Eyewitness: Richter scale for international crises

Can a political crisis be measured? Is there a quantitative way to compare long-running tensions between India and Pakistan with US reactions to the Cuban missile crisis?

Michael Brecher, founder of the International Crisis Behaviour Project and professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal, believes that a set of indicators can be used to measure crises on an index, just like the Richter scale measures earthquake intensity.

Since 1975, academics at the ICBP have been investigating crises worldwide. They studied skirmishes between more than 100 states involved in 412 international and 895 foreign policy crises from 1918 to 1994 to find a benchmark that can be used to establish a pattern.

The group has established an index of six criteria. These reveal the severity of a crisis:

• The number of states involved
• Involvement of major powers
• Geographic significance
• The number of differences among principal adversaries in military strength, economic strength and political regime
• The number of issue-areas involved - such as military-security, political-diplomatic and economic-developmental
• The level of violence, from none to full-scale war.

"The profile of a state that is most likely to initiate a foreign policy crisis," Professor Brecher wrote in Crises in World Politics (1993), "comprises a new or recent independent member of the global system with an authoritarian regime contiguous to and more powerful than its adversary and experiencing domestic instability". He has found some other consistencies - a state with a deteriorating economy tends to resort to war, and most crises occur between immediate neighbours.

He believes the index could help leaders. "It provides decision-makers who have to cope with international crises with a scientific method for discovering the severity of a crisis as it unfolds. It is the key to effective crisis management for an international organisation such as the United Nations, a major power or an alliance that has a primary interest in enhancing or maintaining international stability when a crisis unfolds."