Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs and Nigerian Diplomacy: The Influence of Individual Leaders on Foreign Policy Outcomes

This study examines the role of individual political leaders and senior diplomats as foreign policy entrepreneurs in shaping Nigeria's international relations, testing the proposition that specific personalities, leadership styles, and personal networks have produced measurable foreign policy changes beyond what structural theories would predict. Foreign policy analysis has debated the relative causal weight of individual agency versus systemic and domestic structural factors in determining foreign policy behaviour. Drawing on cognitive foreign policy analysis and the leadership trait analysis approach, this research analyses three case studies of foreign policy entrepreneurship in Nigeria: the diplomatic activism of a former foreign minister who reshaped Nigeria's ECOWAS role, a presidential initiative that transformed a bilateral relationship, and a senior diplomat whose personal networks opened a previously dormant diplomatic channel. The study employs a qualitative process tracing methodology, drawing on diplomatic memoirs, oral history interviews with former officials, presidential speech analysis, and secondary academic literature. Findings are expected to demonstrate that individual entrepreneurship matters in Nigerian foreign policy but operates within constraints set by bureaucratic inertia, fiscal limitations, and Nigeria's non-aligned tradition, with the most successful entrepreneurs those who align personal initiative with structural opportunity. The research contributes to the agent-structure debate in African foreign policy analysis. Keywords: foreign policy analysis, leadership, Nigeria, foreign policy entrepreneur, diplomatic history.