CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Mistakes and Failures

in International Relations

Andreas Kruck, Kai Oppermann, and Alexander Spencer

We all make mistakes. Mistakes are human. Mistakes happen not only in
our individual lives but also in national and international politics. While
mistakes have always been at the centre stage of International Relations
(IR) as a discipline implicitly, due to the fact that events attract far more
attention when they are considered to have gone wrong, the conceptual-
ization of ‘mistakes’ as an explicit analytical concept and focus so far has
been neglected. This edited volume is concerned with mistakes in differ-
ent realms of IR including foreign and security policy, international politi-
cal economy and issues of international public policy such as health and
development, environmental policy and migration. In particular, the book
and the individual chapters address the following key questions: What is a
‘mistake’ or ‘failure’, and how does one identify and research such a phe-
nomenon? Why do mistakes and failures occur? How are actors made
responsible, and what consequences do mistakes and failures entail? When
and how do actors learn from mistakes and failures?

A. Kruck (*) • A. Spencer

Institute of Social Sciences and History, Otto-von-Guericke University
Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany
K. Oppermann
Department of Politics, University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Kruck et al. (eds.), Political Mistakes and
Policy Failures in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68173-3_1
2 A. KRUCK ET AL.

In pursuit of some answers to these questions, this introductory chap-

ter first considers the concepts of ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’ in IR and other
disciplines and reflects on ontological and epistemological perspectives on
how to study mistakes and failures. The second part turns to the question
of what causes mistakes and failures and considers a range of theories from
different fields for explaining and understanding mistakes and failures.
Part three examines the notion of responsibility attribution and considers
why and how actors get blamed for mistakes and failures. In these three
parts, we both summarize the state of the art on the relevant questions and
point out how the chapters in this volume add new insights and perspec-
tives. Part four offers an overview of the chapters which are to follow and
part five elaborates on the lessons learnt from these insights on mistakes
and failures in IR.

The Concepts of Mistakes and Failures and How

to Study Them

The study of situations in which something has gone wrong has, at least
implicitly, always been a part of IR. Political events and decisions usually
attract much greater scholarly attention if they are seen to be a failure than
if they are considered a success. It is of little surprise then that many of the
best-studied events are precisely those which have been linked to ‘disas-
trous’ failures or consequences. Mistakes such as the appeasement of
Hitler, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the catastrophic mismanagement of dis-
eases and pandemics (e.g. AIDS or Ebola) or the failure of banking regula-
tions in the run-up to the recent financial crisis have always preoccupied
scholars of IR. It is hardly a stretch to say that mistakes are omnipresent in
IR research and that we do research and teach our students IR by studying
mistakes. Many studies in IR, however, do not explicitly engage with or
employ concepts such as ‘mistake’ or ‘failure’ as an analytical category but
expect the consequences of the policy to be a sufficient indicator of a mis-
take or failure. Mistakes have rarely been the subject of systematic concep-
tual and comparative analysis in IR. This edited volume wants to address
this gap in the literature by analysing mistakes of different dimensions in
various issue areas.
As this volume illustrates, there is very little agreement on the defini-
tion of a political ‘mistake’ or a policy ‘failure’ and how to study such a
phenomenon. In the literature, one encounters a number of very different
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 3

concepts including ‘fiasco’, ‘catastrophe’, ‘blunder’, ‘crisis’ or ‘disaster’

denoting similar things (Dunleavy 1995; Gray 1996; Bovens and ‘t Hart
1996; King and Crewe 2013). While some try to make distinctions
between these different concepts with regard to their severity, we consider
a key difference between mistakes and failures to relate to the role of
agency. While the concept of mistakes is necessarily linked to agents or
their choices playing a substantial role in negative outcomes, the concept
of failures zooms in on the negative outcomes but is less explicit about the
role of agency. Beyond this basic distinction, the volume emphasizes the
unifying characteristics of the phenomena and considers mistakes and fail-
ures as ‘something considered to have gone wrong’.
Overall one can distinguish two different approaches to failures: an
objectivist and an intersubjective perspective. The first objectivist perspec-
tive tends to follow a foundationalist and positivist tradition that has long
been dominant in policy evaluation studies (Marsh and McConnell 2010:
567). According to this perspective, policy failures are objective facts that
can be independently identified and verified. Thus, policies count as a
failure if they fall short of certain objective criteria or benchmarks for suc-
cess (Howlett 2012: 541–542; McConnell 2010: 349–351). In the nar-
rowest sense, the classic model of policy evaluation starts out from a
policy’s official objectives and considers the policy a failure if it does not
meet these objectives (Gray 1996: 76). In a slightly broader sense, ratio-
nalist understandings of policy failure may also bring in the costs of a
policy, the damage caused by it as well as the policy’s unintended and
adverse consequences (King and Crewe 2013: 4; Dunleavy 1995: 52).
A number of scholars have here emphasized the need to examine differ-
ent levels of failure. For example, Michael Howlett (2012) developed a
typology which differentiates between the magnitude of a failure in terms
of its extent and duration and its salience in public debate with regard to
its intensity and visibility (see Fig. 1.1). Thereby he articulates four types
of failure including major failure (high in both magnitude and salience),
focused failure (low in magnitude but high in salience), diffuse failure
(high in magnitude and low in salience) and minor failure (low in magni-
tude and salience).
Allan McConnell (2016: 672–675) in contrast differentiates between
process, programme and political failure. Process failure is here u­ nderstood
as failure with regard to the government’s inability to produce the neces-
sary policy instruments or formulate desired outcomes, the illegitimacy of
the policy process, the existence of widespread opposition and inability of
4 A. KRUCK ET AL.

Fig. 1.1 Howlett’s typology of policy failure (Adapted from Howlett 2012: 544)

governments to gain support for the policy. Programme failure is charac-

terized by the failure in the implementation of policy, the inability to pro-
duce results, the damage to the intended beneficiaries of the policy, the
inability to adhere by standard policy criteria and the existence of major
opposition to the aims, values and means of implementation. Political fail-
ure is considered to be composed of reputational damage, inability to keep
politically difficult issues off the agenda, danger to the entire trajectory of
government and opposition to the government as a whole. In all these
approaches there is little critical reflection on the subjective side of the
‘failure’ label, but it is taken as a starting point for the explanations of why
policy failures occur and what conclusions can be drawn from these
explanations.
The second intersubjective perspective sees ‘failure’ not to be an inher-
ent attribute of policy but rather considers it a judgement about policy.
Here, policy outcomes do not speak for themselves but only come to be
seen as successful or unsuccessful because of the meaning imbued to them
in political discourse. Policy mistakes and failures are understood as ‘essen-
tially contested’ concepts (Gallie 1955). Since there are no fixed or com-
monly accepted criteria for the success or failure of a policy, such
judgements are always likely to be subjective and open to dispute (Bovens
and ‘t Hart 1996: 4–11). This holds no less for efforts at evaluating poli-
cies against the benchmark of officially stated objectives, which will often
be vague, diverse and conflicting and which may have been formulated
more for their strategic or symbolic functions than as a realistic guide to
policy-making: ‘The goals of policy are often not what they seem to be,
and it is a mistake to take stated purposes too literally’ (Ingram and Mann
1980: 20).
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 5

Policies that are seen as successful by some may thus well be dismissed
as failures by others. Such opposite judgements can come, for example,
from differences in the timeframes or geographical and social boundaries
of assessing the impacts of a policy as well as from cultural biases or diverg-
ing evaluations of available alternatives (Bovens and ‘t Hart 1996: 21–32;
Marsh and McConnell 2010: 575–577). They may also be driven by
uneven levels of expectation or aspiration (Levy 1994: 305). Most nota-
bly, however, the designation of (foreign) policy as success or failure is
inescapably intertwined with politics (Brändström and Kuipers 2003:
279–282; Bovens et al. 2001: 10). Policy evaluations will thus be influ-
enced by the values, identity and interests of the evaluator and may reflect
underlying power relations in the political arena or in society at large
(Ingram and Mann 1980: 12; Marsh and McConnell 2010: 566–568).
In particular, labelling a policy or decision a ‘mistake’ or ‘failure’, i.e. its
social construction, is an intensely political act (Gray 1998: 16). It makes
for a powerful semantic tool in political discourse to discredit opponents
and seek political advantage (Howlett 2012: 547). Accusations of policy
failure are likely to provoke political conflict over the interpretation of a
policy where the result depends on the extent of intersubjective agreement
in this regard, in particular among powerful political and social actors
(Boin et al. 2009: 82–85). Political discourse, in this sense, can be seen as
a struggle between competing claims which either attribute the ‘failure’
label to political decisions or reject such a label.
A number of authors have pointed out that the constitution of a policy
failure and the attributed notion of blame (see below) is down to a contest
of competing frames of interpretation (‘t Hart 1993; Brändström and
Kuipers 2003; Boin et al. 2009). As Arjen Boin and others point out in
this respect: ‘Contestants manipulate, strategize and fight to have their
frame accepted’ (Boin et al. 2009: 82). Therefore, emphasizing the socially
constructed and political nature of a ‘failure’, Bovens and ‘t Hart (1996:
15, emphasis added) consider a fiasco as ‘a negative event that is perceived
by a socially and politically significant group of people in the community
to be at least partially caused by avoidable and blameworthy failures of
public policymakers’.
Closely intertwined with the question of what constitutes a ‘failure’ is
the question about how to do research on the subject. While the objective
perspective will try and find indicators of the failure of a policy with refer-
ence to objective benchmarks of success, the intersubjective perspective
will be rather interested in how something comes to be seen as a ‘failure’
6 A. KRUCK ET AL.

regardless of whether this policy is ‘really’ a failure or not. As a result, both

will examine very different material for their research: The objective
approach will examine numbers, statistics, statements by experts/eyewit-
nesses or similar evidence of success or failure of a policy, while the inter-
pretivist will examine representations in political debates, media reporting
or similar discourses and practices.
Despite these seemingly unsurmountable ontological and epistemo-
logical differences between these two perspectives, scholars have recently
started to bring objectivist and intersubjective approaches together by
both arguing that subjective non-material aspects do play a vital role in
the labelling of events and conceding that a ‘failure’ is not totally inde-
pendent of material events as there are limits to what can be constructed
into a failure (Oppermann and Spencer 2016; Kruck 2016). Even tradi-
tionally objectivist scholars agree that the assessment of a failure is often
the result of political struggle. As Allen McConnell notes: ‘A policy fails,
even if it is successful in some minimal respects, if it does not fundamen-
tally achieve the goal that proponents set out to achieve, and opposition is
great and/or support is virtually non-existent’ (McConnell 2016: 672,
emphasis added).
Bovens and ‘t Hart (2016) explicitly focus on this interconnection
between objective and subjective characteristics of a failure or what they
refer to as reputational or performance evaluation and hold that the over-
lap between intersubjective and objective elements can tell us something
about the severity or kind of failure we are encountering. They hold that
if both the political (subjective) and programmatic (objective) assessments
are negative, we are able to talk about a major failure or ‘fiasco’. If the
subjective interpretation is negative and the objective positive (or at least
not negative), we could consider this a ‘tragedy’. Vice versa, if the subjec-
tive interpretation is positive and the objective assessment negative, they
consider this to be a ‘farce’. Only if both the subjective and the objective
evaluations are positive, can we speak of a success (see Fig. 1.2).
These objectivist, intersubjective and middle-ground perspectives are
all also visible in this edited volume. A number of chapters take an objec-
tivist perspective and analyse how their empirical event can be objectively
considered a mistake or a failure (Lankester, Chap. 11, this volume;
Kamradt-Scott, Chap. 9, this volume). In this vein, the chapter by Tim
Heinkelmann-Wild, Berthold Rittberger and Bernhard Zangl (Chap. 8,
this volume) refers to policy performance as an indicator for failures in
the realm of EU financial policy. Similarly, the chapter by Antto Vihma
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 7

Fig. 1.2 Bovens’ and ‘t

Hart’s logics of evaluation
(Adapted from Bovens
and ‘t Hard 2016: 4)

(Chap. 12, this volume) also points to the modest results of the
Copenhagen climate conference as an indicator for failure.
The volume however also includes chapters which take a middle-ground
position: These chapters point to objective negative consequences of a
policy or a decision but at the same time hold that a failure or a mistake is
not a natural fact but something which is widely seen to have gone wrong
and very much depends on the audience, readers or those being addressed
by a policy (Kruck, Chap. 6, this volume; Fisher, Chap. 10, this volume).
For example, Michael Legrand and Michael Lister (Chap. 2, this volume)
argue that (objective) genuine errors and misapplications of counter-­
terrorism policy can, due to the precautionary logic of counter-terrorism,
lead to unintended consequences where a ‘suspect community’ subjec-
tively perceives the occasional objective errors as representative of how
things ‘really’ are.
Finally, on a more intersubjective side, a number of chapters clearly
focus on the representation and construction of ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’.
For example, Mischa Hansel, Henrike Viehrig and Danae Ankel (Chap. 4,
this volume) examine how foreign policy failures are portrayed in German
media reporting and who actively participates in this framing regardless of
whether the event was ‘truly’ a failure or not. James Hampshire (Chap. 13,
this volume) shows that mistakes are greatly shaped by indeterminacy and
contingency with regard to the criteria by which a policy is evaluated, the
intentions of the policy-makers and the timeframe in which the ‘negative’
consequences are evaluated. This indeterminacy makes it very hard to
objectively categorize a policy as failure. Also along this intersubjective line,
Kai Oppermann and Alexander Spencer (Chap. 3, this volume) argue that
the social construction of failure occurs through the clash of competing
8 A. KRUCK ET AL.

claims in political discourse, and Oliver Daddow (Chap. 5, this volume)

holds that failure is down to a hegemonic interpretation of a policy which
flows from narrative contestation. Thus, the chapters in this volume repre-
sent a broad range of conceptual perspectives on the study of mistakes and
failures in IR, underlining the analytical usefulness of both objectivist and
intersubjective approaches while also pointing to opportunities to catch the
middle ground between these opposite perspectives.

Why Things Go Wrong: The Causes of Mistakes

and Failures

Understanding why mistakes happen or why some policies or decisions

come to be seen as mistakes will be of interest to many concerned with the
topic of mistakes in IR. For one thing, knowledge about the causes of
mistakes is intrinsically linked to any attempts at learning from mistakes in
order to avoid them in the future. Similarly, such knowledge is critical for
attributing responsibility for mistakes and thus for holding political leaders
to account. While the interest in the causes of mistakes cuts across the
divide between objectivist and intersubjective approaches to studying mis-
takes, scholarship in the two traditions explores this question from differ-
ent angles. From an objectivist perspective, the issue at stake is quite
straightforward: ‘Why have things gone wrong?’ Adopting an intersubjec-
tive perspective on mistakes, to the contrary, suggests a rather different
take on the question: ‘How was it possible that things have come to be
seen as having gone wrong?’
Beginning with the objectivist angle on the question, the theoretical
toolbox in IR and Foreign Policy Analysis explicitly or implicitly points
towards a broad and diverse range of possible causes of mistakes in
IR. These causes relate to four different levels of analysis: individual
decision-­makers, the decision-making process, domestic politics and the
structure of the international system.
On the individual level of analysis, a particularly rich history of schol-
arship has put mistakes in IR down to cognitive biases and limitations of
decision-makers. Perhaps the foremost example of such studies in IR is
Robert Jervis’ (1976) work on ‘misperceptions’. Here, mistakes happen
because decision-makers misperceive and misrepresent the intentions
and behaviour of other actors in the international arena. For example,
such misconceptions arise because decision-makers interpret incoming
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 9

information about international events through the filter of pre-existing

beliefs and try to maintain consistency between new information and
their established views (Jervis 1968). Actors in IR (and elsewhere) are
therefore primed to see what they expect to see. Decision-makers who
hold an image of another country as an ‘enemy’ will likely interpret the
actions of that country as hostile or deceitful and respond accordingly
even if these actions were intended to be friendly and sincere (Herrmann
and Fischerkeller 1995). Along similar lines, the over- and underestima-
tion of hostility have been linked to the outbreak of international wars,
including World Wars I and II (Jervis 1988). Attribution theory, in turn,
points to a general tendency of decision-makers to ascribe hostile or
harmful behaviour of others to their motives and personal characteristics
while downplaying the role of situational factors. In contrast, decision-
makers are much more ready to excuse their own behaviour in terms of
external constraints and (often wrongly) expect others to recognize these
constraints as well. It is easy to see how this ‘fundamental attribution
error’ (Gawronsky 2007) can lead to misjudgements in IR.
Closely related, research in cognitive and social psychology has explored
a range of decision-making heuristics which individual decision-makers
employ to reduce uncertainty but which also imply certain biases that
might result in mistakes. For example, decision-makers are prone to assess
the likelihood of an event in terms of how easily they can retrieve examples
of the same type of event from memory (‘availability heuristic’). However,
this will often not reflect the true probability of the event but rather the
familiarity of the decision-maker with this class of event or the salience of
previous examples of such events in their minds (Tversky and Kahneman
1982: 11–14). Similarly, decision-makers may rely on particular historical
analogies to make sense of their decision context not so much because the
analogies resemble that decision context but more because they are top of
their heads (Oppermann and Spencer 2013). Prospect theory, in turn,
suggests that mistakes in IR may be caused by the tendency of decision-­
makers to give excessive weight to (and prepare for) events with very low
probabilities and that they are overly risk acceptant when they seek to
recoup losses but unduly risk averse when realizing gains (Kahneman and
Tversky 1979).
Another strand of research on the individual level of analysis traces mis-
takes less to the cognitive limitations and strategies of decision-makers but
foregrounds the role of their emotions. Specifically, the argument is that
emotions such as anger, fear, happiness, sadness, stress or disgust affect
10 A. KRUCK ET AL.

how decision-makers process information and make judgements

(McDermott 2017). Emotions thus shape how decision-makers respond
to their environment and might trigger behaviour that, from an objectivist
perspective, fails to realize their goals or interests. Along similar lines, mis-
takes might happen because decision-makers are predisposed to avoid or
ignore value trade-offs in their decisions in order to shield themselves
against the emotional strain which such trade-offs entail (Jervis 1986:
333–334).
On the level of the decision-making process, the causes of mistakes
have mainly been put down to either social-psychological dynamics in
small decision-making groups or the rigidities of organizational routines.
As for the former, the most prominent example, by far, is Irving Janis’
(1982) work on ‘groupthink’. This concept describes a mode of decision-­
making in cohesive groups of decision-makers that prioritizes concurrence
seeking and consensus within the group over a critical and open debate
about the promise and drawbacks of different options. The tendency for
groupthink is facilitated by a range of structural and situational context
factors, such as the insulation of the group, a lack of impartial leadership,
high stress as well as low self-esteem of group members, for example, as a
consequence of previous failures. The symptoms of groupthink involve an
overestimation of the group, including a sense of invulnerability and moral
superiority, the closed-mindedness of group members as well as self-­
censorship. These symptoms, in turn, result in defective decision-making
which facilitates mistakes and failures. Prominent examples of foreign pol-
icy failures which have been linked to groupthink mainly include cases in
US foreign policy, such as the lack of preparation for a Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor in World War II, the escalation of the Korean War, the
attempted ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion of Cuba in 1961, the Vietnam War (Janis
1982) as well as the abortive mission to rescue US hostages in Iran in
1980 (Smith 1985) and the 2003 Iraq War (Badie 2010). However, oth-
ers have rejected the notion of an intrinsic causal relationship between
groupthink and foreign policy failures and argued that some symptoms of
groupthink may actually lead to successful foreign policies, for example, in
the case of the US-led liberation of Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion in 1991
(Yetiv 2003).
While groupthink traces mistakes in IR to pathologies in small-group
decision-making, the organizational process approach starts out from the
policy-making process inside government bureaucracies (Allison and
Zelikow 1999). Specifically, the approach suggests that decision-making
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 11

in government departments is shaped by relatively stable and rigid rou-

tines, so-called standard operating procedures (SOPs). These SOPs are
central to how organizations operate and are functional in reducing the
complexity of decision-making. In particular, they enable boundedly ratio-
nal decision-makers to come up with consistent responses to recurring
types of decision problems (Simon 1957; Cyert and March 1963). Such
organizational routines are therefore not only unavoidable in government
policy-making; in the overwhelming majority of cases they also represent
an efficient use of cognitive and bureaucratic resources and result in ‘good
enough’ decisions. In exceptional cases, however, these same routines can
have unintended consequences and thus cause mistakes and failures in
IR. This is mainly because of the inflexibility of organizational routines,
their lack of responsiveness to the particularities of specific cases and their
difficulty in accounting for interdependencies between different decisions.
Cases in point relate to military planning in the run-up to World War I
(Levy 1986) and naval strategies between the World Wars (Steinbruner
1974: 79–80), the US system of defence readiness levels in the wake of
Pearl Harbor (Wohlstetter 1962: 394–395) and during the Yom Kippur
War (Sagan 1985: 122–128) as well as a number of ‘near misses’ during
the Cuban Missile Crisis (Allison and Zelikow 1999: 208–217; Sagan
1985: 118–121).
Moving on to the level of domestic politics, objectivist approaches trace
mistakes in IR either to domestic constraints on decision-makers that pre-
vent them from pursuing successful policies or on domestically driven
interests of decision-makers. The focus on domestic constraints is particu-
larly evident in works on two-level games (Putnam 1988) in which the key
benchmark for success or failure becomes whether or not decision-makers
are able to devise policies on the international level that do not flounder
over obstacles in the domestic arena. From this perspective, mistakes hap-
pen when decision-makers are unable to implement domestically what
they have agreed to internationally, either because they have misjudged
their domestic constraints or because these constraints have changed. A
similar argument follows from veto player approaches which trace the
­failure of decision-makers to implement their preferred policies to the
number and preferences of domestic veto players (Tsebelis 2002).
Prominent examples for such ‘involuntary defections’ (Iida 1996) in IR
are widespread, including the failures of US President Woodrow Wilson to
secure Senate support for the League of Nations in 1920 and of President
Bill Clinton to achieve domestic ratification of the Comprehensive Test
12 A. KRUCK ET AL.

Ban Treaty in 1999. European integration is also beset with these kinds of
mistakes, from the rejection by the French National Assembly of the
European Defence Community in 1954 to the unsuccessful referendums
on the European Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands in
2005 and the failure of the UK government of Prime Minister David
Cameron to win public support for its ‘remain’ position in the 2016
British EU membership referendum.
A different argument on the level of domestic politics starts out not
from the constraints of decision-makers but rather zooms in on how their
domestic interests drive them towards making mistakes. The classic exam-
ple here is Graham Allison’s (1971) bureaucratic politics model. From this
perspective, government decision-makers are motivated primarily by
securing and expanding their bureaucratic interests, in particular their
budget and turf. Foreign policy thus emerges as the result of bureaucratic
struggles inside the government, rather than as an attempt to find the best
possible answer to foreign policy problems. Mistakes in IR that have been
explained along these lines include the abortive mission to rescue the
American hostages in Iran in 1980 (Smith 1984) and the US decision to
invade Iraq in 2003 (Smith 2008).
On the highest level of analysis, in turn, objectivist studies of the causes
of mistakes in IR may point to the structure of the international system.
The prime exhibit for this line of argument comes from the neorealist
school of thought for which a state’s foreign policy is driven by its relative
power position in the international system (Elman 1996). Specifically, the
international power position of states implies a set of systemic imperatives
and opportunities to which they respond in order to secure their survival.
Mistakes, however, can happen if the incentives and pressures from the
international system are complex, ambiguous or in flux. For example,
some neorealists maintain that multipolar systems are more war prone
than bipolar systems, partly because there is less clarity about threats and
more scope for miscalculations. Also, significant changes in the balance of
power can make states misread structural incentives from the international
system and lead to conflict and war (see Mearsheimer 2007: 78–82).
Along these lines, Robert Jervis (1994) has suggested that the post-Cold
War international system has become structurally more complex, making
mistakes in IR increasingly likely.
In contrast to explanations of the causes of mistakes and failures in IR
that take an objectivist viewpoint, looking at the topic from an intersub-
jective angle changes the perspective entirely. Mistakes and failures are no
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 13

longer seen as objectively given but rather as socially constructed in politi-

cal discourse. It follows that studying the ‘causes’ of mistakes turns into
questions about how social constructions of mistakes in IR become pos-
sible and what facilitates or hinders such constructions. These questions
can be addressed on three levels of analysis: the authors of ‘mistake claims’
in political discourse; the content of the discourse itself; and the audience
of the discourse. From all three perspectives, the social construction of
policies, actions and decisions as mistakes is facilitated by ‘unsettled’ dis-
cursive contexts, in which no interpretation of these policies, actions and
decisions has attained dominance and in which their meaning remains
contested (Krebs 2015a: 32–36). Since claims of mistakes and failures in
such contexts will likely meet with counterclaims rejecting allegations of
mistakes and failures, the critical issue is which attempt at meaning giving
gains the upper hand in political discourse.
On the level of an actor-centred and resource-based understanding of
discursive power, the resonance and reception of claims of mistakes and
failures depends on the power and standing of the authors of such claims.
Specifically, social constructions of mistakes in IR will more likely gain
traction if they can rely on the judgements and interpretations of actors
who have the capability to shape public and media discourse. This in turn
is conditional on a range of immaterial and material resources, including
the authority, personal credibility and reliability of the speakers, as well as
their expertise, rhetorical skills and access to the media and public rela-
tions budgets (Aronczyk 2008; Hülsse 2009). Similarly, claims of mistakes
and failures are more likely to become dominant in political discourse, if
actors who seek to reject such claims lack some or all of these resources. As
a case in point, the interpretation of Germany’s abstention in the UN
Security Council on the 2011 military intervention in Libya as a major
diplomatic mistake initially resonated strongly in political discourse, partly
because the main actor who stood against a broad coalition of highly
respected German and international voices and who tried to counter such
an interpretation, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, was
widely regarded as a weak and incompetent foreign minister who lacked in
political capital and authority (Oppermann and Spencer 2016).
As for the level of the content of political discourse, the attention shifts
to the plausibility and persuasiveness of ‘mistake claims’. Here, the scholar-
ship on policy failures in public policy points to a range of factors which
make assertions of mistakes in IR more or less convincing. For example,
social constructions of mistakes critically depend on the argument that
14 A. KRUCK ET AL.

there would have been (better) alternatives. If this case cannot be made,
mistakes look as if they had been unavoidable. Without an element of choice
and agency, ‘things that have gone wrong’ will likely be put down to ‘fate’
and cannot be convincingly construed as a mistake (Ingram and Mann
1980: 14). Similarly, arguments about mistakes and failures should be more
powerful in political discourse if they can point to warnings that have been
ignored. This suggests that a failure was foreseeable which makes it more
difficult to invoke ‘misfortune’ or an erratic turn of events (Bovens and ‘t
Hart 1996: 73–92). Moreover, the resonance of ‘mistake claims’ tends to
be stronger if they can refer back to stated objectives of a policy and make a
plausible case that the policy has fallen short of these objectives or led to
unintended (and undesired) consequences (Dunleavy 1995: 52; Howlett
2012: 541–542). The ability to support allegations of mistakes with histori-
cal analogies (Khong 1992) or metaphors (Oppermann and Spencer 2013)
can also contribute to the plausibility of such allegations. Finally, the social
construction of mistakes is inextricably linked to the allocation of blame and
responsibility (see below). Such constructions are not usually successful, if
mistakes and failures cannot be causally linked in political discourse to the
actions or inactions of responsible agents (Gray 1998: 8–9).
On the level of the audience of political discourse, the social construc-
tion of mistakes and failures may be helped or hindered by pre-existing
intersubjective understandings (Van Ham 2002: 262). Such predisposi-
tions within the audience, for example, regarding the appropriate stan-
dards for success and failure in politics or the trustworthiness and
responsibility of political elites, define the boundaries of what can legiti-
mately and successfully be portrayed as mistakes in political discourse
(Krebs 2015b: 813). In other words, ‘mistake claims’ must have ‘verisi-
militude’ in light of the intersubjective understandings in the audience of
what counts as mistakes and they must fit into the canonicity of culturally
embedded expectations in this regard in order to resonate.
If anything, this overview of the very broad array of different perspec-
tives on what causes mistakes in IR and on what facilitates the social con-
struction of such mistakes serves to indicate how central these questions
are for scholarship on mistakes in politics. It is little surprise, therefore,
that many chapters in this volume also implicitly or explicitly speak to the
‘causes’ of the mistakes under study.
On the ‘objectivist’ side of the debate, a number of chapters zoom in on
the decision-making process. Adam Kamradt-Scott’s (Chap. 9, this vol-
ume) account of the mistakes of the WHO in dealing with the 2009 ‘Swine
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 15

Flu’ pandemic and the 2014 Ebola outbreak, for example, links the failings
of the organization to deficiencies in the management and bureaucratic
procedures of the WHO secretariat, including poor coordination efforts,
obstructive intra-organizational dynamics and a lack of an ‘emergency cul-
ture’. Legrand and Lister (Chap. 2, this volume) in their analysis of British
counter-terrorism point to the misapplication of the precautionary princi-
ple in the making of counter-terrorism policy as a cause for mistakes. On
the same level of analysis, Vihma (Chap. 12, this volume) traces the failure
of the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference partly to procedural mistakes
of the Danish Presidency, in particular, its inability or unwillingness to
provide strategic leadership. In addition, the chapter shows how factors on
the international level of analysis have also contributed to the failure of the
conference, in particular the emergence of China as a key player in climate
negotiations and the failure of the US and the EU to try to accommodate
China’s more powerful and assertive position. Tim Lankester (Chap. 11,
this volume), in turn, sees the root causes for the failure of the Pergau
Dam project, a controversial UK foreign aid project in Malaysia, on the
level of British domestic politics. Despite warnings from civil servants that
the programme represented a poor use of development aid, the British
government went ahead with the project for political reasons and as a quid
pro quo for a major arms deal with Malaysia. The result was not only the
waste of development money but also significant damage to the reputation
of UK development policy and the British government.
From the perspective of an ‘intersubjective’ understanding of mistakes,
Oppermann and Spencer (Chap. 3, this volume) argue that the social con-
struction of mistakes proceeds through narratives. In particular, they point
towards certain discursive elements, i.e. setting, characterization and
emplotment, which are essential to ‘narratives of failure’ and thus to the
construction of mistakes in political discourse. Hansel, Viehrig and Ankel
(Chap. 4, this volume), moreover, focus on the role of media frames in
constructing German foreign policy mistakes and suggest that these frames
are most powerful in political discourse when they suggest interpretations
of particular decisions as violations of salient norms in German foreign
policy. Hampshire’s chapter (Chap. 13, this volume) on British immigra-
tion policy, finally, foregrounds the temporality of social constructions of
mistakes. In other words, the chapter reminds us that judgements about
policies will often shift over time and depend on the time horizon of the
observer. In consequence, answers to the question of how policies can be
constructed into mistakes are time sensitive as well.
16 A. KRUCK ET AL.

Failures, Mistakes and the Attribution

of Responsibility

Whenever things go wrong, the question of who is to blame is usually

quick to pop up. The realm of IR is no exception in this regard. If any-
thing, politics, including international politics, is particularly prone to
‘blame games’ after mistakes and failures. Besides those who suffer from
the harmful consequences of a policy failure, a whole range of actors—
including various critics, rivals or foes of the alleged ‘perpetrator’—can be
expected to denounce policy-makers for their (perceived) mistakes and
failures. At the same time, policy-makers, who are sensitive to the political
costs of publicized mistaken decisions and failing measures, face strong
incentives to evade or shift responsibility for mistakes and failures (Gerhards
et al. 2013; Hood 2002, 2011; Rittberger et al. 2017; Weaver 1986).
Thus, the questions of how responsibility for mistakes and failures is
attributed and how we can explain such responsibility attributions have
traditionally preoccupied researchers of public policy and have also been
picked up by IR scholars. Mirroring different objectivist and intersubjec-
tive understandings of mistakes and failures (see above), some perspectives
emphasize how objective properties of mistakes, of their perpetrators or of
the political context shape the attribution of responsibility, whereas others
highlight discursive struggles as well as the role of interpretation and con-
testation in the construction of mistakes and those seen as responsible for
them.
From an objectivist perspective, first of all, the avoidability and severity
of a mistake or failure are key determinants for the attribution of blame
(Howlett 2012). As we have highlighted in our above discussion of
­subjective approaches to the ‘causes’ of mistakes, social constructions of
mistakes will likely fail if alternatives to the taken actions (are considered
to) have been absent. By implication, policy-makers will hardly be held
responsible for political developments that took a bad, possibly even disas-
trous turn but were beyond their reasonable control. By contrast, if a
mistake was foreseeable, for example, because it went against the advice of
relevant observers or participants of decision-making (Tuchman 1984: 5),
not only successful failure constructions (see above) but also ex-post attri-
bution of responsibility for the failing policy and its consequences to a
particular actor are likely. Also, more severe, that is, more harmful, failures
are expected to trigger more intense blame games than minor ones, espe-
cially when they affect powerful constituencies.
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 17

Moreover, a number of authors have sought to identify particular attri-

butes of policy-makers that render them prone to be blamed for mistakes
and failures (Rudolph 2003; Malhotra and Kuo 2008; Marsh and Tilley
2010; Tilley and Hobolt 2011; Hobolt and Tilley 2014). Besides playing
a leading role in the making of the relevant decision(s) leading to policy
failure (Hill 2003: 56–62), inexperience, weakness, dishonesty or arro-
gance as well as the pursuit of personal or domestic political motives for
foreign policy decisions may make policy-makers particularly vulnerable
for attributions of responsibility and blame. Governments or other actors
that were considered weak or unreliable even prior to the mistake will have
a particularly hard time to deflect responsibility (Bovens et al. 1998: 199;
Dunleavy 1995: 61–4).
Another strand of objectivist research focuses on the importance of the
institutional context for responsibility attributions (Powell and Whitten
1993; Anderson 2000; Rudolph 2003; Gerhards et al. 2013). As
Heinkelmann-Wild, Rittberger and Zangl (Chap. 8, this volume) elabo-
rate in more detail in their contribution to this volume, some studies find
that responsibility ‘travels’ with policy-making authority (Gailey 2013;
Gailey and Lee 2005; Hamilton 1986). Those actors who have the
decision-­making authority will also be held responsible for mistakes that
occur under their authority. Thus, there is a congruence between the for-
mal institutional distribution of authority and the distribution of blame,
not only in the national political arena but also in international contexts.
By contrast, others argue that authority structures do not shape responsi-
bility attributions in complex multi-level governance systems because due
to their institutional complexity and the general public’s lack of knowl-
edge about the actual distribution of authority in such cases, the general
public cannot attribute responsibility correctly, leading to diffuse public
responsibility attributions (Hobolt and Tilley 2014; Hobolt et al. 2013;
Powell and Whitten 1993). Thus, in international institutions that are
characterized by a complex and opaque distribution of policy-making
authority among states and between states and international bureaucra-
cies, decision-makers may find it easy to escape public responsibility and
blame for policies they actually brought about. Public responsibility attri-
butions will be untargeted and infrequent as it is hard([er] than in domes-
tic contexts) for broader public constituencies to identify and assess
international authority structures and attribute responsibility accordingly
(Hobolt and Tilley 2014: 24).
18 A. KRUCK ET AL.

Rather than locating the determinants of blame in ‘objective’ proper-

ties of mistakes, policy-makers or institutional contexts, an intersubjective,
interpretivist approach to the attribution of responsibility for political mis-
takes and policy failures emphasizes that blame games are not only highly
political but also discursive phenomena. On a fundamental level, the social
construction of a policy or decision as a mistake or failure (see above)
already implies the invocation and attribution of blame. As Boven and
‘t Hart hold: ‘to explain [a failure] is to blame’ (Boven and ‘t Hart 1996:
129). Claiming that a person’s, government’s or international organiza-
tion’s policy has failed at the same time constitutes the originator of the
failing policy as an object of blame, which in turn may undermine her/
his/its authority. The close link between labelling a policy a failure, blam-
ing its originators and reaping political benefits from succeeding in the
blame game crucially contributes to making the designation of a policy as
a failure so political, powerful and contested.
Who is blamed for a perceived mistake or failure—and how much so—
is shaped by the struggle between competing and possibly shifting frames
of interpretations (‘t Hart 1993; Brändström and Kuipers 2003; Boin
et al. 2009) and narratives (Oppermann and Spencer 2016) that seek to
make sense of actors’ responsibilities for mistakes or failures. The key
question for understanding the attribution of blame is then which frames
or narratives are intersubjectively shared and accepted by a relevant audi-
ence. While framing approaches tend to stress the role of situational
agency in mobilizing political constituencies by the skilful use of frames
and counter-frames to attribute responsibility (Boin et al. 2009), narrative
analysis highlights the cognitive and cultural embeddedness of narratives,
which limits what can be (convincingly) told in a certain cultural and dis-
cursive context about the sources and perpetrators of alleged mistakes.
This allows narrative approaches to capture the middle ground between
objectivist and radically subjectivist accounts of responsibility attributions
by highlighting certain features of narratives and their broader discursive
cultural contexts which (likely) shape the extent to which certain narra-
tives of responsibility for mistakes are intersubjectively accepted (see
Oppermann and Spencer 2016; Chap. 3, this volume). In other words,
they discursivize seemingly material, objectively given properties of mis-
takes and their perpetrators.
For example, as already indicated above, the setting of the failure narra-
tive has to allow for agency and the possibility of choice. Compared to
events which are construed as being beyond the control of decision-­makers,
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 19

the construction of the narrative setting of policy failures as avoidable

makes it easier to (successfully) represent a certain course of action as a
‘mistake’ (see the section on ‘subjective’ causes of mistakes) and more dif-
ficult for decision-makers to escape blame by invoking mitigating circum-
stances such as misfortune or structural constraints. Such narratives are
most compelling in attributing blame if they make plausible claims to the
effect that the negative implications of a policy were foreseeable and con-
trollable at the time when the policy was formulated (Bovens and ‘t Hart
1996: 73–90). Moreover, the narrative attribution of blame for policy fail-
ures can be driven by characterizations of decision-makers which cast doubt
on their competence, credibility and sincerity. Such characterizations will
likely resonate best if they can pick up on low levels of trust and reputation
and pertain to agents who command only little political capital (Boin et al.
2009: 96–100; Bovens et al. 1998: 199; Dunleavy 1995: 61–4).
Several chapters in this volume contribute to our understanding of
responsibility attributions in international politics by introducing new
perspectives and findings. Heinkelmann-Wild, Rittberger and Zangl
(Chap. 8, this volume) qualify the prevailing ‘authority’ and ‘complexity’
hypotheses in the institutionalist literature on public responsibility attri-
butions in international governance systems. They argue that in complex
policy-­making systems, which are common in international politics,
responsibility tends to be attributed to implementing actors rather than
politically superior actors. The chapter by Hansel, Viehrig and Ankel
(Chap. 4, this volume) sheds new light on the questions of who is blaming
and who gets blamed in their analysis of German media reports on foreign
policy fiascos. Perhaps most interestingly in this regard, their findings con-
tradict the widely held expectation that blaming and blame games are
ubiquitous wherever failures are discussed. Rather, they claim that a large
portion of fiasco references in the German news media does not blame
anybody at all. The chapter by Andreas Kruck (Chap. 6, this volume)
highlights that even in cases of severe and intersubjectively recognized
failures, their consequences in terms of enhanced mechanisms to hold
their originators accountable may be limited, if and when institutional
path-dependencies and the structural power of incumbent governance
actors are pronounced. Kruck’s chapter thus proposes to move beyond a
focus on the ‘objective’ severity of mistakes and/or the amount of inter-
subjective agreement on a discursively construed mistake to take seriously
the role of institutional dynamics and regulatory path-dependencies as
determinants of post-­failure accountability politics.
20 A. KRUCK ET AL.

Bart Paudyn (Chap. 7, this volume) emphasizes in his contribution

how a hegemonic discourse of risk (management) in financial governance
provides ‘immunity’ to financial markets and regulators from the conse-
quences of their highly costly mistakes. In his account, the performativity
of risk management/discourse creates and legitimizes the conditions and
subjectivities that validate its continued utility and normative authority,
shielding those responsible for mistakes from public contestation and
accountability-enhancing reform. By contrast, analysing the failing UN
climate negotiations in Copenhagen and the ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ learning
they spurred, Antto Vihma stresses on a more encouraging note that
intense blaming after mistakes and policy-makers’ desire for blame avoid-
ance may indeed have positive effects in the sense that they may drive
policy learning for strategic political motivations. Thus, while the litera-
ture on responsibility attributions in IR is still relatively young compared
to equivalent research in public policy, several chapters in this volume add
important insights and point to new avenues for research on blame and
responsibility attribution in international politics.

Structure of the Book

The chapters which follow this introduction analyse mistakes and failures
in various issue areas of international politics from a range of analytical
perspectives.
The chapters in Part I focus on mistakes and failures in Foreign and
Security Policy. Considering mistakes in counter-terrorism, Legrand and
Lister (Chap. 2, this volume) highlight how issues of uncertainty lead to
complications in assessing when ‘something goes wrong’ in
­counter-­terrorism, with uncertainty giving precautionary logics a promi-
nent place in this policy area. Distinguishing different types of mistakes in
counter-­terrorism and discussing their effects, they conclude that ‘mis-
takes are endemic to counter terrorism, and not aberrations which result
from faulty application of tools/techniques or individual errors’. The
chapter by Oppermann and Spencer (Chap. 3, this volume) retraces how
Germany’s abstention in the UN Security Council vote on Resolution
1973 in March 2011 regarding a military intervention in Libya was con-
stituted as a mistake in German media reporting. Introducing narrative
analysis as a discourse analytical method, they use this case to illustrate
how foreign policy mistakes are socially constructed in and through narra-
tives—and can thus fruitfully be studied by means of narrative analysis.
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 21

Drawing on a salience and framing analysis, Hansel, Viehrig and Ankel

(Chap. 4, this volume) study German news media coverage to point out
which foreign policy episodes came to be regarded as major failures or
fiascos in the German press. They argue that it is first of all the violation of
fundamental foreign policy norms such as the norm of multilateralism that
triggers a fiasco framing in German media coverage. Daddow (in Chap. 5,
this volume) considers New Labour’s alleged European policy failure, pre-
cipitated by an overheard phone call in the Red Lion public house in
1997. Taking an interpretivist approach and investigating criticisms and
defences of New Labour’s European policy, the chapter makes the case
that judgements about ‘success’ and ‘failure’ cannot be objectively deter-
mined but instead flow from different forms of narrative contestation
about ‘what really happened’ and why.
Part II of this volume is concerned with mistakes and failures in the
International Political Economy. Focusing on credit rating agencies
(CRAs) and private military and security companies (PMSCs), Kruck
(Chap. 6, this volume) explores when and to what extent private gover-
nance failures in finance and commercialized security have subsequently
led to enhanced legal control of these private authorities. The chapter puts
forward an analytical approach that centres on political costs/benefits and
structural path-dependencies to capture why regulation and legal over-
sight of CRAs and PMSCs have increased after their failures but are
plagued with limitations and entail unintended consequences. Chapter 7
(this volume) by Paudyn focuses on post-crisis financial market practices
and regulation, asking how it is possible that, despite its history of trigger-
ing major mistakes, so much dubious financial risk management remains
taken for granted and promoted by financial markets and regulators today.
Paudyn argues that the hegemonic discourse of risk (management) insu-
lates market subjects from serious public contestation and reform; it thus
depoliticizes the constitution of authoritative knowledge underpinning
the political economy of finance. Heinkelmann-Wild, Rittberger and
Zangl (Chap. 8, this volume) study EU financial policies to address the
question of who is held publicly responsible for mistakes in EU policies.
Their key claim is that in complex policy-making systems, responsibility
for mistakes—such as the absence of sanctions against countries that vio-
lated the Stability and Growth Pact and harmful tax competition between
EU member states—tends to be attributed to implementing actors.
The chapters in Part III on International Public Policy consider mistakes
and failures in global health, development, environment and m ­ igration.
22 A. KRUCK ET AL.

Chapter 9 (this volume) by Kamradt-Scott analyses the WHO’s han-

dling of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic and the 2014 West African
Ebola outbreak to draw out what mistakes occurred throughout these
two health crises, why they happened, the consequences arising from
them and whether the organization has learnt from these mistakes.
Kamradt-Scott argues that various structural, cultural and political fac-
tors influenced these events, in particular the WHO secretariat’s aver-
sion to offending member states and the division of the organization
into autonomous regional offices. Fisher (in Chap. 10, this volume)
examines the UK Government’s international development policies,
focusing particularly on political conditionality, to explore the difficul-
ties in assessing the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of policy initiatives in the face of
different and changing objectives for such initiatives. He argues that the
UK Government’s dominant rationale for political conditionality in giv-
ing aid has shifted from ‘instrumental’ to ‘expressive’ concerns in the
mid-2000s, raising difficult questions around viewing political condi-
tionality as a success or a failure in its current application. Chapter 11
(this volume) by Lankester on the UK’s funding of the Pergau hydro-
electric project in Malaysia in the early 1990s analyses how the wilful
misuse of aid turned into a serious foreign policy blunder. Retracing
how the decision to fund the Pergau hydroelectric scheme came about,
Lankester, who was the most senior civil servant in the Overseas
Development Administration at the time, provides an insider’s account
of how a range of non-developmental factors and conflicting policy
objectives led to deficient decision-making, creating high economic and
political costs. Vihma (in Chap. 12, this volume) considers the failure of
the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, investigating the reasons
for the failure and pointing to lessons learnt from Copenhagen. He
argues that procedural failures in the run-up to and during the meeting
as well as excessive expectations coupled with misconceptions of great
power politics were responsible for the Copenhagen failure, but at the
same time this massive failure of negotiations has spurred ‘thin’ and
‘thick’ learning on process and politics in global climate talks. Finally,
Hampshire (in Chap. 13, this volume) conducts an empirical analysis of
immigration policy mistakes in Britain to emphasize the indeterminacy
of policy mistakes. Immigration policy evaluations are shown to be inde-
terminate or contingent as they are politically contested, the intentions
of policy actors are often ambiguous or difficult to recover, and the eval-
uation of policies changes over time.
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 23

Learning about/from Mistakes and Failures

In the various ways spelled out in this introduction, the focus of the fol-
lowing chapters is to contribute to our learning about mistakes and fail-
ures, how to study them, what their causes are and how responsibility for
them is attributed. At the same time, the book also includes important
insights and findings on learning from mistakes and failures. Indeed, ques-
tions around whether, what and how actors learn from their own or oth-
ers’ mistakes and failures have always been part and parcel of scholarship
on mistakes and failures in public and foreign policy (Janis 1989; Howlett
2012; Bovens and ‘t Hart 2016). Some of this research has precisely been
driven, at least in part, by a self-consciously normative agenda of how to
improve policy-making and to avoid mistakes and failures in the future
(Gray 1996; King and Crewe 2013).
As an analytical concept, learning depicts a process in which actors
change their instrumental or normative beliefs and ‘ways of doing things’
as a result of their interpretation and evaluation of experience. This can
involve either more shallow forms of ‘simple’ learning in which actors
adapt their behaviour and strategies to better realize given goals or deeper
forms of ‘complex’ learning in which actors re-examine their underlying
goals, interests and identities (Levy 1994; Harnisch 2012; Ziv 2013).
While such learning can take place in response to any sort of (direct and
indirect) experience, it is often assumed that (perceived) mistakes and fail-
ures provide strong incentives for actors to reconsider their beliefs, behav-
iour and interests and should thus be particularly likely to foster learning
(May 1992: 341–343). In other words, actors are expected to learn more
from failure than from success.
Broadly speaking, the chapters in this volume relate to debates about
learning from mistakes and failures in three different ways. First, a number
of chapters present cases in which mistakes and failures have indeed trig-
gered learning. In particular, Vihma (in Chap. 12, this volume) shows
how the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference has resulted in
learning, for example, with regard to the institutional set-up of UN cli-
mate conferences, the role of the Presidency and the importance of expec-
tations management about what can and cannot be realistically achieved.
According to Vihma, the lessons learnt from Copenhagen facilitated the
success of the subsequent climate conference in Paris. Kamradt-Scott (in
Chap. 9, this volume) suggests that the WHO and, above all, its secre-
tariat have attempted to learn from various investigations into their mis-
24 A. KRUCK ET AL.

takes and failures in handling the H1N1 and Ebola crises, for example, by
launching a new Health Emergency Program. Kamradt-Scott also notes,
however, that the underlying ‘mind-set’ of the WHO that played a large
part in its mistakes in the two crises has been very resistant to change,
indicating that ‘complex’ forms of learning face the most entrenched
opposition. An important takeaway message from Vihma’s and Kamradt-
Scott’s chapters is that learning, in both cases, is built on a clear under-
standing of the main causes of mistakes and failures and of who was
responsible. While the learning processes identified by Vihma and
Kamradt-Scott can both be characterized as ‘simple’ learning, Fisher
(Chap. 10, this volume) gives an example of ‘complex’ learning.
Specifically, he argues that the shift from ‘instrumental’ to ‘expressive’
motivations as the main rationale for political conditionality in UK inter-
national development policy has been driven by changed beliefs about the
effectiveness and appropriateness of the ‘old conditionalities’ since the
late 1990s. However, whether this kind of complex learning has contrib-
uted to better development policy in terms of improving the living condi-
tions in recipient countries seems very doubtful.
A second group of chapters, in contrast, foregrounds the difficulties
and obstacles to learning from mistakes and failures. At the most extreme,
Paudyn (in Chap. 7, this volume) argues that hegemonic discourses of risk
have made public and private actors involved in financial risk management
immune to learning from their mistakes in recent financial crises. Kruck
(in Chap. 6, this volume) shows that the scope for policy-makers to learn
from private governance failures of actors such as CRAs and PMSCs and
to introduce effective regulatory reforms is severely circumscribed by
path-dependencies, the political costs involved and structural ­dependencies
of policy-makers on private authorities. Kruck also emphasizes the unin-
tended consequences that attempts to learn from mistakes and failures
within such constraints might entail. Legrand and Lister (in Chap. 2, this
volume), in turn, highlight the role of uncertainty as a particular obstacle
to learning. Specifically, their analysis suggests that the difficulties in coun-
ter-terrorism to establish ‘when things have gone wrong’ seriously inhibit
any prospects for learning. Overall, the message of this group of chapters
is that learning from mistakes and failures is less straightforward than it
may seem.
The third perspective on learning in this volume, finally, can be found in
chapters that go furthest in adopting an intersubjective understanding of
mistakes and failures. From this point of view, learning is not about avoiding
 INTRODUCTION: MISTAKES AND FAILURES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 25

objectively negative consequences of policies but about the social construc-

tion of mistakes and failures. In other words, these chapters focus attention
on social and political learning rather than instrumental policy learning
(May 1992: 335–340). For example, the analysis of Oppermann and
Spencer (in Chap. 3, this volume) suggests that whether policy-­makers can
forestall perceptions of their policies as ‘having gone wrong’ depends on
their ability to learn, in a specific social, cultural and political context, how
to develop powerful counter-narratives to thwart attempts in political dis-
course to construct the policies in question as mistakes or failures. Closely
related, the argument of Hansel, Viehrig and Ankel (in Chap. 4, this vol-
ume) about the framing of foreign policy failures in the German news media
implies that learning from such failures will start out from the logic and
context of German media reporting. Finally, Hampshire (in Chap. 13, this
volume) emphasizes the temporality of discursive constructions of mistakes
and failures which adds an interesting twist to intersubjective views on learn-
ing from failures. In particular, he turns the relationship between failures
and learning around and argues that, over time, social learning can change
intersubjective agreements on whether or not ‘things have gone wrong’.
Also, he reminds us that what actors learn from mistakes and failures is
shaped by their temporally situated vantage point.
If anything, what this introduction should bring across is the extent to
which the key questions of the volume are interconnected and entwined.
What are ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’ and how can we study them? Why do
mistakes and failures occur? How is responsibility for mistakes and failures
attributed? What and how do actors learn from mistakes and failures? The
following chapters give a wide range of answers to all of these questions and
doubtless raise many new ones. Collectively, we hope, the chapters in this
volume succeed in reinvigorating the study of mistakes and failures in IR.

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