Explaining Foreign Policy: International Diplomacy and the Russo-Georgian War

摘要

This dense analysis of the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia by Danish political scientists Hans Mouritzen and Anders Wivel is an unmitigated pleasure to read. The book does not break new theoretical ground: the authors make use of well-established paradigms of international relations theory to evaluate the strategies of various actors in the conflict. They combine these techniques astutely by giving precedence to the sequence of events, before moving on to foreign policy, where they examine the international system, the foreign-policy motives of state actors and their possible internal political motives. In all, they come up with an analytical framework that is both solid and not too overwhelming for the reader.