Objectives Session Overview

The fundamental objective of Seminar XXI is to provide current and future leaders of the foreign and national security policy communities with analytic skills for understanding foreign countries and the relations among them. Fellows learn to raise questions about the fundamental assumptions and assessments made by decision makers, both domestic and foreign, so as to understand better the motives and behavior of allies and rivals. The ultimate purpose is to develop a wider range of options to deal with them. 

The method of the seminar is to present different paradigms, theories, and other analytic tools to understand better the interrelationships among the political, economic, institutional, cultural, and international factors that influence the foreign policy behavior of states. The term “paradigm” and “theory” are used to refer to the causal models that social scientists have developed to explain important political outcomes.