Feedback Loops as Links Between Foreign Policy

Feedback Loops as Links Between Foreign Policy and International Relations: The U.S. War on Terror Frank Gadinger Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen [email protected] Dirk Peters Peace Research Institute Frankfurt [email protected]

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‘Foreign policy needs liberating from the narrow and over-simplified views that are often held of it, and International Relations as a subject needs to move forward in reconstituting its notions of agency after the waves of attacks on realism in recent decades, which have established the weakness of state-centric accounts without putting much in their place.’ Christopher Hill (2003, p. 2) Introduction Even in a globalized world, states persist and they continue to pursue foreign policies. Yet the analysis of these foreign polices has become more difficult and the confines of the disciplines we are working in are not always helpful in addressing these difficulties, as Christopher Hill rightly remarked a decade ago. As the boundaries between the internal and external become increasingly blurry and states become more and more enmeshed in their global environment, the relation between foreign policy and international environment becomes more immediate. State policies are more directly affected by the international environment but they, in turn, also have a more immediate impact on this environment the mselves. Consequently, feedback between states' foreign policies and their external environments is apparent in many policy fields such as climate policy, Western interventionism or the global financial crisis. Typical instances for feedback loops in foreign policies include sanctions against dictators which unintentionally stabilize the power of autocratic regimes. Policies of Western democracies which aimed to stabilize allied autocracies in the Maghreb and the Middle East have indirectly contributed to growing domestic frustration within these states. This, in turn, contributed to the recent democratic upheavals there, which feed back into Western democracies and necessitate fundamental adjustments in their policies, most apparent in French President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to lead the UN engagement against Libya’s leader Gaddafi in 2011. The US War on Terror is another prime example for observing foreign policy feedback. When the United States started their war against terrorism after the attacks of 9/11, their goal was to defeat Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘global terrorism’ at large. The war altered the international setting fundamentally, albeit not in ways intended by the US. Today Islamist terror groups

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are still active in several parts of the world and Al-Qaeda has transformed from a terrorist network to a global ideology. Many commentators contend that it was US policy and especially President George W. Bush’s decision to intervene in Iraq in 2003 that contributed decisively to this development, forcing the US today to respond to the fallout from its earlier decisions (Roy 2008). While the decision of US President Barack Obama to terminate the war against terrorism can be interpreted as profound adaptation, his new strategy of fighting terrorism primarily through surveillance and drones could further strengthen hostile attitudes against the US and exacerbate the problem of terrorism. Ultimately, the feedback processes between US foreign policy and the environment it seeks to control are open-ended and lead to a complex relational network. Surprisingly enough, such mutual relations as feedback loops or feedback processes have rarely been addressed in International Relations (IR) theory or Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Indeed, we would argue that this very split between IR theory and FPA has rendered the relational dimension a blind spot in theory-driven research. IR theorists concern themselves primarily with the role of international structures and with theorizing and demonstrating how such structures dispose similarly placed actors toward similar actions. Consequently IR theorists tend to focus on ‘actor-general’ theory (Hudson and Vore 1995), that is, to treat states as black boxes and to downplay the role of agency in international relations. In contrast, FPA focuses on the domestic traits of states and how they affect foreign policy. Thus foreign policy analysts employ ‘actor-specific’ theories (Hudson and Vore 1995) and struggle with the contingency of agency by analyzing the details of foreign policy decision-making. We argue that a focus on feedback loops can help to bring these two sub-fields closer together and to understand long term dynamics in both foreign policies and the international system. The concept of feedback loops, borrowed from cybernetic theory, is intended to capture the basic intuition that policies may affect those structures which helped to bring them about in the first place. While IR theory will help us to understand the basic forms of feedback effects in international relations, the effects that action may

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have on its context and the potential effects from context on action; FPA will provide tools to better understand how context conditions are actually translated into action. We argue in this paper that, even though the core ideas of cybernetics, which conceives of our world in terms of communication, control and feedback are alive in contemporary discussions, its full potential for informing IR research has not yet been realized. As we argued elsewhere (Gadinger and Peters 2014), rediscovering the cybernetic spirit and especially the concept of feedback, which lies at its heart, provides a useful analytical framework that enables empirical research to analyze the intricate mechanisms to which recent IR theory has turned. Cybernetics is interested in examining feedback processes which link action (regardless of whether it is performed by individuals, organizations, animals or machines) to the environment in which it is performed; and environmental effects, in turn, to subsequent action. In exploring such feedback processes, cybernetics speaks to the conceptual concerns of recent relational approaches all while providing an accessible framework for empirical research. Moreover, it allows researchers to draw together insights from IR theory and FPA which have existed as separate sub-fields for too long. By focusing on the feedback loops between action and environment – between a state's foreign policy and international politics, for instance – cybernetics is particularly suited to examining foreign policies in a time when states become more and more enmeshed in their global environment. Thus, it provides an analytical angle from which key aspects of international politics in an era of globalization can be examined. In making our argument, we first outline some basic elements of cybernetic thinking and highlight three important characteristics through which cybernetics can contribute to current debates in the discipline. First, it can provide a framework for linking insights from IR theory and FPA, from structure-centered and agency-centered research. As such, it addresses the agency-structure problem as it has been discussed in IR (Wight 2006; Franke and Roos 2010) and FPA (Carlsnaes 2002; Hellmann et al. 2005) and contributes to recent theorizing on international practices (Adler and Pouliot 2011; Bueger and Gadinger 2014). 4

Secondly, it provides a framework for analyzing foreign policies and international politics over time. As feedback processes unfold over time, they provide a useful perspective for addressing long-term dynamics in historical contexts (Buzan and Little 2000) and for examining political change (e.g. Barnett 1999), a need emphasized by recent approaches in historical sociology (Lawson 2012) and historical institutionalism (Fioretos 2011). Finally, the feedback perspective highlights the importance of relations in wider networks and the indeterminate and non-linear character of interactions within these networks, as emphasized by actor-network (Best and Walters 2013) or assemblage approaches in IR (Acuto and Curtis 2013). These approaches are commonly interested in studying complex phenomena such as terrorism, peacebuilding, piracy, migration, financial markets or private security networks which are located in-between the traditional domains of FPA and IR, and thus demonstrate the need to overcome this artificial split. Following our sketch of cybernetics and its characteristics, we outline the elements of a feedback analysis and demonstrate how a feedback approach can incorporate insights from IR theory and FPA. We then illustrate our conception of a sequential feedback analysis by reconstructing the US War on Terror as one example of current transformation processes in world politics. This illustration cannot provide a full-blown empirical analysis in its own right but it serves to highlight the merits of such a perspective. We conclude with some challenges for such a cybernetic research agenda in IR and FPA.

The roots of feedback analysis in cybernetic thought The core ideas of cybernetics have never arrived in a real sense in IR and FPA. In some systems approaches in IR, however, the ideas of Karl W. Deutsch and Ernst Haas had a clear impact on conceptualizing politics in terms of information, control and learning, for example in models of interdependency (Keohane and Nye 1977) or, later, complexity thinking. Systems thinking put forward by

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Waltz, Kaplan and Easton is, nevertheless, often associated with static descriptions of the world. Emanuel Adler (2005) attacks this prejudice and uses some core ideas of Deutsch and Haas to develop his conception of communities of practice in international relations as process of learning. For Adler (2005, p. 34), Deutsch and Haas were Heraclitean thinkers who ‘stressed the individual as a learning actor, as reacting and adapting through processes of positive and negative feedback ’. Their thinking about international politics was rooted in cybernetics, which had originally been established as a broad theory of communication and control. Norbert Wiener (1948) derived the term from the Greek kybernetes (steersman), which (via the Latin gubernare) evolved into the English ‘to govern’ (Wiener 1954, p. 15). Indeed, cybernetics can be read as a generalized theory of governance that is concerned with how order is created and maintained. It rests on the view from modern physics that disorder (entropy) is ever-increasing and thus the creation and maintenance of order becomes highly unlikely. Nonetheless, pockets of order exist in the world. Life organisms, societies and also machines are obvious instances. The core claim of cybernetics is that all these pockets of order are maintained by one key mechanism: the management of feedback. Wiener developed these thoughts to put forward the argument that key processes of life are very similar between human beings and machines and Karl W. Deutsch (1966) transferred cybernetic thinking to government and societies. Feedback loops are mechanisms in which, broadly speaking, a system’s output affects the input into that same system and thus the system’s subsequent output. Every ordered structure, be it a machine, a human being or an animal, will in some form seek to control its environment to maintain its existence or fulfill its purpose. To do so it will have to not only perform actions through which it attempts to affect this environment, but also monitor whether these actions had the intended effects and, if not, adjust its actions accordingly. A human may, for example, want to steer a car along a road. In this process s/he will constantly have to monitor whether the car stays on its intended course and, if necessary, adjust the steering wheel, accelerate or reduce the speed. Similarly an automated train in the London Underground

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will need to have mechanisms that constantly monitor whether the tracks are free and adjust its speed to the given circumstances. Such processes can of course not only be found in the technical world as they are also widespread in the social world and in international politics. Typical examples include arms races or successful deterrence. But also more complex chains of events as the processes unfolding in the War on Terror can be understood as instances of feedback, as we will demonstrate below. The processing of information is key for the management of feedback. In the cybernetic view, information travels along, and is processed in, communication networks which can be conceived either as interpersonal networks, neural networks or any other set of relations along which information can be passed (e.g. Deutsch 1966, pp. 79-80). Two basic kinds of feedback can develop via these networks: positive feedback loops, in which the output is amplified by the input, and negative loops, in which the output is restricted depending on the input (Rosenblueth et al. 1943, p. 19). The ultimate result of a feedback process is difficult to predict beforehand. It may result in goal attainment but there are two sources of disturbance that make control via feedback difficult. Firstly, the environment can confront the actor with unforeseen problems as it is not completely controllable by any one actor. When steering a car, there may be bumps on the road or a cat may suddenly cross. When steering a society, other societies, the market, nature or powerful individuals may act in unpredicted ways. Control (or governance) through feedback is, therefore, always precarious and must remain an ongoing process. Secondly, the monitoring and processing of the information may be problematic. Information will get lost or distorted on its way through the networks, it may be selectively processed and the processing procedures may be inadequate (in terms of goal attainment).

Key Characteristics of Feedback Analyses

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A feedback analysis can be utilized to trace global dynamics and long-term foreign policy change. This will take the form of a sequential analysis which starts with a foreign policy decision, traces its effects in a state’s environment and examines how these effects, in turn, affected subsequent decisions of that state. Feedback analyses can thus draw both on insights from structural theorizing (in examining the changes in an actor's environment) and on insights from agency-centered perspectives (in scrutinizing foreign policy decisions). We will elaborate on the individual steps in the analysis below and also illustrate them with respect to an empirical example. Before we do so, let us highlight three key characteristics that make such an analysis unique and potentially valuable. First, a cybernetics inspired analysis of feedback loops transcends the boundaries of established subfields in the analysis of international politics by tying together the analysis of international structures and state agency in a single framework. For a long time there has been a rather clear delineation between approaches that explore the grand structures of international relations, on the one hand, and approaches that focus on decision-making and how actors behave or act in the international system, on the other. This separation of domains of theorizing has been lamented repeatedly. Structuralist theorizing in particular has been attacked for producing a static view of the world which cannot account for agency and change. This has been said especially of neorealism and neoliberalism since the late 1980s (Gaddis 1992/1993) but mainstream constructivist approaches have also been accused of privileging structure over agency (Doty 1997). The agency-structure debate has done much to clarify the problems associated with privileging just one aspect of the social world. As a consequence, researchers increasingly call for approaches that can accommodate both an examination of agency and the effects of larger structures and examine how they interact. At an abstract level, Valerie Hudson called for a general appreciation of FPA’s focus on human decision-making to provide an agency-centered grounding for IR theorizing (Hudson 2005, 2007, pp. 7-14). On a more concrete level, Bryan Mabee (2007, 2011), for instance, suggests combining the 8

macro-oriented tradition of historical sociology with micro-historical sociological analysis (historical institutionalism). Peter Howard (2004) proposes a process-oriented FPA focusing on language games in the interaction of states. David Patrick Houghton (2007) suggests reinvigorating the study of foreign policy decision making by using a constructivist approach to link FPA to the main theories of IR. Neoclassical realism (Rose 1998) seeks to analyze how incentives from the international system (the international distribution of power) lead to foreign policies that are not uniform but contingent upon domestic characteristics of the states concerned. Another small group of authors propose more generally a process-oriented and dialectic thinking in IR that will go beyond abstract state-centrism in the field (Jackson and Nexon 1999; Cederman and Daase 2003). Our cybernetic approach attempts to achieve just this: to provide a perspective that links individual (in our case, state) action with the structures in which it is embedded, by which it is affected, and which it affects itself. This ties in with a second important characteristic of our approach. Feedback analyses are analyses over time. The analytical steps need to be considered as an integrated whole, none of them can stand meaningfully on their own. Feedback analysis thus proceeds diachronically. It does not rely on taking isolated snapshots of the political world but on a sequential analysis of processes as they unfold over time (Hay 2002, pp. 148-167). As such it is equipped especially well to examine processes of change. It actually forces analysts to think in longer time intervals and can guide the analysis towards the big picture of longer-term processes and patterns that become easily obscured in other modes of analysis. Take the US War on Terror as an example. Individual FPA case studies can reconstruct the making of the decision to go to war in Afghanistan or examine the effect that the Abu Ghraib scandal had on later US foreign policy decisions. IR analysis can explore the effects of the Afghanistan war on patterns of cooperation within NATO. A feedback analysis, however, would aim at bringing these insights together and explore their linkages in a unified framework. Thus it could potentially make visible long-term processes that produced change in US foreign policy, in the NATO alliance, and in the Middle East and 9

work out the linkages among them. Instead of recounting and explaining isolated episodes, a feedback analysis would aim at demonstrating how US foreign policy decisions contributed to both intended and unintended changes in Afghanistan and its wider environment that were perceived and processed, in turn, by the US administration, leading to changes in administrative structures and policies that themselves produced further effects, and so on. We will examine this case in more detail below. Thirdly, in tracing such processes over time, feedback analysis is based in a non-deterministic perspective. Neither the effects that action produces in a state’s environment nor how these effects are interpreted, processed and translated into action is considered determinate. For one, this is a result of the fact that no actor can fully control its environment. Consequently, there is always an element of unpredictability when interaction with the environment takes place. Furthermore, having its roots in modern physics, cybernetics is grounded in a probabilistic world view accordi ng to which there are always numerous possible worlds at any time. Cybernetics, therefore, recognizes ‘a fundamental element of chance in the texture of the universe itself’ (Wiener 1954, p. 11), which makes room for acknowledging ‘creativity and novelty’ in social relations (Deutsch 1966, p. 176). To add to this, the cybernetic view implies that small causes can have large consequences because feedback loops can amplify effects considerably. A low background noise emitted from a loudspeaker can escalate in to an unbearably loud howling sound if it feeds into a microphone connected to that same speaker. Deutsch (1966, pp. 192-195) points to arms races and the escalation of mobilization orders throughout Europe in 1914 as instances of such ‘positive’ feedback where an initial action becomes self-reinforcing and produces effects that are amplified time and again. Thus a cybernetic perspective is highly sensitive to the views of complexity theory that are increasingly gaining traction in IR theory and that emphasize the need to take questions of indeterminacy and non-linearity (as exemplified by the ‘butterfly effect’) into account (Bousquet and Curtis 2011, pp. 45-47). A sequential analysis of feedback systems can rely on a rich reservoir of previous theorizing about international politics and foreign policy decision-making. As a

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matter of fact, a feedback analysis can be thought of as a framework that allows the researcher to ‘slot in’ existing approaches and explore the linkages between them. It can work with existing approaches of IR when it comes to the effect that a foreign policy decision has in the international environment; it can rely on approaches to foreign-policy decision-making when dealing with how information about external effects is processed and transformed into subsequent decisions. In the next two sections we will discuss research from IR theory and FPA that takes up cybernetic concerns and thus can be utilized in such a feedback analysis, before we turn to illustrating our proposal by sketching the basic elements of a feedback analysis of the US War on Terror.

Foreign policy feedback I: international context and foreign policy A feedback analysis proceeds in a series of steps which analyze sequentially how foreign policy affects a state's environment, how these effects feed back into the foreign policy decision-making process and how this results in subsequent foreign policies. At every step along the way, feedback analyses can rely on a rich set of existing approaches in IR theory and FPA. In analyzing the effects that policies have in a state’s environment, such analyses can start out from existing theories of IR. As a matter of fact, the bulk of IR theorizing can be read as dealing with the effects that state actions have in the international system. Three elements of the environment have received particular attention in past research: international institutions, the international distribution of power, and the policies of other states. International institutions International institutions can be broadly defined as the stable rules and norms that govern international interactions, with different strands of research highlighting different aspects of international institutions. Constructivist research has primarily conceived of institutions as constitutive of states and their goals (for example Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986; Wendt and Duvall 1989). Rationalist research, in contrast, has 11

emphasized the view that institutions regulate behavior, that is actors (of which we now think as pre-existing, given entities) adjust their behavior to their institutional environment (for example North 1990). How states that are embedded in international institutions act may be strongly affected, but is not determined, by their institutional environment. Rather, to analyze individual state actions we need FPA and its toolkit (see the next section below). Yet, regardless of how they act, states’ actions will have repercussions on their institutional environment. These effects can be analyzed employing institutionalist research from different strands. The most obvious effects of state action on institutions occur in negotiations about international regimes. Here, states intentionally and directly engage in altering institutions by creating and modifying them, explicitly defining the principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures that make up the regime. Yet state actions may also have much less clearly visible and possibly even unintentional effects on institutions. Over time, changes in state practice may tacitly contribute to the modification of international institutions. These may be hard to detect and difficult to attribute to single states. Changes in state practice have, for example, led to a considerable change in the meaning of sovereignty over the past decades and centuries (Sørensen 1999), which have resulted in changed or newly emerged norms, like the 'responsibility to protect' (Arbour 2008). Not all of these changes have been explicitly codified. Nor are they necessarily the result of intentional institutional design. Rather the collusion of marginal changes in individual foreign policies of different actors led over time to changed practices, changed conceptions of appropriate and inappropriate behavior and thus ultimately to institutional change. Similar effects can be observed in the US-led war on terror, as we will demonstrate below. Such changes require actors to deviate to a certain degree from the institutional norms and rules. However, even mere adherence to the institutions will tend to feed back on them. Different strands of critical theorizing have highlighted the importance of the social reproduction of institutions. This reproduction too can be construed as a particular kind of feedback loop, in which states are predisposed 12

by existing institutions to follow a certain path of action; and by actually following that path contribute to the continuing existence of this institution. The international distribution of power and wealth That foreign policies are affected not only by norms and rules but by power is probably one of the oldest assumptions of international political thought and it is already implied by the concept of power itself. In its most abstract conception, power can be defined as ‘the production, in and through social relations, of effects that shape the capacities of actors to determine their circumstances and fate’ (Barnett and Duvall 2005, p. 42). Realist theory, in various versions (e.g. Morgenthau 1948, Waltz 1979, Rose 1998), posits that the international distribution of power constitutes an opportunity structure which enables states to pursue certain actions, induces them to adapt certain policies and constrains them from pursuing others. Again, there is no direct determinate relation between the environment, in which a state is embedded, and its foreign policy actions. Even though states may be induced to follow certain pathways, e.g. to balance preponderant power, they are free to disregard structural pressures, even if such resistance will come at a price. To understand how states respond to a given situation we, therefore, again need to employ the tools of FPA. But whatever a state chooses to do, its actions will have repercussions on the international distribution of power. Whereas institutions appear to induce states to contribute to the reproduction of the existing order, the international distribution of power appears to entail incentives to modify it by becoming more powerful than others. While states thus are induced to contribute to a reallocation of resources in the system in their own favor, the actual effect of their policies will depend on individual circumstances. If, at the extreme, we are in a system with a roughly equal distribution of power and all states attempt to achieve a reallocation in their favor, the effects will likely cancel each other out. If the system is unbalanced, the dynamics may be different in both the short and the long run. In the short run, a dominant state may be better able to achieve its goals and assert its interests. This may, however, induce 13

weaker states in the system to intensify their efforts to bolster their position, which may ultimately lead to a more even distribution of power. This illustrates how power dynamics in international politics may be conceived in terms of foreign policy feedback. Such a perspective adds to common understandings of, for example, balancing dynamics in highlighting the importance of contingent state responses to given structural conditions. States may reinforce the existing distribution of power or undermine it — intentionally or unintentionally. We will show below that, again, the US-led war on terror provides a good example for these mechanisms, as here a preponderant power exploited its room for action and, in doing so, eventually undermined its own power position. Policies of other states Even though they do not form macro structures like international institutions or like the international distribution of power, the policies of other states obviously also affect what a state can and will do in the international system. And even though these policies of others have not become the subject of grand schools of thought in IR theory, they did receive some theoretical attention, especially in two strands of thought. The most elaborate rationalist account of the effects of other states' policies comes from game theory (Kahler 1998). It points out that the preferences and policies of interaction partners form certain micro-structures (situations) which affect the policy paths that are chosen by the actors. Game theory is useful for analyzing foreign policy feedback as it points out the importance of others for the formulation of one's own policy. Its assumption that actors have fixed preferences is, however, problematic. As Deutsch had criticized with a view to deterrence theory this creates an unnecessarily static view of the world. A game situation itself may contribute to a change in actor preferences. To appreciate this and the breadth of potential feedback effects that may ensue, game theory's focus on

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actor constellations and how they may affect policies must be complemented by approaches that leave room for agency in responding to them. Interactionist approaches (e.g. Wendt 1992) have a somewhat different take on the issue. They highlight not so much the constraining effect that others' policies might have on the ability of actors to achieve their given goals. Rather they point out that (social) actors and their goals only come into existence in the interaction with others. According to them, there is a constitutive aspect to interactions and this implies that the policies of others contribute to this constitutive process. It is especially the interpretation of each others' actions that creates a mutual understanding of whether actors belong to the same group (Risse-Kappen 1995). Game theory and interactionism both inherently posit the existence of feedback effects. How an actor responds will have an effect on the (game) situation or on others' conception of itself and its counterparts. Both approaches have a tendency to focus on positive feedback, in which an existing situation becomes reinforced over the course of interaction. To be sure, interactionism emphasizes that early phases of interaction are marked by a high degree of openness. But over time, interactions tend to become stabilized, feedback tends to reinforce the established path and make it difficult to deviate from it. Over time, institutions may develop, which come with their own feedback loops as we have seen above.

Foreign policy feedback II: decision-making as learning The second step in a feedback analysis concerns the question of how policy effects are processed and how they result in subsequent action. Here, feedback analyses can tap into the rich literature on foreign policy decision-making which has extensively analyzed how certain stimuli are translated into foreign policies. As cybernetic research has pointed out, the crucial link between the decision-making system 15

and its environment lies in the flow of information. Whether feedback works towards goal achievement or leads to uncontrolled reinforcement of effects or break-down crucially hinges on how information about policy effects is represented and processed in the decision-making system. Feedback processes can thus be understood as political learning processes, in which political systems respond to information about the external effects of their policies (Deutsch 1966, pp. 145-153). Deutsch distinguished two types of learning. ‘Simple learning’ affects only the means but not the ends of policy, whereas ‘complex learning’ also affects underlying goals. This general analytical distinction has found wide application in policy sciences (Nye 1987; Wendt 1999, pp. 326-336) and is reflected in similar distinctions such as adaption vs. learning (Haas 1990) or single-loop vs. double-loop learning (Argyris and Schön 1978, p. 3; pp. 20-26).1 Even though Jack Levy (1994) has rightly characterized learning in foreign policy as a ‘conceptual minefield’, we would argue that the notion of learning provides a crucial entry-point for studying foreign policy feedback at the agent level. What makes the concept of learning so attractive is that it systematically takes into account the external stimulus that leads to a certain response; that it focuses on how agents engage with this stimulus in a more or less creative way; and that it indicates a non-determinate, open-ended process. Past research in (foreign) policy analysis indicates a variety of ways in which feedback analyses can examine such processes. To analyze simple learning, Jack Levy (1994, p. 288), for instance, suggested a straightforward stepwise model according to which ‘organizational learning involves a multistage process in which environmental feedback leads to individual learning, which leads to individual action to change organizational procedures, which leads to a change in organizational behavior, which leads to further feedback.’ Such a bottom-up learning model has been used for example to explain the revolutionary changes under the Soviet regime of Mikhail Gorbachev (Breslauer and Tetlock 1991; Stein 1994). A learning process like this is dominated by 1

Some texts also identify a third category of reflexive learning (learning to learn), or deutero -learning (Argyris/Schön 1978: 26-28). 16

individuals (civil servants, policy elites), organizations, relationships between them and former policies. To examine these processes the researcher needs to dissect the decision-making process and primarily reconstruct the flow of information in advisory channels. Such analysis may result in a somewhat mechanistic understanding of learning, in which the transfer of knowledge, technology, or policy, is basically an act of engineering (Freeman 2006, p. 379). Many FPA studies suggest ways of adding complexity to this picture – at every level of this stepwise process and across levels. The wide literature on the psychology of individual decision -makers (see Young and Schafer 1998) demonstrates how cognitive and psychological pre-disposition of individual decision-makers can intervene in this process. Studies on the role of groups, including studies of groupthink (Janis 1982), bureaucratic politics (Allison 1971), or epistemic communities (Adler and Haas 1992), show how inter and intra-group dynamics can affect learning processes. They suggest that learning is an active and interactive process between groups, networks, communities, and organizations and thus a social process. Even though the latter studies introduce the social dimension of learning processes and Houghton (2007) has recently pointed to avenues for linking cognitive psychological approaches of FPA to contemporary constructivist theorizing in IR, this research strategy is still in its infancy. A more sociological perspective of this nature would not only add complexity to studies of simple learning in foreign policy decision making, but it would also open up ways for analyzing issues of complex learning. Whereas the issue has not yet received much attention in FPA, certain studies of public policy provide insights into how such complex learning could be analyzed. Accordingly, policy does not exist in a finished form somewhere else – as the prominent notions of lesson-drawing (Rose 1991) or policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000) would suggest – and is ready to be used and learned from. But it is arrived at in an active, generative process of learning in practice. It was the classic study of Peter Hall (1993) on the economic policy change in Britain from Keynesianism to monetarism which introduced this way of thinking on policy learning. The revolutionary paradigm shift in British economic policy was not

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based on rational grounds alone in terms of goals and means (adjusting tax rates), but rather was enabled through a wider policy discourse in the public arena, including the media and societal actors in an electoral campaign struggle (Hall 1993, p. 287). At the end of this process social learning occurred: the goals of policy itself changed (growth instead of employment). Similar paradigm shifts may occur in foreign policy as well, even though they may be rare. Germany's move in the 1990s from a purely civilian foreign policy to participation in military operations even without a UN mandate indicates such a process of complex learning. Overall, a focus on learning at the level of the state and below can break up the mechanistic feedback loops suggested by structuralist IR theorizing. FPA offers many tools especially to analyze instances of simple learning. Here, decision-makers observe the effects of foreign policies in the international system; analyze their effects on the achievement of basic foreign policy goals; and strategically adapt foreign policy decisions in the light of these feedback effects. Thus they either strategically utilize feedback effects to further their goals or deliberately attempt to break up positive or negative feedback loops that appear detrimental to goal achievement. The more sociologically minded literature on learning focuses instead on how socially embedded actors learn in communities and through common practices. Here, learning means an emergent and organic process of social negotiations on every stage: from agenda-setting to implementation. While these sociological attempts are more dominant in organizational studies and public policy analysis, theoretical integration in FPA and IR theory is already under way and appears promising.

Follow the loops! The War on Terror in a cycle of feedback So far, we have developed the elements of a feedback analysis and outlined the potential it holds for integrating insights from previous IR and FPA research, for further extending these insights and for

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examining issues that receive increasing attention in recent IR theorizing. In the remainder of this paper we want to illustrate the merits of a feedback analysis by exploring one concrete empirical example: the US War on Terror. It is beyond the scope of this paper to deliver a full-blown feedback analysis. Rather we intend to illustrate the sequential character of such an analysis and indicate the directions in which it could be taken and we hope this serves to demonstrate the potential that such an approach holds. The observation that currently FPA analyses and IR studies hardly speak to each other is nicely illustrated by current research on the War on Terror. There seems to be a clear distinction between analyses of the US foreign policy decision-making system and changes in domestic politics, which are the domain of FPA (e.g. Mitchell and Massoud 2009) and discourse (e.g. Jackson 2005) or cultural analyses (e.g. Croft 2006) , on the one hand; and of the transformations in the international system in the context of institutions, norm compliance, alliance building and localizations of threats, with which IR deals (e.g. Jervis 2005), on the other hand. The following brief illustration of how the War on Terror evolved demonstrates that the concept of feedback loops connects both lines of research. Reconstructing a situation of crisis We begin our illustration with a single situation of foreign policy decision-making, which reflects the cybernetic position that small causes can have large consequences in the system and on the actor itself. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 there was, for a short period of time, a ‘void of meaning’ (Campbell 2002). No interpretation of this moment of crisis existed and no sense-making narrative was yet established. It did not take long until President Bush (2001) filled this void with his interpretation according to which ‘enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country’. This interpretation of the events as ‘war’ was neither self-evident nor did it follow a natural and compelling logic (Krebs and Lobasz 2007, p. 413). In principle, an infinite number of interpretive constructions of ‘9/11’ would have been possible. Richard Devetak (2009, pp. 804-808) identifies at least four plausible narratives beside the war-interpretation: September 11 as trauma, as a world-changing 19

event, as an act of terrorism and as an act of evil. Each story would have had different implications for US foreign policies, and thus would have had different effects on the global environment. Once the US President had chosen his interpretation, it was communicated by the US to the wider world by words and deeds. On its way through the networks in which the US was embedded – its bilateral and multilateral relations – the definition of the situation as a 'war' and a 'fight for freedom' had a myriad of effects. Other actors accepted it or took it up in modified form but, ultimately, there was also significant resistance. Effects in the global environment The predominant effect of the US declaration to fight a war against terrorism was broad support around the world among close allies, but also among rivals like China and Russia. Yet it is important to note the differences between the narratives and frames of 9/11 around the world to understand further conflicts in the international system. From the beginning, President Bush (2001) made it clear that the US response would be interventionist and global in its ambition: ‘Our war on terror begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber – a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms – our freedoms of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.’ This framing of 9/11 as an ‘attack on freedom’ was perfectly compatible with the cultural context of the US and the historical array of religious and ideological patterns of reasoning (the institutional memory, in cybernetic terms) on which US decision-makers could draw to justify interventions as ‘American missions’. On its way through the environment of the US, however, this interpretation was received by

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actors who had to square it with other cultural prerequisites and so it had different effects in different places, even among US allies. In Britain, for instance, 9/11 was primarily framed as an attack on democracy and British Prime Minister Tony Blair did everything to represent the War on Terror as a rational, reasoned and pragmatic enterprise. In Germany Chancellor Gerhard Schröder initially called 9/11 a declaration of war against all of civilization, but after a while it became clear that Germany , with its deeply embedded post-World War II reluctance to fight wars, did not consider itself in a state of war and rather viewed the fight against terrorism as an issue of law enforcement. Related to the war rhetoric, the US administration attempted to create a clear-cut distinction between friend and foe through forcing others to choose sides (‘you are either with us or against us’) and by stigmatizing ‘harboring states’. The effects of this were ambiguous. On the one hand, the strategy appeared successful. Most actors on the state and private level made every effort to ensure they did not appear to be standing against the US. To the US, this conveyed the information that the War on Terror, indeed, was a common enterprise with common goals. This and the conflation of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Afghanistan as synonymous (Holland 2011, p. 57) made it difficult to judge the situation on the ground and also to understand the role of surrounding actors like Pakistan which played a hybrid role somewhere between supporter and target. It disguised the fact that actual constellations were much more complex than what was perceived. To put it in conceptual terms, the effects of US policy itself made it difficult for the US administration to recognize the dynamic and fluid evolution of the War on Terror as a ‘network enterprise’ (Duffield 2002) in a relational, complex system. The idea of simply depriving Al-Qaeda of the territory on which it could organize followed the conventional logic of war between states and the notion of a controllable world. The defiant commitment of the US to this policy goal made it exceedingly difficult to anticipate the problems that would emanate from its actions. 'Positive' feedback: preemption on a global level

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What followed from this setting was a classical example of positive feedback, through which a system amplifies any perturbation in the context of prior foreign policy decisions. It eventually resulted in the formulation of the National Security Strategy 2002, including the Bush doctrine with its core premise of preemptive war and the subsequent decision to intervene in Iraq in 2003. This decision was brought about by the confluence of external factors, themselves the result of prior US decisions, and internal factors that concerned how information was processed in the US decision-making system. Externally, the situation resulted from the problematic strategy of fighting terrorism by means of war and pressuring other actors to go along with this strategy. Consequently, the war in Afghanistan had not dealt a fatal blow to Al-Qaeda, let alone international terrorism, even though the US strategy appeared to receive widespread support internationally. Internally, information was processed in biased ways which reinforced the view that to achieve policy goals, Iraq had to be attacked. How the US administration could come up with this decision without an obvious connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda is a puzzle which has been studied extensively in FPA and insider journalism (e.g. Woodward 2004). Many analysts examined the pathologies of the foreign policy decision-making process and pointed especially to the sharp split between intelligence information and decision making (Pillar 2006) and to tendencies of groupthink within the Bush administration. For Dina Badie (2010) the decision to incorporate Iraq into the wider post 9/11 mission was pathologically driven by groupthink, which caused a shift in the administration’s view of Saddam Hussein from a troubling dictator to an existential threat to US security. Furthermore, Bush’s management style had two important effects on the decision making process: it created an environment in which his advisers engaged in anticipatory compliance and it allowed for the formation of in-groups and out-groups in terms of bureaucratic politics (Mitchell and Massoud 2009). The bureaucratic style of Rumsfeld, a form of controlling, suspicious and overbearing behavior (Dyson 2009), further exacerbated the deficiencies of the process. Moreover, potential correctives from the outside

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were not taken into account. Criticism of close allies concerning the illegitimacy of the Iraq war was not taken seriously by the US government. The narrative of a necessary and morally justified war on terror completely dominated the US discourse, in which critical voices were sile nced through a ‘symbolic generalization’ of the War on Terror as a new social reality for Americans (Jackson 2005, p. 1; p. 118). In such a political climate of patriotic paranoia, an ‘atmosphere of fear’ (Crawford 2004, p. 700) and a common perception of a permanent ‘risk of inaction’ (National Security Strategy 2002, p. 15), cycles of recursion and iteration occur that are difficult to break. From a cybernetic point of view, the increasing ‘politics of preemption’ (de Goede 2008) in all spheres of public life is a symptom of the desire of a government to control a system on a global level that, through its very complexity, is not single-handedly controllable (Duffield 2002, pp. 154-55). The resulting decision to go to war, justified by dubious accusations (weapons of mass destruction) and the insistence on a right to preemptive (preventive) action, had profound consequences in the international system. These concerned the military aspects, as the US was now engaged in a fight with increasingly blurry goals. The unclear definitions and objectives of a global War on Terror were mirrored in a fluid and disappearing target, reaching now from Al-Qaeda, Taliban and Afghanistan to an ‘axis of evil’, including the ‘rogue states’ Iran, Iraq and North Korea. They also concerned the US alliance. In particular, it led to severe tensions in the transatlantic relationship as France and Germany were not willing to be part of the ‘coalition of the willing’. The escalation of the War on Terror: taking corrective action The war had a series of unintended consequences for the US. Other rogue states like Iran prepared for going to war as well after a period of détente policy, the battleground of the War on Terror shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, and a third front in the Pakistan border region emerged. Despite the hasty ‘mission accomplished’ declaration by President Bush in 2003, the military intervention in Iraq proved to be a fiasco which played into the hands of Iran and Al-Qaeda. The prolonged intervention produced a 23

multitude of effects for the War on Terror, especially when the torture scandal of Abu Ghraib became public in 2004: a widespread perception of the US as an imperial occupying power and not as force for freedom, the development of counter-narratives against the US war on terror narrative, the justification for further terrorist attacks in Bali, Madrid, London, Djerba and other sites and with them the increasing relevance of ‘homegrown terrorists’ who see themselves as part of an ideology of Global Jihadism (Roy 2008), and a general radicalization of many young Muslims around the Arab world. On top of this, the costs of the Iraq war exploded to around three trillion dollars (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008) and the military capacities of the US were stretched to their limits. An economic crisis confounded the problems and made it increasingly difficult for the decision makers to defend an unspecified ‘long war’ with no defined exit strategies and deadlines (Bacevich 2008). It was only after these massive negative repercussions that corrective mechanisms in the US gained significance and produced negative feedback in the decision-making system. This started with some minor adjustments in the foreign policy strategy of the Bush administration. These concerned primarily the means and not the main goal to ‘win’ the War on Terror. In a direct response to the fiasco in Iraq – analogous with Vietnam – a new strategy of counterinsurgency was established to stabilize the situation which appeared to successfully end the escalation. While corrections from inside the decision-making system remained limited, negative feedback in the wider US political system gained more and more prominence. The critical discourses on the slow death of the torture norm in contexts of counterterrorism, on the restrictions of civil rights, the treatment of suspects detained in lawless realms (Guantánamo), and on the widely perceived legitimacy crisis of US policy, which appeared engaged in imperial overstretch, put increasing demands on the Bush administration. How much this contributed to the election of a Democrat as President in 2008 is difficult to establish. After the change in the Presidency, however, a second loop of negative feedback can be observed. In contrast to his predecessor, Obama made some major adjustments in the following years. He avoided 24

the military vocabulary of the War on Terror, ended the war in Iraq and transformed the War on Terror into a technocratic and hidden enterprise employing the means of drones and surveillance. Even though space constraints do not permit a full-blown analysis that would utilize IR and FPA theorizing all the way through the feedback loops, our illustration serves to demonstrate the insights that can be drawn from such an approach. We have shown how initial decisions set in motion a process that was increasingly difficult to govern due partly to environmental effects, partly to deficiencies in information processing. It makes clear that transforming security terrains can be interpreted as ‘exceedingly complex systems’, a concept that cybernetic research originally developed for the economy, the brain and the company (Beer 1959, p. 18). It also highlights an aspect of social reality which is highly controversial and which is discussed in relational approaches to changing practices in finance, policy implementation or strategy planning in companies: how processes of diffusion and assimilation can silently take place in a feedback system. In this sense, the war on terror can be framed as a ‘complex adaptive system’, a term used by Michael Dillon and Julian Reid (2001, p. 55) to describe such networks between ‘beings-in-relation’ in patterns of connectivity, autonomous powers of adaptation and spontaneous emergence. Confronted with a fundamental negative feedback loop after the disastrous intervention in Iraq, decision-makers in the US have adapted to some degree some of Al-Qaeda's hidden strategies and imitated in US strategy its fluent ontological character. Using a relational ontology, Knorr Cetina (2005, p. 214) explained the success of new global terrorism with its arrangement as ‘global microstructures’ in ‘forms of connectivity and coordination that combine global reach with microstructural mechanisms that instantiate self-organizing principles and patterns’. As a result of the feedback loops indicating the lack of success of earlier strategies, US policy has shifted in a similar direction, in which warfare becomes increasingly hidden as drones and surveillance are employed as primary means, and in which military and technology innovations, intelligence information and private interests of companies become increasingly enmeshed. The war on terror is still global in scope, but it

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does no longer take place on clearly localized battlefields but rather in microsociological spaces in which smaller units interact. It remains to be seen how transnational terrorists will respond to these changes by the US and what adaptive strategies and transformations may be the results of the ensuing feedback into US policy. The research agenda in IR is only beginning to study phenomena like peacebuilding, failed states or financial markets with such a relational understanding of complex networks.

Conclusion For some readers the attempt to rediscover core ideas of cybernetics for theoretical debates in IR and FPA could appear outdated or at least dusty. This gives a false impression of cybernetics. As we have argued in this article, cybernetic thought and recent debates in IR can speak to each other. Focusing on one basic idea of cybernetics – the concept of feedback loops – enables researchers in IR and FPA to have a clear methodological entry-point to trace complex relations between agency and structure. Furthermore, the work with foreign policy feedback mechanisms overcomes the artificial split between FPA and IR. It should be obvious that a feedback analysis, embedded in a complex, relational ontology, goes beyond a simple two level model or systems thinking. A cybernetic perspective provides the opportunity to tap into the rich traditions of IR theorizing, integrating insights from FPA into the analysis and at the same time adds to these perspectives by focusing on change, highlighting the importance of indeterminacy and complexity. In applying these insights it is worth noting that cybernetic scholars have come up with powerful normative claims in the course of their research. While the cybernetic language may appear to reflect an interest in engineering and support a view of politics and society (and even of the human mind) as machines that can and should be optimized in certain respects, it is important to point out that the cybernetic tradition comes with a great sensitivity towards the particularities of the human mind. As a matter of fact, scholars in the cybernetic tradition have pointed out the necessity of preventing developments in which humans become simply elements in a larger machinery, objects of engineering of 26

whatever kind. Alker (2011) demonstrated that Deutsch, for instance, emphasized the fact that the optimal functioning of systems required openness to a wide variety of information and thus the y must not systematically suppress any opposing information. Wiener (1954) emphasized the need for making value-based decisions and the fact that such decisions should not be guided simply by the know-how of the engineering mind. In sum, it would be a misunderstanding to see cybernetics as a purely technical and apolitical endeavor. The rejection of the classical mode of control leads cyberneticians to a performative form of democracy, within social organizations, between them, and even between people and things. The ‘political’ appeal of cybernetics resides not only in its promise to rearrange the world we have, but rather in its attempt to offer a constructive alternative to modernity and to emphasize the possibility of acting differently in spheres of politics (Pickering 2010, p. 383; p. 393).

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