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Systemism and social mechanisms, as articulated by Bunge, are concepts with great potential for application to assessment of research progress. This study will use the conceptual tools made available by systemism and social mechanisms to evaluate the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project as a scientific effort toward the greater understanding of crises in world politics. Systemism and social mechanisms are articulated as key concepts in the quest for scientific progress. The goals and basic characteristics of the ICB Project as a scientific venture then are described. The ICB Project is assessed in terms of how well it lives up to standards for scientific progress. Finally, conclusions and ideas about future research are presented. The basic finding of this study is that the ICB Project is quite successful in meeting the standards for scientific progress entailed by the concepts of systemism and social mechanisms.

The Ellison Model Executive Mentoring Inclusive Community Building Model (The Ellison Model) is used in training people to initiate and implement inclusive community building (ICB) projects using executives and professionals from a variety of fields and industries to mentor university and pre-college students, all serving as mentors at each succeeding level of function. The model promotes ethical values and inclusion in community development. Participants at ICB conferences receive conflict resolution, relationship management and cultural sensitivity/diversity training through interactive and dramatic techniques. This essay examines the theoretical premises upon which The Model bases its philosophies. Theories examining the nexus between culture and conflict are also explored. Conflict resolution as a unitary process (from the individual perspective) is also discussed within the context of relationship management.

This study reports the results of a project to construct dyadic-level data from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project data collection. The project defines coding rules used in identifying crisis dyads and applies them to identify 766 crisis dyads for the period from 1918 to 1994. This research makes it possible to perform a careful comparison of crisis dyads to dyads involved in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). The comparison indicates that conflicts that qualify as both a MID and a crisis are significantly more severe than conflicts that do not pass both thresholds. The study offers a robustness analysis of Russett and Oneal's Triangulating Peace (2001) and finds that two of the three Kantian variables theorized to inhibit conflict involvement maintain a relationship similar to the onset of international crises as they do for MIDs. The analysis indicates that economic interdependence is a somewhat weaker inhibitor of crises than MIDs.

Underlying the emerging interest in the role of rivalry processes as antecedents to interstate conflict is the simple idea that conflict within the constraints of rivalry works differently than conflict outside of rivalry. In this article, we inspect the concepts of protracted conflict, as developed within the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project, and rivalry, and discuss some of their applications to crisis escalation. The protracted conflict and rivalry concepts are not identical, but they do overlap in terms of their emphases on historical context, serious goal incompatibilities, and stakes that might be resolved coercively. Developing an argument for the concept of rivalry possessing fewer limitations than protracted conflict, we proceed to analyze and test the interaction between rivalry and other variables, again making use of an ICB escalation model, when predicting crisis escalation to war. Throughout, our basic question concerns what role interstate rivalry plays in crisis behavior. Are the crises of rivals more lethal than those of non-rivals? If so, can we pinpoint why that is the case? We find that rivalry not only makes escalation more likely, but also significantly interacts with more traditional predictors of conflict, such as capability ratios, the number of actors in a crisis, democracy, and the issues under contention.

AbstractIt has often been said that the closest thing we have to an empirical law in international relations is that democracies do not fight against each other. This study adds to the literature on democratic peace by focusing on the crisis behaviour of democracies and nondemocracies. International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project data are used to conduct a quantitative analysis of states' crisis activity from 1918 to 1988. Strong support emerges for the three hypotheses of the study. First, it is clear that democracies initiate fewer crises than nondemocracies. However, democracies tend to escalate crises to higher levels of severity. Finally, democracies eventually win the crises in which they become involved. The conclusion is that democratic leaders face strong incentives to "select" winnable crises against nondemocratic states because of the audience costs they face, but when the opponent is another democracy, the domestic audience expects leaders to compromise.