Study title

The dataset includes 7 timelines covering three cases of foreign affairs surprises - Arab Uprisings, ISIS/Daesh, and Ukraine/Russia - and how these were perceived by three politics: the UK, Germany and the EU. It covers key milestone or turning points in the threat evolution, knowledge claims by experts from media, think-tanks and NGOs and government responses over a time period of roughly 12 months in each case.TThe proposed project addresses salient concerns about alleged failures of anticipation, preparedness and response in national and European foreign policy against a backdrop of three 'strategic surprises': the Arab Spring, the Russian annexation of the Crimea (Bildt, 2013), and the rapid rise of the so-called Islamic State/D'aesh. Strategy documents identify rising levels of uncertainty and proclaim '[w]e live in a world of predictable unpredictability. We will therefore equip ourselves to respond more rapidly and flexibly to the unknown lying ahead' (EGS, 2016: 46). In response to these surprises and alleged failures, different public bodies have conducted performance reviews relating to the Arab Spring (2012), the EU's approach to Russia (House of Lords 2015), the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Committee of Privy Counsellors, 2016) and the confluence of different crises (German Foreign Office, 2014). Lessons identified from these episodes are likely to shape future foreign policy for years to come, just as lessons from the 1930s shaped the thinking of a generation of US and European policy-makers, for good or for worse (Lebow, 1985). Yet, the few existing public inquiries differ substantially in their depth and scope, the criteria for judging success and failure, and how they handle problems such as hindsight bias. Moreover, not only do practitioners disagree about what is knowable and should be learnt, but public and mediatised debates follow their own logic in constructing failures (Oppermann & Spencer, 2016). The existing academic literature in the...