Substate Organizations as Foreign Policy Agents: New Evidence and Theory from India, Israel, and France

How do states identify the right partners for international cooperation? Why do states develop partnerships in specialized areas with certain countries and not others? Which national institutions actually make those choices and then enact cooperation policies? The extant scholarship in international relations prioritizes three main variables: shared national security interests, similar political institutions, and overlapping cultural norms. While a useful framework of analysis, these three sets of variables fall short of accounting for the plethora of significant international partnerships where none of the factors are found to be decisive. Specialized areas like defense, space, and nuclear technologies are technologically complex. International cooperation in these fields, therefore, necessitates a level of technical expertise that is not always widely available in the foreign policy executive (hereafter, FPE). As a result, international cooperation in specialized areas offers agency to substate organizations (hereafter, SSOs) to exercise control over foreign policy behavior beyond their official mandate. SSOs are organizations that are a part of the government machinery but lack the official mandate to unilaterally devise and execute policy. For the purposes of this study, we will concentrate on SSOs in the specialized fields of defense, space, and nuclear technologies and their role in international cooperation.