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A foreign policy analysis perspective on After Victory

This article presents a foreign policy perspective on Ikenberry’s (2001) After Victory and his reflection essay in this special issue. After Victory was indeed a breakthrough piece of research, reorienting our understanding of institution-building and creation in post-war moments. The purpose of this article is not to critique After Victory but to use it as a platform, taking Ikenberry’s arguments as a starting point to explore the micro-foundations of the international relations (IR) he examines. In other words, here I take the opportunity to ask (and answer): What would a foreign policy analysis (FPA) perspective add to After Victory? What would FPA focus on in the book and in Ikenberry’s reflection essay? What would an FPA-inspired future research agenda on institution-building and order creation look like? FPA is a subfield within IR, first established in the 1950s and 1960s with seminal research by Snyder et al. (1954), Sprout and Sprout (1956), and Rosenau (1966). FPA developed into a large research programme encompassing many topics including elite– mass relations, institutional and regime designs, and individual and small group psychological processes in leader decision-making – all geared to explaining why and how states make foreign policy decisions that constitute international relations. An essential feature of FPA research is that it does not assume the state is a unitary actor and instead focuses on domestic politics; it opens up the ‘black-box’ of the state (for overview, see Hudson, 2005; Kubálková, 2001). While not a single theory, FPA is a distinct perspective with its ‘actor-specific focus based upon the argument that all that occurs between nations and across nations is grounded in human decision makers acting singly or in groups’ (Hudson, 2005: 1; see also Kaarbo, 2015). After Victory, like much research in IR, largely treats states as unitary and rational actors. As Ikenberry has adeptly demonstrated, this approach goes a long way to explain the development and maintenance of international organisations and international order.