Lessons of October: historians, political scientists, policy-makers and the Cuban missile crisis

Scott, Len; Smith, Steve

doi:10.2307/2624552

Cited by 18 publications

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“…Lebow and Stein (1994) make a convincing case that the reinforcement of the deterrence logic as lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis may have had destabilising effects for the Cold War more broadly. The problems with the deterrence universal even during the Cuban Missile Crisis became all too obvious after the end of the Cold War when scholars and practitioners alike started to revisit the Cuban Missile Crisis (Allyn et al, 1989;Blight and Welch, 1989;Lebow and Stein, 1994;Scott and Smith, 1994;Allison and Zelikow, 1999;Blight and Lang, 2005;Grattan, 2006), with McNamara (1986 playing an important role in questioning the received wisdom.…”

Section: Studying Political Judgement: a Map For Empirical Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theagent'slogics of action: defining and mapping political judgement

Kornprobst

2011

Int Theory

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How do individual actors figure out what to do? This article advocates a departure from carving up research on this key question about political agency into narrow scholarly categories. Such categories, especially what has to become framed as incompatible logics of action in International Relations Theory, may make for neat and tidy scholarly boxes. But they miss the winding roads through which actors come to embark on a course of action. In order to overcome this shortcoming, I start with uncovering an important clue on which authors adhering to different logics of action converge; political agency has a lot to do with making judgements. I proceed with conceptualizing political judgement broadly in terms of subsuming particulars and universals. I follow-up with outlining a map for empirical research on judgement that helps us follow the actors in how they figure out what to do (the agent's logics of action) rather than superimposing our narrow scholarly categories on their reasoning (a scholarly logic of action). Scrutinizing the usefulness of this map, finally, I analyse McNamara's exercise of political agency during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The findings underline my overall argument: the inclusive conceptualization of political judgement, coupled with the balance of theoretical and empirical inquiry that the research map facilitates, improves on our understandings of how actors figure out what to do.

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Section: Studying Political Judgement: a Map For Empirical Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theagent'slogics of action: defining and mapping political judgement

Kornprobst

2011

Int Theory

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“…With few exceptions, the accounts of world politics that serve as the ground for IR theory‐building and empirical analysis are Eurocentric, taking the perspective of the most powerful states in the international system (e.g., Krishna 2001; Suzuki 2005). In the analysis of October 1962, “the very definition of the crisis and what exactly its main events were has been dictated by the American version of what happened” (Scott and Smith 1994, 664). We treat Cuba’s invisibility—not unusual in itself—as a puzzle to be explained.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…5 5 For the impact of adding Cuba to decision‐making models, see Allyn, Blight, and Welch (1989/90), Brenner (1990), Domínguez (2000), Scott and Smith (1994). On different accounts of world history and decision‐making, compare, for example, Allison (1971) and Morley (1987). …”

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confidence: 99%

Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis

Laffey

Weldes

2008

International Studies Quarterly

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Postcolonial scholars show how knowledge practices participate in the production and reproduction of international hierarchy. A common effect of such practices is to marginalize Third World and other subaltern points of view. For three decades, analysis of the Cuban missile crisis was dominated by a discursive framing produced in the ExComm, one in which Cuba was invisible. The effort to produce a critical oral history enabled Cuban voices-long excluded from interpretive debates about the events of October 1962-to challenge the myth of the crisis as a superpower affair. Despite the oral history project's postcolonial intervention, however, and greater attention to Cuba's role in the crisis, this framing persists and is reproduced in the micro-practices of scholarship. Decolonizing the crisis, and by extension the discipline itself, is not easy to do.

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Cuba

McPherson¹

2014

A Companion to John F. Kennedy

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Lessons of October: historians, political scientists, policy-makers and the Cuban missile crisis

Cited by 18 publications

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Theagent'slogics of action: defining and mapping political judgement

Theagent'slogics of action: defining and mapping political judgement

Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis

Cuba

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