This is a helpful addition to the growing body of historical institutionalist literature that demonstrates the influence of macro- and sectoral-level institutions on policymaking. The central arguments, examined here with regard to agricultural policy, are two. First, institutional relationships among state and nonstate actors may facilitate one policy objective but impede other policy goals. Neither novel nor inconsistent with the literature, this proposition is advanced through elaboration of how various interrelationships between political parties and interest groups shape governments' policy capabilities. Second, Sheingate argues that the American institutional framework of dispersed authority and pluralism does not necessarily render governments incapable or subject to interest group capture. In advancing this proposition, he seeks to put paid to popular depictions of American agrarian politics as constituting iron triangles and all-powerful farm groups.

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.

It's not every day that you find a book that argues for its own irrelevance. This is not, of course, how Mark Franke characterizes his project in Global Limits—but it is the upshot, and he is admirably candid in putting together the individual pieces of the argument pointing to it.

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).

Since the Cold War, the United States as well as other countries have struggled with the “new world order.” Further integration of the European Union, mostly in economic and political ways, has given it recognition as an actor within the international arena. During the crisis that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the international community witnessed the EU's failure to bring a speedy end to the genocide and violence in the region. The EU's inability and lack of efficacy in the situation tarnished its image and prompted it to begin working toward the creation of a European Common Foreign and Defense Identity. More recent events of September 11, as well as increased violence between Israel and the Palestinians, once again beg the question: What is the role of an integrated Europe? As the United States takes on its war against terrorism, it looks to its closest allies in Europe to be supportive and to help in the endeavor. Actions or opinions from individual member states, however, seem to gain more public attention in the United States than those from the EU as a single entity acting in the global arena.

Politics of Institutional Choice is an important contribution to the literature on legislative institutions. The authors' backgrounds complement each other to good effect. The result is a study that is both conversant with the literature on legislative politics in the United States and Western Europe and solidly grounded in the politics of contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the adoption of reformed legislative institutions by the Russian Republic in 1993 left the newly elected representatives with the need to devise a working set of parliamentary institutions for the newly formed bicameral legislature. The “building materials” out of which these were fashioned—legislative committees, party caucuses, rules allocating agenda control to leaders—resemble those of the U.S. Congress and Western European parliaments, but the institutional structure was adapted to the needs of Russian politics.

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.”

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.

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.

W. Rand Smith compares socialist policies of industrial retrenchment in France and Spain during the 1980s and 1990s. Both governments sought to adapt their national economy to change in the global market, through investment incentives and labor policies, in a way that would avoid sectoral crisis or even collapse. They sought to achieve an “orderly exit” of labor from redundancy-plagued industrial sectors, notably steel and automobiles, through job retraining, help in establishing small businesses, relocation incentives, and improvements in the job market, not to mention such standard support mechanisms as severance payments and preretirement systems that supported the incomes of unemployed workers. There was a distinct convergence between French and Spanish policy around this kind of adaptive policy. Neither country after 1983 resisted global market trends through price controls or subsidies or trade protection, and neither government embraced market adjustment through more liberal policies of deregulation of capital or labor markets.

This elaborate study analyzes the Nigerian foreign policy decision-making structures and processes from 1960 (when Nigeria became an independent country) until 1999. Using Graham Allison's conceptual models of decision making (the rational-actor model, the organizational process model, and the bureaucratic politics model), Ufot Inamete examines how foreign policy decision making during the Balewa, Ironsi, Gowon, Muhammed/Obasanjo, Shagari, Buhari, Babangida, Shonekan, Abacha, Abubakar, and Obasanjo governments manifested both changes and continuities (p. 289). Importantly, theory from Allison's model is well integrated with the substantive and analytical portions of the book, and, thus, it goes beyond the theory of a strong-leader approach in Third World countries to demonstrate that developing countries do have organizational structures that deal with foreign policies.

Robert Jackson's recent book The Global Covenant is a work in the tradition of the international society school that extends the perspective of that school to today's world events and theoretical debates. Jackson's argument has several important components: that we live in a society of states that operates according to particular norms having significant ethical implications for the conduct of world politics; that this society of states can be distinguished from both the amoral perspective of the (neo)realists and the universalism of cosmopolitans; that this world must be examined primarily through the words and actions of statespeople, its primary articulators; that this world is distinguished by values of antipaternalism, normative pluralism, and the observance of sovereign rights of nonintervention and self-determination; and that recent crises (e.g., the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc.) demonstrate more the continued durability of this world (which has existed roughly since Westphalia) than its decline or demise.

William Walters probes understandings of the concepts of unemployment that developed and, to an extent, succeeded one another over a hundred years in British history. The British case has its own unique trajectory but parallels developments elsewhere, so the book's interest is not confined to specialists in British politics or social history. Walters applies a Foucauld-inspired governmentality perspective to unemployment in order both to overcome the routine and familiar understandings that have become attached to the concept and, more broadly, to contribute to what he terms a genealogy of the social. The latter refers to a particular sphere of governance as exemplified by the practices, techniques, and institutions devised to govern processes and problem populations, in this case the unemployed. Genealogical approaches are suspicious of generalization and systematization and hold that “we can learn from the particular and the contextual” (p. 8). Thus, Walters argues, the government of unemployment will be instructive for understanding social governance generally.

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).

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.

By almost all indicators, Rwanda's civil war should have ended in a successful negotiated settlement. Both the Tutsi rebels and the Rwandan government had agreed to participate in negotiations brokered by a team of Tanzanian mediators whom most people considered highly skilled. The two parties to the negotiations were able to reach and sign a detailed peace settlement that guaranteed both parties representation in the legislature and a set percentage of slots in the military. And the United Nations offered to “guarantee” the security of the two sides during the implementation period. Almost all factors purported to lead to a peaceful solution were present at the time the Arusha accords were signed in 1994. Rwanda's civil war, however, did not end peacefully. Instead, a peace process that seemingly had all the elements of success ended in one of the most rapid genocides in recorded history.

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.

While this book does not quite cover the broad range promised by its title, it does offer a sophisticated analysis of the privatization of rural industry in China, thick in social science theory and rich with empirical data.

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.