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Winter 1999: Rationality And International Relations (Part I)
Kennedy, Kroutchev and the Cuba Missiles: Rational and Individual Responsibility (PDF, 71 pages, 229.9 KB) , by Jean-Yves Haine
Jean-Yves Haine has a critical reading of rational choice approaches and shows a certain number of their limits. He insists on the necessity to include the imperfect information and freedom of judgment dimensions in order to develop a historicised and contextualised approach of the decision-making. The author starts from the very complex decision-making environment, which is notably linked to radical uncertainty. By doing so he suggests putting the decision maker's freedom and responsibility at the center of his analysis, whether the decision maker is a politician or a bureaucrat. The author thus shows that being conscious of one's responsibilities and being worried for one's credibility played a crucial role in the decision-making process during the Cuba missiles crisis.
The essence of decision: the rational actor model (PDF, 71 pages, 211.3 KB) , by Graham T. Allison and Philip D. Zelikow
This article is the French translation of the Essence of Decision by Graham Allison and Philip D. Zelikow. It offers a very complete synthesis of the debates on the rational choice in International Relations. This conrtibution shows that far from leading to a unified approach, the rational choice analysis declined in various schools that all refer to different modelisations of the decision-making. Thus, classical realism, structural realism, international institutionalism, and liberalism all start from common hypothesises but conclude differently. This text also spots the light on the contributions brought by Herbert Simon's theory of limited or procedural rationality.
Are Rationalities and International Relations an Impossible Synthesis (PDF, 6 pages, 23.6 KB) , by Jean-Yves Haine
Despite the theoretical controversies that surround the rational choice approach, this vision remains at the heart of the realist school of international relations. Thus, the vision of a desincarnated State, founded on questionable hypothesises, first presided this discipline's main productions. Jean-Yves Haine presents a certain number of alternative analyses that developed and reconfigured the discipline once the limits of the rational choice had been taken into account. But while insisting on the difficulty to concile all these approaches, the author considers that all the critics of the rational choice do not entirely disqualify this approach.
How can Decisions be interpreted? (PDF, 12 pages, 40.5 KB) , by Erhard Friedberg
Ehrard Friedberg underlines the vague and sometimes arbitrary aspects of the frontiers separating the different models of decision-making developed by Allison and Zelikow. He thereby does a real second reading of this founding book, by showing that all three models are in reality complementary interpretative models, and not exclusive models. He insists on the predominance of bureaucratic phenomena and the weight of organisational contexts to show that the rational choice approach cannot be considered without taking into account the rules and conventions that structure these choices.