Warning about War

Christoph O. Meyer is Professor of European and International Politics at King's College London. He is the author of The Quest for a European Strategic Culture (2007) and the editor (with Chiara De Franco) of Forecasting, Warning and Responding to Transnational Risks (2011). Meyer is currently co-leading an ESRC-funded project on learning and intelligence use in UK, German and EU foreign policy. Chiara De Franco is Associate Professor in International Relations and deputy head of the Centre for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. She is the author of Media Power and the Transformation of War (2012) and director of Protection Complexity: how EU, UN and AU practice protection of civilians, an international research project funded by the Danish Research Council. Florian Otto is Associate Director at global risk consultancy Control Risks. Previously, he led the country risk analysis on Europe and Central Asia of Verisk Maplecroft. His research has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Media, War & Conflict. He also regularly comments on current affairs and his analysis has appeared in various trade publications.

'Meyer, De Franco, and Otto show that the problem of warning needs to be conceptualized broadly and seen as part of an interactive foreign policy process, with important warners being not only government officials, but NGOs, the media, and informal advisors. The sophisticated analysis is supported by detailed case studies drawing on a wide variety of unusual sources, and the result is a book of great interest.' Robert Jervis, Adlai E. Stevenson Professor, Columbia University and author of How Statesmen Think

• 1. Conflict warnings as persuasion attempts; 2. A theory of conflict warning as persuasion in foreign policy; 3. Inside-up warnings within states and international organisations; 4. Outside-in warnings I: persuasion by NGOs; 5. Outside-in warnings II: persuasion by journalists and media organisations; 6. (Mis-)identifying warnings and the problem of hindsight bias: the case of the Rwandan Genocide; 7. What makes individual officials persuasive warners? The case of the 2004 Darfur crisis; 8. Explaining differences in persuasiveness: the EU members states and the 2008 Five-Day War in Georgia; 9. Warning within EU institutions and the Ukrainian-Russian conflict of 2013–14; 10. When are warnings heeded and what can warners do?; References; Index.