Traditional analysts of internation

Traditional analysts of international politics have paid little attention to agenda formation: to how issues come to receive sustained attention by high officials.


The traditional orientation toward military and security affairs implies that the crucial problems of foreign policy are imposed on states by the actions or threats of other states.


These are high politics as opposed to the low politics of economic affairs.

Yet, as the complexity of actors and issues in world politics increases, the utility of force declines and the line between domestic policy and foreign policy becomes blurred: as the conditions of complex interdependence are more closely approximated, politics of agenda formation becomes more subtle and differentiated