The Impact of Norms in International Society: The Latin American Experience, 1881–2001. By Arie M. Kacowicz. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. 232p. $40.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

With this book, Arie Kacowicz addresses the ongoing “norms debates” in the international relations literature and attempts a synthetic perspective on norms. The attempt at synthesis is an important one and well done, even if problematic at points.

Trust and Mistrust in International Relations. By Andrew H. Kydd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 284p. $39.50.

That cooperation is at best difficult and at worst impossible in the anarchic international system is an established idea. Analyses usually assume that state preferences put them in a prisoner's dilemma where defection is the strictly dominant strategy. Explaining cooperation means showing why actors forgo the short-term benefits of exploiting others. Mechanisms involve conditional play, institutional arrangements, and hegemonic leadership, which help overcome coordination, monitoring, enforcement, and free-rider problems.

Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War. By Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 300p. $32.95.

Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder's article “Democratization and War” (Foreign Affairs 74 [May/June 1995]: 79–97) arrived in 1995 like a thunderclap, riveting me to questions about domestic political changes and their implications for peace and conflict between states. The article appeared when the intellectual wars over the democratic peace were hot, and when research critical of democratic performance in general was receiving heightened scrutiny. In general, the early response to the authors' claim that democratization significantly increases the war-proneness of states focused narrowly on their research design. However, my review of Mansfield and Snyder's book-length treatment of the subject focuses on the broader weaknesses in the book, of which there are few, and the book's strengths, of which there are several.

The Politics of the Global. By Himadeep Muppidi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 130p. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Himadeep Muppidi has written a short, sophisticated, and provocative book that pushes its readers to think hard about global politics. His main hypothesis is that a thorough analysis of the “contestations over the social meaning of the global” (p. xvii) allows us to explore new “spaces and strategies for resisting the colonialization of the global” (p. xviii). In the end, however, the reader feels a little puzzled regarding the fruits of the exercise, including whether we have really gained a better understanding of global politics or whether we have been offered new possible ways for doing politics globally.

Renegade Regimes: Confronting Deviant Behavior in World Politics. By Miroslav Nincic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 232p. $29.50.

The term rogue states gained currency in the 1990s, and was applied by policymakers, pundits, and a few scholars to regimes worthy of moral condemnation and political-military coercion. The Clinton administration introduced the less offensive appellation “states of concern,” but the current Bush administration, not one to shy away from inflammatory rhetoric, brought “rogue states” back into use and made them a more central focus of its foreign policy. Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba head the administration's list, and the charge also has been leveled against Syria, Yugoslavia, and Libya (before its recent about-face).

Globalizing Critical Theory. Edited by Max Pensky. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. 264p. $82.50 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This is a welcome and innovative book, at least in its basic intent. The innovation resides mainly in the correlation between a prominent strand in Western social and political thought—the Frankfurt School program of “critical theory”—and a major phenomenon of contemporary political life: the process of globalization. In many ways, this correlation goes against the dominant academic grain. At least as cultivated in American academia, political theory tends to be mainly retrospective and concerned with the rehearsal of time-honored texts, often with a pronounced slant against contaminating theorizing with mundane affairs. On the other hand, examination of current developments—including the process of globalization—tends to be left to journalists or else to specialists in international politics with little or no background in traditions of political thought. In this respect, the present volume is a breakthrough. It deliberately seeks to bring the insights of the Frankfurt School program to bear on ongoing discussions about global politics, economics, science, and aesthetics. All the contributors, including the editor, are distinguished scholars with solid reputations grounded in the traditions of critical theory and adjacent theoretical paradigms.