The team of the Foreign Policy Lab presented their latest researach at this year’s European International Studies Association Pan-European Conference on International Relations in Lisbon, organized the section “S12 - Citizens and Foreign Policy”, chaired multiple panels, and discussed several papers.
Papers presented
Vulnerability and Agency: Climate Change in the Grand Strategies of Small States
Franz Eder
Grand strategy refers to how states align ends, ways, and means in the conduct of foreign policy. It provides a blueprint for defining national interests and addressing challenges that threaten core values. While military power was long regarded as both the principal threat to, and instrument of, state survival, the scope of grand strategy has broadened to encompass economic, diplomatic, social, and cultural forms of power. Despite this expansion, the influence of anthropogenic climate change on grand strategy and strategic thinking has received little systematic scrutiny. This neglect is especially surprising given that small states are disproportionately affected by climate change, yet possess several characteristics that position them to address it effectively, including their sheer numbers in the international system, their ability to build coalitions, and their capacity for normative leadership. This paper seeks to fill that gap by examining how anthropogenic climate change features in the grand strategies of small states and by analyzing the instruments they employ to confront this threat. It assesses the strategic logics underpinning small-state responses and explores how their collective action and norm entrepreneurship seek to shape international outcomes.
Citizens’ Attitudes on Foreign Policy: New Instruments and Evidence from Austria
Anna Stock and Martin Senn
Although small states make up the majority of the international system, our knowledge of the attitudes citizens in these states hold towards the direction of their states’ foreign policy is still very limited. This paper seeks to advance our understanding of citizens’ attitudes on foreign policy in small states by introducing a new conceptual framework as well as a corresponding survey instrument and applying it to the Austrian case. It presents four two-dimensional models for characterizing distinct attitudes which capture fundamental foreign policy orientations structuring more specific attitudes and policy preferences: International Orientation (how states should relate to the international environment), Interests (how states should pursue their interests), Use of Force (whether force should be a legitimate tool in international relations) and Solidarity (whether states should show solidarity in international relations). Drawing on this framework, the paper examines Austrian citizens’ attitudes on foreign policy based on original survey data (n=1,500). To address concerns about attitudinal consistency and ultimately about the attitudes’ predictive power and normative meaning, it explores both collective-level profiles and the individual-level structure of attitudes employing Latent Profile Analysis and set intersection analysis.
Debating Disarmament and International Security: The UNGA First Committee Dataset
Katja Astner et al.
The First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly has served as the primary international forum for states to discuss arms control, disarmament, and international security. This is especially true for the period from the 1940s through the late 1980s, when it functioned as the “most representative forum” (Norwegian representative Tom Eric Vraalsen), as alternative venues such as the NPT Review Conferences either did not yet exist or remained restricted in participation. Despite the Committee’s role as a critical “sounding board” (UK representative Tess Solesby) within the UN disarmament machinery, scholars have devoted surprisingly little systematic attention to diplomatic processes within it. In large part, this lack of attention stems from poor data quality and accessibility: statements remain scattered across archives, often available only as low-quality scans and lacking metadata, limiting their use in systematic text-as-data research. In this paper, we introduce the UNGA First Committee Dataset covering more than 11400 statements by 188 member states and 56 non-state-actors in the First Committee’s general debates from 1960 through 2024. This dataset digitizes and consolidates these statements, standardizes speaker and country identifiers (including historical states), and provides structured meta-data for longitudinal and comparative analysis. To illustrate the added value of the dataset, we analyze how diplomatic dynamics in the First Committee have evolved in terms of state activity, gender representation, and issues polarization. This analysis demonstrates that the dataset is a valuable resource for scholarship in the fields of diplomatic studies, international security, and political communication.
From Covert Practices to Durable Relations: How Foreign Intelligence Activity Generates International Structures
Stefanie Kirchweger and Shlomo Shpiroo
Foreign intelligence activity within host states constitutes a form of international practice capable of generating enduring patterns of international interaction that operate alongside and shape formal diplomacy. This article employs a practice-theoretical lens to analyze how covert intelligence practices on foreign soil generated enduring international interaction patterns. Drawing on multi-archival research on Israeli intelligence operations in Austria and Yugoslavia (1945-1955), the study traces how the Bricha, an intelligence arm of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, established extensive clandestine ties to facilitate Jewish refugee transit across postwar Europe. These initially improvised interactions generated routinized and shared practices between Israeli and host-state actors, and evolved into a sustained field of Austrian-Israeli covert and diplomatic relations throughout the Cold War. The analysis identifies three mechanisms through which covert practice generated enduring international relations: the formation of cross-national communities of practice, the gradual tacit recognition of foreign intelligence presence by host states, and the embedding of clandestine interaction within broader bilateral relations. The article contributes to international practice theory by demonstrating how covert, historically evolving intelligence activity can constitute a persistent field of international interaction that shapes diplomatic relations.
A Lost Cause? Explaining Persistent State Advocacy for Nuclear Disarmament
Katja Astner
Since the dawn of the nuclear age, state representatives have repeatedly affirmed their commitment to global nuclear disarmament in countless speeches and documents. Even as nuclear arms competition resurges and arms control agreements erode, such declarations remain commonplace. Yet some states go beyond mere lip service: they persistently champion nuclear disarmament initiatives, actively promote a nuclear-weapon-free world in international negotiations, and challenge the existing nuclear order. While the existing literature acknowledges the influence of these advocate states — most prominently in the processes leading to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) — it rarely explains which states assume and sustain this advocacy role over time, and why. This paper examines which states engage in persistent nuclear disarmament advocacy and identifies the necessary and sufficient configurations of conditions under which such advocacy emerges and endures. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA), it analyzes how combinations of explanatory conditions shape advocacy patterns in four eras of the nuclear age (1946–2024): (i) domestic governance and ideology, (ii) military alliance memberships, (iii) geographic proximity to nuclear arsenals, (iv) experiences with nuclear testing or accidents, and (v) the agency of key individuals. By demonstrating the causal complexity of state advocacy, this paper advances debates on norm and policy entrepreneurship and highlights the role of states as agents of change in global nuclear politics.
The Public and the Secret State: Measuring Citizens’ Attitudes towards Intelligence Services
Franz Eder and Stefanie Kirchweger
The tension between national security intelligence and the values of liberal democracy lies at the core of Intelligence Studies. To what extent are citizens willing to accept trade-offs between security and civil liberties? Despite recent studies, we still know relatively little about public attitudes toward intelligence services and their activities, and there is no comprehensive survey instrument to measure them. This article addresses these gaps by introducing a survey instrument, making it publicly available, and applying it to the case of Austria. The instrument rests on five interdependent pillars: (1) citizens’ knowledge of intelligence agencies, their mandates, and capabilities, and the sources of that knowledge; (2) citizens’ trust in these agencies; (3) the conditions under which citizens are willing to accept trade-offs between security and civil liberties; (4) the forms and degree of oversight that citizens deem necessary; and (5) citizens’ willingness to allow intelligence agencies to share information internationally, and with whom.