Graham Allison: Conceptual Frameworks of Foreign Policy Decision Making

The study of foreign policy has acquired new relevance with the end of the Cold War and after 9/11, which re-oriented the attention of International Relations (IR) scholars from the structure of the international system to the centrality of decisions taken by states and other actors. Graham T. Allison’s Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, which aims to examine the central puzzles of the Cuban missile crisis and to explore the influence of unrecognized assumptions upon our thinking on foreign policy decision, is one of the most influential twentieth-century studies of foreign policy. This chapter is divided into five sections. The first contextualizes Allison’s work in the framework of foreign policy studies. Section 2 presents the three conceptual frameworks used for analysing foreign policy decisions, while the following three sections summarize the explanations provided by these frameworks to the key puzzles of the Cuban crisis in order to show their strengths and weaknesses in interpreting foreign policy decisions.