This book examines six major British foreign policy challenges the country faced after World War Two.

All ten of the living former U.S. State Department legal advisers from the Carter administration to that of George W. Bush examine the role international law played during the major crises on their watch.

In this fully updated Second Edition, three of today’s most respected crisis/risk communication scholars provide the latest theory, practice, and innovative approaches for handling crisis. This acclaimed book presents the discourse of renewal as a theory to manage crises effectively. The book provides 15 in-depth case studies that highlight successes and failures in dealing with core issues of crisis leadership, managing uncertainty, communicating effectively, understanding risk, promoting communication ethics, enabling organizational learning, and producing renewing responses to crisis. Unlike other crisis communication texts, this book answers the question, “What now?” and explains how organizations can and should emerge from crisis.

Why democracies believe they can survive any crisis—and why that belief is so dangerous Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008. A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises: from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama. In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them—and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything—a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.

Presents a portrait of five extraordinary figures--Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rachel Carson--to illuminate how great leaders are made in times of adversity and the diverse skills they summon in order to prevail.

Making the Hardest Decisions As a young aid worker, Sasha Chanoff was sent to evacuate a group of refugees from the violence-torn Congo. But when he arrived he discovered a second group. Evacuating them too could endanger the entire mission. But leaving them behind would mean their certain death. All leaders face defining moments, when values are in conflict and decisions impact lives. Why is moral courage the essential factor at such times? How do we access our own rock-bottom values, and how can we take advantage of them to make the best decisions? Through Sasha's own extraordinary story and those of eight other brave leaders from business, government, nongovernment organizations, and the military, this book reveals five principles for confronting crucial decisions and inspires all of us to use our moral core as a lodestar for leadership.

An empirical investigation of financial crises during the last 800 years.

Psychological Crisis Intervention: The SAFER-R Model is designed to provide the reader with a simple set of guidelines for the provision of psychological first aid (PFA). The model of psychological first aid (PFA) for individuals presented in this volume is the SAFER-R model developed by the authors. Arguably it is the most widely used tactical model of crisis intervention in the world with roughly 1 million individuals trained in its operational and derivative guidelines. This model of PFA is not a therapy model nor a substitute for therapy. Rather it is designed to help crisis interventionists stabile and mitigate acute crisis reactions in individuals, as opposed to groups. Guidelines for triage and referrals are also provided. Before plunging into the step-by-step guidelines, a brief history and terminological framework is provided. Lastly, recommendations for addressing specific psychological challenges (suicidal ideation, resistance to seeking professional psychological support, and depression) are provided.

For thirteen days in October of 1962, a truly perilous flirtation with nuclear war developed between the United States and USSR, as the superpowers argued over the installation of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba. Launched by rash judgment and concluded through circumspect leadership, the Cuban Missile Crisis acted as a catalyst for change during the Cold War. Resolved through back-channel negotiations, the moment is popularly remembered as the closest the world has ever come to full-scale nuclear war. Using government memoranda, personal letters, and newspaper articles The Cuban Missile Crisis, details the actual events of the political history, while explaining widespread public response. In six concise chapters, Alice George introduces the history of Cold War America and contextualizes its political, social, and cultural legacy. This will be a must-read for anyone looking for an in-depth summary of these important events. For additional resources please visit the companion website at http://www.routledge.com/cw/criticalmoments.

Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward. In our increasingly globalized world, states have been stripped of much of their power to shape the course of events. Many of our problems are globally produced but the volume of power at the disposal of individual nation-states is simply not sufficient to cope with the problems they face. This divorce between power and politics produces a new kind of paralysis. It undermines the political agency that is needed to tackle the crisis and it saps citizens’ belief that governments can deliver on their promises. The impotence of governments goes hand in hand with the growing cynicism and distrust of citizens. Hence the current crisis is at once a crisis of agency, a crisis of representative democracy and a crisis of the sovereignty of the state. In this book the world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and fellow traveller Carlo Bordoni explore the social and political dimensions of the current crisis. While this crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the turmoil following the financial crisis of 2007-8, Bauman and Bordoni argue that the crisis facing Western societies is rooted in a much more profound series of transformations that stretch back further in time and are producing long-lasting effects. This highly original analysis of our current predicament by two of the world’s leading social thinkers will be of interest to a wide readership.