Foreign policy analysis (FPA) is a vibrant academic field that features methodological diversity, active and ongoing conceptual debates, and unresolved differences in understandings of paradigmatic structures, nomenclature, emphasis, and interpretation. This makes it an especially exciting field for scholarly research and discourse. However, what is exciting for scholars can be confusing to practitioners.
This textbook is geared toward students who are current or prospective national security professionals. Our primary goal in engaging the extant FPA literature is to render this conceptual field of knowledge into a cohesive, comprehensible, and useful analytic toolkit for these students who are seeking practical professional knowledge that can be readily applied to the complex and evolving realities of the contemporary national and international security environment. Toward this end we have taken deliberate liberties to update and standardize how certain concepts are named, organized, and understood. We do not claim that this approach represents an authoritative encapsulation of the FPA field as it stands today, nor do we aver that scholars should mimic our approach for their own scholarly purposes. The academic debates will continue evolving, and we do not wish in any way to imply that these debates have been, or even necessarily should be, resolved along the lines we suggest here.
The authors are grateful to various colleagues who have challenged and informed our thinking, but we take full responsibility for any errors of fact or arguable suppositions, inferences, or conclusions. In other words, all viewpoints are solely those of the authors.