ABSTRACT
The term crisis has acquired so many different meanings in contemporary discourse, that a description of what is meant by an interstate crisis should be offered at the outset of this chapter. The type of dispute that I discuss can be labeled more precisely as a militarized interstate crisis, that is, a dispute between nation-states that reaches a level of severity at which participants on each side threaten, display, or use military force against those on the other side. In other words, these are disputes in which there is a significant threat of war.
