Description
How leaders define foreign policy challenges figures mightily into how they respond to them. Foreign Policy Analysis has long held the “definition of the situation” as its central conceptual concern but has failed to sustain any systematic research programme around it. Drawing on foreign policy timing theory and taking “time” as an elemental feature, I develop a temporal conception of decision-makers’ sensemaking of foreign policy problems. This includes traditional “clock-time” dimensions such as beginnings, duration, and pace, but also “timing” features such as harmony, discord, and synchrony. Using both qualitative and quantitative empirical measures of timing I demonstrate their value through several foreign policy cases, including Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme, and Brexit. I find that by moving away from the logic of flat preference and goals, viewing sense-making as timing introduces a valuable fourth dimension for understanding how decision-makers define and respond to foreign policy problems.
