Author's Keywords: 9/11, U.S. Decision-Making Process, Conspiracy Theories	Convention Convention is an application service for managing large or small academic conferences, annual meetings, and other types of events! Submission - Custom fields, multiple submission types, tracks, audio visual, multiple upload formats, automatic conversion to pdf. Review - Peer Review, Bulk reviewer assignment, bulk emails, ranking, z-score statistics, and multiple worksheets! Reports - Many standard and custom reports generated while you wait. Print programs with participant indexes, event grids, and more! Scheduling - Flexible and convenient grid scheduling within rooms and buildings. Conflict checking and advanced filtering. Communication - Bulk email tools to help your administrators send reminders and responses. Use form letters, a message center, and much more! Management - Search tools, duplicate people management, editing tools, submission transfers, many tools to manage a variety of conference management headaches! Click here for more information.
Association: Name: ISA's 49th ANNUAL CONVENTION, BRIDGING MULTIPLE DIVIDES URL: http://www.isanet.org
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p253864_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Vallet, Élisabeth. "The U.S. Decision-Making Process and Conspiracy Theories" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ISA's 49th ANNUAL CONVENTION, BRIDGING MULTIPLE DIVIDES, Hilton San Francisco, SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA, Mar 26, 2008 <Not Available>. 2010-01-24 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p253864_index.html>

Vallet, Ã. , 2008-03-26 "The U.S. Decision-Making Process and Conspiracy Theories" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ISA's 49th ANNUAL CONVENTION, BRIDGING MULTIPLE DIVIDES, Hilton San Francisco, SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA Online <PDF>. 2010-01-24 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p253864_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Abstract: Conspiracies per se are not new. The conspiracy theories that have dotted the ideational landscape of the past two centuries recall the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, and indictments from the still more distant past. Since the end of the Second World War, however, there has been a new crop of tales of intrigue in which the United States figures as either setting or main protagonist — the price, perhaps, of the superpower status it acquired after the war. Each break in the historic continuum — the end of the Vietnam War, the end of the Cold War, 9/11 — spawns its own spate of conspiracy theories. The George W. Bush presidency, dominated by 9/11 and studded with scandals and attempts to cover up egregious mistakes, has fed the conspiracy frenzy, spurring an unprecedented upsurge in conspiracy theories championed by figures as diverse as Michael Moore, Thierry Meyssan, Andreas Von Bülow and Mathias Broeckers. In what is a complex situation, the contradictions, prevarications and mistakes of the current administration have led a number of conspiracy enthusiasts to imagine that the U.S. staged 9/11 in order to reburnish its image and reshape the geopolitics of the Arab world. Thus, “the Carlyle group, the Pentagon, the White House and Halliburton, to mention only the least far-fetched culprits, allegedly mounted a plot involving members of Al-Qaeda and requiring silence of the FBI, the CIA and its field agents, bureaucrats in a number of ministries, and White House advisors and staff.” Clearly, 9/11 marked the beginning of a new age, the shape of which remains to be clearly defined: with no objective enemy and no clear motivation on the part of Al-Qaeda, conspiratorial interpretations have proliferated. There is a reason for this: “Paradoxically, the Conspiracy myth tends to perform a social function of some importance, which is an explanatory function […] all the facts are traced back, by an apparently relentless logic, to a single cause, at once elementary and all-powerful.” The simplicity of the explanation also endows a complex set of facts with rationality, the sequence of events with meaning, and it organizes a series of chance occurrences and coincidences into a system, orchestrating them into a perversion of Occam’s razor, so to speak. In this sense, conspiracy theories can be understood as an attempt to resolve chaos and reclaim control of a degraded world. The collapse of the bipolar global structure that provided simple answers in an apparently fixed situation ushered in an era of confusion, exemplified by 9/11: in an untidy world, conspiracies are, according to the philosopher Pascal Bruckner, “a way of reducing complexity.” We shall consider the conspiratorial explanation of the U.S. decision-making process from two points of view and show that it can withstand neither examination of the structure of power nor analysis of the conspiracy theory’s premises as to the rationality of the decision-makers.

Explaining Variation in Foreign Policy: Individuals and Institutions in the Foreign Policy Decision Making Process

Does Context Matter? Advisory Systems and the Management of the Foreign Policy Decision Making Process

Power, Foreign Policy, and Interest Groups: An Analysis of the Systemic Influences over Foreign Policy Decisions