Event

The abstract from the book sounds as follows:

“This study deals with an under-researched question: How do states come to succeed or fail to co-manage international crises? This is an important question to ask. Widespread assumptions in the scholarly literature notwithstanding, purely unilateral crisis responses are the exception, even during military crises. Attempts to arrive at joint responses with like-minded states are the rule. This study develops an innovative theoretical framework to explain how these attempts come to succeed or fail.

The key concepts of this framework are judgment and justification. The concepts are linked together by three circuits of interaction: perimeter, resonance and structuration. Drawing from a repertoire of universals, actors make substantive and procedural political judgments to understand an unfolding situation (perimeter). Depending on their procedural judgments, they are more or less open to revisit their substantive judgments in communicative encounters about how to justify what to do in an unfolding situation (resonance). These processes of judgment and justification feed back into the repertoire of universals (structuration).

This framework makes for a powerful explanatory tool for the analysis of crisis management at a time when leaders find it more and more difficult to evade pressures to justify their doings domestically and internationally. It makes for a particularly powerful explanatory tool for scrutinizing the crisis responses of tightly coupled security communities such as the European Union. It allows for scrutinising convergences and divergences across the repertoires prevalent in member states and available to their leaders, as well as the patterns of judgment and justification to which these give rise. This study’s in-depth analysis of judgments and justifications within and across France, Germany, and the United Kingdom during the crises in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq highlight these contributions to international relations theory, our grasp of international crises in general, and the EU as a crisis manager in particular.”

Markus Kornprobst is a Professor and holds the Chair in International Relations at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. He previously taught at the School of Public Policy at University College London and Magdalen College at Oxford University. Kornprobst's research interests encompass International Peace and Security; International Relations Theory; Political Agency and Practical Reason; Governance and Diplomacy; Nuclear Non-proliferation; Crisis Management; European Politics; African Politics; Methodology.

Chair is Research Director at NUPI, Ole Jacob Sending. He does research on global governance, with a particular focus on the role of international and non-governmental organizations in peacebuilding, humanitarian relief, and development.