Article European Journal of International Relations 16(4) 687–709 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permissions: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1354066110366055 ejt.sagepub.com Corresponding author: Brent E. Sasley, Department of Political Science, University of Texas at Arlington, PO Box 19539, Arlington, Texas, 76019, USA. Email: bsasley@uta.edu Affective attachments and foreign policy: Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords Brent E. Sasley University of Texas at Arlington, USA Abstract Although the important role of emotions in decision-making has been highlighted in the psychology, neural science, and decision research literatures, this conclusion has not been widely adopted in foreign policy analysis and International Relations (IR). Of the work that has been done, much of it has been focused on public perceptions and the impact on foreign policy, but not on elites and the actual decisions of foreign policy. This article seeks to address this imbalance by examining the role of one element of emotion — affect — on key foreign policy decision-makers. It argues that the greater the emotional attachment a leader has to an object, the less flexible she is in foreign policy toward that object. The model is used to explain a critical puzzle in IR: Israel’s decision to pursue and sign the 1993 Oslo Accords. Keywords affect, decision-making, emotion, foreign policy, Oslo Accords Introduction Do leaders have emotions? That is, are they subject to the same emotional processes that members of the general population are? Intuitively one would think so — after all, we are all human. In Political Science, emotions have recently been used to study public percep- tions toward political objects and events in a domestic politics context (e.g., Clarke et al., 2006; Marcus, 2000; Sniderman et al., 1991; Westen 2007). But our theoretical models in International Relations (IR) and foreign policy analysis (FPA) almost never account for such processes. 1 Two of the more recent and dynamic research projects on individuals in foreign policy-making — prospect theory and poliheuristic theory — are both focused on cognitive (or rational) processes. 2 In a recent textbook written for university students of FPA, less than a handful of pages discuss the role of emotions on foreign policy decision-making; and there