[en] Though continuum descriptions of material behavior are useful for many kinds of problems, particularly those involving plastic flow, a more general approach is required when the failure is likely to involve growth and coalescence of a large number of fractures, as in fragmentation. Failures of this kind appear frequently in rapid dynamic processes such as those resulting from impacts and explosions, particularly in the formation of spall fragments. In the first part of this paper an approach to formulating constitutive relations that accounts for the opening, shear and growth of an ensemble of cracks is discussed. The approach also accounts for plastic flow accompanying fragmentation. The resulting constitutive relations have been incorporated into a Lagrangean computer program. In the second part of this paper a theoretical approach to coalescence is described. The simplest formulation makes use of a linear Liouville equation, with crack growth limited by the mean free path of cracks, assumed constant. This approach allows for an anisotropic distribution of cracks. An alternative approach is also described in which the decrease of the mean free path with increasing crack size is accounted for, but the crack distribution is assumed isotropic. A reduction of the governing Liouville equation to an ordinary differential equation of third order is possible, and the result can be used to determine how mean-free-path decreases with increasing crack size