The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization and Identity. By David Romano. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 290p. $75 cloth, $29.99 paper.

When the Ukrainians became independent at the end of 1991, the Kurds succeeded to the title of largest nation on earth without its own independent state. This dubious distinction is not due to any dearth of academic attention since in recent years, there has been an explosion of scholarly books and articles regarding the Kurds. David Romano's new publication is clearly one of the best. The author takes the theoretical analysis of Kurdish ethnic resurgence to a new, higher level, while also placing it in the larger context of ethnic nationalist resurgences throughout the world. No other recent analysis of the Kurds has done this.

The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan. By Aseema Sinha. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 384p. $64.95 cloth, $27.95 paper.

This excellent study by Aseema Sinha is a pathbreaker in the fields of political economy and comparative politics generally, and an especially welcome addition to India studies. Conventional wisdom has it that low economic growth rates in India until liberalization in the 1990s were the result of centralized control, especially in the area of the issuance of licenses governing investments known as the license raj. On this view, licensing controls and cumbersome bureaucratic implementation procedures—supported by an ideology that sought to prevent concentration of economic power in the hands of a small group of private entrepreneurs at the expense of the wider social good—have been a drag on the Indian economy. Far better, the argument goes, would have been to let the market function to determine investment patterns. In essence, the debate about Indian growth has been framed around two alternatives—the classical free market and the dirigiste state.

Public Opinion and Political Change in China. By Wenfang Tang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 237p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

In this comprehensive book, Wenfang Tang explores the nature and origins of mass opinion in urban China through survey research conducted between 1987 and 2000. The general theme is how some local democratic practices can develop within the People's Republic of China (PRC). However, rather than presenting a single theory or model, Tang examines a series of case studies on public opinion. He draws on a rich data set that consists of 11 large-scale urban surveys conducted by Chinese government and academic institutions, including his own 1999 six-city survey. With this data he examines a wide range of theories and explanations, such as regime legitimacy (Chapter 3), the influence of the media on opinion (Chapter 4), social capital theory (Chapter 5), political participation (Chapters 6 and 7), and the role of intellectuals (Chapter 8). Thus, this book has a broad appeal to those interested in political development as well as contemporary China.

Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, 1990–1999. By Joshua A. Tucker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 444p. $29.99.

On the heels of a generation of scholarship on democratic transition and consolidation in postcommunist countries, and after several election cycles, relatively steady economic growth, and the accession of many countries in the region to NATO and the European Union, the theoretical concepts and assumptions derived from studies of mature democracies have increasingly been applied to the new democracies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. One fine example is Regional Economic Voting in which Joshua A. Tucker effectively probes and refines the assumptions of economic voting in established democracies to suggest how variations in economic conditions have affected political support for postcommunist parties. In particular, Tucker explores whether—and under what conditions—traditional economic voting assumptions, that incumbent parties and certain types of parties (right-wing parties in established democracies) perform better if the economy is better, are supported in postcommunist cases.

Immigration Phobia and the Security Dilemma: Russia, Europe, and the United States. By Mikhail A. Alexseev. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 294p. $70.00.

National Security and Immigration: Policy Development in the United States and Western Europe Since 1945. By Christopher Rudolph. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 288p. $55.00.

Analyses of immigration from the perspective of national security are often greeted with skepticism. In the early nineties I mentioned the work of Myron Weiner, a pioneer in thinking about the security implications of migration, to a scholar who later held a high immigration policy position in Washington, D.C. “A waste of time,” came the reply, “worse than that, positively damaging, because immigration has no important security implications and such talk only provides ammunition to anti-immigration activists.” In the wake of 9/11, that complacency has been shaken amid a groundswell of interest in security and migration, but there is in some quarters more resistance than ever to linking the two concepts. The recent literature is sharply divided over the legitimacy and necessity of policies that “securitize” migration policy and over the appropriateness of academic analysis set within a security framework. A major theme in the literature is the claim that the securitization of immigration policy is a repressive state strategy designed to capitalize on public fears in the post–Cold War era and to give security forces something to do now that keeping track of communist subversives is no longer on the table.

How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict. By Ivan Arreguin-Toft. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 250p. $75.00, cloth, $29.99 paper.

The question of asymmetric conflicts or, more precisely, wars between two states of unequal power capabilities is an important one, but it has received scant scholarly focus, especially in the international relations field. More importantly, the subject of weaker actors winning wars against stronger adversaries has received limited attention. This is especially puzzling since during the Cold War, both superpowers experienced defeat or stalemate at the hands of weaker powers. In the case of the Soviet Union, an ill-fated asymmetric war in Afghanistan contributed to its demise as a state. America's failure in Vietnam had a major impact on U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy behavior for years to come. It affected American strategy regarding war in the developing world, encouraging the development of and reliance on new precision-guided weapons systems and strategies that would preclude ground combat. The failure of France in Indochina and Algeria also point to the significance of the phenomenon of asymmetric war. The Israeli and American withdrawals from Lebanon in 1982 and 1983 and India's pulling out from Sri Lanka in 1990 are other instances of stronger powers failing to make gains against their weaker adversaries. In the post-9/11 world, asymmetric conflicts have increasingly received the attention of military strategists as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they have not received commensurate attention from IR scholars.

Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. By Simon Caney. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 319p. $82.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The author's aim in this book is the defense of a “cosmopolitan political morality” that pits cosmopolitan ethics against its communitarian competitors (e.g., realism, the “society of states” tradition, and nationalism) and finds them wanting in relation to a number of key issues: human rights, distributive justice, political institutions, war, and intervention. These issues are addressed in specific chapters, which outline the cosmopolitan positions and then negatively evaluate the alternatives. At the outset, we are informed that this is not intended to be a “neutral account” (p. 3), and the author consistently and methodically picks his way through the book at every turn seeking to reinforce his defense.

Unifying China, Integrating with the World: Securing Chinese Sovereignty in the Reform Era. By Allen Carlson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 320p. $55.00.

This is one of the first major works examining Chinese sovereignty in the post-Mao era. Unlike earlier works that have examined sovereignty through its manifestation in one or two policy areas—such as Taiwan, human rights, or economic integration—Allen Carlson's synthesizes Chinese behavior and rhetoric over a range of issue areas, from Taiwanese independence to World Trade Organization accession.

Globalization from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks. By Donatella della Porta, Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca, and Herbert Reiter. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 300p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics. By Francesca Polletta. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 242p. $45.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

While different in scope and intent, both books offer a refreshing and uplifting sense of the capacity and willingness of people to protest conditions in society, or the world, which they deem unjust. The authors may not have set out to highlight idealism in political activism, but they ended up doing so.

Making War and Building Peace. By Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 400p. $24.95.

Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil Wars. Edited by Philip G. Roeder and Donald Rothchild. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 392p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The two books discussed in this review address the same substantive question: How does one establish sustainable peace after civil war? However, their approaches are quite different. The Roeder and Rothchild edited volume focuses on one aspect of establishing postwar peace—the post–civil war political institutions of the country. Doyle and Sambanis focus on the role of the United Nations in helping to establish sustainable postwar peace. I will first address the edited volume and then turn to the Doyle and Sambanis book before offering a few concluding remarks.

Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy. By Colin Dueck. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 236p. $29.95.

The six years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington have seen a proliferation of books on the limits of U.S. primacy, the origins of the Bush doctrine, and the future of U.S. grand strategy. The conventional wisdom is that the George W. Bush administration's grand strategy—chiefly its unilateralism, its hubris, its open embrace of “preemption” (more accurately preventive war) as means to prevent states and terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, its pursuit of democratization in the Middle East as a cure-all for jihadist terrorism, and its refusal to plan for or devote sufficient resources to the postwar reconstruction of Iraq in 2003–4—represent a radical break with the grand strategies of previous administrations.

The Samaritan's Dilemma: The Political Economy of Development Aid. By Clark C. Gibson, Krister Andersson, Elinor Ostrom, and Sujai Shivakumar. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 288p. $99.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

The authors of this book start from the premise that there is something “wrong with development aid” (p. 3). They point to a number of studies that were conducted in the 1990s and found little consonance between foreign aid levels and changes in macrolevel indicators like economic growth and poverty reduction in recipient developing countries. Their aim is to explore the “perverse incentives” within the current aid system that militate against aid's success.

The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789–1989. By Mark L. Haas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 250p. $39.95.

Realists argue that state behavior is predicated on the distribution of power in the international system. Specifically, states attempt to acquire, maintain, exercise, and balance power in response to the same behavior expected of other states in the system. In this book, Mark L. Haas offers a compelling argument for thinking beyond power variables and considering the independent effects of ideology on leaders' foreign policy decisions. The main thrust of his thesis is that the greater the ideological distance between decision makers of different states, the greater the likelihood that they will view each other as threats to domestic power and international security. Conversely, the greater the ideological affinity between states' leaders, the greater the likelihood that they will see each other as mutually supportive of one another's interests and, therefore, as less threatening. Decision makers' conflictual or accommodative foreign policies, then, are a function of threat perception caused by ideological distance. The book begins with the explication of the theoretical argument and then applies the theory to five different historical case studies. Haas concludes with policy implications and prescriptions for current and future international politics generally, and U.S. foreign policy specifically.

Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International. By Stephen Hopgood. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 249p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

As human rights promotion gradually comes to rival development and democratization in the Western policy pantheon, more human rights–related books appear each year. Only a minority of these are empirically and methodologically rigorous, however, and even fewer are theoretically adventurous. Stephen Hopgood's unique study of Amnesty International is thus a welcome contribution from a political scientist with anthropological instincts, and it is likely to become a classic in the field. Hopgood immersed himself for over a year in Amnesty's culture, rituals, and politics, and then interpreted this data with insights from Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu. He writes clearly and well, and his interpretations should appeal to students of transnational organizing, human rights, and international affairs, broadly conceived.

Capitalism, Democracy and Welfare. By Torben Iversen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 226p. $29.99.

Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America. By Jonas Pontusson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 242p. $19.95.

Can policymakers reconcile the dual objectives of economic development and social justice? Are equity and sustained growth in an inherent conflict? How does the welfare system fit in a capitalist market economy? Jonus Pontusson and Torben Iversen provide two perspectives on these basic policy and political debates in interesting, well done, and quite complementary studies of comparative capitalism.

States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World. By Colin H. Kahl. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 354p. $35.00.

Environmental issues have only recently attracted more attention in social science's reasoning about the causation of war. Even though many scholars would probably agree with the assertion that environmental degradation and demographic pressure play a role in the causal nexus of many civil wars, the question of how this relation could be conceptualized has remained open for a long time. It is the aim of Colin Kahl's book to tackle this issue not by a mere theoretical and conceptual discussion but by using two intensely studied cases as material to construct such a conceptualization and to render it empirically applicable and plausible.

The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present. By Christopher Layne. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 290p. $29.95.

For over a decade, through a series of influential articles, Christopher Layne has been the leading advocate within the academy of an entirely new and much more detached foreign policy strategy for the United States, one based upon what he calls “offshore balancing.” In The Peace of Illusions, Layne puts his argument in book form, addressing conceptual as well as historical and policy issues.