Bøger af Richard Ned Lebow

"The political and cultural lessons drawn from the collapse of the Weimar Republic are invoked in order to understand contemporary threats to democracy. The contributors challenge the validity of these lessons, the extent to which they reflect political agendas, and how they are brought to bear on contemporary political problems"--

Richard Ned Lebow spells out the implications of historical experience for American perceptions of the place of crisis management in superpower strategic relations. identifying and discussing three reasons for the outbreak of World War I--preemption, loss of control, and miscalculated escalation--he argues that all three are equally serious threats to peace and survival. He documents how psychological stress in past crises has induced erratic, dysfunctional behavior from national leaders, even paralysis. A nuclear crisis, he argues, would generate even more acute stress because of the unprecedented destructiveness of nuclear weapons and the extreme time pressure that leaders are likely to face.

This volume focuses on the assessments political actors make of the relative fragility and robustness of political orders. The core argument developed and explored throughout its different chapters is that such assessments are subjective and informed by contextually specific historical experiences that have important implications for how leaders respond. Their responses, in turn, feed into processes by which political orders change. The volume's contributions span analyses of political orders at the state, regional and global levels. They demonstrate that assessments of fragility and robustness have important policy implications but that the accuracy of assessments can only be known with certainty ex post facto. The volume will appeal to scholars and advanced students of international relations and comparative politics working on national and international orders.

Rough Waters and Other Stories is a collection of original stories addressing different ethical questions and dilemmas. An introduction makes connections among the stories, puts them in personal and political perspective, and anchors them in a tragic understanding of life and ethics. The characters in Rough Waters and Other Stories - some based on real historical people - must make or finesse ethical choices, some of them straight-forward, others tragic in nature. Tragic choices involve trade-offs between seemingly irreconcilable but important goals. Alternatively, they entail committing ourselves to decisions or policies whose outcomes are uncertain. We are desperate to avoid tragic choices and prone to convince ourselves - often in the face of good evidence - that we can satisfy all of our desires or needs instead of making difficult choices between or among them. We also tend to convince ourselves that our decisions or policies well succeed in proportion to the degree that we feel compelled to commit to them. A standard trope of Greek tragedy - think here of Oedipus - is that our choices sometimes lead directly to the outcomes we are trying desperately to avoid.

It has three new substantial chapters: a prologue, a chapter on new evidence on World War I, and an epilogue. The new chapters update and reevaluate these arguments and approach a critical hindsight assessment in light of post-Cold War developments.

In 2020, America will elect a president, deciding not just the trajectory of its national politics but the future of American foreign policy.

This book recapitulates and extends Ned Lebow's decades' long research on conflict management and resolution. It updates his critique of conventional and nuclear deterrence, analysis of reassurance, and the conditions in which international conflicts may be amenable to resolution, or failing that, a significant reduction in tensions.

Identity is the master variable for many constructivist scholars of international politics. In this comparative study, Richard Ned Lebow shows that states do not have identities any more than people do. Leaders, peoples, and foreign actors seek to impose national identifications consistent with their political projects and psychological needs. These identifications are multiple, fluid and rise in importance as a function of priming and context. Leaders are at least as likely to invoke national identifications as rationalizations for policies pursued for other reasons as they are to be influenced by them. National identifications are nevertheless important because they invariably stress the alleged uniqueness of a people and its country, and are a principal means of seeking status and building self-esteem. Lebow tracks the relative appeal of these principles, the ways in which they are constructed, how they influence national identifications, and how they in turn affect regional and international practices.

Using concrete examples of negotiation from everyday life as well as world politics, The Art of Bargaining provides the reader with ways to increase bargaining leverage, analyze the strategies and goals of bargaining opponents, and overcome the obstacles that present themselves at the negotiation table.

Could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists in 1914? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet? Would the Cold War have ended as it did? In Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ned Lebow develops protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and uses them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments like World War I and the end of the Cold War. He uses experiments, surveys, and a short story to explore why policymakers, historians, and international relations scholars are so resistant to the contingency and indeterminism inherent in open-ended, nonlinear systems. Most controversially, Lebow argues that the difference between counterfactual and so-called factual arguments is misleading, as both can be evidence-rich and logically persuasive. A must-read for social scientists, Forbidden Fruit also examines the binary between fact and fiction and the use of counterfactuals in fictional works like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to understand complex causation and its implications for who we are and what we think makes the social world work.

Drawing on recently declassified documents and extensive interviews with Soviet and American policy-makers, among them several important figures speaking for public record for the first time, Ned Lebow and Janice Stein cast new light on the effect of nuclear threats in two of the tensest moments of the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the confrontations arising out of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. They conclude that the strategy of deterrence prolonged rather than ended the conflict between the superpowers.