ABSTRACT
This chapter explores one approach to short-term forecasts of international political crises. It offers a definition of crisis that encompasses both abrupt outbreaks and gradual buildups, and will search in both types for a crisis precipitating event that triggers the onset of a crisis for at least one of the parties. The properties of an event can be determined by a careful observer of international relations, even though a state of crisis for a set of policymakers depends on the perceptions of the event by the recipients. Crisis is defined as a situation that the relevant decisionmakers interpret as constituting a high threat to values they regard as important to their regime or country, and presenting a relatively short period of time for decision before the situation evolves further in a way that is unfavorable from the perspective of those policymakers.
