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"Accountability and Blame Avoidance After Crises" published on by Oxford University Press.

AbstractThe field of crisis and disaster studies has proliferated over the past two decades. Attention is bound to grow further as the world negotiates the prolonged challenges of the Covid‐19 pandemic. In this review, we provide an overview of the main foci, methods, and research designs employed in the crisis and disaster research fields in the period of 2001–2020. The review documents that the focus and methods used have not changed much over time. Single case studies and exploratory research prevail, the focus has shifted from preparedness to response, and methodological diversity is limited, but gradually increasing. Future challenges are to understand transboundary crisis management and creeping crises. Advancing the field calls for our community to put more effort in drawing lessons beyond the single case to uncover comparable and universal patterns that connect between events or phases, which help to theorize the multifaceted nature of crisis and disaster management.

AbstractTransboundary crises, incidents and disasters, such as chemical spills, airplane crashes and critical infrastructure breakdowns, involving multiple levels and domains of governance pose a particular set of challenges. These challenges also pertain to the investigation and learning phase of a crisis. We study a typical transboundary case: the crash of a Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), with 298 people on board from a variety of nationalities but the majority from the Netherlands, that crashed in Ukraine in a conflict zone near the Russian border. The MH17 case contains valuable lessons on transboundary disaster investigations. The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) took the lead of the international independent investigation into the causes of the crash. With an international group of stakeholders, the DSB investigated a crash that resulted from a bilateral conflict, requiring the support from Ukraine's powerful neighbour Russia that meanwhile stood accused of withholding evidence and supporting Ukrainian separatists. Retrieving evidence and researching the causality of the crash was no easy task. If countries wish to follow their ambition to learn from accidents in order to "prevent the past repeated," they may more often need to investigate such transboundary cases. This case study probes into how challenges that are typical to transboundary crises affected the accident investigation into the MH17 disaster. We search for lessons on transboundary accident investigation that transcend the boundaries of this single case. Such lessons may prove invaluable for learning from future accidents.

AbstractTransboundary crises, incidents, and disasters, such as chemical spills, airplane crashes, and critical infrastructure breakdowns, involving multiple levels and domains of governance pose a particular set of challenges (Ansell et al, 2010; Boin, 2019; Kuipers & Boin, 2015). These challenges also pertain to the investigation and learning phase of a crisis. We study a typical transboundary case: the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), with 298 people on board from a variety of nationalities but the majority from the Netherlands, that crashed in Ukraine in a conflict zone near the Russian border. The MH17 case contains valuable lessons on transboundary disaster investigations. The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) took the lead of the international independent investigation into the causes of the crash. With an international group of stakeholders, the DSB investigated a crash that resulted from a bilateral conflict, requiring the support from Ukraine's powerful neighbour Russia that meanwhile stood accused of withholding evidence and supporting Ukrainian separatists. Retrieving evidence and researching the causality of the crash was no easy task. If countries wish to follow their ambition to learn from accidents in order to "prevent the past repeated," they may more often need to investigate such transboundary cases. This case study probes into how challenges that are typical to transboundary crises affected the accident investigation into the MH17 disaster. We search for lessons on transboundary accident investigation that transcend the boundaries of this single case. Such lessons may prove invaluable for learning from future accidents.

This review aims to map the literature on crisis and disasters by means of a machine‐read assessment of the scholarly debate in these domains. The software analyzed abstracts of over 1,000 articles of four related crisis and disaster journals—to find out how the software categorizes their content in a set of topics, what the dominant topics of discussion are, how the topics are distributed over the journals, and what profiles the journals de facto have. The review reflects on the advantages and the limits of machine‐read classification and analysis vis‐à‐vis the manual approach. The conclusion offers an agenda for further research and debate.

Terrorism only poses a small risk to people but tends to be a major source of public fear. Through fear, terrorism has far-reaching implications for public governance. In this paper we look at trust in government as a potential mitigating factor of fear of terrorism. We discern between calculative trust, based on analytical assessment of previous and expected future actions, and relational trust, based on emotions and perceived value similarity with government. We find that relational trust decreases fear of terrorism. A similar but less robust negative relationship exists between calculative trust and fear. However, our regression analyses suggest that relational trust, in fact, may mediate the relationship between calculative trust and fear of terrorism. In other words, the more citizens think government is able to prevent terrorist attacks and feel that authorities are doing enough, the more they, in turn, feel that their government shares their values, and the less fearful they are of future terrorist attacks.