A thoughtful book on a subject that can be quite vexing, Shades of Citizenship benefits greatly from the comparative analytical framework employed. The central poles of comparative attention are the U.S. and Brazilian censuses, but Nobles also comments on a range of other national processes of census-taking and systems of racial classification employed; Germany and South Africa as well as other Latin American, African, and European countries are mentioned.

The “borderless world” is an early twenty-first century cliche, particularly in Europe. Overlapping processes of globalization and regional integration have done much over the past decades to alter the political and economic nature of geographic boundaries. As a result, the tendency is to anticipate a fundamental deterritorialization of politics and economics. However tempting, it would nevertheless be hazardous to rush to judgment. Through a series of overlapping case studies—essays, really—Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort demonstrate that frontiers remain important both within the European Union (EU) and without. Politics and economics continue to be rooted in geography despite the transformations of the late twentieth century. This is true not only in practical terms but also in relation to individual and group identities. As the authors suggest, “there remains in Europe a highly developed sense of territoriality” (p. 11).

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.

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.

It seems timely and appropriate that the twentieth century—the century of the Holocaust, the Gulag Archipelago, the Killing Fields, the Cultural Revolution, and the “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans and Rwanda—ended with a wave of growing interest in healing past injustices. Human rights organizations and international commissions investigate violations of human rights. International tribunals judge political leaders, warlords, and their soldiers. Historians, political scientists, and legal theorists study the implications of such crimes and punishments.

Scholars of media and public opinion in Western Europe and the United States will find plenty of useful information and much to argue about in A Virtuous Circle. The data are rich and broad, and the conclusions drawn are provocative and relevant to some of the major debates in the field. The central question addressed is whether the news media discourages political engagement.

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.

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.

A lot of scholarly attention has been devoted to demonstrating that transnational activists “matter” in explaining international outcomes. Having paid those dues, it can be argued that scholars of transnational activity can safely shift from a documentary focus to a more profound inquiry concerning how, why, and to what extent nonstate actors matter. On the other hand, to understand the work of transnational activists for the international implementation of moral and legal standards—not a completely new area of inquiry, but a burgeoning one—still requires a considerable amount of empirical documentation of exactly what that work entails. Only time-intensive, border-hopping research provides the names, dates, and actors' words, deeds, and intentions that comprise whatever political activity there is to be theorized about. Thus, both empirical documentation and theorizing about transnational and multilateral processes are demanding, and interdependent, scholarly necessities. In her book Moral Victories: How Activists Provoke Multilateral Action, Susan Burgerman presents finely articulated empirical research that is a welcome contribution to the literature on human rights in multilateral political processes.

Leigh Payne greatly enriches our knowledge of Latin American transitions from authoritarianism to democracy. The Armed Right Wing focuses on the role of violent right-wing groups and government responses to them in three Latin American countries, with application elsewhere. Explaining that uncivil social movements “use political violence … to promote exclusionary objectives … as a deliberate strategy to eliminate, intimidate, and silence political adversaries” (p. 1), Payne contrasts these movements with “civil” social movements. They employ rule-breaking (and violence) to “expand [rather than curtail] citizen rights and freedoms” (p. 1).

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.

A specter is haunting the Trilateral Democracies—this specter is called civic malaise. It has visited these countries before; rearing its head for the first time a quarter-century ago, proclaiming the demise of democracy due to the inability of governments to respond to the onslaught of waves of new forms of participatory democracy and political action. (Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, 1975). Too much democracy, as it were, may be too much of a good thing. Fortunately many of these dire predictions have not materialized, perhaps partly because they were highlighted a quarter-century ago. The sequel, Disaffected Democracies, celebrates the silver anniversary of the original Crisis of Democracy. This successor volume is similarly concerned with the fate of democracy in rich countries. These democracies are “troubled” (p. 7), so the argument goes, because their public institutions are undermined by declining confidence in government and sagging interpersonal social trust. The authors of this edited volume situate the sources of these “disturbing” (p.13) developments squarely in the political sphere. In other words, the origins of the decline in confidence in political institutions is not explained by a frail social fabric but, rather, by failures of government and politics themselves. Despite a tight focus on the temporal (the last 25 years) and spatial (the Trilateral countries) parameters of this edited volume, it is refreshing to see so many diverse and innovative diagnoses as to what is ailing the rich democracies.

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.

Africa's Challenge to International Relations Theory, edited by Kevin Dunn and Timothy Shaw, offers a timely reflection on the content and nuance of international relations theory in an era of “the new inequality” (Craig Murphy, “Political Consequences of the New Inequality,” International Studies Quarterly 45 [September 2001]: 347–56). The central question posed by the authors is: How international is international relations theory? In the authors' view, not very much. As a consequence, their objective in the volume is “to replace the dominant/dominating denotative reading of the IR text with a more pluralist connotative reading” (p. 8; my emphasis). Drawing on African experiences in the discipline of international relations, all 13 chapters of this engaging volume take aim at various manifestations of the Eurocentricity and “provincialism” of international relations theory then and now. Very early in the volume, Dunn sets the stage for a deliberate and systematic engagement with the discipline for its relegation of Africa to the footnote of international relations theory (p. 4).

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.

As Michael O'Hanlon concludes in his excellent contribution to Rockets' Red Glare: “We should…get used to the debate over ballistic missile defenses. It has been around a long time, and no final resolution is imminent” (p. 132). In one sense, a review of these three recent books makes clear that many analysts had grown a bit too used to positioning themselves in terms of the 1972 ABM Treaty. Preoccupied with arguments over whether the treaty should be preserved, modified, or rewritten in light of a changing strategic and technological context, no one seemed to have anticipated that President George W. Bush would simply withdraw from it, invoking Article XV's provision that either party could withdraw if “extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this Treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests.” Even many strategic defense supporters who deemed the treaty obsolete (as Robert Joseph persuasively maintains in his contribution to Rockets' Red Glare) generally believed that it should only—and would only—be scrapped if negotiations over U.S.-proposed changes broke down. (“The Bush Administration,” surmises O'Hanlon, “will surely try very hard to amend it before going to such an extreme”) (p. 112). In the event, the president's team disavowed even the word “negotiation,” saying they were willing only to “consult” the Russians regarding the treaty's impending demise.

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.

What is public opinion? In this aptly named book, authors Jacob Shamir and Michal Shamir attempt to address their perceived deficiencies in public opinion research by posing a new theoretical framework for the study of this important subject. Though hundreds of books, articles, and monographs have addressed public opinion, the authors contend that current theories of public opinion are too deterministic and that they fall short of explaining the full range of public opinion possibilities. Existing studies attempt to interpret public opinion on the basis of the observed outcomes—i.e., Why was a particular opinion expressed? What does it mean in the context of the instrument constructed to measure that opinion? The authors believe that to understand public opinion, one must come to understand the role of the information environment in which that opinion is located. In other words, Shamir and Shamir are not interested simply in the static outcomes of public opinion but in the environment in which that opinion is constructed. To this end, they propose a new theoretical construct by which to interpret it.