206 CHAPTER Six ■ The IndIvIdual
understand how individuals make decisions, how they employ vari ous psychological
mechanisms to pro cess information, and what impact these pro cesses have on individ
ual and group be hav ior. Mass publics matter to liberals because liberals believe these
publics help formulate the state’s interests. Private individuals also matter, although
they are clearly of secondary importance, even in liberal thinking. Constructivists, too,
see individuals as impor tant. Individuals form collective identities; elites can be key
policy entrepreneurs who can promote change through ideas. But only in more recent
postmodernist and some constructivist scholarship, especially in feminist scholarship,
have private individuals’ stories found salience.
Realists and radicals do not recognize individuals as impor tant, in de pen dent
actors in international relations. They see individuals primarily as constrained by the
international system and the state. To realists, individuals are constrained by an anar
chic international system and by a state seeking to proj ect power consonant with its
national interest. Similarly, radicals see individuals only as members of a class often
misled or deluded by elites in the international cap i tal ist system and within a state
driven by economic imperatives. In neither case are individuals believed to be suffi
ciently unconstrained to be considered at the same level of analy sis as either the inter
national system or the state.
Individuals and states are not only impor tant in themselves. They also form
groups and operate in both international organ izations and nongovernmental organ
izations, within a framework of international law. We turn to these topics in the next
chapter.
d iscussion Questions
- Leaders such as Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Equito
rial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, and North Korea’s Kim
Jong Un are often dismissed as “crazy” or “nuts.” What do we mean by
these characterizations? What other explanations can be offered for their
be hav ior? - You are a top decision maker in a government bureaucracy. What strategies
would you use to try to minimize the effects of misperceptions in decision
making? - If more women held major leadership positions in international affairs, would
policies be any diff er ent? What theories would explain be hav ior by women
leaders as similar to or diff er ent from that of male leaders?