitutionalizing restructuring’ to foreign policy institutions. As we illustrate, this deinstitutionalizing restructuring involves concurrent bureaucratic expansion and bureaucratic retrenchment. The process is accompanied by a populist narrative that this restructuring is done to realize the ‘popular will’ or to regain ‘full sovereignty’. We conclude the article with the policy implications of this populist transformation of foreign policy institutions.

Racial Tropes in the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: A Computational Text Analysis

AbstractHow do racial stereotypes affect perceptions in foreign policy? Race and racism as topics have long been marginalized in the study of international relations but are receiving renewed attention. In this article we assess the role of implicit racial bias in internal, originally classified assessments by the US foreign policy bureaucracy during the Cold War. We use a combination of dictionary-based and supervised machine learning techniques to identify the presence of four racial tropes in a unique corpus of intelligence documents: almost 5,000 President's Daily Briefs given to Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. We argue and find that entries about countries that the US deemed “racialized Others”—specifically, countries in the Global South, newly independent states, and some specific regional groupings—feature an especially large number of racial tropes. Entries about foreign developments in these places are more likely to feature interpretations that infantilize, invoke animal-based analogies, or imply irrationality or belligerence. This association holds even when accounting for the presence of conflict, the regime type of the country being analyzed, the invocation of leaders, and the topics being discussed. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it adds to the revival of attention to race but gives special emphasis to implicit racialized thinking and its appearance in bureaucratic settings. Second, we show the promise of new tools for identifying racial and other forms of implicit bias in foreign policy texts.

Special Interests in Foreign Policy Bureaucracies: Evidence from Foreign Aid

Previous articleNext article No AccessSpecial Interests in Foreign Policy Bureaucracies: Evidence from Foreign AidShannon CarcelliShannon Carcelli Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Just Accepted Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723821 Views: 24Total views on this site HistoryAccepted October 14, 2022 © 2023 Southern Political Science Association. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Turf Wars in Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: Rivalry between the Government and the Bureaucracy in Turkish Foreign Policy

Abstract This paper, using examples from Turkish foreign policy between 2002 and 2014, argues that the fragmentation in foreign policymaking due to adopting different foreign policy ideas, that is, ideas of the elected leadership and the bureaucracy, is likely to generate competition between the state agencies that constitute the foreign policy bureaucracy. If there is backlash in the bureaucracy to realize the government's revisionist foreign policy goals, then the government aims to transform the bureaucracy by empowering certain small bureaucratic units, that is, missionary agencies. Once the degree of conflict between the government and the bureaucracy becomes severe, then the elected officials opt to work with the established bureaucratic agencies to speed up the decision-making processes. The analysis based on a series of interviews conducted with sixty-one Turkish foreign policymakers shows that the turf war in the foreign policy bureaucracy is a conceptual framework for comprehending how elected officials use bureaucratic tactics to undermine the involvement of bureaucrats in decision-making processes. Finally, the study contributes to current debates on populism and the presidentialization of foreign policy by showing that the foreign policy bureaucracy is not immune from the anti-elite, anti-establishment rhetoric of governments.

Gifted Greek: The Enigma of Andreas Papandreou

Gifted Greek: The Enigma of Andreas Papandreou

Making Sense of Human Rights Diplomacy: Evidence from a US Campaign to Free Political Prisoners

AbstractScholarship on human rights diplomacy (HRD)—efforts by government officials to engage publicly and privately with their foreign counterparts—often focuses on actions taken to “name and shame” target countries because private diplomatic activities are unobservable. To understand how HRD works in practice, we explore a campaign coordinated by the US government to free twenty female political prisoners. We compare release rates of the featured women to two comparable groups: a longer list of women considered by the State Department for the campaign; and other women imprisoned simultaneously in countries targeted by the campaign. Both approaches suggest that the campaign was highly effective. We consider two possible mechanisms through which expressive public HRD works: by imposing reputational costs and by mobilizing foreign actors. However, in-depth interviews with US officials and an analysis of media coverage find little evidence of these mechanisms. Instead, we argue that public pressure resolved deadlock within the foreign policy bureaucracy, enabling private diplomacy and specific inducements to secure the release of political prisoners. Entrepreneurial bureaucrats leveraged the spotlight on human rights abuses to overcome competing equities that prevent government-led coercive diplomacy on these issues. Our research highlights the importance of understanding the intersection of public and private diplomacy before drawing inferences about the effectiveness of HRD.

Japan’s economic statecraft

Japan – with the world’s third-largest economy and a pacifist constitution that limits its military capability – has long used economic tools to pursue its international goals. However, China’s rise as a geo-economic power has driven the Abe administration to reshape its foreign-policy bureaucracy to compete with China in this regard and to recalibrate its approach to economic statecraft.

"Noisy democracy": imágenes y discusiones sobre la democracia chilena en los documentos norteamericanos frente a la elección presidencial de 1970

La presente investigación muestra las discusiones que surgieron sobre Chile en el aparato burocrático de polí­tica exterior norteamericana frente a la elección presidencial de 1970 y el impacto de las imágenes sobre nuestro paí­s en la configuración de la polí­tica exterior de Estados Unidos. Se utilizaron documentos recientemente desclasificados por el Departamento de Estado, compilados en los volúmenes Foreign Relations of the United States, los cuales retratan la dimensión cotidiana del proceso de construcción de polí­tica exterior estadounidense. Estos documentos muestran la manera en que distintos miembros de aparato de polí­tica exterior de ese paí­s interpretaron Chile y su democracia, afectando el proceso de toma de decisión. Esta perspectiva busca proponer nuevas preguntas a un problema que ha sido clásicamente entendido desde la perspectiva de la intervención y la acción encubierta. Se concluye que las imágenes de Chile como una excepción o Chile como un estereotipo en la región latinoamericana, impactaron la construcción de la polí­tica exterior norteamericana, determinando las acciones que tomarí­a la potencia ante el desafiante escenario polí­tico chileno.

Present at the Destruction: The Trump Administration and the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy

Donald Trump has articulated foreign policy ideas at variance with the prior status quo of liberal internationalism. Trump’s status as an ideological outsider poses an interesting question: Can an executive institutionalize unorthodox foreign policy ideas in the face of bureaucracies dedicated to an alternative set of norms? This article argues that the Trump administration has failed to create new institutions or reorganize existing foreign policy bureaucracies to better serve its policy aims. Trump’s brand of populism succeeds more in the weakening of bureaucracies embodying liberal internationalism than in the creation of populist alternatives. While the institutional foundations for populism are likely to remain weak in the future, this administration’s erosion of existing institutions will make any post-Trump restoration of liberal internationalism a difficult enterprise. This suggests that the literature on bureaucratic control cannot treat all ideas equally. Some ideas are likelier to thrive in a de-institutionalized environment than others.

Trump’s National Security Strategy: “America First” meets the establishment

Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) promises to put “America first.” However, it is only a partial break from convention, and evinces a deep current of incoherence in Trump’s foreign policy. The NSS attempts to combine two incompatible worldviews into a single doctrine: the president’s “America First” nationalism and the seventy-year-old internationalist consensus among the US foreign policy establishment. Not only does it betray strategic dissonance, it portends an impossible working relationship between Trump’s insurgent nationalism and the traditionalism of the US foreign policy bureaucracy.

The Impact of Bureaucratic Conflict on US Counternarcotics Efforts in Afghanistan

Despite counternarcotics efforts over the past decade, Afghanistan’s drug trade continues to thrive. This article is a review of US counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan, focusing on the inner workings of the bureaucratic machine. During the Bush Administration’s two terms in office, unique agency cultures ensured that no common conception or understanding of the drug problem manifested within the US foreign policy bureaucracy. Various US agencies and officials pursued separate eradication and interdiction policies, and there was similar disagreement in respect to the Alternative Livelihood Program. Consequently, the United States failed to pursue a counternarcotics program that was united, effective, or reflective of Afghanistan’s needs.

China's Foreign Policy Decision-Making Mechanism and “One Belt One Road” Strategy

China's foreign policy agenda will change significantly from “keeping a low profile” to “proactively and enterprisingly striving for achievements” as it implements the One Belt One Road (OBOR) strategy. It requires the foreign policy apparatus to make a response accordingly. However, the current policymaking mechanism has three flaws that include the collection and analysis of information, the selection and summary of policy suggestions, and the final decision making, of which the second process is particularly obvious. Hence, China needs to reform the conceptual framework, bureaucratic systems and talent selection of the foreign policy bureaucracy. Firstly, it should change the view of “no preferential diplomacy for weak country” and form wide-ranging political vision and long-term perspective in the relationship with surrounding countries. Secondly, China should strengthen the National Security Council (NSC)'s control over external affairs and appoint a standing member of the Politburo as deputy NSC chairman and deputy leader of the Central Foreign Affairs Leading Group. This official would then be responsible for foreign affairs. In addition, the post of foreign minister should be held by a vice premier who is also a member of the Politburo. Thirdly, it needs to separate political appointees and civil servants, to strengthen off-the-job training and to appoint experienced specialists and scholars to its decision-making agency.

Divided We Stand: The US Foreign Policy Bureaucracy and Nation-Building in Afghanistan

Afghanistan was the first major test for US nation-building efforts in the twenty-first century. Previous analyses have identified many of the barriers that prevented the USA from engaging in effective infrastructure development, governance, security, counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics. Drawing upon interviews with senior US officials, this article offers an alternative account of the nation-building experience that highlights problems within the US government. Building on the assertions of Graham Allison, it focuses on the behaviour of the agencies and individuals within the US bureaucracy. It is argued that a lack of effective leadership permitted bureaucratic disorder between and within the military establishment, the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The conflict that was precipitated by this dissonance prevented the emergence of a cohesive nation-building strategy.

Elite Perceptions and Nigeria's Foreign Policy Process

The study examined the perception of Nigerian elites on the role of the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in foreign policy formulation and implementation. It investigated how the nature and structure of the Nigerian State shaped the nation's foreign policy bureaucracy as represented by the MFA. The study employed primary and secondary data. Primary data were collected through unstructured interview. Respondents were purposively selected from the academia as well as from among the senior officers of the MFA, the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) and the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) totaling 25 altogether. The eligibility criteria included knowledge of and contribution to the subject matter, as well as expertise and active participation in Nigeria's foreign policy process. Secondary data were sourced from official documents, books, journals, newspapers, news magazines, and Internet-based materials. Data were analyzed using thematic content analysis. From the result, 75% of respondents perceived the MFA as simply a rubber-stamp for the desires and preferences of the President and their kitchen cabinet. 65% of respondents held the view that the Federal Cabinet, National Assembly, think-tanks, and research-based institutions that should be decision units alongside the MFA, appeared to be for the most part, sidelined in foreign policy making. About 60% of respondents submitted that the political, socio-economic, religious, linguistic and ethnical configuration of the Nigerian state and its characteristic differences, impinged on foreign policy decisions and pursuits. The study concluded that the role of Nigeria's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in many cases was undermined. It was seen to be more visible in foreign policy implementation than in decision-making; allowed only marginal roles in decision making or simply used as mere administrative machinery to implement the desires and preferences of the political head and their kitchen cabinet.

Information Flows within the US State Department

What factors are important for information sourcing within the US foreign policy bureaucracy? Are these factors generally agreed upon, or do they vary depending across different parts of institutions? One important place where this information is sourced is through the US State Department which provides large quantities of information and analysis to the rest of the US government. Information sourcing matters not just in terms of which Embassies send the most information back to Washington DC, but also in how the Embassies provide information to each other and therefore give context to their analysis. If more information is passed between Embassies in countries that are at war with each other, then Embassies will be better situated to react to security events and if more information is sent between Embassies in countries that have strong economic ties, then the Embassies will be better able to react to economic events. In this paper, we use social network analysis on a dataset of 400,000 diplomatic cables sent within the US State Department in 1973 and 1974 to look at which factors influence the flow of information between US Embassies and from the central State Department to these Embassies. We find that while security issues are associated with high cable traffic across between a dyad (a pair of Embassies), the vast majority of variation in communication levels can be explained by economic relationships between countries. We also test whether the ordering of priorities differ in the central State Department's behavior and that of the Embassies. The idea that diplomats might "go native" and have a different set of priorities to the central State Department has a long history. A difference of opinion between the parts of the bureaucracy would be important for explaining how new issues get onto the agenda. However, we find that there is a high degree of similarity in how issues are weighed in the communication patterns from the center and between Embassies in the periphery. To validate these findings, we use the network models to predict dyads most likely to include content on particular issues, and cross-check the original cables finding that messages sent across these dyads do make heavier reference to the relevant issues.

Bureaucratic Interests and the Outsourcing of Security

In spite of its sensitivity, diplomatic protection has received very sporadic scholarly attention. This article provides a comparative analysis of US and UK diplomatic security policies, focusing on the increasing use of private military and security companies (PMSCs) for the protection of foreign service and development agencies’ personnel. The existing theoretical explanations of the privatization of security tasks cannot explain why countries displaying similar material incentives and similar political and market cultures have outsourced diplomatic protection to different degrees, nor can they account for variance in the use of PMSCs by different agencies within the same country. Our analysis highlights the importance of investigating organizations’ interests in providing a more accurate explanation of the varying propensity to outsource armed protection. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the outsourcing of diplomatic security was a resultant of foreign policy bureaucracies and military organizations’ preferences.

The International and Domestic Sources of Bipartisanship in U.S. Foreign Policy

Foreign policy scholars have long emphasized bipartisanship in foreign policymaking, particularly in the context of presidential appointments to the foreign policy bureaucracy, emphasizing the role of international crises and national security in affecting bipartisanship. In spite of their enduring nature, few systematic analyses of these claims exist. This study addresses these gaps using new data on appointees to the foreign policy bureaucracy. The results challenge the conventional wisdoms emerging from the foreign policy literature regarding the importance of factors like war, instead pointing to the importance of domestic political factors in affecting bipartisanship in appointments to the foreign policy bureaucracy.

Foreign Policy and Ethnography: A Sceptical Intervention

This article makes a methodological argument about ‘studying up’ in foreign policy bureaucracies. Although recent years have witnessed a growing interest in ethnography across the social sciences, including the study of foreign policy and diplomacy, theoretical reflections on the methodology as such greatly outnumber those that actually attempt ethnographic accounts of foreign policy institutions. This imbalance results in large part from the difficulty of fieldwork in these settings. Drawing on six years of research on EU external relations, including 105 interviews with foreign policy professionals, this article lays out some of the difficulties and thereby clarifies the benefits and costs of such fieldwork. More broadly, the article highlights some of the methodological challenges in interpretative research inside the institutions of foreign policy. My concern is not with ethnography or foreign policy as such; I rather examine the specific challenges of conducting fieldwork informed by ethnographic methodology inside foreign policy bureaucracies. The article advises caution about the ever-widening use of the term ‘ethnography’ in the study of policy.

Reforming Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry: Ideas, Organization and Leadership

More than a decade after Indonesias democratic transition, the effects of domestic politics on the conduct of Indonesias foreign policy continue to attract scholarly attention. Relatively less attention, however, has been given to the foreign ministry, the principal institutional actor responsible for foreign policy formulation and management of Indonesias external relations. This article argues that this neglect is a mistake: institutional changes within the foreign ministry, together with the emergence of new ideas, have played a key role in transforming the countrys foreign policy. It was principally within the foreign ministry that significant attempts were made to change Indonesias national self-image so that it better reflected the values of the reformasi experience. This article explores how democratic norms have been internalized in both the organization of the foreign policy bureaucracy and in the conceptualization of Indonesias external identity.

Architects and Innovators: Building the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1909–2009 , and: Canada among Nations 2008: 100 Years of Canadian Foreign Policy (review)

Reviewed by: Architects and Innovators: Building the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1909–2009, and: Canada among Nations 2008: 100 Years of Canadian Foreign Policy Kevin A. Spooner Architects and Innovators: Building the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1909–2009 edited by Greg Donaghy and Kim Richard Nossal. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009, 318 pp. Cloth $95.00, Paper $39.95. Canada among Nations 2008: 100 Years of Canadian Foreign Policy edited by Robert Bothwell and Jean Daudelin. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009, 400 pp. Cloth $95.00, Paper $32.95. Anniversaries are opportunities to reflect and assess. For Canadian foreign policy, 2009 was just such an occasion. In June that year, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) marked its centennial—an event that proved especially introspective. The evidence of a century of change is obvious even in the differences in name, size, and scope of the bureaucracy charged with managing Canada’s international presence. The Department of External Affairs, as it was known in 1909, was a slight office above a Bank Street barbershop, staffed by a handful of civil servants. Today, Canada’s foreign policy bureaucracy occupies the imposing Pearson edifice on Sussex Drive and consists of thousands of employees, with many deployed to one of dozens of diplomatic missions Canada maintains throughout the world. Such a dramatic evolution clearly suggests much has changed in how Canada interacts with the world, but just as interesting may be the continuities in the nature and [End Page 429] substance of Canadian foreign policy for the past hundred years. Two books have taken on the ambitious task of centennial assessment. Greg Donaghy and Kim Richard Nossal have edited a collection of essays, Architects and Innovators: Building the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1909–2009, while the 2008 installment of the Canada among Nations series, 100 Years of Canadian Foreign Policy, is edited by Robert Bothwell and Jean Daudelin. Together, these works represent more than 700 pages and 30 essays. In this limited space, it is clearly impossible to speak to every contribution; instead, I will address a few broad themes the authors raise. The first conclusion to be drawn from these collections is that individuals do matter to Canadian foreign policy. This maxim may hold more truth for the past than the present, but what emerges in these pages is a picture of policy inspired and shaped by bureaucrats and politicians alike. Architects and Innovators, in its very organization, emphasizes this point. The essays are presented in five sections, proceeding chronologically from the earliest days of the Department of External Affairs and the interwar years to the late twentieth century, stopping along the way to examine the earliest missions abroad, the dynamic period of post-WWII international institution building, and the particular messiness and complexities faced in the 1960s. The authors clearly ground their essays in the lived experiences and contributions of key individuals, but this is not to suggest that structural determinants in foreign policy are ignored. In his concluding essay, J.H. Taylor cautions, “We may be lead by the most charismatic politician since Pierre Trudeau, or the least since Mackenzie King, but when we wake up in the morning, Canada will still be next door to the United States” (p. 292). Yet, Taylor quite correctly asserts that how this relationship is managed can very much depend on the skills and personalities of the very people who shape and implement Canada’s foreign policy. In the history of the Department of External Affairs, its two principal and earliest architects deserve special mention. The two men could not have been more different. Carman Miller’s portrait of Sir Joseph Pope, the first Under-Secretary, as the embodiment of Tory aristocratic internationalism stands in stark contrast with Norman Hillmer’s presentation of O.D. Skelton, Pope’s successor in 1925 (Architects and Innovators). Both men proved to be able advisors to their respective prime ministers, though Pope’s views mattered much less after Robert Borden came to power. Skelton was indispensable to both Liberal and Conservative governments, and he had little respect for Pope...