An Open Access ebook edition of 1997's A Study of Crisis, by Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, is now available at the University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection.
Preface to the E-book
It has been 25 years since the publication of A Study of Crisis by the University of Michigan Press. In this preface to the e-book edition, we want to point out several important developments in the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project, which is at the core of this volume.
First and foremost, this is not an update. The e-book is simply an electronic version of the original book, all 1,064 pages of it! But although the volume has been frozen in time, as is the case with all books, the ICB project itself has not stood still. The 1997 publication covered the period between 1918 and 1994, and included data on 412 international crises and 895 foreign policy crises for individual states. ICB has just released Version 14 of the dataset, now covering all crises from 1918 to 2017, including data on 487 international crises and 1,078 foreign policy crises.
After 45 years of leadership of the ICB project, Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld have been succeeded by a new leadership team, Kyle Beardsley of Duke University and Patrick James of the University of Southern California. With this change, ICB is now housed at Duke University and the annual updates are in the hands of Kyle and an able group of Duke graduate students. And after 20 years of service as Project Manager, David Quinn has turned this task over to David Kennedy at Duke.
The ICB datasets are now available from Duke University at https://sites.duke.edu/icbdata/ as well as from the University of Michigan at https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14982.
With this e-book publication, we also introduce an updated Data Viewer available at the Duke ICB website listed above. This impressive tool allows users of the dataset to search its contents by virtually any variable, set of cases, time period, region, crisis trigger, major responses, outcomes, interventions, etc. Readers should also note that an important new suite of variables pertaining to mediation has been added to ICB since the publication of A Study of Crisis. We wish to acknowledge Alexander Jonas' outstanding contribution in updating and maintaining the ICB Data Viewer.
We hope that this e-book edition will widen even further the community of scholars, students, and members of the policy community who have relied on ICB for insights into the onset, escalation, de-escalation, and resolution of crises in the international system.
Michael Brecher
McGill University
Jonathan Wilkenfeld
University of Maryland
2022
As the e-book "goes to press," we note the passing of Michael Brecher on January 16, 2022, at the age of 96. An obituary to Michael can be found at the ICB website referenced above. May his memory be a blessing.