Individual Leaders and the State: The Case of Israel as a Complex Adaptive System

Year 2025, Volume: 22 Issue: 87, 105 - 122, 18.09.2025

Stephen G. Walker Mark Schafer Joshua Lambert

https://doi.org/10.33458/uidergisi.1616778

Cited By: 2

Abstract

This paper focuses on foreign policy processes of states as social entities, which are made manifest as the “psychology of the state” and specified as learning effects due to external causes (object appraisal); steering effects due to internal causes (ego defense); and social interaction effects from learning and steering processes (self-other mediation).The cases under investigation are the manifest psychology of the state of Israel across three individual Israeli leaders: Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu. The dependent variables are their beliefs about the nature of the political universe (friendly/hostile), the most effective strategies for exercising power (cooperation/conflict), and historical control (low/high). The independent variables are the personality processes of object appraisal (terrorist attacks and fatalities), ego defense (mistrust and self-confidence), and mediation of self-other relations (task v. process orientation and belief in ability to control events. They are analyzed within the context of game theory models of complex adaptive systems.

Keywords

operational code analysis , role theory , Israel , cooperation , conflict

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