Small State Foreign Policies: A Comparative Study of Participation, Conflict, and Political and Economic Dependence in Black Africa

As a comparative study of the foreign policy behavior of 30 black African states in the middle 1960s, we present a typology of states and foreign policy patterns that permits testable, comparative hypotheses to be derived. These hypotheses relating size, level of modernization, and inner or other directedness to four patterns of foreign policy-participation, conflict, political and economic dependence-are operationalized by use of the AFRICA data set and tested via regression and path analysis. Our findings support our typology and hypotheses, accounting for from 50% to 79% of the variance in each foreign policy pattern. They are also simple and interpretable to specialists in African and small state foreign policy behavior.