Contending Dramas

As the field of political psychology has grown, so has the study of foreign policy behavior and motivation. This collection of essays offers the metaphor of drama to pull together the conceptual and behavioral elements of current concepts in the field. The volume uses a common political framework to examine the impact of perceptual changes resulting from the end of the Cold War on the organization and interpretation of international issues. Exploring trends in the superpowers, Europe, Africa and Asia, and examining issues ranging from security to political and human rights matters, the analyses point out a number of trends in policy and strategy that are associated with patterns of perceptual change. In general these essays take a more pessimistic view of post-Cold War policy trends than one finds in the field at the moment. The articles examine the confusion and potential for continued international conflict that result from the end of the Cold War and they argue that cooperation in international politics in not an inevitable outcome of the new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. They argue that there is much greater opportunity for new directions in conflict resolution but that without careful attention to the reformulation of perceptions and policy, those opportunities could be lost.