Diversionary Foreign Policy - Impact On International Relation Approaches

Impact On International Relation Approaches

Challenges to Realism and Liberalism

The focus of the Diversionary War theory on individual state actors and their domestic situations as causes for war challenges the basis of major approaches to International Relations. Many of these International Relation theories used by scholars, such as liberalism and realism, focus on states as the main actors in the international system. Technically, this is referred to as using the interstate level of analysis. These scholars attribute the motives and actions of states to the states themselves, instead of the decision makers inside their governments.

On the other hand, the use of diversionary foreign policy suggests that factors inside of a state, such as domestic disputes and economic lows, have as much of an impact on foreign policy as national interests. As a result, examinations of the use of diversionary wars shift the study of International Relations away from the interstate level of analysis, toward the domestic level of analysis, and even the individual level of analysis In fact, many critics of realism use examples of the use of diversionary wars as a means to discredit the theory