Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger

Risk Taking and Decisionmaking: Foreign Military Intervention Decisions

Preface Abbreviations 1. Introduction Part I. Theory: 2. The anatomy of risk: what is risk and how is it framed? 3. The formation of risk judgements and risk preferences: a sociocognitive approach 4. Foreign military intervention: national capabilities constraints 5. The international milieu and foreign military intervention: when and how much does the milieu matter? Part II. The Case Studies: A Comparative Analysis: 6. Foreign military interventions with low to moderate risks: Grenada, Panama, and Czechoslovakia 7. High-risk foreign military interventions: Vietnam and Lebanon 8. Conclusions and implications Notes Bibliography Index.

The Antinomies of Collective Political Trauma: A Pre‐Theory

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabins assassination has less of a lasting impact on the Israeli publics political values, beliefs and attitudes than might have been anticipated from the magnitude of the event and intensity of the immediate responses. Why did the assassination have such a short-lived effect? This article considers the puzzle as a specific case of the broader phenomenon of collective political trauma and its consequences for values, beliefs and attitudes held by the mass public toward issues that it associates with the traumatic event. The article offers six deductively inferred hypotheses that describe, explain and link affective, cognitive and behavioral aspects of collectively experienced trauma. These hypotheses form a pre-theory explaining the perseverence of core political cognitions, even in the face of a considerable challenge to their validity and relevance.

Bureaucratic-organizational Politics and Information Processing in a Developing State

This article argues that the bureaucratic-organizational paradigms can be usefully applied to the understanding of information processing in the decisionmaking context of developing states. Using the Sino-Indian border dispute of 1959–1962 as a case study, the author shows that various dimensions of inter-organizational relations, intra-group dynamics and the small group-organization nexus explain the emergent preference, within the decisionmaking group, for a specific interpretation of situations and the degree of openness to dissonant information regarding those situations. The article concludes by drawing some general conclusions with regard to bureaucratic-organizational politics in general and in a Third World context in particular.

National capabilities and foreign military intervention: A policy‐relevant theoretical analysis

The recent successes of U.S. military interventions in Panama and the Gulf should not obscure the fact that since 1945 large scale foreign military interventions have quite often resulted in disastrous military, economic, and political consequences for the intervening power, in spite of what seemed a clear superiority in power over the adversary. Some of these cases, such as U.S. intervention in Vietnam, had far‐reaching consequences for global and regional politics and stability. Yet, a broad policy‐relevant theoretical analysis of the necessary and sufficient capability determinants of successful intervention does not exist, although it is imperative for avoiding adventurous decisions. This paper intends to fill the gap by providing a systematic policy‐relevant theoretical analysis of these capabilities. The paper sets out in detail the military, economic, and political capability requirements for successful intervention. Short historical examples are used to illustrate the arguments.

The Sino-Indian Border Dispute and Sino-Indian Relations.

The Sino-Indian border dispute is a legacy of British and Russian expansions in Central Asia at the start of the 20th century. This text focuses on the bilateral relationship between China and India, as well as past American and Soviet policies towards South Asia, China and India since the 1940s.

Misperception in international politics: A typological framework for analysis

The study argues that in spite of seminal advances made, the literature dealing with the role of misperception in international politics suffers from over‐generalization and some fuzziness. This encourages eclecticism in research and lack of differentiated theory, which takes into account the complexities of information processing in foreign policy‐making. Thus, the paper notes the special attributes of information in that arena which is the base for image formation and definition of the situation. It is suggested that misperception is measured in terms of the gap between the real and the psychological environments, and the study points out in detail the dimensions of the three sets of components which make up these two environments: the constraints within which the individual performs, the specific contents of the environments, and the frame of reference factors. It then goes on to differentiate between three types of misperception: cognizance gap, relevance gap, and evaluation gap, and spells out the co...