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

The framing strategies used by political actors to redirect blame for critical incidents that become highly politicized are examined. Military actions involving the failure of the Swedish Navy's submarine detection system in 1994 & the Dutch military's inability to prevent the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims near the Srebrenica region in 1995 are analyzed to determine which strategies European political actors used to deflect accountability for these incidents. Informed by crisis management theory, the extent to which these events were portrayed as violations of core values, products of endemic problems, or results of poor decision making by networks or certain powerful individuals is determined. A framework using multiple decision trees is subsequently presented to illustrate the various paths available to political actors who attempt to redirect blame for politicized incidents. Future research is urged to perform additional studies to demonstrate the strength of connection between political framing & accountability processes. 1 Figure. J. W. Parker

AbstractThis article aims to enhance understanding of selective politicization processes in policy failures and examine the attempts of policy-makers to use framing strategies to allocate blame. The policy response to alleged submarine intrusions in Sweden and Dutch military involvement in the fall of Srebrenica are the two case-studies used in this article. These cases will be analysed using three perspectives derived from the literature on framing: depicting events as violations of core public values; depicting events as operational incidents or as symptoms of endemic problems; allocating accountability and blame for the occurrence and/or 'mismanagement' of crisis. Finally, we present a conceptual framework of the different shapes that political blaming can take when certain framing strategies are adopted.

This survey of the literature on crises and disasters reveals that crisis and disaster scholars remain focused on 'classic' natural disaster types and on our ability to prepare and respond to the threat they pose. The prevalence of natural disasters as a crisis type and the dominance of preparedness as a crisis theme indicates that the literature remains firmly linked to the world of practice, examining how best practices may be shared to prepare for future incidents. Yet interestingly, the three journals studied demonstrate modest interest in a number of issues that are only likely to increase in the coming years, all of which relate directly to an increasingly interconnected world. Most notably, the lack of attention on system interconnectedness or on advances in communication and cyber dependence (despite the rise of social media and internet use) is a surprising result, given how such systems and methods of communication are becoming so integrated into daily life. Such studies could help scholars and policymakers understand the unexpected turns crises can take and provide practitioners with a range of tools when preparing for or handling future crises.

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.