The research for this book began twenty-two years ago, during a leave spent at the University of Michigan. Following a brief correspondence, I had managed to attach myself to David Singer's Correlates of War (COW) Project. Singer had launched what has since become the largest data-based research project on the problem of war, and in 1970 he and his associates were deeply engaged in generating aggregate data on the onset, magnitude, and severity of all wars since the Congress of Vienna, and on the attributes of the international system and its member states during the same period. Missing from the COW project, however, was any attempt to generate data on the behavior of states in the crises that preceded the wars in order to identify differences in the patterns of action between those crises that ended in war, and those that were resolved peacefully. When I mentioned to Singer that it seemed odd that such a promising predictor of the outbreak of war was not included, he seized upon my innocence regarding the data generation problems such an effort entailed, and suggested that I immediately begin working on that part of the project. That effort has been my major scholarly preoccupation ever since.

Over the next two decades I completed a number of articles dealing with interstate crisis behavior, all of which made use of the data that had been generated up to that time. This book goes back over some of the ground covered in those earlier studies, but with the larger sample of forty crises, and the advantage of the insights gained from the research conducted in the intervening years.