# Introduction or any study of international relations, the context it is of most importance, given that this field of research analyses human phenomena of large scale. The international relations involve the widest level of human relations, because such relations are the result of a large number of interconnected variables. Independent of the way of approach in this research area, either structural, regional, domestic, or even individual, the phenomena observed from international relations perspective are always linked to a context that cannot be ignored. In most cases, the context itself -if well mapped and interpreted -contains most of the answers for question posed. The main goal of this article is to build up an analytic model that could be used as a tool for mapping contexts of international relations phenomena, thus to help observers obtain a broad and detailed view of their area of interest. To accomplish this goal, a theoretical discussion of analytic models from the field of political science and international relations studies will be done, in order to get their main concepts in a combined way, which will lead to the final model of mapping. But first, some considerations must be taken into account regarding the concepts that will be used here. Given that international relations involves such a large variety of aspects, in order to understand it, it is necessary to summarize what international relations are characterized by in a general concept that can guide efforts to study it. Here, international relations will be considered as a series of decisions made that generate outcomes that affect the international environment. Taken on global scale, those decisions and their outcomes form a network, which is what constitutes international relations in their broader scope. Taking decisions as a main explanatory aspect of international relations is justified by the human aspect of this area of study. Issues that don't involve humans in international relations could be presented as factors that argues against the focus on decisions, such as environmental and climatic themes, but in international relations objects of study are concentrated on how human society deals with issues, whether they originate within it or not. Therefore, by considering outcomes as consequences of decisions, to understand international relations one must understand several aspects of decisions, such as what are their consequences, how they were taken, and what they affect and are affected by. Thus, the mapping of international relations proposed here is basically a network of different decisions and their outcomes, but this needs further refinement. First of all, it is necessary to acknowledge that decisions are made by actors. It follows that actors can have many different aspects; they can be individuals, they can be collective, they can take decisions inside an institutionalized environment that regulates their actions, or they can act outside a clear set of rules. All of those aspects depend on the observed phenomenon; therefore one of the necessary steps to mapping international relations is being able to see how actors make their decisions. In other words, the decision making process of an output is an important aspect of mapping international relations. This leads to two major questions on how decisions are made: Which are the rules of that environment, how they were made, and what logic do they follow. The second question takes us to a main debate of classical political science that will be considered further on this article, specifically the rationality of actors. The debate around rationality is extensive, but this article does not seek to deepen this discussion. Rather than that, the analytical model proposed to map international relations will suggest a simplification of the rationality attributed to actors, in order to try to surpass the detailed aspects of the different approaches that make them harder to apply on different methodology programs, this will, however, be explained in greater detail bellow. # a) Nested Games in International Relations The model that drove the creation of this article originally comes from political science, and it was develop to understand why political actors make what sometimes seems like suboptimal decisions. Such a model comes from the main idea of the book Nested Games from George Tsebelis (1990). To summarize why this model is useful to build up a mapping in international relations, the idea of nested games is that actors participate in a series of games, or arenas, in which they try to maximize their interests, but those arenas are not always directly connected to one another. Sometimes they are not related at all, but nonetheless they will ultimately affect each another. This happens because besides having multiple interests in multiple issues, actors also have a priority order for those interests that are scattered across multiple arenas, and they would forfeit gaining success in one arena to maximize the results of a more important one, hence the name "nested games". The author of this model actually uses in a very regulated environment, which is within certain government institutions, therefore the actors are politicians subjects to a clear set of rules on how government decisions are made, such as parliamentary voting. The goal of the book was to explain how, inside a classical rational choice logic those politicians would vote in ways that if directly looked at did not seem rational at all, since the voting would produce a suboptimal result. Tsebelis himself defines the limits of his model when he states that "I do not claim that rational choice can explain every phenomenon and that there is no room for other explanations, but I do claim that rational choice is a better approach to situations in which the actors' identity and goals are established and the rules of interaction are precise and known to the interacting agents" (Tsebelis 1990, 32), but, in this article some of the limits of the nested games logic will be pushed further with the purpose of making it suitable for understanding international relations, since the rational choice limitations must be somehow bypassed. Firstly, in Tsebelis book he uses the nested games logic to trace in which strategic issues politicians are involved. These issues are limited to their political governmental environment, so the different arenas would present different topics subject to voting combined with election/reelection goals mainly. Therefore, all the environments observed for this nested games logic are linked by the same set of rules of their government institutions. In international relations, issues often present outcomes that come from different countries which have different institutions with different sets of rules. There is some consensus among international relations mainstream theories that the international environment is in essence anarchical (Morgenthau 1960;Waltz 1979;Bull 1977;Axelrod and Keohane 1985;Wendt 1992;Milner 1991), therefore the relations between countries are not subject to a clear set of rules. This means that to apply nested games this must be taken into account, hence the necessity of adapting Tsebelis model. Even with an anarchic environment, international relations are still the product of decisions. Those decisions can be made at any level, be it domestic (coming from national governments), or international (coming from international institutions such as the United Nations). Those decisions generate the phenomena that are studied by this field of research, thus the decisions that generate those outcomes can and should be explained. It is inevitable that selection as well as a data evaluation can be influenced by the psychological nature of the agent, considering that whatever the level of analysis chosen the states, institutions, and interest groups are composed by people. Interests, images, perceptions, worldviews and ideological biases help determine which facts the observer will highlight and which ones they will ignore. They also influence the importance to selected data and patterns drawn. In fact, the actors in the decision-making process do not respond to objective reality (as seen by the observer), but to their individual subjective perception of reality. (Jervis 1976). If you do not know what a problem is, consider the interests, the perceptions and the calculations of senior government decision makers. According to Jervis (1976), the functioning of bureaucracies can determine a policy. It is not enough to show the course of action of the State, and may seem inconsistent and responsible for the integration of values. Such shortcomings may be products of the perception of individual decision making. Individuals, as well as organizations, are unable to coordinate their actions and develop the payment structure. The fact that people must take decisions in face of the burden of multiple goals and highly ambiguous information means that policies are often contradictory and inconsistent to the information at hand. There is no understanding; the intriguing behavior of the state will automatically be seen as the product of any internal trading or an autonomous operation of different parts of government. Coming back to the question on how decisions are made, we believe that rather than focusing on the rationality of the actor, and if he acts driven by rational choice or not, this articles defends the idea that the main rationality must come from the observer -the one that is looking at a phenomenon from outside and trying to make sense of it. Therefore, the rational approach that is being proposed does not come from the perspective of the involved actors, which means that it is not necessarily expected that the actors will make decisions based solely on the game's logic, using a mathematical methods and reasoning to make optimal decisions with the variables that are known to them. In other words, it is not expected that actors act based on traditional rational choice parameters, rather the rational approach used in this study comes from the perspective of the observer himself; this rationality will orientate the observers view in regard to the object studied. While the approach of the nested games works with actors subjected to incomplete information and an incomplete perception of the whole network of games, the observer from outside it's given a more comprehensive view derived from the mapping of the nested games, therefore having the capacity of understanding not only how the games align with one another, but also why the actors in each game make the decisions they do. The important detail here is that whether actors act rationally or not is not the point, what matters is how the observer can rationally understand the decisions made by actors given their context, perceptions, influences, preferences and all variables that are traceable and somehow affect the decisions made. On the structural aspect of the original model, since some limits of it are being stretched to transport it to the international relations level, some additional concepts must be added to the general idea of nested games to ease the transition and form a new model that can suit the international level. In order to do that, the two-level game theory from Robert Putnam (1988) general idea can be applied to better illustrate the mapping model intended. The distinction between the domestic and the international level are useful when working with nested games in an international scope, given that arenas can be on either level and yet their results can generate outcomes that affect the other level, and vice versa. So, the combination of nested games with the two-level games logic would be a mapping of multiples arenas throughout both levels and a network of outcomes and influences between those arenas that can originate on either level and yet have effects across both. In the end, both models end up complementing each other. Therefore, although the logic of nested games was design to understand intrainstitutional decisions at a domestic level with wellestablished rules, when you look at the international relations from the perspective of the two-level games from Putnam, it is possible to map events of international scale using nested games dynamics in a less classical rational choice approach, since competition among different interests won't always happen in highly institutionalized arenas. What matters for mapping international relations is understand how arenas from the same context are linked to each other either domestically, internationally or between both levels. These connections can be via the effects of the outcomes of each arena on their actors on outside actors and therefore on other arenas, and how those actors perceive those effects and make decisions based on the information they have, experience and interests among other possible individual aspects that may be relevant depending on each case. As an example of this, in 1959 when Fidel Castro's revolution took power in Cuba, the United States government initially (at the Executive level) didn't have a clear idea on what type of regime Castro institute on the island. From within, the most solid thing that could be said about the new and young Cuban leaders was that they were essentially nationalist, with a wide variety of ideological motivations. During first few months of Castro's government, he was invited to the U.S. as a way of easing the possible tensions between the two countries. On one side, the U.S. was living the Cold War under the Truman doctrine, with a high aversion to anything that could seem like communism, on the other side the Cuban revolutionaries had just gone through a bloody campaign to overthrown a dictator and to obtain national liberties, and the Cubans were suspicious of U.S. intentions of granting them autonomy to lead Cuba. Leo Grande and Kornbluh (2015) tell in detail the visit of Fidel Castro to the U.S. and illustrate through official declassified documents the ambiguous position the new Cuban government presented, and the hasty misperceptions of U.S. officials to rapidly qualify Fidel's regime as communist (even with him publicly saying he wasn't on New York). What this event shows, is how the individual perceptions of actors of the nested games are of great importance to understand why they made their decisions. Also it is important to notice how actors' rationality is something relative and subtle. Based on Leogrande and Kornbluh's work it is possible to see multiple mail correspondences of relevant actors in their perception of the situation from different angles, and how their personalities manifest strongly on their decisions and actions, yet is very difficult to attest to what level certain decision was made due to rational choice calculation, or due to emotional haste, for instance. This makes stronger the argument that rationality it's not a required element of the actor, but is required for the observer, since he will be the one trying to make sense of the actors' individual characteristics and their decisions. At this point, it is useful to establish a conceptual difference between interests and preferences in order to get a more detailed sense of how actors pursue their interests. Helen Milner's, (1997) simple and elegant distinction fulfills these purposes. For her, an interest is a general goal, as two opposing politician may have the same interest in being reelected, but the preferences are the different means they use to follow that interest, such as different policy proposals and government programs (Milner 1997, 35-36). Although Milner uses this distinction to work with a specific set of actors (legislators politicians, executive politicians and interests groups), this logic can be universally applied to understand a large array of interests and different nuances among actors of many kinds. Still, in international relations the triad of actors proposed by Milner will often be encountered, as the author herself uses this concept to analyze international cooperation, and, it is worth to point out that on her analysis also uses the logic of two-level games. In that sense, the two level logic of Putnam helps to separate international and domestic decisions, but also emphasizing that decisions and outcomes from both levels are directly or indirectly connected and influence the preferences of actors, strengthening the use of the nested games model to map a network within an international relations phenomenon. It is worth mentioning that the model here suggested to accomplish the mapping of international relations does not consider States as unitary monolithic actors, since it takes into account the domestic level and its different arenas to pinpoint outcomes, the decisions behind them, and the influences in the decision process. This not necessarily means that the model cannot be applied in monolithic State actors' logic, but in that case the domestic level would have to be simplified or ignored, which could lead to a loss of explanatory capacity of the nested games logic in the international relations area. Once it is established that the proposed model for mapping international relations is based on a twolevel logic of nested games via multiple arenas, an additional analytic tool can be added in order to facilitate the identification of possible relations between actors, arenas, and preferences, and this would be Model III from Alisson's (1969) conceptual approaches on foreign policy, the bureaucratic politics model. This conceptual model was presented by Graham T. Alisson in an article in 1969, and later further developed by him and Phillip Zelikow (1999) in a book called the Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. All three conceptual models presented by this work speak directly to a nested games approach, since the authors suggest that Model I is a model related exclusively to rational choice parameters of the leaders; Model II seeks to explain decisions attributing them as outputs of organizational relations, and therefore results of institutional processes; and Model III could be roughly considered as a mix of the previous two Models and explains foreign policy as the suboptimal result of a series of bargains between individual actors within preestablished organizations. Although Alisson and Zelikow's (1999) proposal treats international events as the result of decisions that come from intra-national games, therefore the domestic environment, their case study on the Cuban missile crisis can be interpreted in Putnam's (1988) logic of twolevel games, since it can be seen in their book that outcomes that originated from outside of the domestic context (the international) had an effect on the decisions taken in the national level, both form the United States and Soviet Union perspective's. The book itself recognizes the value of the two level logic, but opts to dismiss it due to its own goal of narrowing down the analysis (Alisson and Zelikow, 1999, 260-261). Since the effort in this article goes in the direction of helping observers to build a broad map of international relations contexts and events, the narrowing of analysis would be a further step for researches on "sub-subjects" of the final mapping, hence the possibility of combining the two level logic with Alisson's and Zelikow Model III adaptation. Overviewing the international phenomena as double ends events helps to increase understanding of the influences flow and origins of the actors' perspective and decision making, especially in a nested games scheme within the scope of international relations. With that in mind, the suggestion of adding the conceptual model of bureaucratic politics to the model that's being built so far relies on the fact that many of Model III concepts are useful in explaining at some level of detail the possible interconnections between arenas spread to the two-level logic. First, it is necessary to emphasize a conceptual choice that was made in this model, anticipating this discussion. From the beginning of this study, it has been stated that decisions generate outcomes instead of outputs, being outcomes the result of several suboptimal decisions combined, this differentiation was done on purpose, since Alisson (1969) indicates from his very first work on the conceptual Model III, that outputs can be considered as a calculated result of a decision, and an outcomes would be the result of many conflicting interests and decisions which will hardly generate an ideal expected result for any of the parts involved in the process. This logic can be simplified by the suboptimal decisions explanation of Tsebelis (1990), in that sense, the outputs of suboptimal decisions would be a suboptimal result, and therefore, they are actually outcomes of arenas bargain processes and clashes of preferences. With that distinction clarified, the general organizing concepts that Alisson (1969, 708 -710) suggests and later develops in the book with Zelikow, could be of help to understand the type of connections between arenas in the model this study proposes. It is worth mentioning that the basic unit of analysis for Model III considers Policy as a Political Outcome, which in no sense goes against with the parameters pre-established at the beginning of the study, where it is stated that International Relations phenomena are a series of outcomes derived from decisions. Further on, some of the mentioned organizing concepts from Model III that could help in showing the connections in the model of two-level nested games will be discussed, and adapted if needed. In the decision-making process individuals do not decide alone, but rather in the company of others, where the group dynamics can have an impact on the process and the outcomes of decision-making. The behavior and the dynamics of the group are more than mere aggregation of individuals that make up and analysis goes beyond the rationalist view of the systemic theories in International Relations. Many decision-making models in political science examine the choices of an individual from the perspective of rational choice. These models typically deal with individual strategic interaction using formal models that characterize what happens when conflicts arise. However, these models can be adjusted to examine the interaction between individuals within groups. The group dynamic of a more psychological perspective investigates a slightly different phenomenon, the strategic interaction between individuals or groups usually focuses on inherently conflictual situations, and this is not necessarily the case with the dynamic analysis in a group (McDermott, 2004). Within a group, individuals often want to work together toward a mutually desirable goal and, while members of the group may end up at odds with another group, they need not conflict with each other, although obviously it may occur. It is difficult to determine exactly who is in a decision-making group, especially when the same actors are involved to varying degrees in different but related issues. In addition, some actors are likely to have more power, some will remain much more committed to certain issues than others, and may be demanding to map these complexities and integrate them into an understanding of the general group. Further, in a methodological perspective, it can be difficult to know what constitutes a representative sample of experimental groups to study fairly generalized form; after all, groups vary in size, racial and gender composition, leadership style and problem area. However, group dynamics continues to be a critical aspect of the decision-making process in any organization, as a government. Several important templates provide information about certain processes and procedures in different types of groups and organizations. Three of the most influential in the literature are: Graham Alisson's Models II and III and Irving L. Janis Groupthink model. The model of the organizational process argues that decision-making is not the result of deliberate choices by a single decision maker, but rather appears as a product of large organizations that operate in accordance with standard operating proceedings. These, in turn, are designed so that certain events can be treated by routine patterns of behavior or decision. Because decisions seemingly result from organizational results in this model, the basic unit of analysis remains a policy that emerges because of this process. In this perspective, an analyst should look for occurrences of these patterns (Alisson and Zelikow, 1999). Once found, the observer should determine the ways in which existing routines and strategies form the basis of the options considered, especially in a time of crisis when time is short. In addition, the results emerging from these organizational routines serve to frame various situational constraints on the future choice. The main actors of this model are organizations relevant to an issue, often working under the leadership of political appointees or elected. These questions are allocated between the groups so that they can be worked on simultaneously. As a result, problems divide, power is fragmented, and overall goals can be lost. The agenda of these groups implies that they compete for limited resources of an organization. These interests and perceptions of finem which issues are important, which is a threat to the organization and how to deal with these concerns. The selective use of information reinforces the pre-existing beliefs and contradictory evidences. Each person considers their own question as the most important. In addition, the selection, recruitment, promotion and retention of people like perpetuate a cycle in decision making. Allison argues that researchers who seek to analyze a decision from the perspective of organizational policies should begin by trying to discover the routines and organizational repertoires that guide and restrict action. The bureaucratic politics refers to negotiation between organizations or groups using regularized communication channels. The bureaucratic model sees outcomes as a result of overlapping negotiations between various parts of an organization or government. Rational responses remain outside the analysis and calculation of the actors. The organizing concepts of this model differ from organizational processes in several important ways. The first consideration in this analysis is the relative position of the actors, because these jobs help determine the prospects of employees in certain problems. Model III attempts to capture behavior and motivation in a single calculation. As in the organizational process model, there are priorities, perceptions and problems, although the origin of such approaches works on different bases. In model II, the basis for reduced reach derives from competition for scarce resources within the organization. The bargaining games are around interests, stakes and power of the actor. Obviously, those with more will or power may Volume XX Issue I Version I exert more influence over a result. Again, as in the organizational process, general problems are often divided into a series of small problems for consideration by different groups within a given bureaucracy or between bureaucracies. In this model, the policy results from the flow of results that emerge from the various trading games around a given problem. The policy itself produces these results. The results are determined by things like the pace, the rules, the structure and the rewards of various and often simultaneous bargain games. Individuals who can set the agenda or determine the rules of the game may exert undue influence from this perspective. In many ways, the bargaining environment itself shapes results to reflect the interests of powerful actors in decision-making and policy-making. A bureaucratic analysis requires an examination of the decisions and actions resulting from the negotiation between individuals and groups within the government. In general, this model focuses on the actions and intentions of the main actors in the policy process. Moreover, this model depends on the existence of hierarchy within the bureaucracies. Leaders expect subordinate options. All actors require commitment from their peers. And followers expect the confidence of superiors to function effectively. Without this hierarchy, the channels of action are confused. All players must know who can play the game and what are the actions involved before they can effectively operate within their limits. The organizational process considers the decision-making problems resulting from the impact of standard operating procedures on organizations. In other words, attention is focused on the prescribed form in which demands within the organization restrict creative responses to crises. Bureaucratic politics occurs between organizations, such as the State Department and the Department of Defense. The analysis could even examine a policy as it traverses an organization using Model II and then using Model III to explore how these products are used in trading games to produce policy results through interagency negotiations. Allison described different models for analyzing decisions to emphasize how different conceptual orientations force attention on different aspects of a problem. Different models ask different questions, look for different types of evidence and produce different answers. For example, in the Cuban missile crisis, the organizational process model focuses on the standard operational procedures of the navy in quarantine implementation. Bureaucratic policy places greater emphasis on the role of Robert Kennedy as Attorney generates le as the president's brother in developing a return channel for negotiation with the Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister, Gromyko. In the end, alternative perspectives shed light on different aspects of a situation or crisis that can be ignored using only a single conceptual analysis, just as prospect theory and rational choice models illuminate different aspects of certain problems. It may be that some models are better designed to analyze certain types of problems. For example, the organizational process can provide information on gun procurement issues, while bureaucratic policy can provide better enlightenment in trade policy. These alternative models may therefore help to provide a fuller and richer understanding of the dynamics of an event or crisis. The first one would be Players in Positions, which in this model can be understood as the characterization of the type of actors (politicians, interests groups, organizations, coalitions, press, think tanks, electoral public, among many others, since it depends on the context observed), and their placement in the arenas in which they participate. Identifying arenas and players would be the first step to build a map of the scenario one wishes to observe. To this end, it must be added that the placement of the arenas could be either on the international or domestic level, and actors can be participants in either one whether they originated in it or not. As an example one can think of foreign interests groups engaging in direct lobby activities in the United States Congress, or private individuals seeking international spaces to enforce their interests, like members of the Venezuelan opposition to the Chavista governments participating in sessions of the Organization of American States to enforce their own agenda against the national government (Guevara and Pedroso, 2016). Alisson's Model III emphasizes the constraints on actors according to their position, especially in terms of what they can or cannot do. This detail is particularly useful for this model of mapping, because it helps to pinpoint the limitations of actors in their arenas, and also to see arenas in which actors are not participating but somehow are constricted by outcomes from those arenas. A good example for this could be the new policy changes promoted by Obama, when he recently started a process or normalizing relations with Cuba, and suggested that the Cuban embargo should be revised as part of this new policy towards the Island. However, the Cuban embargo can only be revised extensively by the United States Congress, since it is regulated by a Public Law. Although Obama has changed substantially the relations with Cuba towards normalization with all the tools available to the Executive Power, total normalization did not rely solely on Presidential initiatives. And, since Congress did not successfully take the initiative to pursue President's Obama new strategy toward Cuba, what is seen is that U.S. foreign policy toward the Island is a combination of the outcomes of the Executive and Legislative branches of government, Volume XX Issue I Version I which do not produce a cohesive Cuba. Translating these facts to the model, we see that President Obama, an actor participating directly in the arena at the international level of bilateral relations with Cuba, is being affected by the outcomes of a domestic arena in which he is not able to effectively participate and make decisions, since it is the Congressional arena that could revise and/or end the Cuban embargo. The second organizing concept from Model III that can be used and adapted is Parochial Priorities, Perceptions, and Issues. This concept is used on Model III to identify some of the organizational pressures and movements in order to enforce certain interests among their participants and show how actors perceive the games, issues and their own capacities and limitations in face of others. This concept marries well with the concepts already presented: interest and preferences. The notion of how priorities are organized and pursued by different kind of actors can be seen through the hierarchy of preferences that individuals establish for themselves in face of the arenas where they participate and the limited perception they have of the whole network of nested games. Information, limitations and capacities are central to understand the actor's perspectives, and therefore the path for their decisions. The others organizing concepts from model III that are worth mentioning due to their interchangeability with a nested games logic would be "Interests, Stakes and Power", "The Problem and the Problems", "Action Channels", "Action as Politics" and System of Outcomes" (Alisson, 1969, 710-711). In summary those concepts are basically types of connections between actors and the arenas in which they are inserted. Although useful, these concepts are already diluted in the nested games approach, and basically go into detail on how the dynamic may unfold under certain specific circumstances. At this point, it suffices to say that most of the conceptual model III, helps to solidify the proposed model for mapping in this article. As demonstrated, when using the two-level in nested games logic, some specific concepts of Alisson's and Zelikow bureaucratic model can be used to better pinpoint and describe in detail the correlations and positions of actors and arenas throughout the mapping of international relations. Recapitulating the theoretical discussion that was presented, and summarizing it's argument: employing the combination of the theories and models discussed, with the proposed adaptations, it is expected that researchers in international relations can be able to build a map of their phenomenon using a two-level nested game theory with some of the conceptual contributions from Alisson's model III . To simplify the name, the present proposal for a mapping model of international relations, can be called Mapping Multiple Arenas in a Two-level logic. To accomplish this mapping the observer will consider its main event of interest as the general outcome of the main arena, and from it he will trace back the preferences, decisions, outcomes and their influence to the network of arenas that ultimately led to the main outcome. In this process the observer will be trailing the actors and their perception and actions of the nested games, thus understanding all the decision processes that culminated in the analyzed event, hence achieving the map of the context. On the other hand, Irving Janis presented an alternative model of group decision making in his book Groupthink (1982). He invented this word to explain the processes he believed often occurred in group decision making. Janis was a psychologist who applied his notion of collective thinking to the decision-making effects of groups in various international crises, including Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Watergate and Vietnam. In some cases, such as the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, Janis examined what he considered to be decision failures resulting, at least in part, from the group's mechanism. In other cases, such as the Cuban missile crisis, he explored cases where leaders implemented strategies that helped overcome the group's impact on effective decision-making. In each case, Janis tried to separate the ability of the decision from the success of the result. We don't want to emphasize this kind of analysis, but it's important to understand that the State is not a bloc, groups and interests are relevant to the analysis of foreign policy and State's behavior. Continuing with this argument, Janis argued that the groups develop strong group pressures for compliance and cohesion. Any member who threatens this cohesion can be punished with social reprimands or isolation. As each member wants to belong and feel liked and appreciated by the group, each person makes every effort to follow the consensus of the group in order to protect their membership value. Group pressures can be especially strong among members who have been in the same group or who have known each other for a long time. People who know each other well are also likely to know what others think about certain problems and problems and can infer the opinions of leaders without explicit direction. Groups are an important and common forum for decision-making (McDermott 2004). Graham Allison's work on the organizational process and bureaucratic politics illuminates how organizations fall victim to established routines and power politics to reach their political choices and conclusions. Janis's work on collective thinking shows the myriad ways in which internal social psychological pressures can undermine creative decision-making by restricting members who become reluctant to challenge established wisdom and group consensus. The polarization of the group contributes to the Volume XX Issue I Version I According to our main argument, the State foreign policy is more than a simple process of maximizing interests. What we tried to explore is the different approaches to the decision-making process in international relations, and trying to explain that the rationality of the State's behavior is not inherent of the State, but the observers' analysis. Taking Hobbes' most famous work The Leviathan (1983), what distinguishes man from all other animals, besides being rational, is the will to know the causes of phenomena. When other animals come across something new their only interest is whether the object is likely to help or harm the environment at that time. Already when men see something new, they try to discover their cause. Other animals live almost entirely in the present, because little or no prediction of the future is possible. For men, on the other hand, fear is not only located in the present, but in the future as well. Because men are able to recognize the dependence of one event on the other, fear necessarily extends as much as their thoughts and causes (Blits 1989). Man can understand only what he does, only the events of which he is the cause or whose construction or generation is totally within his domain. He may know that every natural phenomenon is caused by some kind of movement, yet nature is, in principle, unknown. No one can fight or escape what he cannot identify or know to be solved, fear has to correspond to something; it must have an object. So when an object is missing men will find an imaginary, they will invent an identifiable object that they may fear. And therefore, when there is nothing to be seen, there is nothing to accuse, but some invisible power or agent (Hobbes 1983). Moreover, man, according to Hobbes (1983), always tries to find patterns to phenomena, and the international relations are not different, observers try to analyze the States' behavior based on a rational source. The State's action isn't necessarily rational in the traditional sense, but the observer's analysis tries to be in order to make sense of the phenomena seem from an outside perspective. This model hopes that it can be used as a way to bring several important contributions of the Social Sciences together in a dynamic that might help researchers in the difficult task of understanding human and political events of large scale and complexity as is the case with the International Relations area. © 2020 Global JournalsMapping International Relations: A Model for Analysis Year 2020 © 2020 Global Journals Mapping International Relations: A Model for Analysis * Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis TAlisson Graham American Political Science Association 63 1969 * Accessed 10.2307/1954423 February 21. 2015 * The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis TAlisson ZelikowGraham Philip 1999 Longman New York * Achieving Cooperation under Anarchy: Strategies and Institutions RobertAxelrod RobertOKeohane doi:10.2307/ 2010357 World Politics 38 1 1985. 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