Terrorisme international et marchés de violence., Kalulambi Pongo, Martin et Landry, Tristan, Québec : Les Presses de l'Université Laval, Collection Nord-Sud, 2005, 144 p.

La science politique : cette locution semble parfois prendre des allures d'oxymore. Dans le contexte actuel, la recherche et les écrits sur le terrorisme sont parfois plus politiques que scientifiques. Le problème est important : comment étudier scientifiquement, cette catégorie si polémique de “ terroriste ”? Martin Kalulambi Pongo et Tristan Landry s'intéressent pourtant au “ scientifique ” de la question. Dans Terrorisme international et marchés de violence, Kalulambi, professeur associé au département d'histoire de l'Université Nationale de Colombie à Bogota, et Landry, professionnel de recherche à l'Université Laval, tentent d'atteindre deux objectifs. Premièrement, ils dégagent des constantes dans les diverses guerres civiles à l'aide de la théorie des “ marchés de violence ”. Deuxièmement, ce qu'ils ont découvert les aide à montrer les failles tant dans l'étude de ces conflits, que dans la lutte contre-terroriste elle-même. Leur analyse démontre qu'au-delà des diverses motivations idéologiques, ces conflits perdurent grâce à une logistique rationnelle centrée sur les intérêts des acteurs en place. Les auteurs montrent en outre que ces conflits sont aussi des moteurs du terrorisme international.

Aboriginal Conditions: Research as a Foundation for Public Policy, Jerry P. White, Paul S. Maxim and Dan Beavon, eds., Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003, pp. 285.

The situation of Aboriginal people in Canada deserves close attention from academic researchers and policy makers. While it is important to explore the larger questions of self-government, sovereignty, and land claims, it is also necessary to conduct research based on the current reality of Aboriginals in order to develop relevant and effective strategies. This collected volume of essays brings together researchers and policy makers in an attempt to provide an empirical foundation for building better policy and better communities for Aboriginal peoples in Canada. The research itself is structured around two central questions: What is the situation? How has it developed? The effort to answer these questions provides a substantial basis for future development and initiatives.

Dynamiques partisanes et réalignements électoraux au Canada (1867–2004), Pierre Martin, Paris : L'Harmattan, 2005, 302 pages.

Les politologues canadiens ont abondamment documenté la plupart des élections fédérales depuis le milieu du 20e siècle par des ouvrages collectifs (en particulier, la série The Canadian General Election of…), des analyses de données provenant d'enquêtes d'opinion publique (les études sur les élections canadiennes) et d'autres contributions. La plupart de ces publications se concentrent sur un ou deux rendez-vous électoraux. L'ouvrage de Pierre Martin est différent puisqu'il adopte une perspective historique englobant toutes les élections fédérales depuis 1867 et rejoint ainsi certains travaux de David Smith, Kenneth Carty et Richard Johnston. Le politologue français examine le cas canadien en y appliquant une version revisitée de la théorie des réalignements électoraux.

A Civil Society? Collective Actors in Canadian Political Life, Miriam Smith, Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2005, pp. 224.

A curious thing about Canadian political science is that, compared to its American or British counterparts, it offers very little analysis of collective action outside of political parties. Even the interest groups in Canada don't call themselves interest groups any more. So, when a book on collective actors by a respected scholar like Miriam Smith—who has made significant contributions to the study of Canadian institutionalism and whose book on the lesbian and gay movement is a gem—comes along, it is an event for the field. Because Smith starts the book with a quote from my 1996 article with Jane Jenson on regime shift, I was well invested from the first line and had high expectations that Smith would not only set the macro institutional context that she always does so well, but would provide an insightful analysis of developments in collective action over the past decade that would build on where Jenson and I left off.

Continuity and Change in Canadian Politics: Essays in Honour of David E. Smith, Hans J. Michelmann and Cristine de Clercy, eds., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006, pp. 273.

Festschrifts pose tricky problems for editors, publishers and reviewers. Editors have to confront the sensitive issue of whom to ask to contribute, how to nudge tardy contributors along and whether the honoree will be pleased with the result. Such collections are seldom thematically coherent enough to guarantee large sales, which is an issue for publishers facing bottom-line calculations. Reviewers have to critically appraise essays on which they are often not experts and they have to remember the occasion for putting those essays between covers. Despite these problems the genre persists, partly on the basis of tradition but also out of the genuine desire to honour colleagues who have been outstanding scholars and “citizens” in their professional fields.

The Government Taketh Away: The Politics of Pain in the United States and Canada., Leslie A. Pal and R. Kent Weaver, eds., Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003, pp. xii, 340.

Compiling edited collections is notoriously difficult because editors and contributors frequently work from a different script. The result is that instead of producing a coherent volume which addresses a particular theme, readers are often left with a collection of scholarly papers that share little in common. What may have started as a project with a single goal and focus can quickly disintegrate into a patchwork quilt. This major problem has been avoided in Leslie Pal and Kent Weaver's edited book, The Government Taketh Away: The Politics of Pain in the United States and Canada, a sophisticated and richly detailed analysis of how decision-makers in the two countries attempt to introduce policies that may adversely affect the economic, social and political interests of various groups while trying to minimize political fallout. As the title of this book suggests, the editors are not concerned about why policy makers reward certain sectors and groups in society. After all, common sense dictates that politicians need votes and attempt to acquire them by appealing to the broadest segment of the population. In this book, the focus is on how policy makers, when faced with potential opposition from different groups, make strategic decisions that result in the imposition of losses. Although the editors do not offer a concrete definition of loss, examples include policy decisions that result in the de-indexation of old age pensions, the closure of military bases and the retraction of tax benefits. This book is not an indictment of government—the editors acknowledge that in democracies politicians must often make difficult choices that will help some and hurt others. Rather, it is a thorough exploration of how decision makers make these decisions and how various groups and sectors react.

Calling Power to Account: Law, Reparations, and the Chinese Head Tax Case, David Dyzenhaus and May Moran, eds., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. 471.

This is a collection of fifteen essays that addresses different aspects of the Chinese head tax case. Edited by two law professors and written mostly by lawyers and law professors, the collection has a strong legal flavour. The book begins with the legal case of Mack vs. Attorney General of Canada. However, the book does not provide a succinct summary of the case. In brief, the case involves three Chinese Canadians, Shack Jang Mack, Quen Ying Lee and Yew Lee, filing a statement of claim through their attorney in December, 2000, in a class action on behalf of head tax payers in the Ontario Superior Court. In all, the case went through three courts, and the original ruling dismissing the claim of head tax payers was upheld by the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court.

Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System, Daiva K. Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. 233.

Negotiating Citizenship is a thoughtful, well-researched and insightful book concerned with the topical issue of citizenship and contesting citizenship rights within the context of global capitalism. It is a timely and comprehensive piece that interrogates and dissects traditional theories of citizenship, and offers an alternative theoretical perspective on the basis of examining the status and condition of foreign domestic workers and nurses who migrate to Canada from two similar but different regions of the world: the Caribbean and the Phillipines. In creating the context for discussion, the work takes the reader on the journey of these migrant women workers from their home countries in the “Third World” where national labour markets are becoming increasingly unable to absorb surplus labour and where they have been adversely affected by the anti-social structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to the more economically developed Canada where the state encourages them to work without providing them with citizenship rights. By so doing, as the text points out, the Canadian state, which still has primacy under globalization, reinforces the vulnerability of an already vulnerable social group for which migration is a survival strategy.

Au sein de la Maison-Blanche. La formulation de la politique étrangère des Etats-Unis., David, Charles-Philippe, Québec : Presses de l'Université Laval, deuxième édition, 2004, 737 p.

Charles-Philippe David est un chercheur francophone bien connu dans les milieux académiques de la discipline des relations internationales. Il a publié un bon nombre d'ouvrages et d'articles sur la sécurité internationale, les études stratégiques et diplomatiques et la politique américaine. Ses travaux de langue française sont particulièrement importants et bienvenus chez les chercheurs et les étudiants francophones s'intéressant à une discipline où la langue de Shakespeare est largement prédominante. David récidive donc avec la 2e édition de ce volumineux livre de quelque 700 pages, avec l'addition d'un chapitre sur la présidence de George W. Bush et d'une étude de cas sur l'invasion de l'Irak. L'objectif général de l'auteur est d'analyser de l'intérieur la formulation de la politique extérieure des États-Unis, de Truman à Bush, le fils. L'angle d'analyse de Charles-Philippe David est particulier, dans le sens où il défie les théories des relations internationales systémiques, sociétales ou rationnelles auxquelles les étudiants sont souvent invités à s'intéresser.

Canadian Newspaper Ownership in the Era of Convergence, Walter C. Soderlund and Kai Hildebrandt, Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta, 2005, pp. 194.

This timely book contributes to ongoing debates in Canada about media ownership. The opening chapters summarize government responses to concentrated media ownership since the 1970s and survey some academic studies on the issue. The study's carefully compiled data on the influence of changes in ownership on content poses a strong challenge to those who see media moguls as using the media to pursue their own ideological and corporate agendas. Journalistic values, organizational realities and the relentless challenge of new technologies severely constrain such action, claim Soderlund, Hildebrandt and two others who contribute to this volume, Ron Wagenberg and Walt Romanow. Perhaps the best chapters in the book are those dealing with the creation by CanWest, one of Canada's largest media organizations, of its ill-fated National Editorial Policy and the dismissal of Ottawa Citizen publisher Russell Mills.

The Art of Governance: Analyzing Management and Administration, Patricia W. Ingraham and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., eds., Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004, pp. 238.

What is “governance”? Despite a huge literature, a major journal, and numerous teaching programmes and courses ostensibly dealing with the subject, it is a concept that still inspires much confusion. Many students of political science, among others, see the term as being simply a synonym of “governing,” used to describe what governments actually “do,” or as just a new name for the traditional subject matter of established fields such as public administration and public management, offering little in the way of value-added to those more traditional terms and academic fields. Others, of course, argue that “governance” represents a fundamental new way of “governing,” specifically a much less top-down and hierarchical form than is traditionally associated with studies of public administration, and hence a subject worthy of additional attention and the coinage of neologisms.

Unfinished Constitutional Business: Rethinking Indigenous Self-Determination, Barbara A. Hocking, ed., Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005, pp. 293.

In the introduction to this collection of papers from a 2001 conference in Brisbane, Australia, the editor asks, “can indigenous peoples' experiences of colonisation reshape our constitutional language?” (xv). The contributions to the book reflect the breadth of indigenous experiences as well as the range of ways that many nation-states will have to revisit their constitutions in order to satisfy the goal of decolonization/self-determination. Indeed, the book requires us to rethink what we consider to be a constitution in the context of unresolved and highly unsatisfactory indigenous-settler relations. More than a document or series of political institutions, the book explores the many ways that colonial societies have been and remain constituted by non-indigenous assumptions and ideologies and considers whether and how these impair claims for indigenous self-determination.

Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jonathan Marks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. viii, 191.

This is a thoughtful and ambitious book that seeks to challenge standard schools in the interpretation of Rousseau, while at the same time arguing for the importance of new attention to Rousseau to address questions concerning the defects of liberalism. It is well written and well argued, even if not fully convincing, and deserves the attention of serious Rousseau scholars.

City Politics, Canada, James Lightbody, Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006, pp. 576.

Scholarly research on Canadian urban politics has never been extensive, and the few who teach in the field have had to make do with a limited range of textbooks, mostly focused on the institutions of local government. Those wanting to extend their coverage to deal with such issues as the importance of globalization, social movements, race and ethnicity, social inequality, urban political culture, regional governance, the media, and federal policy, have been forced to rely on an assemblage of diverse materials. As well, the politics of, and role played by, the suburbs is often marginal to most texts, focused as they are on the politics of the largest central cities.

Petites sociétés et minorités nationales. Enjeux politiques et perspectives comparées., Jacques L. Boucher et Joseph Yvon Thériault (dir.), Sainte-Foy : Presses de l'Université du Québec, 2005, 398 p.

La diversité culturelle qui meuble et module les sociétés du monde s'exprime par plusieurs moyens, tels la politique de l'identité, la mobilisation de mouvements sociaux, l'élaboration des politiques publiques qui la gèrent ou le développement d'un discours des droits auquel les politiciens et les tribunaux font écho. Elle fait l'objet d'une attention soutenue dans le contexte des petites sociétés et des minorités nationales, qui sont constamment confrontées à leur condition minoritaire ou précaire de par leur position géopolitique ou de par leur diversité interne en conséquence de mouvements migratoires, de conquêtes, de colonisations ou de partitions. La mondialisation complique encore les choses, en provoquant une transformation des rapports de pouvoir, un repositionnement territorial de ceux-ci et une transformation du rôle de l'État et de la société. Tel est le contexte de la discussion proposée dans le recueil de Jacques L. Boucher et Joseph Yvon Thériault, intitulé Petites sociétés et minorités nationales. Enjeux politiques et perspectives comparées. Le volume rassemble une série de textes, eux-mêmes présentés lors d'un congrès tenu à Ottawa et Gatineau, à l'été 2002, tel qu'on nous le rappelle dans les détails bibliographiques. Démontrant une multidisciplinarité utile à la compréhension des nombreux enjeux propres aux petites sociétés, le volume propose une discussion de ces enjeux à partir de la situation du Québec et des communautés minoritaires ailleurs au Canada, ainsi que de celle de sociétés d'Europe et d'Asie. La mondialisation représente la trame de fond principale des débats, car elle transforme les capacités des petites sociétés, les forums vers lesquels elles se tournent pour faire entendre leurs revendications et la nature même de ces revendications. De plus, la mondialisation entraîne une restructuration de leur société civile et par conséquent l'apparition de nouveaux lieux et formes de conflits.