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Prof. John Anderson addresses this in part in his chapter “Religion and International Relations” in Issues in International Relations edited by Salmon and Imber. Of course this is not necessarily “new” but as suggested (at least to my eyes) in your comment, we sometimes (again in large measure due to our current post-modern frames of reference) may downplay or even omit the role of such things as religion. This is discussed in the context of “idealism” by Ronen Palan and Brook Blair in their piece, “On the Idealist Origins of the Realist Theory of International Relations” Review of International Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Oct., 1993), pp. 385-399.

Sam Barkin’s recent book, Rethinking International Relations Theory, also touches on this more integrated approach you are describing. Finally, and perhaps in a more “pedestrian” discussion, Army Colonel (Chaplain) Jonathan Shaw addresses some of this from a strategic standpoint in his 2010 paper, ” The Role of Religion in National Security Policy Since 9/11″ http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA521960 .

See here

http://figuraleffect.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/levels-of-description-in-the-socialist-worker/

(Although the Socialist Worker often shoots from the hip, it gets it very right here.)

and here

http://figuraleffect.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/death-and-furniture/

The idea of cogsci is to delve deeper than behavioural psychology and postulate some kind of mental mechanism causing stimulus-response (and much more complicated) observable relationships. Some kind of representation is surely needed, e.g., to make sense of sounds, sights, smells, touches; to remember things; to remember to respond in particular ways; etc.

Cogsci assumes that interesting things about the properties of mental representations can be said at levels of abstraction above the wet, pokeable, brain matter, though of course it accepts and studies relationships between levels of abstraction. (And even at the pokeable level of brains there are many perspectives, ranging from how chemicals flow between synapses up to variation in blood oxygenation levels.)

Computer sciences go well beyond explaining how your PC works. The idea of the cognitive sciences is to use the rich sets of computational theories, including various non-classical logics, probabilistic models, statistical models, and use them to characterise cognition. The challenge is to say enough without saying too much that can’t be tested empirically.

Even with something warm like emotion, you’re going to want to postulate information flows! Exercise to the reader: try it (using folk psychology) for something scary, something pleasurable, and something boring.

What’s neglected in the cognitive sciences is serious discussion of what it feels like to be a person doing the thinking. But there’s no reason why it can’t inform and be informed by such analyses.

When it comes down to it, we’re pretty awful at understanding why things have happened, still less predicting what might…

[LBJ] didn’t engage in a rational, deliberate assessment of objective, material military power, or what the implications of using it would be for the wider balance of strategic relations at the time.

If social scientists are awful at predicting what might happen –as claimed above– then it seems a little harsh to expect LBJ to be able to accurately predict the implications of escalation. His failure to do so is then used as evidence that escalation was caused by emotional volatility or cognitive bias or a combination thereof. This is a non-sequitur.