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[No abstract available]

Operational code analysis was originally designed to analyse the Soviet Politburo members' political strategies and was codified by George and Walker, Schafer and Young. The approach has mostly been used to analyse individual world leaders, rather than specific political groups. In this article, I use the operational code construct to analyse political Islamists' belief systems. I discuss issues regarding using the operational code construct in a non-Western political and cultural setting. The first difficulty of using the operational code analysis to analyse political Islamists' strategies is the diversity of the movement, which led to a certain level of analysis problem. Second, whether to use computerised analysis or traditional hand coding was an important decision. Third, some procedures of the operational code research agenda, such as coding only transitive verbs, at times seemed to be in conflict with Turkish and Arabic sentence structures and verbs. Lastly, since the "Western" foreign policy analysis (FPA) theories are not frequently applied in the "global south" cases, I did not have a large body of literature to use while conducting my research. This article discusses the "boundedness" of the operational code analysis in analysis of non-Western individual leaders and political movements by discussion of these issues and others.

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This article is an introduction to the applications of game theory in international studies and makes an evaluation of what is added by using it. I illustrate the benefits of incorporating the instrumental rationality assumption and formal methods to international studies via giving examples from the literature. I argue that despite its relative infancy in the field, use of game theory have greatly contributed to our understanding and explanations of international relations. First, the assumptions of the theory are discussed. Second, some commonly used games from the literature are presented. A short literature review is followed by a discussion of what is added by using game theory in international relations studies. Finally, criticisms, limitations and future of game theory are discussed.

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[No abstract available]

This essay evaluates the English School - a prominent approach to the study of international relations - as a "research enterprise" (James 2002). Our exploration begins with an introduction of a "continuum of aggregation" that conveys a given research enterprise, such as the English School, at different conceptual levels. The English School's axioms along with its negative and positive heuristics are identified and evaluated based on the classics and more recent works from Wight, Bull, and others. Conclusions and prospects for further development of the English School complete the review.