CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Orton, Liam Francis |
|---|---|
| Title | Leadership and Unreflective Decision-Making in Crisis: a Window into the International System? |
| Summary | This thesis suggests that unreflective decisions made by world leaders in moments of extreme crisis can be used as an access point to uncover their core assumptions about the international system. It builds a conceptual model by drawing on common heuristics from cognitive psychology to operationalise Vincent Pouliot’s ‘logic of practicality’ into an observable phenomenon at the individual level of analysis. These are applied to analyze unreflective decision-making in the immediate milieu of a major crisis; attention focuses on the knee-jerk outbursts and purely reactive decisions that leaders make when they are first adapting to the crisis, understood here as a ‘pre-cognizant stage’ of decision-making. It is argued that these constitute ‘arational’ (non-rationalized rather than irrational) attitudes that leaders subconsciously and habitually reproduce as agents on the global stage. This takes the ontological discussion one level deeper than traditional theories of IR tend to consider. It follows that the thesis is inherently experimental. Its focus is on establishing a possible new approach for further development, rather than obtaining concrete conclusions in its own right. |
| Supervisor | Kurowska, Xymena |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/orton_liam.pdf |
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