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"Appeasement is a controversial strategy of conflict management and resolution in world politics. Its reputation is sullied by foreign policy failures ending in war or defeat in which the appeasing state suffers diplomatic and military losses by making costly concessions to other states. Britain's appeasement policies toward Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s are perhaps the most notorious examples of the patterns of failure associated with this strategy. Is appeasement's reputation deserved or is this strategy simply misunderstood and perhaps improperly applied? Role theory offers a general theoretical solution to the appeasement puzzle that addresses these questions, and the answers should be interesting to political scientists, historians, students, and practitioners of cooperation and conflict strategies in world politics. As a social-psychological theory of human behavior, role theory has the capacity to unite the insights of various existing theories of agency and structure in the domain of world politics. Demonstrating this claim is the methodological aim in this book and its main contribution to breaking new ground in international relations theory"--

Mistakes as a feature of everyday political life -- Foreign policy mistakes and the exercise of power -- Fearing losses too little : deterrence failures -- Fearing losses too much : false alarm failures -- Seeking gains too late : reassurance failures -- Seeking gains too soon : false hope failures -- Foreign policy analysis : maximizing rationality -- Foreign policy analysis : minimizing mistakes -- Avoiding foreign policy mistakes : extension and expansion -- Foreign policy dynamics : the Middle East and South Asia systems -- Some final thoughts : exploring the rationality frontier

The problem of understanding when and how change happens in world politics is under-conceptualized. One potential source of change for further examination is the relationship between change and the leadership of states and international institutions. The decisions and actions of leaders are an immediate source of both peaceful and violent change. A change of leaders may simply be an endogenous marker for a shift in historical forces that explain change in world politics, or leaders may be indispensable in explaining change at state and systemic levels of analysis. Are leaders the pilots or simply passengers on states caught in the tides of history? Binary role theory offers a coherent account of "role change"specified by the interactions and outcomes between leaders and historical situations, which is a more nuanced "both/and"account than a simple "either/or"answer to this question. The interactions and outcomes that model role change are first presented in the abstract terms of role theory and then illustrated with two case studies of UK-Iran and US-Iran relations.

"Role Contestation in Making Foreign Policy Decisions: Digraph and Game Theory Models" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Role Theory As an Empirical Theory of International Relations: From Metaphor to Formal Model" published on by Oxford University Press.

The symposium papers show that differences in sources and context clearly matter in the 'at‐a‐distance' assessment of a leader's psychological characteristics. The stability of both cognitive and personality attributes decreases as observations focus on shorter time frames, more spec fic policy domains, and private rather than public arenas. Despite these qualifications on the use of texts to profile individual leaders, the indices of social cognition and personality do discriminate individual differences between leaders. Because the results reveal significant differences in assessing individual leaders over time with multiple sources and at different levels of analysis, it becomes more worthwhile to investigate research questions that would be moot in the absence of important source, context, or aggregation effects. With the use of automated content analysis and greater access to data from electronic sources, it is now easier to carry out quantitative content analyses of psychological characteristics and to confirm or qualify the insights generated in this symposium.