Crisis Studies and Foreign Policy Analysis: Insights, Synergies, and Challenges

Abstract

For good and ill, the development of foreign policy analysis has been and will continue to be intimately linked to the phenomenon of crisis in both domestic and international politics. The problem of coping with crisis exerts a strong gravitational pull on scholars and practitioners alike for good political and psychological reasons. Crises are consequential, dramatic, vivid, and emotionally charged. They are moments or periods of truth in which the mettle of leaders and the robustness of institutions are tested and frailties are quickly revealed to colleagues, journalists, and citizens. Crises tend to capture the attention of leaders and scholars alike, sometimes to the neglect of other fundamental but less thrilling aspects of national and international politics. Events such as the Korean Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Energy Crises of the mid-1970s, Chernobyl, the Gulf War, Mad Cow Disease, and September 11, 2001, demand our attention and cast long political and intellectual shadows (Rosenthal, Boin, and Comfort 2001). Crises provide opportunities for leadership that are not only exploited by policy practitioners but by scholars as well. In the personal computer industry, it has become commonplace for strategists to use the term “the killer application” to refer to a software product that becomes a vehicle for launching a new technological platform. Major crises have often served as such killer applications in the scholarly community, providing compelling empirical demonstrations of theoretical or metatheoretical arguments. Glen Paige's (1968) study of the Korean Crisis became an important exemplar, showing how Richard Snyder and his associates' (1962) foreign policy decision-making framework could be used as a basis for theoretically driven empirical research. Other good examples include Yuen Foong Khong's (1992) use of the Vietnam crisis of 1965 to launch his theoretical framework for the analysis of the impact of historical analogy on foreign …