Decision Making During International Crises

An examination of the problems which national leaders face when they are involved in international crises, including stress, fatigue and communication difficulties. The majority of crises covered are post-1945, with others chosen to illustrate a particular constraint, such as July 1914.

How do nations act in a crisis? This book seeks to answer that question both theoretically and historically. It tests and synthesizes theories of political behavior by comparing them with the historical record. The authors apply theories of bargaining, game theory, information processing, decision-making, and international systems to case histories of sixteen crises that occurred during a seventy-five year period. The result is a revision and integration of diverse concepts and the development of a new empirical theory of international conflict. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book provides an analysis on the impact of culture on crisis management, exploring how different cultural types are reflected in crisis-related decision making patterns. Providing an interdisciplinary and international perspective with a rich research and practical outlook, this work is an important contribution to the field of crisis management and decision making. Offering essential understanding to how countries, organizations, groups and individuals prepare for and respond to crises thus combining research across several disciplines, offering theoretical development, empirical testing and reporting on the testing of a large number of hypotheses across several frameworks. The novelty of this book lies in its presentation of the quantitative testing of the relationship between cultural theory and crisis management, drawing on data from cases that cross continents and crises types. The book also includes a review of cases from South Korea and suggests a number of ways in which practitioners at various levels of government can prepare their organizations to cope better with the introduction of cultural bias into the decision making process. Those with an interest in risk management, disaster management and crisis management will value this pioneering work as it reveals the influence of cultural bias in decision making processes. This work offers important insights for practice as well as for theory-building, scholars and practitioners of public administration, management, political, and international relations, organizational, social and cultural psychology, amongst others, will all gain from reading this work.

This volume addresses the question as to where international law fits into the making and implementation of foreign policy during an international crisis in which a State is considering and / or may actually use force. Empirical literature on the law-State behaviour relationship during international crises has not been able to answer this question adequately. The limitations of existing empirical literature are identified as stemming from the limitations of existing positivist, realist and functionalist theoretical explanations of the law-State behaviour relationship. These theoretical approaches, which underpin existing empirical literature on international crises, assume that international law matches what is referred to in this book as its ‘rule-book’ image. This is the notion of international law as a finite set of objective, politically neutral, rules that can be applied so as to distinguish objectively between legal and illegal action. The rule-book image of international law does not match reality, but the assumption that it is true underpins both theoretical literature and references to international law in political rhetoric. The rule-book image and the reality of international law have been reconciled within the theory of International law as Ideology (ILI) as developed by Shirley Scott. This book hypothesises that an ILI perspective offers a better explanation of the law-State behaviour relationship during international crises than rival explanations grounded in positivism, realism or functionalism. Four case studies of State behaviour—of the US, the Soviet Union and the PRC during the Korean War (1950-1953), of the US and UK during the Suez crisis (1956), of the US and the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and of the US and an alliance of Latin American States during the Dominican Republic crisis (1965)—are used to test the hypothesis. The findings confirm the greater explanatory efficacy of ILI and demonstrate that the significance of international law to foreign policy decision-making during international crises is more than that of deterring the use of force as is assumed by rival theoretical approaches grounded in a rule-book image of international law. International law is shown to serve as a vehicle for inter-State competition during international crises.

Motivational models are critical to understanding crisis decision making because leaders and their advisors are emotionally involved, intent on reducing stress, and motivated to find ways of advancing their interests while minimizing the risk of war. The principal theoretical work on the subject is Irving Janis and Leon Mann’s classic study of decision making, published in 1977. While useful, the book has a significant flaw: Janis and Mann theorize that policy maker stress during crisis is derived from decision deliberation, leading to a circular approach. This book solves the identified problem by addressing circularity between the rise of psychological stress, decision deliberation, and dysfunctional behavior with an independent measure of decision conditions using cognitive complexity. With an effective independent measure of stress, the key contribution of this volume is a reformulation of Janis and Mann’s model to render the construct more rigorous and empirically useful to the present-day study of crisis decision making.

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