The editors of Bridges and Boundaries asked contributors—nine political scientists and eight historians, all of them North American—to reflect on their respective disciplines and the way they go about “the study of international events” (p. 1). We should notice a positivist disposition here. While contributors “share an interest…in the state, politics and war” (p. 2), events are the stuff of international relations. That the state, politics, and war are complex institutional phenomena perhaps not reducible to events points to conceptual issues that this volume fails generally to address. Instead, contributors discuss the many problems attending generalized explanation and empirical fit—theory and science—as if their shared interests imply a common stock of core concepts.

Rethinking Europe's Future and From the Nation State to Europe? belong to two different genres of European studies. From the Nation State to Europe? is a collection of academic essays about the transformation of the nation-state in the European Union's context and its implications for social scientific theoretical concepts. Rethinking Europe's Future is by contrast aimed at politicians and policymakers. Its major objective is to discourage policies designed to push Europe and NATO to expand eastward, perhaps to embrace Russia, and instead to encourage Western Europe to assert itself as a major independent, even if not fully united, force in the world. Despite this disciplinary difference, however, the two books complement each other well. The former is about the present state of affairs in Europe; the latter concerns the future and, for that purpose, a good deal of the past. Both involve excellent scholarship and thoughtful arguments, though organizationally they share some weaknesses. They should prove interesting to any student of European affairs.

One test of a book is how well it weathers major developments in world events, and, as with the end of the Cold War, the beginning of the new war on terrorism presents recent publications in international or military affairs with the danger of untimely relegation to the trash bin of history. After September 11, as we scramble to adjust and make sense of the “hunt for Osama,” Stephen Cimbala's work, however, remains a useful compendium of lessons from several recent wars, crises, and ongoing military challenges. Although the book is not as suddenly relevant as Samuel Huntington's (1998) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order or Chalmers Johnson's (2001) Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, the wisdom distilled within it is sound enough to apply equally well to the pre- and post-September 11 worlds. It is largely rooted in frameworks developed for studying the Cold War and superpower arms races, but Cimbala's examination of the new realities of military strategy and technology still has much to say about the war being waged in Afghanistan and the campaigns that are likely to follow.

I have a colleague who collects maps of Africa that demonstrate a specific phenomenon: the developed world's unlearning of African geography. Across the centuries, the maps seem to show that mapmakers know less about the geography of the African continent—particularly the internal parts—than previously was the case. Rivers change direction; mountain ranges disappear. This unlearning, my colleague argues, comes from notions about the acceptability of sources of information previously used. These maps show the social nature of “learning,” the idea that while in many cases there may be actual answers (after all, African geography exists), what information you look for, and from whom, determines how you will view the information you get, and ultimately what you will do with it.

This excellent collection of essays takes the reader into a complex area: the relationship between economic development and ethnic conflict. It is such a tricky topic because there is consensus about neither what ethnicity is nor the contributions that economic factors make to the origins, dynamics, and resolution of ethnic strife. In fact the essays presented here steer clear of origins and resolution and focus instead on the less controversial area of how development policy impacts on the dynamics of ethnic conflicts. There is a great need for contributions in this area, because, as the introductory chapter by Herring and Esman notes, the international community is becoming more involved in humanitarian assistance and postviolence reconstruction initiatives in a number of protracted intercommunal conflicts. These include Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel and Palestine, Northern Ireland, and Lebanon. At the same time the increased awareness of ethnic conflict in the past decade has resulted in reassessments of what development means in a multicultural setting.

According to editors Bernard I. Finel and Kristin M. Lord, “the puzzle for analysts of international affairs” in relation to transparency is not only how it has weakened states, “but also how it has strengthened them” (p. 2). Transparency, for them, is “a condition in which information about governmental preferences, intentions, and capabilities is made available either to the public or other outsiders” (p. 3). This apparently increasing openness is the outcome of, among other things, emerging communication and information technologies, the widespread adoption of democratic institutions, and the global reach of mass media organizations. Although transparency is “transforming international politics” (p. ix), it has been underassessed and, as such, Finel and Lord aim to examine “the phenomenon” in a “comprehensive way and assess its impact on world security and diplomacy” (p. 6).

For many people, the Internet is simply a mass of information that arrives on their desktop through the miracle of e-mail or web browsers. The existence of reasonably efficient and intuitive interfaces, however, serves to mask the incredible complexity inherent in the establishment, growth, and maintenance of a global tangle of computer networks administered by a variety of universities, private corporations, governments, and individuals.

The basic premise of Paul Harris's edited volume is that “understanding U.S. international environmental policy is central to the entire project of global environmental protection” because the United States is the “world's largest polluter [as well as] the world's wealthiest country” (p. 4). To argue that the United States is disproportionately important to international environmental policy (or to international policy on most other issues) is an important, but relatively uncontroversial, case to make; and it is made rather well throughout the chapters in this book.

At least since Ernest May's influential (1973) ‘Lessons’ of the Past, students of American foreign policy have been conscious of the powerful hold that some analogies seem to have on the minds of decision makers. All of us can think of “Munich” and “Vietnam” as shorthand for a whole series of judgments that we rely on to work through the maze of foreign policy calculus. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack in September 2001, we heard reference to “Pearl Harbor.” And we can now anticipate that “9-11” will take its place as a marker for a set of lessons concerning the struggle against terrorism.

National-level policy outcomes produced by European Union–level directives and regulations are much more diverse across member states than one might expect. This is especially true for those undramatic but complex policy areas that lack the salience of high-level negotiations and treaty signings. Adrienne Héritier and her five coauthors investigate the phenomenon of differential national responses to European policymaking in two transportation policy subareas across five states. They focus on the deregulation of road haulage (trucking) and the reform of publicly owned railways in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. This allows them to show just how widely national policy outcomes can vary and still be generally in line with European Union (EU) requirements.

This book is a detailed study of recent changes in security threats and defense forces in China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea. The author argues that East Asia is in the midst of an arms race “of unprecedented scale” (p. 231). The major threats (“flashpoints”) in the region are the tensions between North and South Korea, the conflict between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China over the future of Taiwan, and the competing claims to oil and other natural resources in the South China Sea. The range and character of these threats have not changed appreciatively in recent years, but what has changed are capabilities of militaries to project power, threaten neighbors, and destabilize the region.

In Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, Thomas Homer-Dixon continues his examination of environmental scarcity. This exploration of the links between environmental scarcity and violent conflict captures much of the related complexity. He finds that scarcities of renewable resources, such as cropland, freshwater, and forests, can contribute to civil violence. As scarcities worsen, the incidence of this kind of violence is likely to increase. Although he acknowledges that environmental scarcity “by itself is neither a necessary nor sufficient cause” (p. 7) of violence, he argues that analysts should not underestimate its importance: Some conflicts cannot be clearly understood without an examination of the role of environmental scarcity. In this work, he offers “analysts and policymakers a tool kit of concepts and generalizations that they can use to analyze, explain, and sometimes predict connections between environmental scarcity and violence around the world” (p. 73).

David Patrick Houghton's U.S. Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis explores the power of historical analogies in foreign policy decision making, offering along the way an engaging, thought-provoking account of decision making during the Iranian hostage crisis. Posing the question “How do decision makers reason when confronted by a problem which seems almost entirely novel in character and therefore without precedent?” (p. 19), Houghton follows Khong's Analogies at War in arguing for the centrality of analogical reasoning. The seizure of the American embassy by Iranian student radicals presented a genuinely perplexing problem for decision makers on all sides, and Houghton captures their uncertainty well. Since decision makers can rely on different historical analogies, and even the same historical analogy can offer competing lessons or be subject to divergent interpretations, Houghton focuses attention upon the interpretive interplay of analogies. As the crisis unfolded, decision makers deliberated, directly and indirectly, over the most relevant and useful analogy. These analogies, according to Houghton, are not merely justifications for strategies chosen for other reasons but directly affect individual policy preferences by shaping beliefs about the nature of the problem. Houghton convincingly establishes the prevalence and power of historical analogies in shaping the response of policymakers to unfamiliar situations. His efforts to construct generalizable theoretical propositions about their relative causal weight are somewhat less successful but are consistently thought-provoking.

In recent years, scholars of the European Union (EU) have looked increasingly at the impact—administrative, institutional, legal, societal—of European integration on the member states. Some of this earlier literature on “Europeanization” viewed the Brussels–member state relationship in a rather static, one-way, top-down dimension. For this reason, the editors of The National Co-ordination of EU Policy take pains to eschew Europeanization as an organizing concept. But perhaps the editors doth protest too much. The National Co-ordination of EU Policy, in fact, fits nicely in the current literature on Europeanization, which views the Brussels–member state relationship in more dynamic terms. Indeed, the book provides a welcome and valuable addition by examining the domestic coordination processes through which “governments arrive at the position that they defend in EU decision making” (p. 235).

Alice Landau explores the nexus between globalization and regionalization in the global economy in Redrawing the Global Economy. This means that she examines the ways in which national economies are being melded globally, while at the same time, those very same economies are creating regional economic blocs.

John Sislin and Frederic Pearson have written a fine book that addresses a complex and understudied issue: the role of arms in ethnic conflict. While it is abundantly clear that arms and ethnic conflict are closely intertwined, we have little systematic knowledge on the nature of the relation. What kinds of weapons—tanks versus small arms, say—play the greatest role? Whatever the weapon, how does its influence vary at different stages in the process of ethnic conflict? As unpleasant as the thought might be, are there conditions under which armaments play a positive role in such conflicts—for example, by promoting a situation of stalemate or bringing about outside humanitarian intervention? The signal contribution of this compact volume is to shed much-needed light on these and many other questions.

Public diplomacy, or foreign policy rhetoric, is an increasingly important dimension of international relations. As modern media extend their global reach, they bring national foreign policy actions out of the diplomatic closet into full public view. Public relations experts market foreign policy as they do other products and services. Foreign policy marketing uses rhetoric strategically to legitimize national actions, mobilize support from allies, and counter the propaganda efforts of opponents. McEvoy-Levy's work contributes to the growing literature of such modern international communication.

Since the end of the Cold War, development studies have fallen to the wayside as attention has shifted to the democratization process in Eastern Europe, the increased integration of the European Union, and the effects of economic globalization in the advanced industrialized countries. The developing world was seen as an afterthought or, in some cases, as arenas of misunderstandable ethnic or religious conflict, structural poverty, disease, and other hardships. However, in the context of September 11, more attention now is on the developing world, perhaps not so much on economic development, but more on containing various terrorist organizations. Yet development studies still exist, and this area of study maintains an historical connection to several decades worth of academic research. Scholars persistently ask such questions as why the South is poor and politically weak compared to countries in the North. Answers generally are located in the dependency literature of unequal economic relations leading to unequal power relations. Darryl C. Thomas, in The Theory and Practice of Third World Solidarity, asks this question but provides a somewhat different response. The economic and political inequality in the world is not necessarily due to economic ideology but to the color of skin (p. xi). The solidarity of the Third World that Thomas sees in the past is one based on race, and racial solidarity should be the means by which the poor and powerless of the Third World transform unequal power relations. Thomas refers to this relationship as global apartheid, defining it as a structure of the world system that combines political economy and racial antagonism (p. 26). He states that global apartheid refers to the continuation of white-minority dominance of political, social, legal, cultural, and economic decision-making apparatuses within the world system (p. 111) and that this form of racial capitalism has become a permanent feature in the world system.

For too long, nuclear deterrence theory has been treated as a casualty of the end of the Cold War. During the preceding period of superpower rivalry, debates over the credibility of nuclear deterrence attracted the attention of sophisticated game theorists in diverse disciplines. But with the end of the Cold War, this research tradition virtually ground to a halt. In this important new book, two long-term contributors to this body of research revisit these issues and effectively recast these models as representations of policy dilemmas of long-standing and continuing relevance. For instance, their models of U.S. strategic doctrines of massive retaliation and flexible response prove relevant to any situation in which the parties perceive two levels of conflict to be significantly different, even if neither level involves the use of nuclear weapons.