Decision-Making on International Relations: A Theoretical Analysis

Abstract

In the course of everyday running of contemporary political and institutional systems, decision makers are often faced with a great complexity of big and small challenges requiring decisive action in line with laid down principles and rules of behaviour. In the process of trying to satisfy the various corporate interests within an institutional framework, the decision maker is faced with, and often has to choose between various competing policy options. Making use of library research methodology, the paper undertook a careful and critical appraisal of the ways and means by which decision makers arrive at basic decisions in the dynamic field of international politics, with a view to discovering basic consistencies that can form a basis for an understanding of the theory of decision making, in a descriptive explanatory and predictive perspective. The paper concluded that, since the decision making environment does not always manifest openness and popular participation, the ultimate decision maker’s sense of objectivity cannot always be guaranteed.