ABSTRACT
The many sources of tension and discord in the world make international stability both precious and precarious. Crisis prevention, due to its importance, has attracted the attention of some of the best theoreticians and practitioners in the realm of diplomacy. Statesmen attempted to avert the outbreak of crises by developing any number of procedures for communication that demonstrated mutual respect, built confidence, avoided surprises, and generated good will. The careful tailoring of solutions to particular problems is closely related to the feature of specificity in conditions. This specificity of crisis-prevention regimes, in turn, is intimately connected with the degree of mutual understanding among the actors over conditions for compliance. When creating their crisis-prevention regimes, the Great Powers also made efforts to differentiate their respective interests. Reciprocal advantages of crisis-prevention regimes cannot be considered in isolation, however, for they represent only one side of the coin.
