Foreign Policy Learning Research Articles

Lessons that Lead to War: Foreign Policy Learning and Military Escalation in the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

ABSTRACT This paper examines Azerbaijan’s decision to go to war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. It aims to unveil the lessons Azerbaijan learned from the reaction of major regional actors in the South Caucasus to rising tensions in Armenian–Azerbaijani relations from the mid-2000s to the 2020 July border crisis. The paper argues that the consistent unresponsiveness of the international community emboldened Azerbaijan to proceed with its war preparations. It shows that Azerbaijan perceived the attitude of regional powers as inability and/or reluctance to interfere in the conflict, and this created a permissive environment for an all-out war.

‘Remember Iraq!’ Learning theory and the 2013 non-decision on air strikes against Syria

Statesmen sometimes seek to legitimize contemporary foreign policy decisions by referring to a ‘historical lesson’, derived from an allegedly analogous situation in the past. According to foreign policy learning theory, such lessons may also be decisive for the actual decisions. Learning theory is here being tested against four national decision processes in August–September 2013 regarding air strikes against Syria. The four countries participated militarily in the March 2003 Iraq intervention. The latter being defined as reasonably ‘similar’ to the Syria project and also as a failure, learning theory expects the 10-year-old memory to decisively restrain their 2013 decisions. Was this really the case, or were the countries driven more by, for example, contemporary 2013 concerns focusing at the situation in and around Syria? The theoretical expectation turns out to be fulfilled in the USA, the UK, and Poland, but is disappointed regarding Denmark, where a rivalling lesson, i.a., proved stronger.

Conceptualizing in the Minefield: Role Theory and Foreign Policy Learning

Harnisch, Sebastian. (2011) Conceptualizing in the Minefield: Role Theory and Foreign Policy Learning. Foreign Policy Analysis, doi: 10.1111/j.1743-8594.2011.00155.x The paper suggests a dialogue between role theory and foreign policy learning literature. I argue that role theory, when conceptualized in the interactionist tradition of George Herbert Mead, can contribute analytical clarity to the literature on policy learning. By specifying role theory to account for various modes of “role taking,” the constitutive social effects of individual or organizational learning for a given community become apparent. Furthermore, an interactionist reading of role theory advances the concept of “role taking” by complementing it with “role making.” While the former connects societal expectations and individual or collective self-expectations and behavior, the later conceives learning as the interaction between individual creativity and societal expectation in the process of “as-if role taking.” The illustrative cases of role making and taking reveal the creative effects of role making while accounting for the constraining impact of institutions and communal expectations. I conclude that role theory and (foreign policy) learning are powerful explanatory tools, but only if they are integrated to bridge the gap between agent and structure.

Reputation and Interstate Conflict

In international politics, states learn from the behavior of other nations, including the reputations states form through their actions in the international system. This article presents a model of how states process this information and examines how this learning affects international conflict. The model builds off of cognitive balance theory and foreign policy learning models and breaks new ground in its ability to provide a contextual assessment of reputation in world politics. The article then investigates whether a dyad is more likely to experience conflict if at least one state has a reputation for hostility. This hypothesis is tested empirically across all dyads in the international system from 1817 to 2000. The results indicate that states do engage in this learning behavior and that the information generated by extra‐dyadic interaction of states has a significant bearing upon the likelihood of dyadic conflict.

Imitation in International Relations: Analogies, Vicarious Learning, and Foreign Policy

Do states learn from other states' experiences in international relations? This is the expectation of prominent theories. But empirical research indicates that foreign policy learning is based overwhelmingly on direct experience. I argue that vicarious learning has not been uncovered because we have not known where to look: there has been no well-developed theory leading to falsifiable expectations. Here I suggest a theory and test it on data for foreign policy beliefs and analogies used by Ukrainian and Russian elites. The results indicate that learning from vicarious success, or imitation, has a strong impact on beliefs following a major failure. This has implications for foreign policy decision making and for concepts of interests and change in systemic theories of international relations.

War-weariness and Cumulative Effects: Victors, Vanquished, and Subsequent Interstate Intervention

It is often assumed that policymakers and populations grow weary from war. The costs associated with the use of military force are thought to become readily apparent in the wake of devastating conflicts, and support for military forays is expected to erode as a result. Although the notion is compelling, to date, empirical studies of war-weariness have yielded mixed results. This article re-examines war-weariness theory. It focuses upon a recent, but largely neglected, refinement in the theory as well as insights gleaned from the foreign-policy learning literature. The theory is recast with emphasis placed on the collective weight of consecutive war wins and consecutive war losses. War-weariness is postulated to follow a series of war defeats. A series of victories is assumed to produce the opposite effect. Bolstered by past success, decisionmakers in states that have a run of war wins should use military force more frequently. To test the article's hypotheses, time series, cross-section negative binomial and OLS regressions of 66 states for the period 1946-96 are employed. Interstate military intervention is the type of force analyzed. Intervention initiations are found to not only increase as states win successive wars, they also increase as war losses mount. This U-shaped relationship holds for large-scale interventions as well. Although these results provide little empirical support for a cumulative approach to war-weariness, they do suggest that a state's war record affects decisions to intervene militarily. In the realm of low-scale military force, the weight of the past does affect policymakers and is important for understanding contemporary policy.

Political structure and foreign policy learning: Are democracies more likely to act on the lessons of history?

This paper assesses the impact of domestic political structure on whether a state's foreign policy will reflect the lessons of history. The paper focuses on one theory of learning in foreign policy, the formative events model. Drawing on social psychology and public opinion literatures, two arguments are made as to why the foreign policies of democracies may be more likely to reflect the lessons of formative events than those of non‐democracies. Another argument, based on a bureaucratic learning model, is made as to why the foreign policies of non‐democracies may be more likely than those of democracies to reflect the lessons of formative events. These hypotheses are then tested on behavior in three areas, alliances, crisis bargaining, and extended deterrence. The results indicate limited support for the hypothesis that the foreign policies of democracies are more likely to reflect the lessons of formative events than those of non‐democracies.

Foreign policy and East Asia: learning and adaptation in the Gorbachev era

1. Introduction 2. Learning, adaptation, and foreign policy change 3. Learning and adaptation in the historical context 4. The People's Republic of China 5. Japan 6. The Korean peninsula 7. Learning and security in the Asian-Pacific region 8. Conclusion: Soviet foreign policy learning.