This book attempts to draw upon some heterodox, mainly Marxist, approaches to Western influence on Central European political economies in the 1990s. It also argues that the European Union's (EU's) role in the Central European transformation was qualitatively more positive than the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

In this book, Festus Eribo gives a broad historical view of Russian–African relations and the role of newspapers in communicating Russian and Soviet perceptions of Africa and its people. Not surprisingly, Eribo argues that ideology drove the content of coverage as the Soviet Union attempted to shape opinion according to Marxist–Leninist principles. In taking on the very broad topic of communication, Eribo notes the presence of multiple audiences but describes the content of Russian domestic newspapers in much greater detail than the story of how Russia communicated with African people. While the topic is important, because this book is descriptive and not theoretical, it leaves the reader with more questions than answers about the role of the media in communicating images of Africa.

In Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (2nd edition, 1993), Walter LeFeber analyzes the extraordinary continuity of U.S. policy in Central America. Indeed, from the Rio Bravo all the way to Tierra del Fuego, for more than a century, the United States has refused to tolerate leftist governments when recourse to other options has been available. Thus even in 1959, it didn't take a political scientist to predict that the United States would not accept the Cuban revolution.

Human rights as a focus of both theoretical and practical concern came alive in the last decade of the twentieth century. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “third wave” of democratization, and the globalization-cum-transparency revolution have all played a part in the widening and deepening of global human rights norms. The revitalization of human rights norms has profound implications for the complex interdependence between China and the global community. Indeed, human rights diplomacy is one of the most novel but generally overlooked aspects of international relations in post-Mao China, where it has finally come of age, whatever the motivation.

India's nuclear tests in May 1998 came as a surprise to many observers and proved all the more puzzling when Indian Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee, in a letter to President Clinton, singled out China as the focal point of Indian security concerns. This statement and others led some, including Beijing's own foreign policy community, to view the tests as an effort to boost India's status internationally and to shore up domestic support for a new coalition government. John Garver's book challenges this domestic-driven interpretation of the tests by chronicling in detail a half-century of contentious relations between the world's two most populous states. Seen in historical perspective, India's nuclear tests were another episode in what Garver terms a “protracted conflict” (p. 3) between Beijing and Delhi. (The milder-sounding “protracted contest” serves as the book's title, but “protracted conflict,” a term Garver uses with some frequency, better captures the book's thesis.)

This study, a volume in the SUNY Israel Studies series, represents a new stage of maturity in academic research on Israel's Arab minority: a serious and scholarly (if rather severe) overview from within that community. Ghanem, a lecturer at Israel's University of Haifa, has, within a few short years, emerged as a leading academic analyst of Israeli Arab political issues, and the book at hand will cement his reputation. It combines an insider's feel for his subject with a critical, but reasonably restrained and balanced, presentation of a topic that has too often generated apologetics or polemics. Ghanem does not focus on the history or substance of relations between the Jewish majority and Arab citizens of Israel, or on official policies and practices. On these issues he briefly redraws the picture sketched by previous studies, most of them by Israeli Jewish scholars: Israeli Arabs/Palestinians (the latter designation is increasingly preferred) have formal rights of citizenship, but are in fact second-class citizens both in law (given legal expressions of the Jewishness of the state) and, even more, in practice. While they have made great absolute progress by most measures in the half-century of Israeli statehood, a huge gap between the two communities remains. Furthermore, they are doubly marginalized, first, as Israelis and, second, as part of the broader Palestinian Arab community in which their position is also problematic.

Forty years ago Arnold Wolfers lamented that scholars had failed to examine those rare occasions, following great wars, when statesmen gather to refashion the norms and institutions of international politics. He noted in his (1962) Discord and Collaboration (pp. 137–38) that creating a new order after the close of war is “one of the trickiest tasks of diplomacy,” for how that order is fashioned will have a profound impact on the subsequent pattern of war. Charles Doran's (1971) The Politics of Assimilation, Robert Randle's (1973) The Origins of Peace, and my (1991) Peace and War: Armed Conflict and International Order provided empirical support for Wolfers' insights, but G. John Ikenberry offers the first study that links peacemaking to specific types of international order.

The analysis and practice of foreign policy are in flux on the African continent as elsewhere at the turn of the century. The combined forces of the end of bipolarity, then apartheid plus exponetial liberalization(s) and globalization(s), have changed the balance of power, not just between states externally but also between states and nonstate actors (e.g., civil societies and private sectors) internally. The eight regional or national case studies in this collection capture the latter dynamic well—foreign policy is no longer, if it ever was, the monopoly of regimes—but the pair of end pieces by the coeditors is, alas, more cautious and realistic. Thus, this original volume, by nine mainly younger scholars, encapsulates the debate about the sources and causes of, actors and interests in, inter- and transnational relations in this distinctive region with relevance for broader discourses about local to global governance. So chapters 1 and 10 could have been written a decade ago, whereas the central eight very much reflect the profound changes in relations and analyses of the 1990s, especially that by William Reno, “External Relations of Weak States and Stateless Regions in Africa,” with resonance for comparable regions such as Central Europe and Central Asia.

Every scholar likes to think that what he or she studies is of capital importance. For that reason alone, this ambitious book would have to please immigration specialists. “Demography is destiny” is Rey Koslowski's thesis, boiled down, and in his view it is almost impossible to overrate migration's impact on international politics. While guilty of overreaching in a few spots and failing to appreciate the role of politics in quite a few more, he makes a compelling case overall. His bold work both brings a stimulating perspective to a multidisciplinary area of study that is still seeking its center of gravity and serves to remind the field of international relations (IR) that migration deserves its full attention.

Thucydides, one of the intellectual fathers of international relations (IR), wrote a postmortem of a great war. In the process he also served as a general and was banished from Athens when he arrived too late to save a battle. Fortunately for us, the banishment improved his data and his analysis. Such are the delicate complications of analysis, theory, and practice. Being in the world of action provides crucial questions; distancing oneself from that world provides insight into the questions. This volume edited by Miroslav Nincic and Joseph Lepgold explores the variety of problems and prospects associated with linking theory and practice in international affairs. They do not argue that theory should be rejected for praxis. Rather they and their contributors argue that the isolation of the two unnecessarily oversimplifies the political world. The world of academic IR theory can benefit from closer contact with the world of policy and the world of policy will do better if it uses more theory.

I approached this book with the dreaded sense that the subject matter of extradition would not hold my interest for very long, certainly not a hefty book of this size, and doubting the connection with human rights advertised in the title. I was decidedly wrong on both counts. Perhaps the first prejudice can be excused on the grounds that scholarship on this subject has indeed been “relentlessly academic,” as Christopher Pyle himself acknowledges. This book, however, is anything but this. Instead, it not only has very impressive scholarship and is certainly pertinent to world events (especially after September 11), but also is a wonderful read.

To date, the main body of research on the economic dimensions of foreign policy has focused on narrow, tactical considerations alone. Are sanctions effective tools of diplomacy? Do governments try to sway the nation's trade away from enemies and toward allies due to relative gains concerns? Does foreign aid win compliance? Lars Skålnes's new book refocuses the attention of the field greatly by asking us to consider foreign economic policy as a core component of great-power grand strategy. The purposeful manipulation of foreign economic ties by national leaders, he argues, is not merely an ancillary instrument in the diplomatic kit of foreign policy elites. Indeed there may be times in which it is the central tool used by powers to secure their strategic objectives. Moreover, Skålnes's framework seeks to identify the specific political–strategic conditions that make it more likely or less likely that great powers will build their grand strategies around such policy. This idea should not seem strange to us when we recall initiatives over the past 30 years such as Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, Henry Kissinger's notion of détente with the Soviet Union, and current American attempts to moderate Chinese behavior by integrating that emerging power more fully into the global economy. While these examples are not treated in the book (Skålnes examines German, French, British, and American cases over different years between 1879 and 1967), they stand as additional instances that might be understood in new ways. Politics, Markets, and Grand Strategy makes a persuasive argument for permanently removing the “low politics” label from foreign economic policy and viewing it instead as coequal with military strategy in the realm of “high politics.”

The Helsinki Final Act was adopted by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in 1975. Among the basic principles for relations among states that were affirmed in the document were the apparently contradictory principles of nonintervention in the internal affairs of states and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Should a collision between these two principles occur, which one would prevail? It was widely assumed at the time, of course, that the principle of nonintervention would win out. The Soviets and their bloc members apparently had no intention of complying with the human rights principles enshrined in the Final Act, and even Western statesmen such as Henry Kissinger downplayed their importance.

While there are numerous examples of transaction cost analysis in the literature on international cooperation, little of this scholarship concentrates on military collaboration. Indeed, studies like Weber's that explain the varying density of military agreements are rare under any rubric. Weber's offering thus begins to fill an important void in the scholarship on military cooperation.