The Nation-State in Question. Edited by T. V. Paul, G. John Ikenberry, and John Hall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 400p. $60.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

As John A. Hall notes in the introduction, many authors (including the present writer) writing in the 1990s questioned the future of the nation-state, which, to them, was coming under attack both from above—at the hand of global economic forces—and from below, at the hand of various national or ethnic revivals. As he also notes, the purpose of the volume under review is to question that question and see whether there is still some life left in the nation-state. To do so, he and his fellow editors have assembled an impressive battery of American, Canadian, and British scholars, each of whom has something interesting to say. Let us see, then, what they do say.

When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Edited by Robert I. Rotberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 336p. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Failed states have proliferated in the last 15 years. For much of this time Robert Rotberg has played a major role in defining debates about this development. His latest edited volume is a collection of 14 essays that examine why states fail and what to do about them once they fail. Most of the contributors are political scientists. A few are experts in conflict management and have worked directly in international efforts to remedy state failure.

Whose World Order? Russia's Perception of American Ideas After the Cold War. By Andrei P. Tsygankov. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 224p. $45.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

One consequence of the end of the Cold War has been the muddling of boundaries between Russian and Western, notably American, scholars. In my own experience, this has been all to the good. Social scientists at the University of Michigan have had, for instance, an ongoing relationship with their counterparts at the European University in Saint Petersburg (EUSP) for many years now. In our meetings, the distinctions between the Self and the Other (to use the constructivist jargon favored by Andrei P. Tsygankov in the book under review) have often been rather arbitrary. The intellectual divide we have most frequently encountered has been between those of us, Russians and Americans, who attach relatively greater weight to the role of culture and those for whom institutions matter more, a divide that separates us more by disciplinary background than by citizenship or where we teach.

Moving Money: Banking and Finance in the Industrialized World. By Daniel Verdier. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 326p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

Although it may seem arcane or prosaic to some, the literature on the political economy of money and finance has burgeoned within political science since the mid-1980s. The two decades after the end of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s was a time of considerable macroeconomic volatility and cooperative effort to coordinate suitable policy responses. This stimulated scholarly inquiry. Since then, financial globalization has drawn in those interested in the challenge financial markets seem to pose to the official political order centered on states. This developing political science research tradition has, however, existed on the periphery of two other longer-standing literatures. The first is the economic history of monetary and financial affairs. This tradition has exhaustively investigated the formation, organization, and implications of the classical gold standard and the Bretton Woods order. This research stimulated many of the political science pioneers and remains seminal and vibrant. The other tradition to mention is that impulse in the social sciences to identify and characterize different forms, tendencies, or cycles in capitalism, and link these to distinct political and social orders. This much more controversial way of thinking has its origins in the great nineteenth-century systems of ideas. In more recent times, Karl Polanyi, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Alexander Gerschenkron, John Zysman, and the many authors associated with core-periphery and world systems theory have kept the tradition alive. Although many readers will assume Daniel Verdier's new book is unproblematically part of the political science tradition, it should be read squarely as a product of this last tendency, making use of the established historical work to generate a reinterpretation.

Dangerous Alliances: Proponents of Peace, Weapons of War. By Patricia A. Weitsman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 264p. $49.50.

Patricia Weitsman sets out to provide a unified theory of alliance politics that explains when states will manage threatening neighbors by allying with them rather than allying against them, when allies will undertake different types of military obligations, when alliances will be more or less cohesive, and how alliances aimed at preserving peace sometimes provoke war. Although she is not entirely successful in fulfilling this extensive agenda, Dangerous Alliances is nevertheless a constructive contribution to several ongoing debates about alliance politics.