Description
Analysis of Our Common Agenda requires theory that is applicable to all states. However, historically the focus of IR theory has been overwhelmingly on large states and great powers, making it unsuitable for explaining the behaviour of the ‘rest’. Scholarship has produced many behavioural strategies available to weaker states in their interactions with great powers, but while many of these help in observing and describing the policies adopted by weaker states, put together they provide for a confusing mix that has little analytical value and is of limited utility for explaining why certain states choose one kind of behaviour over another. It also fails to address questions about the extent to which some strategies go well with others and yet others do not. Instead, such questions require investigation into the larger objectives that a combination of behaviours might serve. In other words, there is need for a theory of weaker state agency that focuses not on the chosen strategies but, rather, on the incentives, structures, and conditions that provoke them. This paper, while drawing on recent work in this sprouting research area, analyses Latin American behaviours vis-à-vis the United States between 1990-2010 to develop such a theory.
