Role, socialization and foreign policy : integrating agency and structure to explain Pakistan’s status-seeking process in the international system

The doctoral dissertation examines Pakistan’s socialization process with India, the United States and China in the post-Musharraf era from an interpretive perspective. More precisely, it applies role theory to develop a theory of socialization through role compatibility to explain how Pakistani decision-makers, both civilian and military, define their country’s positioning towards these three significant others. The study proposes an interpretive stance on the decision-making process of Pakistani foreign policy. It uses the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) method to identify the drivers of Pakistan’s socialization process in the international system, focusing on India, the US and China. The results show that Pakistan defines six roles for itself, reflected both by the military and the political elite. These six roles represent Pakistan’s main drivers in international affairs. They highlight the country’s insecurity in its role of sovereign state, and its drive to be recognized as a fully functional and responsible actor in the international system. The degree of compatibility of the country’s role conceptions with its significant others underlines the causality between state identity, foreign policy behaviour and state socialization. Importantly, the research proposes a clearer understanding of agent-structure co-construction in Pakistani foreign policy behaviour. Departing from strictly structural or agent-oriented explanations about foreign policy, the research demonstrates that interactional dynamics are central to understand the international behavior of Pakistan.