Small States in International Politics: A Case Study of Foreign Policy of Sri Lanka

The Anglo-American tradition, which has dominated the discipline of International Relations Studies until recently, had an explicit discriminatory bias in favour of the analysis of the foreign policies of powerful and dominant states of the international system. This scholarly orientation has resulted in a substantial corpus of theoretical knowledge on various aspects of the foreign policies of dominant states. However, in the case of small states such orientation has been considerably weak or inadequate. With the dominant tradition having consciously neglected the study of the foreign policies of small states, there is a significant lack of theoretical literature on the foreign policies of these states. It can hardly be overemphasized that the absence of a scholarly perspective on the foreign policies of small states in the discipline has led to an inadequate and distorted understanding of international politics in general.