A newly updated edition of a concise and evidence-based approach to strategic crisis leadership.

Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how leaders deal with the strategic challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the errors they make, the pitfalls they need to avoid, and the paths away from crisis they may pursue. This book is grounded in over a decade of collaborative, cross-national research, and offers an invaluable multidisciplinary perspective. This is an original and important contribution by experts in public policy and international security.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Arial} Crisis management has become one of the core challenges facing governments, but successful crisis response depends on effective public leadership. Building on insights from Pragmatist philosophy, this deeply nuanced book provides guidance and direction for public leaders tackling the most challenging tasks of the 21st century.

Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. In the decades between the end of the cold war and the crisis of 2014, the country suffered a large decline in agricultural and industrial production, plunging economic indicators into a sharp decline and leading to large-scale poverty and hardship. This collection by leading scholars from the region explores the various crises affecting Ukraine since independence. Valuable crisis management research is made available from both Russian and Ukrainian sources and the on-going crisis in Ukraine put in context and analysed. This accessible volume interacts with many disciplines including political science, security studies, crisis management and communication studies; and should prove useful to both students and researchers.

From floods to fires, tornadoes to terrorist attacks, governments must respond to a variety of crises and meet reasonable standards of performance. What accounts for governments’ effective responses to unfolding disasters? How should they organize and plan for significant emergencies? With fifteen adapted Kennedy School cases, students experience first-hand a series of large-scale emergencies and come away with a clear sense of the different types of disaster situations governments confront, with each type requiring different planning, resourcing, skill-building, leadership, and execution. Grappling with the details of flawed responses to the LA Riots or Hurricane Katrina, or with the success of the Incident Management System during the Pentagon fire on 9/11, students start to see the ways in which responders can improve capabilities and more adeptly navigate between technical or operational needs and political considerations.

The constant threat of crises such as disasters, riots and terrorist attacks poses a frightening challenge to Western societies and governments. While the causes and dynamics of these events have been widely studied, we know little about what happens following their containment and the restoration of stability. This volume explores 'post-crisis politics,' examining how crises give birth to longer term dynamic processes of accountability and learning which are characterised by official investigations, blame games, political manoeuvring, media scrutiny and crisis exploitation. Drawing from a wide range of contemporary crises, including Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Madrid train bombings, the Walkerton water contamination, Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia and the Boxing Day Asian tsunami, this is a ground-breaking volume which addresses the longer term impact of crisis-induced politics. Competing pressures for stability and change mean that policies, institutions and leaders may occasionally be uprooted, but often survive largely intact.

This book explores the role of elected leaders in disaster management. Filling a significant gap in disaster literature, the authors take a pragmatic approach to the relationships between the public under threat, the operational response, and the interests and actions of elected officials. Key tactics are explored, from the ways operational managers strategically deal with unreasonable political demands to what disaster officials argue is the responsibility of elected officials at all levels of government – that is, to ensure vital life-saving information reaches the people who need it most. The book draws on case studies such as the mismanagement of public perceptions by President George W. Bush during Hurricane Katrina in the United States and the widely acclaimed, heartfelt messages delivered by Queensland Premier Anna Bligh during the 2010–11 South-East Queensland floods in Australia. Drawing on a series of interviews with senior disaster managers in ten countries, this book is highly relevant for students, scholars and practitioners interested in disaster communication.