| Summary/Abstract |
Understanding how foreign policy decisions are made in revolutionary states has proven to be a difficult puzzle for scholars and practitioners alike. While political scientists have made great strides in developing standard decision-making frameworks, those have generally been based on the experiences and conditions of Western states and rely on stable government structures for their explanatory power. Revolutionary states by their very nature lack this stability, since the conditions of revolution commonly result in major reorganizations or wholesale removal of preexisting government structures. In this article, we begin to build a new framework for understanding decision-making in revolutionary states and employ case studies of Iran, Russia, Sudan, and Afghanistan to show that the process in these states involves input and considerations from various actors and therefore cannot be understood by simply looking at the desires of the charismatic leaders that are so often the focus of outside analysts.
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