The Concept of Crisis in International Politics

This article is concerned with a development of a dynamic model that deals with the defini- tion of crisis situations. It develop ideas first presented by Charles Hermann by incorpora- ting them into two models of catastrophe theory. It is argued by the authors that the incorpora- tion of Hermann's situational definition of crisis into the catastrophe models allows for a delineation of the relationship between actors' perceptions and behavior. The authors posit that the defining variable of crisis behavior in an actor's perceptual field is his conseption of threat. The decision time variable helps in determining whether an actor's behavior will be discontinuous causing what has commonly been referred to in the literature as a crisis. While decision time is a defining variable, it is combination with the variables uncertainty and threat which actually demarcate that threshold point in a percep- tual field which corresponds to a behavioral trigger known as a crisis. The authors further posit that discontinous shifts occur in two behavioral dimensions operational preparedness and military behavior. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^$^^^^^^^^^