The fog of leadership: How Turkish and Russian presidents manage information constraints and uncertainty in crisis decision-making

ABSTRACT

Leaders choose to mislead their domestic peers when the political risk and cost associated with a particular foreign policy decision is too great and when the structure of the political system in question is too leader-centric to afford these costs being incurred by the leader. This article argues that risk, uncertainty and imperfect information are not necessarily external, unwanted, or unforeseen factors in foreign policy decisions. In certain cases, they too are instrumentalized and adopted consciously into decision-making systems in order to diffuse the political costs of high-risk choices with expected low utility by insulating the leader from audience costs. This dynamic can be best observed in leader-centric and strong personality cult systems where the leader’s consent or at least tacit approval is required for all policies to be realized. This article uses two important case studies that effectively illustrate the use of deliberate uncertainty in decision-making in leader-centric systems: post-2014 Russia (War in Donbass and the annexation of Crimea), and Turkey (ending of the Kurdish peace process and the change in policy towards Syria).

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign policy analysis
• Turkish foreign policy
• Russian foreign policy
• misinformation
• Syria
• Ukraine
• leadership
• Kurds

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This refers to the February 2015 formal meeting between the government officials and pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP) members, officially confirming the agreement that would result in increased autonomy for the Kurds in exchange for PKK’s disarmament.

2. This term was originally coined by Metin Gürcan; see Ongun (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hamid Akin Unver

Hamid Akin Unver is an assistant professor of international relations at the Kadir Has University in Istanbul. He is the author of ‘Clash of Empires: Why Turkey and Russia Fight’ (2015) and ‘Ankara to Black Sea: Turkey and Russia’s Age-Old Struggle for Regional Supremacy’ (2014), both published by Foreign Affairs. He is interested in exploring how uncertainty and misinformation work in foreign policy decisions of hybrid and authoritarian regimes during crises and time constraints.