Description
Attention to leaders in International Relations has been growing, and leaders have long been a focus in Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), yet research on leaders rarely uses the counterfactual method. This paper argues that counterfactuals are good for leader analysis, as they centralise the question of ‘actor dispensability.’ Counterfactual methodology fits with FPA’s challenges to structural assumptions and perspectives that embrace the contingency of international outcomes by foregrounding the agency of policymakers. This aligns squarely with counterfactual analysis, as it addresses the hindsight bias which reinforces deterministic readings of the past. FPA research on leaders – e.g., how their traits, beliefs, and experiences affect foreign policies -- provides the necessary theoretical foundations to systematically link counterfactual changes in leaders to their impacts in IR. We also suggest that counterfactuals can uniquely support recent advances in FPA research on leaders – such as those examining leaders and populism, gender, emotions, time, and how leaders ‘break bad’. Our paper aims to harness the untapped potential of counterfactual methodology for scholarship on leaders, to guide and accelerate recent advancements, to demonstrate best practices around their use, and to establish counterfactuals more firmly as a valuable method in FPA and IR.
