Crisis Management Europe: An Integrated Regional Research and Training Program

Abstract

This article describes the Crisis Management~CM! Europe program that seeks to produce scientific knowledge that can be used also in order to train practitioners to cope more effectively with national and regional crises. Initiated in 1997 with a focus on the Baltic Sea area, the program has recently been broadened to cover all of Europe. The program documents and analyzes specific cases of national and regional crises. It relies upon a contextually grounded process tracing strategy for case reconstruction and dissection derived from relevant literatures in political science, psychology, and organizational sociology. To facilitate comparison and cumulation of case findings, a systematic four-step research procedure has been developed. Ten analytical themes of potential interest to both scholars and practitioners are identified as targets for structured focused comparison. More than a hundred cases have been studied by researchers working in research teams based in many European countries. Training tools have been successfully deployed in training practitioners from more than a dozen countries. An ongoing dialogue between academics and practitioners from across the Continent promises to make a contribution toward bridging the gap between these two different communities.The governments of today's Europe operate in domestic and international political settings which have been profoundly altered by the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the significant steps taken in the last decade toward European integration. Many of these changes have been positive and perceptions of military threat have lessened in many-but not all-corners of the Continent. Political and economic liberalization and democratization have changed the face of Europe and Churchill's iron curtain is no more. As old threats have receded, new ones linked to transnational social, economic, political, ecological, and technological processes have emerged and joined old scourges in wreaking Authors' note: The authors wish to thank Paul 't Hart, the editors of ISP, and the anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to our many CM Europe collaborators for countless inspiring conversations. We wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Swedish Agency for Civil Emergency Planning and the Swedish National Defence College, which have greatly facilitated our regional research and training activities.International Studies Perspectives~2002! 3, 71-88.

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