ABSTRACT
The latest development which has appeared and which is being taken up by social scientists, including on a modest scale international relations theorists is "catastrophe theory." Crudely, catastrophe theory concerns those situations where a smooth or continuous change in some variables brings about smooth changes in another variable, which, then, at some stage, makes a discontinuous jump to perhaps a different sort of behaviour altogether. Despite the widespread publicity it has received, catastrophe theory has had a short life and it is not surprising that there have been few applications of it yet to international relations. An application has been made of catastrophe theory to developing a theory of crisis behaviour by Phillips and Rimkunas. The theory of crises has been a popular topic amongst behaviourally-oriented international relations scholars, partly because crises frequently precede important events, by the loose standards of political science, about which one might hope to get a theory with a reasonably economical set of variables.
