The rise and fall of powers in the contemporary international system is accompanied by a marked increase in assertive state behavior.¹ This trend is not bound by borders, evidenced by the tensions over pivot states such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, as well as over the wider East and South China Sea region.² The Crimea Annexation Crisis and the resulting standoff between Russia and the West, has been followed by a succession of interstate crises, in recent months including Turkey versus Russia (late November 2015) and Saudi Arabia versus Iran (early January 2016). In the current strategic environment interstate...

The term ‘crisis’ conjures images of violence and terror, but violence and crisis are not intrinsically connected. Rather, a crisis marks a critical juncture in interstate relations. Indeed, the term crisis derives from the Latin medical term krisis which refers to a ‘turning point of disease’. This in turn originates from the Greek verb krinein - ‘to separate, decide, judge’.⁹ The Oxford Dictionary defines crisis as ‘a time of intense difficulty or danger’.¹⁰ In the international relations and conflict literature the term is generally used to refer to a particularly dangerous turning point in a dispute that carries with it...

Key insights about crisis escalation and crisis management were developed during the Cold War - the era of confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In that era, reducing the risks of nuclear war whilst protecting one’s core interests became of crucial importance. A lot of intellectual effort, in particular in the US, was devoted to developing concepts and strategies to that purpose. To a large extent, the theoretical analysis of crisis and crisis management has relied on game theory, which can be described as “the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation...

The essence of crisis management lies in the prevention of crisis escalating to war while protecting one’s core values and interests. The tension between these two objectives creates a fundamental dilemma that decision makers must resolve.¹⁰² To be able to do so, they must be crisis literate and possess a fundamental understanding of the nature of crises. Every crisis is, however, unique. Escalation dynamics are strongly affected by various structural conditions affecting crisis stability, by conflicting strategic interests, by the interactive and often unpredictable crisis behavior of the actors, as well as by random events. Given these uncertainties, the question...