Theorising Risk and Uncertainty in International Relations

Abstract

Frank Knight was one of the twentieth century’s most illustrious economic thinkers. His writings and enquiry into the nature of method, theory and knowledge in relation to the activities of social actors, and under what circumstances and with what limitations we might adequately theorise social agency, bequeathed a rich tradition of theoretical and practical insight. Many of his writings centred on the issue of risk and uncertainty, how social actors anticipate the future and manage and mediate terrains of uncertainty and risk, and in doing so change the outcomes that obtain. Knight’s contributions essentially constructed a means for assessing and measuring risk in various facets of social activity, seeding insights which remain pertinent today. As the article notes, however, despite Knight’s insights and the methodological schema he constructed for probability analysis, remarkably few social sciences – including international relations – have mined his work. Ironically, much that we need to know to more effectively theorise and accommodate the conundrums of risk and uncertainty into social scientific methods Knight long ago handed down to us.

Resilience and Complexity: Conjoining the Discourses of Two Contested Concepts

“…Defining risk as likelihood × consequences" of a future event, presupposes our ability to predict and assess the probability of the event in question, but this is much easier to do in the ordered domains than in cases of un-order. Uncertainty must be re-installed in the concept of risk from where it has been largely absent since Frank Knight established the distinction between uncertainty and risk (seen as measurable uncertainty) in 1921 (Jarvis 2011).…”

Designing for robustness: surprise, agility and improvisation in policy design

“…Policymakers and implementers may be somewhat surprised when particular elements of policies or their expectations fail to occur as anticipated, but they are not necessarily deeply shocked or disturbed when this happens. Even when causal relationships and future scenarios are relatively well known, there is always some uncertainty with respect to policy predictions due to statistical and uncertainties in data and estimates of the coefficients attached to expected relationships between policy interventions and target behaviour and policy actors, generally, are aware of this (Jarvis, 2011;Morgan & Henrion, 1990;Schrader, Riggs, & Smith, 1993).…”

“…There is much more ambiguity in scenario forecasts and projections, however, when critical data is lacking or non-existent. This makes it much more difficult to assign probability distributions to possible future scenarios with any confidence (Jarvis, 2011;Lempert et al, 2002;McInerney, Lempert, & Keller, 2012;Walker et al, 2010) and policies must be designed to be more 'robust' than 'normal' if they are not to fail. Historically, students of 'wicked' and 'tame' policy problems such as Churchman (1967) and Rittel and Webber (1973) thought about uncertainty in this sense, that is, focusing on the extent to which problem causes and solutions were known or unknown or, in Simon's terms, well 'structured' and 'ill-structured' (Head & Alford, 2013;Simon, 1973).…”

No False Promises: How the Prospect of Non-Compliance Affects Elite Preferences for International Cooperation

“…One of the most enduring problems in politics is that elite decision-makers often must make important decisions under conditions of risk and uncertainty (Edelstein 2002;Jarvis 2011). There are multiple types of risks that shape those decisions (Rathbun 2007).…”