Strategic Crisis Leadership: Theoretical Perspectives

This chapter focuses on the importance of crisis governance. The role of leadership is in fact crucial in ensuring a smoother management of the emergency, although the difficulty in implementing effective measures in a short time challenges the capacity of crisis leaders. In order to evaluate the governance capacity of a leadership when a crisis threatens the political stability of a country, this chapter introduces the strategic crisis leadership framework (Boin et al. The study of crisis management. In Routledge handbook of security studies (pp. 447–456). Routledge, 2016). This approach consists in a model developed to evaluate the relationship between crisis leadership’s performance and the expected outcome of the crisis management process. In particular, the strategic crisis leadership framework considers five elements of the governance of crisis, namely sense making, decision-making, meaning making, accountability, and learning, providing useful insights for the final evaluation of the leadership’s behavior. In the final paragraphs of this chapter, the Lebanese case study will be introduced from a sociohistorical perspective, focusing on the evolution of leadership in the country in relation to the dynamics among state and non-state actors.