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The goal of the study was summarized by Weber as follows: “to force a formal model of cooperation to confront a set of historical cases … [and thereby] to expand [Axelrod’s formal] model” so that one can explain anomalous outcomes.

RICHARD NED LEBOW, BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR: THE NATURE OF INTERNATIONAL CRISES. BALTIMORE: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1981.

This comparative case study examines the relationship between crisis and war. The author examines the origins of crises, the outcome of crises, and circumstances in which crises intensify or ameliorate the conflict between antagonists.618

The author’s research strategy consists of three parts. First, three types of crises are identified and analyzed: (1) “justification of hostility” crises in which the decision for war is made before the crisis commences, the purpose of which is to justify war; (2) “spin off” crises with third parties, which “are secondary confrontations arising from a nation’s preparations for or prosecution of a primary conflict” with a different party; and (3) “brinkmanship” crises, which one side initiates in the expectation that the adversary will back down rather than fight.

These types are derived empirically from the examination of a large number of crises.619 The author does not claim that this typology encompasses all crises—for example, it does not include crises that occur “accidentally” when a provocation triggers a crisis that was “both undesired and unsanctioned by central decision makers.”620

The typology of crises fits the author’s research strategy in that it is used to show that each type is “associated with very different international and domestic conditions.” 621

Part Two analyzes crises outcomes, asking why some crises are resolved while others lead to war. Part Three addresses “the relationship between crisis and the broader pattern of international relations. That is, whether and why some crises intensify and others diminish the underlying causes of tension and hostility.”622

The author draws on a variety of theories and concepts to address the questions raised in the three parts of the study. These include theories of affect and cognition, communication theory, organizational theory, models of governmental politics, and psychodynamics.

Twenty-six historical cases of international crisis spanning a period of seventy years were selected for the study. Case selection was made by compiling a list of twentieth-century crises in which at least one of the protagonists was a great power. The list was then limited to crises that the author regarded as “acute … in which war was perceived as a fairly distinct possibility by policy-makers of at least one of the protagonists.” 623 A few crises were eliminated for lack of source material, but the roster of cases “includes most of the major crises of the last seventy-five years.”624

Accordingly, these cases are not a sample of all instances comprising the subclass of crises singled out; they include virtually the entire universe of such crises.

The methodology of the study approximates that of a structured, focused comparison and employs a great deal of process-tracing. The author states that the crises were examined “in terms of a prepared set of explicitly formulated questions,” but these are not set forth and would need to be gleaned from the study itself.625 This is not an easy task, however, because the author decided to structure the book not by presenting a separate analysis of each crisis, but rather “in terms of a conceptual framework” in which “particular cases are described only so far as they are useful or necessary to document theoretical propositions.”626

The study combines hypothesis formation and plausibility probes, and is intended to draw lessons about crises from examination of historical experience.

YAACOV Y.I. VERTZBERGER, RISK TAKING AND DECISIONMAKING: FOREIGN MILITARY INTERVENTION DECISIONS. STANFORD: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998.

Vertzberger develops an alternative—the sociocognitive approach—to the rational