Four Approaches in the Study of Foreign Policy: The Case of Rouhani Administration

This article studies the change in the foreign policy of the 11th cabinet headed by Dr. Hassan Rouhani based on four ontological and epistemological approaches to the analysis of foreign policy including explanatory individualism, interpretative individualism, explanatory collectivism and interpretative collectivism. The main question of this research is that how change in the foreign policy of the 11th cabinet can be analyzed based on each approach? To answer this question, the main hypothesis of this article is that to fully understand the change in the foreign policy of the 11th cabinet, all four analytical approaches should be simultaneously considered which could be called "ground level of analysis". Therefore, this article concludes that on the basis of the above four analytical levels for explaining foreign policy, fully understanding the foreign policy of an actor in the international system and its changes requires using this level of analysis as a combined level of analysis. It includes all material and non-material dimensions at the micro and macro levels.