Crisis Management: Looking Back to Look ForwardAuthor(s): Janice Gross SteinReviewed work(s):Source: Political Psychology, Vol. 29, No. 4, The Enduring Legacy of Alexander L. George: ASymposium (Aug., 2008), pp. 553-569Published by: International Society of Political PsychologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20447144 .Accessed: 25/10/2012 00:32

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Political Psychology, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2008

Crisis Management: Looking Back to Look Forward

Janice Gross Stein University of Toronto

Alexander George made a seminal contribution to theories of preventive diplomacy, crisis management, deterrence, and coercive diplomacy. Although he made his contribution in the highly structured environment of the Cold War, his analysis of the close connections between positive and negative inducements, the importance of interests in shaping out comes, and the dangers of threat-based strategies as substitutes for policy speaks to the central challenges of contemporary global politics.

KEY WORDS: preventive diplomacy, crisis management, deterrence, coercive diplomacy, threat based strategies

Crisis Management, Deterrence, and Coercive Diplomacy: The Context of the Cold War

Alexander George made a seminal contribution to the analysis of preventive diplomacy, crisis management, deterrence, and coercive diplomacy. Throughout his long and productive career, George was deeply concerned about the prospect of war between the superpowers during the Cold War, a war that could erupt inad vertently through miscalculation or through the ratcheting up of tensions among their smaller allies. From this fundamental preoccupation grew his scholarly interest first in crisis prevention, then in crisis management through deterrence and coercive diplomacy, and finally in the possibility of cooperation among adversar ies. These became his central preoccupations as a scholar deeply committed to improving policy.

It is difficult to remember, almost two decades after the end of the Cold War, the fear of nuclear war that shaped so much of George's scholarship. A prolonged crisis over Berlin was followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis which brought the two superpowers to the brink. Tensions eased somewhat during the decade that fol lowed but erupted again during the October War in 1973 in the Middle East when the United States briefly moved up the ladder as it alerted its forces. The Soviet

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invasion of Afghanistan and the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency pushed these fears to the forefront again at the beginning of the 1980s. Scholars and policy makers alike had little confidence that the United States and the Soviet Union would manage their way through the repeated cycles of crises without slipping over the edge into war. It was in this context of an interna tional system shaped by the rivalry between the two superpowers that Alexander George made his many contributions to theory and policy in international relations.

Crisis has traditionally been defined as a threat to basic values that simulta neously creates a sense of urgency and uncertainty among policy makers. The Cold War gave structure and meaning to global politics for four decades, and this structure and meaning defined what constituted a threat. Threats may have been severe, but they were "knowable," broadly familiar, and increasingly fitted into established structures of thinking and response as the Cold War wore on. Even what was known and familiar, however, could not easily be prevented or managed effectively.

Drawing heavily on the analysis he had done as a political psychologist, George began to explore the importance of signalling and messaging in the prevention of war (George, 1983, 1991). He was among a handful of scholars who systematically examined the likelihood that messages could be misunderstood and

misinterpreted as a crisis escalated and stress increased (Jervis, 1976). All the more important, George (1982) argued, that there be norms and rules in place between the superpowers that could help avoid inadvertent escalation when their leaders

were most likely to escalate. George understood well that in the nuclear age, crises were often a substitute

for war. They offered the superpowers the opportunity to change the status quo and achieve their objectives short of the use of force, but at a high risk that the crisis could spin out of control (1983). Crises, George argued, were an endemic attribute of a bipolar nuclear world; some could be prevented but most had to be managed.

George recognized how difficult crisis prevention was, how the incentives of leaders of the superpowers were aligned to risk crisis in the expectation that they could be kept from escalating. After the Cuban Missile crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union were less inclined to confront one another directly, but did so

indirectly through the allies they supported in their global competition. Crisis prevention, he argued, was inherently more difficult than crisis management for two reasons. First, leaders have little incentive to engage actively in prevention before a crisis is upon them. They supported regional allies to reap political advantage and were unwilling to face the unpleasant consequences, in a context of global competition, of restraining their allies. The superpowers were not equally committed to crisis prevention under all kinds of circumstances. The balance of interests, he argued, varied through time and place as did their estimates of the probability of war. The likelihood of escalation was a function of the interests at

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stake for each superpower and their estimate of the resolve of the other, their determination to stand firm.

Second, George argued, the emphasis on the avoidance of war that the two nuclear powers had learned was not shared by all members of the international community. At times, their smaller allies considered the use of force an optimal instrument to achieve their goals against regional adversaries. Equally dangerous, when smaller allies wanted crucial military, political, or economic resources from the superpowers to help them manage their own conflict, they deliberately sought to create and exploit crisis between the superpowers to focus attention on the regional conflict. Under these circumstances, superpowers could misjudge their allies, underestimate the differences in interests and priorities, and overestimate their capacity to "manage" their friends.

In part because smaller allies at times sought not to avoid war but to provoke crisis, crisis prevention proved difficult even when the superpowers were highly motivated. Effective communication and control between superpower and ally was necessary but not sufficient. Leaders in Washington and Moscow had to control not only their own military forces and bureaucracies as they communicated with each other, but they had to simultaneously persuade their allies to refrain from a use of force and to compromise their fundamental objectives. They struggled not only to

manage an adversary who shared their aversion to war but, equally important, to restrain their ally who considered the use of force an acceptable if not preferred instrument of conflict management. The tacit norm that impels a superpower to restrain its victorious regional ally, George argued, did not work automatically; rather, it was often activated by a credible threat of intervention by the defending superpower. In part for this reason, George concluded that ". . . this tacit ground rule cannot be regarded as a stable, reliable, basis for enabling superpowers to back their regional client states without being drawn into war with each other" (1986, pp. 10-11, emphasis in original).

It was in this context of the serious challenges to crisis prevention that George began his analysis of deterrence and coercive diplomacy as strategies of crisis management. George wrote during a period in history that was heavily influenced by the experience prior to World War II, when Britain tried and failed to appease

Hitler's Germany. The failure of appeasement had a profound impact on postwar scholarship; scholars and practitioners alike used "appeasement" as a pejorative term, as an ill-conceived strategy of crisis management, and looked to strategies of deterrence and coercive diplomacy as the principal strategies of avoiding war. Theories of deterrence were long-standing in the history of international relations, but they seemed particularly apt during the Cold War, when the world was tightly structured into two blocs each headed by a nuclear superpower and a large group of uncommitted states where the superpowers played out their rivalry. The simplified assumptions of theories of deterrence and coercive diplomacy seemed intuitively plausible in a highly structured world where the use of force by either superpower against the other would be catastrophic. Although the two strategies worked

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differently, as George would demonstrate brilliantly, both relied heavily on capa

bilities and demonstrations of resolve, the determination to stand firm (George, et al., 1971; George & Smoke, 1974; Schelling, 1960, 1966). The risk of standing firm for too long, however, was that the crisis would go over the edge into war.

Alexander George and his colleague Richard Smoke broke new ground in

their seminal study of deterrence. They did not focus on the attempt by the United

States to deter the Soviet Union directly but rather on the attempt by Washington to "extend" deterrence and prevent challenges against its allies and friends. And they looked not only at the theory of extended deterrence, but at its practice as well. What lessons did history have to teach policy makers, or more aptly, what lessons could policy makers learn?

Before going to the historical record, George and Smoke began with a surgical

examination of the assumptions of deterrence theory. Deterrence attempts to prevent someone from doing something they would otherwise like to do, while coercive diplomacy seeks to get someone to do something they would otherwise not do. Theories of deterrence and coercive diplomacy argued that the calculations and the incentives of a would-be challenger to use force could be changed by a

credible threat and firm resolve. George and Smoke were sceptical of the highly deductive, abstract logic of

deterrence theory. "We find it necessary," they explained, "to emphasize the way in which deterrence theory was derived, largely deductively, from a priori premises." They intended ". . . to demonstrate the questionable character of many of the premises and assumptions on which deterrence theory has been based. The over simplified and often erroneous character of these theoretical assumptions is best demonstrated by comparing them with the more complex variables and processes associated with efforts to employ deterrence strategy in real-life historical cases" (1974, p. 2).

In his determination to test deterrence theory against the anvil of history, George changed the terrain of the debate. Scholars had been unable to test "general deterrence" theory against the Soviet Union, because, fortunately, it had not failed. From this absence of a major direct Soviet challenge to the United States which escalated to nuclear war, theorists assumed deterrence success and then extended the theory-almost as ideology-to the deterrence of limited challenges against smaller allies. "Reasoning deductively from decision theory, and especially from game theory," argued George and Smoke, "investigators have offered a relatively abstract theory of deterrence which has received little testing against historical

reality." They sounded the warning bell: "This theory has been presented in the

prescriptive mode-that is, as a guide for policy-despite the fact that it does not in actuality meet the requirements for policy relevance" (p. 589).

George took on two related intellectual challenges. First, he questioned whether the dog that didn't bark the absence of nuclear escalation-was due

exclusively to deterrence. The outcome, he argued, could not logically imply the cause. Second, he insisted, even if the theory of deterrence did explain the absence

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of nuclear war between the superpowers, that same set of theoretical assumptions

did not necessarily extend to the deterrence of challenges against smaller allies.

Moreover-and here George began a revolution in the field-"extended deter rence" could be tested against empirical evidence.

George and Smoke moved the debate beyond ideological argument into

empirics. "We give particular emphasis to developing a differentiated theory, one

that discriminates among varieties and patterns of deterrence situations. This kind

of theory offers policy-makers greater assistance in diagnosing new problems as

they arise, in assessing what sort of deterrence strategy may be appropriate to

them, and, more importantly, in judging whether deterrence is indeed the proper

kind of policy to apply to them" (p. 3). Here a third important strand of George's work creeps in early in his thinking

about deterrence. While he recognized its importance and its value as a strategy of

both crisis prevention and crisis management, he argued that there was more to an effective foreign policy than a threat-based strategy. To anticipate language he would use later, deterrence was not always necessary and at times not sufficient.

"Deterrence theory per se does not define its own scope or relevance as an instrument of foreign policy. That is, the general theory of deterrence does not

indicate when a state should attempt to apply deterrence strategy to protect weaker

countries. The answer to this question can be determined only with reference to

that state's foreign policy, not by deterrence theory per se" (George & Smoke,

1974, p. 3). George's sensibility is keenly political and acutely attuned to context.

The strategy of deterrence is both constrained and conditioned by broader

policy objectives and is not, George insisted, an objective in and of itself. Why?

"Deterrence is a policy which, if it succeeds, can only frustrate an opponent who

aspires to changing the international status quo in his favour. The consequences of continued frustration, however, are not easily predictable and are not necessarily benign. The most reliable benefit successful deterrence can offer is more time time in which some of the conflict-generating or conflict-exacerbating elements in a historical situation can abate, so that deterrence will no longer be necessary or, at any rate, so critical for the maintenance of peace" (George & Smoke, 1974,

p. 5). George, in contradistinction to so many of his colleagues writing at the time,

understood that deterrence at best was simply an instrument in the service of larger

political objectives. He was seduced neither by its formal elegance nor by its

apparent success in the absence of evidence. Agnostic, and deeply committed to

empirical scholarship, he understood that the desire for change could be politically driven-and legitimate. Alexander George stood apart from his colleagues who loved the formal elegance of deterrence theory and the pristine quality of its axioms and had little interest in the messy world of politics. Politics, for many of

George's colleagues, was at best an inconvenient truth. Not so for George who resisted the instrumentalization of policy and brought the mind of an investigative scholar to the instruments of statecraft.

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What did George find in his careful empirical investigation of "extended deterrence" and in his subsequent investigation of "coercive diplomacy," a strategy which Thomas Schelling earlier had called "compellence"? George argued that coercive diplomacy was more difficult, that it was harder to force another state to do something they would otherwise not do than to prevent leaders from doing something they wanted to do. Ensuring an act of omission, he cautioned, was easier than securing an act of commission. There were, he implied, limits to the capacity of even the largest and the most powerful to coerce and to compel. Much depended on the balance of interests at stake, on how important the interests were to the would-be challenger. Neither deterrence nor compellence worked on a blank slate, with interests, policies, and politics washed away. On the contrary, it was precisely the balance of interests and the larger policy objectives that shape the success of both extended deterrence and coercive diplomacy.

George's scholarship sparked a lively debate among scholars and a productive research agenda. Deterrence and compellence both made two core assumptions. First, states were "rational" actors that valued survival above all else. Leaders could calculate the likelihoods of the consequences of their actions and roughly estimate the costs and benefits of alternative options. This assumption was central to the logic of deterrence theory. Deterrence works by influencing the cost and benefit calculation of an adversary; it requires an adversary that can do at least rough calculations. The second assumption is closely related. Credible threats, threats that are both believable and communicated effectively, can change an adversary's calculus. Both deterrence and coercive diplomacy work through threatening harmful consequences if an adversary commits an undesired action or fails to do what is asked. Both these strategies of crisis management are threat-based.

These assumptions were subjected to increasing challenge as the Cold War wore on. One group of scholars began to challenge the core assumption of ratio nality and the optimistic assumption that threats were well understood even when they were communicated clearly (Jervis, 1976; Jervis, Lebow, & Stein, 1985; Lebow, 1981; Lebow & Stein, 1994). Scholars steeped in political psychology began to question the microeconomic foundations of deterrence as a strategy of conflict management and identified systematic cognitive errors that could mediate the perception of a threat.

Scholars also began a serious historical investigation of many of the cases that had been treated as cases of successful deterrence. No case was more iconic than the Cuban Missile crisis and scholars began a reexamination of whether indeed it qualified as successful deterrence. New evidence dramatically changed the con ventional interpretation, and it is now widely accepted that the United States did not simply coerce the Soviet Union to withdraw its missiles but resolved the crisis through mutual concessions (Blight & Welch, 1989; Garthoff, 1989; Lebow & Stein, 1994). The outcome was puzzling to proponents of rational deterrence theory: The Soviet Union was at the time outmatched by American military

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capabilities and should have conceded once the threat became clear. President Kennedy, however, was less worried about resolve and the deterrent reputation of the United States than he was about the possibility of inadvertent escalation to nuclear war. Differences in relative capabilities faded in that context.

Intrigued by the counterintuitive findings, scholars expanded their empirical analyses and began a serious debate about the meaning of "success" in deterrence and coercive diplomacy (Huth & Russett, 1984, 1990; Lebow & Stein, 1989, 1990). Much of what once appeared obvious was far less so once the messy richness of contemporary history entered the discussion. Two decades of scholar ship flowed from the work of Alexander George with his colleague Richard Smoke, scholarship that sounded an important warning about a too-easy, reflexive reliance on threat-based strategies of crisis management.

George warned repeatedly against overconfidence in deterrence as a strategy of crisis management. Ironically, leaders in the United States later would have too little, not too much, confidence in deterrence as a strategy to prevent war. Early in his presidency, Ronald Reagan voiced his intuitive distrust of deterrence, his conviction that it would fail sooner or later, and explicitly challenged the Soviet Union to begin a radical process of nuclear disarmament, a demand that shocked many of his advisers. George W. Bush was even less trusting of deterrence and of coercive diplomacy. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Wash ington, Bush moved quickly to a preemptive attack first against the Taliban that had sheltered al-Qaeda and then against Saddam Hussein. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, deterrence has come to look like a relatively safe strategy when compared to preemptive force. Its risks are more manageable and the opportunities it creates for negotiation and diplomacy are much wider. Alex ander George would make these arguments directly when he warned strongly against a preemptive use of force against North Korea when it became clear that it had developed an active nuclear weapons program. History again proved George right.1

The Changing Nature of Crisis: The Search for Meaning

Alexander George did much of his thinking and writing during the long Cold War, a period in international history dominated by an epic struggle between two superpowers that shaped and dominated the international system. Almost two decades after the Cold War ended, the understanding of crisis has changed dra matically, as have the challenges to deterrence and coercive diplomacy.

The difference is largely attributable to the changing structure of global politics. Conventional war between states has declined, but ferocious civil wars rage within states and civilians are their primary victims. Nonstate actors have also emerged as important players in international politics. All three were present

1 Personal conversation with Alexander George.

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during the Cold War, but its long shadow obscured the conflicts that raged beneath the surface. In the aftermath of the Cold War, it became apparent that the "sole remaining superpower" faced new kinds of challenges. These challenges were even less easily accommodated by theories of crisis management that assumed unitary actors and rational choice.

Global politics is today less structured, the meaning of threat is contested, and consequently what constitutes a crisis is far less clearly demarcated. The ontology and metaphysics of "crisis" are at the core of the debate, and the meanings that political leaders give to crisis are constitutive of our understanding of contempo rary global politics. After the attacks on the United States on 9/1 1, President Bush quickly framed the challenge as a "war on terror." It could equally have been framed as isolating a small group of hard-core militants who were prepared to use force against civilians, as a problem of policing and criminal justice, or as a challenge that the United States could meet with its existing policy instruments. By defining the challenge as requiring a "war in terror" through the preemptive use of force, Bush reframed the problem and drew a sharp dividing line between the past and the present. The fundamental challenge came from the breakdown of "familiar symbolic frameworks that legitimise the pre-existing social order" ('t Hart, 1993, p. 39).

Changes in the meaning, the explanation, and the understanding of crisis have been informed by the increasing complexity and diversity of the international environment. "Linear thinking ('big events must have big causes') has given way to a more subtle perspective that emphasizes the unintended consequences of increased complexity. We now understand crises as the complex result of multiple consequences, which interact over time to produce a threat with devastating potential. In a crisis, consequences escalate as they jump from one system to another, deepening the sense of threat, breakdown, and loss of control. This perspective," argue Boin, 't Hart, Stern, and Sundelius, "is somewhat counterin tuitive, as it defies the traditional logic of 'triggers' and underlying causes" (2005, p. 5). Rather than linear models of causation, anchored by unitary actors making rational choices, contemporary studies of crisis management are informed by theories of complexity and epidemiology that focus on the "pathogens" that live

within a system and explode once they cumulate and reach a critical mass. These kinds of crises are more difficult to see, more challenging to manage, and less amenable to the primitive notions of "control" that so informed theories anchored in the Cold War experience. Contemporary crisis management is-or should be-less infected by hubris.

A second factor speaks to the challenges of effective crisis management. It is the rise to prominence of new kinds of actors, with organizational structures that differ sharply from those of states. In the contemporary international system, networks of nonstate actors have joined states as important players in global politics. Today, almost all development assistance is delivered by nongovernmen tal organizations, security in war-torn societies is increasingly managed by private

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security firms, and militias, not connected directly to states, engage in violence across borders. In this far more crowded environment, states are the most impor tant but no longer the exclusive players in global politics.

Networks are the form of social organization that increasingly defines the global system in the twenty-first century. Networks are flatter, less hierarchical than states, and resilient insofar as they build in redundancy and duplication. The loss of one node in a network does not disable the network as a whole, since

information and decision making moves around the disabled node. Networks are

often more nimble and more flexible in their response than hierarchies where information travels up through channels to centralized decision makers and down again for implementation. In a "just-in-time" global system, state structures are slow and lumbering in their responses when compared to the lighter and more

flexible responses of networks. Al-Qaeda, for example, arguably can be modelled as a distributed network,

with a capacity for flexible response. It is resilient precisely because it is distrib uted; it operates through multiple nodes so that the destruction of any one is not

fatal. Coercive diplomacy and deterrence become far more difficult when a

network has no fixed address, can move easily and hide, and routes its messaging

around endangered nodes. After the attacks against New York and Washington on

9/11, leaders in the United States struggled to craft a response that would be

effective against this kind of threat. They sought both to destroy the network and to deter further attacks, but the instruments at their disposal were cumbersome, ill-suited to respond to a flexible network that operated below the radar. Very soon, frustration at the "invisibility" of their opponents led President Bush and his advisers to shift the understanding of the "crisis" created by al-Qaeda. They moved from the unfamiliar to the familiar, and lashed out against an adversary that they had long seen: Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That Saddam was unconnected to al-Qaeda and to the attacks was irrelevant. The president turned the clock back, abandoned deterrence and coercive diplomacy even against a state adversary, and launched a conventional, industrial-model war in a twenty-first century global system running increasingly on networks. It is little surprise that in this kind of system, Saddam's allies were able to organize quickly to fight a low-intensity insurgency. Today, the United States faces simultaneously an insurgency, a civil

war, and militants who are finding safe space in the chaos that is Iraq. The challenges of effective crisis management are greater in a global envi

ronment that is increasingly diverse in its ecology. First, challenges come from a broader range of sources, some clearly identifiable, others not, some familiar, others new. The contemporary global system is less structured and more uncertain than the world which shaped the thinking of Alexander George. As a result, crisis

management has become more complex and poses strategic and coordination problems of a different order of magnitude.

As the complexity and interconnectedness of systems have grown, societies have grown more vulnerable to small causes that amplify through networks to

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cause large disruptions. Response to the attacks of 9/11 was not limited to an international response but also engaged the "home front" on a scale that the United States had not contemplated for almost half a century. Domestic systems had to respond to manage consequences that were unthinkable and had to organize quickly to deter, to detect, and to prevent another attack. Thousands of domestic responders had to be mobilized and organized in flatter structures so that infor

mation could move more quickly through the system and reach the people who needed it in real time. To find an equivalent challenge, we have to go back 50 years to the preparations for a widespread attack from Soviet nuclear bombs and mis siles. That response was never tested, and as the Cold War wore on and became ritualized, the fear receded as did the organizational and human challenge of widespread response to an attack at home. Crisis prevention and management have now leapfrogged beyond a tightly controlled, hierarchically organized response internationally to widespread prevention and management of attacks on civilian infrastructure at home. The challenges are different not only in degree but in kind.

Whether it is a wide-scale black-out of electricity that results from a small failure, or the spread of a virulent virus from a single traveller, or an attack against New York and Washington planned by a small group of people thousands of miles away, it has become clear that prediction and prevention of crises is difficult at best, impossible at worst. Even hypervigilant leaders face daunting challenges in scanning and reading complex environments where chains of connection are often unclear until their effects are large enough to capture attention in a noisy and crowded world.

The barriers to recognizing that a crisis is brewing are formidable. Large organizations develop standard routines to monitor what they are doing. These routines do not equip them particularly well to notice what they do not expect to see. Similarly intelligence agencies, working within existing frameworks, are less sensitive to the network effects that they are not monitoring at the time. It is, of course, an impossible task to monitor the multiple chains which are weaving below the surface. Only when they amplify do they become visible and by then, the "crisis" has erupted. In a tightly interconnected world that is, at the same time, less structured, those that are monitoring for threshold effects have many more places to look and much more to watch. It should not be surprising that they miss a gathering storm. Alexander George identified many of the obstacles to effective crisis prevention-the complexity of organizations, their overloaded channels of communication, and pervasive cognitive biases in the interpretation of data-but these challenges are greater by orders of magnitude in the more tightly coupled contemporary global system. And they refract at home as well as abroad.

Crisis prevention works best when the environment is relatively stable and the challenges are familiar, but is far more difficult in a changing global system which throws up the "unknowable" and the "unimaginable." Some crises are recurrent and familiar: the break-up of empire, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and civil wars that erupt across borders. But many are not: the operations of

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clandestine networks bent on attacking civilians, the detonation of a dirty bomb or a biological weapon, the amplifying effects of natural disasters, the destruction of critical infrastructure, and the chain reactions of high-risk technologies that esca late through tightly coupled systems. The most threatening crises are those that policy makers have not imagined, those that explode existing frames of reference, and those that flow easily across the domestic-international divide. These are more likely in a global system that is evolving, that has no clear, well-defined structure. In the post-Cold War international system, there is no alternative "to investing serious time and energy in thinking in a more generic sense about the 'rude surprises' that will inevitably occur: the unpleasant, undesirable, unexpected, unorthodox, uncertain, and often inconceivable contingencies that cannot be met by the available repertoires and resources of society and government" (Boin et al., 2005, p. 139).

As the space for crisis prevention has shrunk, the importance of effective crisis management has grown. In a multilayered, diverse, noisy international environment, leaders need to plan to manage the unexpected. But the challenges of crisis management are not easy, especially in a world that is increasingly net worked and one where small actions can have large consequences in tightly coupled and integrated systems.

A central dilemma of crisis management in an uncertain and diverse global ecology is the competing pull of centralization to control and decentralization to respond. At a time of heightened uncertainty and threat, the usual impulse is to centralize decision making to frame the crisis, to assert control, and to reassure anxious publics. This is precisely what the United States did when it merged departments to create a single, monolithic Department of Homeland Security, centralized in a single agency.

Yet this "centralization reflex" can have pathological consequences (Boin & McConnell, 2007, p. 53). In an environment where critical infrastructure can be attacked, or fail, a highly centralized institutionalized response can compound the problem. In an information-rich environment, it can slow down badly needed information to political leaders by producing bottlenecks in transmission. It can also make crisis management less flexible and less resilient by centralizing author ity. This kind of rigidity can come at a high cost when networks are decentralizing decision structures, pushing information down, and launching layered responses that come from many different places at different times. In this kind of crisis, an adaptive response depends on delegated authority to front-line responders and on the adaptive behavior of citizens. The challenge is to build resilience within society, to create the capacity to delink, to decouple connections, so that the spread of harmful consequences can be limited and the emergent capacity of people to cope can be released (Boin & McConnell, 2007; McConnell & Drennan, 2006). The challenge of effective crisis management is compounded by the competing logics of integrated contingency planning and the disaggregated institutions that shape modern societies. Much of crisis management is still organized within a

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nineteenth-century model to respond to the networked challenges of the twenty first century.

The challenges to effective crisis prevention and management are broader and deeper than they were during the Cold War. The construction of crisis is in dispute, the meaning it is given is contested, as are explanations of its origins and life-cycle. Linear explanations of crises no longer capture the complexities of linked chains

that cross a qualitative threshold to explode. The iconic image of crisis manage ment in tightly controlled hierarchical structures is gradually fading, an artifact of a particular period of history. The understanding of crisis management is broad ening and flattening to encompass decision making that is pushed down and out to draw on the resources of society. It is the organizational response that often lags badly behind.

Deterrence and Coercive Diplomacy in Asymmetric Warfare

In the contemporary international system, asymmetric warfare and suicide

bombing stand out in the strategic discussion. Some argue that deterrence and

coercive diplomacy have become irrelevant in the face of these two related, but analytically distinct, challenges.

In asymmetric warfare, the weaker party uses low-intensity warfare in a grinding strategy of attrition in order to provoke escalation by the stronger. The purpose of low-intensity warfare is to force the enemy to escalate so that the weaker "wins" a political victory. The genius of asymmetric warfare, when it is well done, is to eliminate anything but poor choices for the stronger party. It is difficult to deter when those who wage it see little option but surrender, and it is difficult to coerce because the weaker party hopes for coercion, so that the conflict escalates and people turn against the perpetrators of violence. Soldiers kicking open doors of homes to find militants or firing on civilians to kill insurgents antagonize the civilian population whose support they badly need. Yet no response is not an option when bombs are exploding in the streets, in schools, and in the

markets. Damned if you do respond, damned if you don't.

Since asymmetric warfare requires far fewer resources than conventional warfare, it can be sustained over long periods of time. It relies on easily avail able technology-the construction of bombs and rockets is not demanding which is widely available and simple to use. And it inflicts serious damage on far more expensive military assets and on civilians and domestic infrastructure, which in turn provokes widespread public anger and frustration. When leaders resort to escalation because they cannot be seen by their publics to do nothing, insurgents waging asymmetric warfare achieve their political objectives and are emboldened.

The use of suicide bombing as a technique of asymmetric warfare poses a

particular challenge to the core logic of deterrence as a strategy. Suicide bombing is not new. It was used in the modern era by the Tamil Tigers, and first used against

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U.S. troops in the Middle East in the 1980s. It is the highly visible use of suicide

bombing against targets in New York and Washington, however, which evoked arguments about "differences in culture" defeating deterrence, making it irrel evant. In essence, if challengers are willing to commit suicide, to lose their life, individually or collectively, then the strategic calculus of deterrence is beside the point. There is no credible threat that can deter those that are willing to sacrifice their life. Deterrence is not simply fragile, as George and his colleagues argued during the Cold War; it becomes impossible in a strategic culture that glorifies martyrdom.

Acknowledging a strategic culture of suicide permits two very different argu ments. The first is cultural; it argues that deterrence is impossible against those informed by a culture that considers death a lesser cost than dishonour. In a cultural analysis of crisis management, deterrence becomes no more than an imagined truth in a (western) culturally idiosyncratic way (Garfinkle, 2006). The human mind is shaped not only by its capacity for rationality but also by emotion, moral logic, and culture which shape strategic reasoning in ways that are outside the scope of deterrence. An Iranian high school textbook, for example, argues that in the coming war against the infidels, Muslims cannot lose: "Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shall shake one another's hand at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, success and victory are ours" (cited by Garfinkle, 2006, p. 4).

If this argument is interpreted literally, deterrence does become impossible. Schelling (1966) struggled with the problem of the credibility of the threat of nuclear retaliation during the Cold War. Clearly, a threat to retaliate with nuclear weapons in response to an attack against an ally was not believable if that meant, in turn, that one's homeland would be obliterated in response. To escape this paradox, he recommended a "rational strategy of irrationality," where leaders deliberately threaten irrational consequences and then, in order to be credible, give up their capacity to prevent their own irrational action. But throw ing away the steering wheel of the car to communicate unequivocal commitment in a game of chicken on a one-lane road would not help to persuade an adver sary who was willing to die in the car crash. Logically, it would not be effective against an adversary who values honor above life. It is difficult to conceive of a deterrence strategy that would work when people are willing to die, or even embrace death.

The death of deterrence, argued in this unequivocal way, is overexaggerated. It is useful to remember that almost all cultures instrumentalize their soldiers so that they become willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause that they believe in.

Most soldiers face a possible rather than a certain death, and that is a significant difference from a culture which embraces certain death. Nevertheless, armies throughout history have glorified death as a sacrifice for the fatherland-or for freedom.

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It is undeniable that within the narrow frame of deterrence, threats of harm cannot deter a would-be suicide bomber who embraces death. However, those who organize and send bombers to their death may not be completely immune to a cost-benefit calculus. Waves of suicide bombings have waxed and waned, for example, as Palestinian leaders responded to the changing imperatives of Israel's negotiating strategies and to domestic politics.

What is important is a deeper understanding of the culture which shapes strategic choices. The strategic reasoning of those who engage in asymmetric warfare is certainly culturally predicated. Suicide, either individual or collective, becomes a tactic of warfare within a larger cultural context. Death to avenge dishonour or humiliation is a postulate that springs from a different cultural tradition, and deterrence consequently becomes culturally contingent.

What this cultural interpretation of rationality does do is force a reexamination of the familiar culture of deterrence which focuses on avoiding death as the ultimate cost. It suggests that great attention be paid to the avoidance of humiliation and shame, especially in those cultures where honor and status matter a great deal. Strategy needs to be informed by the realization that deterrent threats and demon strations of resolve can provoke rather than restrain violence if adversaries are humiliated. Options need to be framed to avoid deliberate or inadvertent humiliation and dishonour and to provide recognition and status. This is not a new concern, but central to effective crisis management, as Alexander George argued decades ago.

Contemporary global politics impose at least two serious limiting conditions on the use of deterrence and coercive diplomacy. The first is the problematic framing of adversaries as unitary states. Networks like al-Qaeda and militias that operate independently-or even against-their own governments are far more difficult to deter or coerce because they deliberately seek to provoke and escalate violence. As these networks proliferate, the challenge to threat-based strategies grows and deepens.

The second limiting condition is more tractable. Deeper understanding of the different cultures which shape strategic choices suggests that deterrence is a risky strategy when it is used alone in cultures premised on honor. Threat-based strat egies which humiliate reinforce the determination to sacrifice, regardless of costs.

Strategy must reach beyond the militants and the militias to create political alternatives and deepen the legitimacy of those they challenge. Alexander George's scholarship speaks precisely to this problem.

Beyond Crisis Management

George and Smoke end their empirical study of deterrence by writing about its

narrowness, in both theory and practice, and the importance of broader strategies of influence. "Deterrence theorists have erred, we submit, in regarding deterrence as a separable, self-contained phenomenon about which a useful general prescrip tive theory could be developed. The work of early theorists," they continue, "was

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flawed by the evident assumption that a viable theory of deterrence could be developed independently of a broader theory of inter-nation influence, one that would encompass the utility of positive incentives as well as negative ones" (1974, p. 590, emphasis added).

Here George articulates an argument that would reappear again and again throughout his scholarship. The failure to offer positive inducements as well as to threaten punishment unbalanced American strategic behaviour and limited its capacity to achieve its objectives. Appeasement of Hitler, George and Smoke explained, had fallen into such disrepute that it had discredited the "traditional reliance of classical diplomacy upon negotiation and conciliation for adjusting conflicting interests and for reconciling change in the international system with the requirements for stability (pp. 590-591). Writing decades ago, Alexander George argued that deterrence should not be considered as a self-contained strategy but as an integral part of a broader, multifaceted process of influence. Making issues indivisible, connecting every issue to another, he insisted, made the management of conflict more difficult and dangerous. What was necessary, George insisted, was a willingness to reach agreement on single issues that could be separated from other more difficult issues (p. 599). It was important, he argued, to apply deter rence and coercive diplomacy selectively, with careful attention to its risks as well as its benefits. Early on, George cautioned against a reflexive use of threat-based strategies as a substitute for policy.

George extended the argument to the long-term development of the interna tional system, an argument that is even more important in a less-structured, evolving global system than it was during the Cold War. Deterrence must be framed within the larger context of negotiation and conciliation to resolve dan gerous conflicts of interests. Here Alexander George was prescient.

Negotiations with North Korea, fiercely resisted by some members of the Bush administration, appear to be succeeding in persuading North Korea to dis mantle its nuclear weapons program. If these negotiations do succeed-and it will be unclear for several years-it will be because the United States conjoined the threat of sanctions with positive inducements. It was not only the commitment to supply energy that mattered, but Washington's agreement to participate directly in negotiations with North Koreans. Status and recognition, not only energy, were important in moving toward agreement. If coercive diplomacy succeeds, it will do so because it was married with intangible as well as tangible positive inducements.

Can the same model be extended to others? North Korea and Iran may be the easy cases, because they are established states, with known addresses and estab lished channels of decision making. Far more challenging are militias and

militants that often have no address and little stake in the status quo. These kinds of conditions complicate enormously the challenges of deterrence and coercive diplomacy as strategies of crisis management. Even then, however, threat-based strategies and the use of force must be complemented by positive inducements to enter into negotiation about a shared political future. If there is no political horizon

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that at least some of the insurgents and militias can see, they will have no incentive to retreat from violence.

Despite the structural changes in the global system, the emergence of net works as important forms of social and political organization in global politics, the blurring of the divide between the foreign and the domestic in contemporary crises, and the challenge of different strategic cultures which create new traps, Alexander George's work speaks to the present as well as to the past. He under stood above all that threats alone would fail in preventing and in managing crises. He anchored his work in politics and argued passionately that elegant logic could never substitute for solutions that brought those who are outside into a political process of negotiation. He recognized that the "soft" intangible needs of status and recognition were as important as the "harder" concessions and urged the crafting of strategies that threatened when necessary, but compromised when possible.

Alexander George's work speaks to us today.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Janice Gross Stein, Munk Centre for International Studies, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON M5S 3K7. Email: j.stein@utoronto.ca

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