International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   In the mid-1960s, James Rosenau was invited to contribute a chapter to an edited volume on comparative and international politics and was asked to address the literature on “internal influences on external behavior,” or as he chose to focus his chapter, “the domestic sources of foreign policy” ( Rosenau 1966 :27). His essay is still interesting today as it provides a point from which to gauge progress. Writing in the midst of the behavioral revolution, he bemoans the absence of “general theory” and the failure of scholars to recognize that their work rarely “contains ‘if–then’ hypotheses,” frequently “treat[s] the internal factor under examination as the only variable in a world of constants,” or “even worse [treats it] as a constant in a world of variables” (1966:31–2). An even cursory perusal of the research published in international relations (IR) in the past few years makes it clear that a robust community of researchers exists among whom these sorts of mistakes do not find their way into print. In the remainder of this essay, we sketch how that change has taken place by focusing our attention on an area of inquiry in which some of the most exciting work in IR has been conducted since Rosenau penned his famous chapter. In this essay, we take stock of the literature that examines the impact of “domestic” variables on international conflict, and to ... log in or subscribe to read full text