Risk Taking In International Politics

Discusses the way leaders deal with risk in making foreign policy decisions

Risks are an integral part of complex, high-stakes decisions, and decisionmakers are faced with the unavoidable tasks of assessing risks and forming risk preferences. This is true for all decision domains, including financial, environmental, and foreign policy domains, among others. How well decisionmakers deal with risk affects, to a considerable extent, the quality of their decisions. This book provides the most comprehensive analysis available of the elements that influence risk judgments and preferences. The book has two dimensions: theoretical and comparative-historical. The study of risk-taking behavior has been dominated by the rational choice approach. Instead, the author adopts a socio-cognitive approach involving: a multivariate theory integrating contextual, cognitive, motivational, and personality factors that affect an individual decisionmaker's judgment and preferences; the social interaction and structural effects of the decisionmaking group and its organizational setting; and the role of cultural-societal values and norms that sanction or discourage risk taking behavior. The book's theoretical approach is applied and tested in five historical case studies of foreign military interventions. The richly detailed empirical data on the case studies make them, metaphorically speaking, an ideal laboratory for applying a process-tracing approach in studying judgment and decision processes at varying risk levels. The case studies analyzed are: U.S. interventions in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 (both low risk); Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (moderate risk): U.S. intervention in Vietnam in 1964-68 (high risk); and Israel's intervention in Lebanon in 1982-83 (high risk).

This book introduces a new perspective on risk seeking behaviour, developing a framework based on various cognitive theories, and applying it to the specific case-study of Turkey’s foreign policy toward Syria. The author examines why policy makers commit themselves to polices that they do not have the capacity to deliver, and develops an alternative theoretical model to prospect theory in explaining risk taking behaviour based on the concept of overconfidence. The volume suggests that overconfident individuals exhibit risk seeking behaviour that contradicts the risk averse behaviour of individuals in the domain of gain, as predicted by prospect theory. Using a set of testable hypothesis deduced from the model, it presents an empirical investigation of the causes behind Turkish decision makers’ unprecedented level of risk taking toward the uprising in Syria and the consequences of this policy.

Soviet Risk-Taking and Crisis Behavior, first published in 1982, examines the question: for what purposes and under what conditions were Soviet leaders prepared to take risks in international relations? It defines the concept of risk in nuclear-armed foreign relations, and analyses Soviet behavior in the Berlin crises.

The field of international relations is only now beginning to take notice of cognitive models of decision making. Arguing against the trend of adopting formalistic depictions of human choice, Berejikian suggests that international relations and realistic models of human decision making go hand-in-hand. The result is a set of interconnected propositions that provide compelling new insights into state behavior. Utilizing this framework, he discusses the behavior of the United States and Europe in negotiating the Montreal Protocol, a landmark international agreement designed to save the earth's protective ozone shield.

Barbara Vis is assistant professor in comparative politics at the vu University Amsterdam. A Veni grant from the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) supports her current research. --

Why do some leaders and segments of the public display remarkable persistence in confrontations in international politics, while others cut and run? The answer given by policymakers, pundits, and political scientists usually relates to issues of resolve. Yet, though we rely on resolve to explain almost every phenomenon in international politics—from prevailing at the bargaining table to winning on the battlefield—we don't understand what it is, how it works, or where it comes from. Resolve in International Politics draws on a growing body of research in psychology and behavioral economics to explore the foundations of this important idea. Joshua Kertzer argues that political will is more than just a metaphor or figure of speech: the same traits social scientists and decision-making scholars use to comprehend willpower in our daily lives also shape how we respond to the costs of war and conflict. Combining laboratory and survey experiments with studies of great power military interventions in the postwar era from 1946 to 2003, Kertzer shows how time and risk preferences, honor orientation, and self-control help explain the ways leaders and members of the public define the situations they face and weigh the trade-offs between the costs of fighting and the costs of backing down. Offering a novel in-depth look at how willpower functions in international relations, Resolve in International Politics has critical implications for understanding political psychology, public opinion about foreign policy, leaders in military interventions, and international security.