Christer Pursiainen – författare

After a period of relative weakness and isolation during most of the 1990s, Russia is again appearing as a major security player in world politics. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of Russia''s current security situation, addressing such questions as:

One important conclusion to emerge is that, while Russian foreign policy under Putin has become more pragmatic and responsive to both problems and opportunities, the growing lack of checks and balances in domestic politics makes political integration with the West difficult and gives the president great freedom in applying Russia''s growing power abroad.

After a period of relative weakness and isolation during most of the 1990s, Russia is again appearing as a major security player in world politics. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of Russia''s current security situation, addressing such questions as:

One important conclusion to emerge is that, while Russian foreign policy under Putin has become more pragmatic and responsive to both problems and opportunities, the growing lack of checks and balances in domestic politics makes political integration with the West difficult and gives the president great freedom in applying Russia''s growing power abroad.

The Crisis Management Cycle is the first holistic, multidisciplinary introduction to the dynamic field of crisis management theory and practice. By drawing together the different theories and concepts of crisis management literature and practice, this book develops a theoretical framework of analysis that can be used by both students and practitioners alike. Each stage of the crisis cycle is explored in turn:

Stretching across disciplines as diverse as safety studies, business studies, security studies, political science and behavioural science, The Crisis Management Cycle provides a robust grounding in crisis management that will be invaluable to both students and practitioners worldwide.

This book focuses on foreign policy decision-making from the viewpoint of psychology. Psychology is always present in human decision-making, constituted by its structural determinants but also playing its own agency-level constitutive and causal roles, and therefore it should be taken into account in any analysis of foreign policy decisions. The book analyses a wide variety of prominent psychological approaches, such as bounded rationality, prospect theory, belief systems, cognitive biases, emotions, personality theories and trust to the study of foreign policy, identifying their achievements and added value as well as their limitations from a comparative perspective. Understanding how leaders in world politics act requires us to consider recent advances in neuroscience, psychology and behavioral economics. As a whole, the book aims at better integrating various psychological theories into the study of international relations and foreign policy analysis, as partial explanations themselves but also as facets of more comprehensive theories. It also discusses practical lessons that the psychological approaches offer since ignoring psychology can be costly: decision-makers need to be able reflect on their own decision-making process as well as the perspectives of the others. Paying attention to the psychological factors in international relations is necessary for better understanding the microfoundations upon  which such agency is based.