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This paper criticizes the epistemic foundations of democratic state-building, which are derived from a model of political transitions according to which liberal democratic institutions will transform a hitherto authoritarian and troubled country into a more prosperous and stable society and, therefore, foreign interventions to establish these institutions are realistic and worthy investments, provided they are properly planned based on knowledge of what has worked elsewhere. This expectation is based upon two epistemological premises. The first premise, linearity , is that social and institutional change exhibits identifiable input–output relations connecting socioeconomic conditions and outcomes. The second premise, ergodicity , is that these relations, inferred from past samples, provide reliable probabilistic projections about future outcomes, which can guide the focus of policy interventions. Drawing from the study of complex systems, the paper indicates why these two premises offer a flawed conception of political transitions and why radical and large-scale interventions, such as state-building, will tend to generate unintended consequences rather than the planned effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an alternative explanation for the processes by which foreign policy is made. It does so across three different countries, across different governments, across issues that had real "blood and treasure" at stake, across different domestic and international contexts, and while holding the target of policy, the United States, constant. Available theories argue that formal political institutions or norms determine who will influence the making of policy and how they will do so. However, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—countries with strikingly similar formal rules for making foreign policy—have been following, for decades, fundamentally different foreign policymaking processes, and they have been doing so without resorting to any normative justifications. The article contrasts the theoretical expectations of rational choice institutionalism and norm-based arguments on foreign policymaking with a logic of habit not captured by the logics of consequences or appropriateness of rational choice institutionalism and norm-based explanations. The article makes two contributions. First, it furthers the theoretical development of the concept of habit in international relations and offers a means of studying habits empirically. Second, it challenges the assumption that the power of domestic actors in foreign policy is a function of formal institutions or prevailing norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that efforts to strengthen the theoretical foundations for foreign policy analysis (FPA) should take as a vantage point the smallest social unit—the human being. It advocates far-reaching engagement with psychology and the life sciences for insights on the individual in the social context. Research on emotion, as a general human phenomenon and one that has been extensively researched across disciplines, is thought to offer a particularly promising conceptual lens on foreign policy. For cues on how to incorporate scientific findings with historical analysis and situate resulting hypotheses in relation to prevailing theoretical paradigms, the article draws on classical realism. Especially mid-twentieth century realists such as Hans Morgenthau expressed a nuanced conception of human agency and the interplay between emotion and cognition. Substantial aspects of their theories, based largely on experience and intuition, have been corroborated by recent scientific research. This review is structured around four central issues. These have been both the loci of much criticism levelled at classical realism and remain a challenge to IR as a whole: the levels of analysis problem, the "scaling up" of emotion, the classification and choice of emotion(s), and the accessibility of the political world to scientific method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]