i. Are multipolar international systems more or less stable than bipolar international systems?
ii. .Are democracies more or less prone to war than oligarchic nations?
iii. In an anarchic system, is the independent seeking of security via arms procurement more or less stable than the collective procurement of arms via balance-of-power politics.
To create answers to such question, we relate the political science concept of “crisis instability” to the mathematical concept of “chaos” in non-linear recursive models of international interactions. The model parameters represent national-societal characteristics that vary on a much longer time scale than do the transitions from peace to war. (Just as national capabilities change at a much slower rate than do national intentions.) In each case, the answer provided by mathematical stability analysis is “less”, an answer which agrees with that obtained by most verbal analyses.