If we look at the world around us, attempts by states to somehow and at certain moments manage international crises together abound. This applies to cases as varied as Libya, Mali, Syria and Venezuela. Our understanding of how states come to succeed or fail to co-manage international crises, however, is severely limited. All too often pundits and scholars alike pretend that crises are managed by a single state  – usually a global power – who, at best, issues orders for how lesser powers ought to contribute to its crisis management.

My book Co-managing International Crises: Judgments and Justifications stays away from these over-simplifications. Focusing on how three states – France, Germany and the United Kingdom – failed and succeeded to manage four crises – Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq – together, the book shows that state borders do not hermetically seal sense-making and decision-making processes. Leaders approached these crises by forming pre-judgments and part of what made these initial inklings develop into more fully fledged judgments was the exposure to private and public justifications in domestic politics. But participating in international private and public justificatory encounters proved to be equally important. Domestic, transnational and international communication pushes and shoves leaders’ judgments. My research even uncovers processes through which actors representing supposedly lesser powers left an imprint on how leaders of supposedly greater powers came to orient themselves in a crisis. Chirac’s justifications for humanitarian intervention, for example, left a mark on Clinton and Albright, and the effects of communicative exchanges between Blair and Bush were not unidirectional either.

Taken together, this book makes three important contributions. First, it explains crisis co-management. Given that our world is growing more and more complex, and widely held assumptions that crisis management is something done by single states all on their own become less and less tenable, this is a timely value added. Second, the book provides novel insights into the workings of security governance. Managing crises together helps re-produce resources required for judgments and justifications to converge across states. This, in turn, facilitates co-managing the next crisis. Failures to act together in a crisis, by contrast, jeopardises the re-production of these resources, making the next crisis co-management even more difficult. Third, the book does not shy away from asking questions that are of fundamental importance for studying international relations. It puts forward a broad conceptualization of reasoning – political judgment –, an equally inclusive conceptualization of communication – public and private justifications – and links these together in a three-circuit map. This map is applicable much beyond the study of international crises.

Professor Markus Kornprobst holds the Chair of Political Science and International Relations at the  Vienna School of International Studies. Previously holding positions at the University of Toronto, the Ohio State University, Oxford University and University College London, his research interests encompass Diplomacy, International Peace and Security, International Relations Theory, African Politics, and European Politics. His research appears in leading journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, International Organization, International Studies Review, International Theory, Millennium, and the Review of International Studies. He is the author of Co-managing International Crises (Cambridge University Press 2019), Irredentism in European Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2008), co-author of Understanding International Diplomacy (Routledge, 2013 and 2018) as well as co-editor of Arguing Global Governance (Routledge, 2010), Metaphors of Globalization (Palgrave, 2007), and Communication, Legitimation and Morality in Modern Politics (Routledge, 2018).

The Vienna School of International Studies organised a conversation about the conditions under which states succeed or fail to manage international crises together between the DA’s postdoctoral fellow, Dr Rachel Johnston-White, and Professor Kornprobst, who answers some of the most important questions related to his book. You can watch the full discussions HERE.