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Crisis escalation to war is a subject of longstanding interest. Case studies, formal models and statistical analysis offer compelling explanations for why some crises escalate to war while others do not. Much less can be said in answer to the following question: where do crises come from in the first place? In this paper, we first introduce the concept of a near crisis following the approach taken over the course of more than four decades by the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. A near crisis is just below a crisis as defined by ICB with regard to intensity, as it lacks one essential condition for a crisis—higher likelihood of military hostilities. Second, we present a newly developed dataset that contains information on 86 cases in which actors perceived a threat to one or more basic values, along with an awareness of finite time for response to the value threat. We also present simple statistical models comparing (a) near crisis to crisis and (b) crisis to war that show that analyses based on the Near Crisis dataset will contribute to advancement of knowledge.

Crisis escalation to war is a subject of longstanding interest. Case studies, formal models and statistical analysis offer compelling explanations for why some crises escalate to war while others do not. Much less can be said in answer to the following question: where do crises come from in the first place? In this paper, we first introduce the concept of a near crisis following the approach taken over the course of more than four decades by the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. A near crisis is just below a crisis as defined by ICB with regard to intensity, as it lacks one essential condition for a crisis—higher likelihood of military hostilities. Second, we present a newly developed dataset that contains information on 86 cases in which actors perceived a threat to one or more basic values, along with an awareness of finite time for response to the value threat. We also present simple statistical models comparing (a) near crisis to crisis and (b) crisis to war that show that analyses based on the Near Crisis dataset will contribute to advancement of knowledge.

"International Crises Interrogated: Modeling the Escalation Process with Quantitative Methods" published on by Oxford University Press.

Discusses adjustment, restructuring, and recovery in trade and industry after the financial crisis in the second half of 1997, and remaining challenges.

At first glance, Germany appears, economically, to be quite unusually successful. Despite the budgetary and financial crises affecting the other nations of the European Union, the German unem-ployment rate is declining. It has a positive export balance, and its own budgetary deficit is shrinking due to increases in national income and tax revenues. Indeed, the other European nations expect a relatively prosperous Germany to take more financial responsibility for the Union as a whole—a view not supported by a German majority. That majority thinks that the German welfare state, with health insurance and retirement pensions and considerable investment in culture and education as well as material infrastructure, is exclusively a national achievement. Having recently spent billions on domes-tic income transfers (from West to East after reunification in 1990), the German citizenry prefers to keep its money in German pockets. Disdain for Eastern and Southern Europeans serves as a solvent, washing away attention to internal differences in income and life chances that might otherwise move to the center of German politics. A truly yellow national popular press, television commentators as clueless as those we know here, and rigid professors of economics insist on austerity as the one true path to economic salvation. Austerity is prescribed not only for other Europeans, but for those Germans so improvident as not to belong to the upper income groups.

Since its establishment in 1949, NATO has been a political and military international organization that constitutes one of the most important actors in the international system. Although the prestige and advantages of being a NATO member in a bipolar world have been questioned from time to time after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the Alliance has continued to sustain itself and, especially in the 2000s, has tended to expand. The acceleration of NATO's development and change after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) suggests that the focus of this international organization is not only on the Eastern Bloc but also on the need to organize for other current and future focal points. Those who argue to the contrary suggest that in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR, which was
the focal point of NATO, and in an international system moving between unipolarity and multipolarity, the existence and purpose of the organization has become meaningless. The structure of NATO has been criticised due to factors such as the criticism of NATO's mission to protect Europe within the European Union (EU), especially in France, and the desire of the member states of the Union to take part in the mission to protect Europe themselves. Within the scope of this analysis, NATO's actions and its position in the face of crises, especially in the 2000s, will be examined, and how the reflections of its actions in the face of these political and military crises shed light on the future of the organization will be discussed. In this context, issues such as what the Alliance countries, especially in Europe, expect from NATO in the face of the recent crises will be analysed.

Political stakes in the Near East : between social and denominational crisis.
Studying more precisely the Lebanese case, the author shows that in the Arab Near East, communities bound together by religion and history, are combined with class identities gained through a process of modernization. When a crisis occurs, when State disappears, community identity and sympathies tend to substitute for the more recent class identity. But behind community unanimity can be perceived ideological, social, regional rifts.

Several emerging economies have, until recently, experienced large government surpluses and accelerating foreign exchange reserve accumulation. This has been accompanied by economic booms, exchange rate appreciations and in some cases increases in domestic inflation. We show that one way to understand these episodes is as manifestations of balance of payments anti-crises, as reflecting the perception that the government intends to discontinue its accumulation of reserves in the near future. The end-phase of such crises is characterized by nominal interest rates approaching their zero lower bou