POL208Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Excomm, Crisis Management, Strategic Dominance
Document Summary
Most wars are preceded by crises and escalation. If want to understand war we need to understand international crisis, and particularly decision making during crisis. If we wish to avoid war we need to improve crisis management skills. The need to manage crises became very acute during the cold war. Herman: an international crisis is composed of three criteria: surprise, high-level of threat, short decision time. We can create a typology of events by looking at the three dimensions. We can think of it as a cube. Situational (structural) variables: the structure of the crisis (decision cube), the structure of the system. Behavioural variables: the quality of decision-making and skill of decision makers. There are two nash equilibriums the only way to survive in chicken is to always do the opposite of what your opponent does. We want to do the opposite of what our opponent chooses to do. The best way to play chicken is to avoid it.
