Workshop Chair: Cameron Thies, University of Iowa
Location: Port Room, Hilton New Orleans Riverside
Time: Tuesday, February 16, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Workshop Summary:
The workshop intends to bring together scholars operating in two distinct intellectual and geographical spaces: foreign policy scholars who typically use cognitive approaches developed in political psychology and international relations scholars who typically draw on constructivism. The former group is largely located in universities in the United States, while the latter is based in Europe and other areas of the world. These two groups of scholars do not generally engage each other intellectually, despite the fact that both draw on concepts associated with role theory. While role theory was initially used by foreign policy scholars starting in the 1970s, it also began to be used by (constructivist) international relations scholars in the late 1990s and early 2000s without any apparent connection. The workshop intends to use role theory as a basis for dialogue between these groups of scholars, with the goal of working toward greater integration between foreign policy analysis and international relations theory. While synthesis between these fields has often been debated in the abstract, this workshop will focus on a specific theory that may offer the potential to succeed in this endeavor. Roles are properties of both agents and structure, thus their origin, enactment, and effect on behavior are of interest to both foreign policy and international relations scholars.
The workshop will bring together a number of leading and budding new scholars working with role theory across these two traditions from around the world. The idea for the workshop grew out of the proposer’s recent experience writing the ISA Compendium chapter on “Role Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis.” While writing the chapter it became quite clear that these two groups should be talking to each other, since each had interesting insights into roles that were largely bracketed by the other group given that they are often working from different levels of analysis (or different vantage points, agents or structure). The publication records of the participants are a strong indicator that our plans to publish the results of this workshop will be successful. Cooper Drury, the new incoming editor of Foreign Policy Analysis, has agreed to consider the papers from this workshop for a special issue. We also plan to pursue an edited volume with Routledge that will include papers from participants, observers, and other scholars who were not able to attend the workshop. Depending upon the success of this first venture, we may seek to reconvene at the subsequent ISA to include some scholars who were not able to attend this year’s meeting due to scheduling conflicts. This workshop and its aftermath have the potential to create a strong research community spanning typical intellectual and geographical divides.
Broader Impacts - The workshop will bring together a number of senior, established professors from around the world, as well as more junior scholars just beginning their careers. The ability for senior faculty to network with each other is exciting in its own right, but we are also looking forward to the potential of establishing mentoring relationships with the younger faculty. We believe that there is a high likelihood of co-authoring relationships developing between junior and senior faculty, and between faculty in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere in the world. Every person that was contacted to participate in this workshop responded immediately and enthusiastically, so the hope for dialogue is improved by an initial stock of goodwill. The results of this workshop will be published in Foreign Policy Analysis, and extensions of this work will appear in a future edited volume with a press like Routledge that is well-established in both Europe and the U.S. The special issue of FPA is an especially great way to disseminate our workshop results to the entire membership of ISA.
Workshop Participants:
- Richard Adigbuo, Delta State University, Nigeria
- Rikard Bengtsson, Lund University, Sweden
- Marijke Breuning, University of North Texas, USA
- Sebastian Harnisch, Heidelberg University, Germany
- Adrian Hyde-Price, University of Bath, UK
- Juliet Kaarbo, University of Kansas, USA
- Paul Kowert, Florida International University, USA
- Binnur Ozkececi-Taner, Hamline University, USA
- Chih-yu Shih, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
- Cameron Thies, University of Iowa, USA
- Stephen Walker, Arizona State University, USA
- Richard Whitman, University of Bath, UK
No Observers – Attendance Limited to Participants
