After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions. Edited by Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 272p. $60.00.

Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss's edited volume constitutes a useful introduction to important research frontiers in the analysis of postcommunist polities. The editors explicitly set the contributors the task of transcending conventional (post-)Soviet Studies and contributing to a social science analysis of formerly communist polities. Through that lens, “legacies” of the old regimes are important inasmuch as causal mechanisms can be spelled out that show their continuing relevance for the dynamic reconfiguration of politics in the region.

Decentralization and Democracy in Latin America. Edited by Alfred P. Montero and David J Samuels. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 320p. $47.50 cloth, $27.50 paper.

The study of decentralization has become something of a fashion, not least because it seems to encapsulate the process of democratization in Latin America and the shift to a neoliberal policy framework, and because it has been adopted by the political Left in sharp contrast to the state-centered policies of previous decades. Decentralization has been seen as the answer to improving the quality of popular participation in Latin America, to improving the quality of public services, and to improving the efficiency in the allocation of public resources.

Misplaced Distrust: Policy Networks and the Environment in France, the United States, and Canada. By Éric Montpetit. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2003. 168p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Given the enormous impact that agricultural practices have on the natural environment, it is surprising that so little research has been done on the subject. In addition to problems associated with runoff from feedlots, farming generally requires the use of large amounts of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. The chemicals that are used in farming, if not adequately controlled, pollute the air and water and negatively impact plants, wildlife, animals, and humans. Many environmental scientists believe that agriculture has become too dependent on chemicals to raise animals and grow crops and that it relies too little on effective natural alternatives.

The Quality of Democracy: Theory and Applications. Edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Jorge Vargas Cullell, and Osvaldo M. Iazzetta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 288p. $55.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

The primary goal of this unique and compelling book is to provide the theoretical and empirical foundations for what the authors hope will be a new wave of interest in the quality of democracy. At the heart of the book is a reaction against the minimalist definitions of democracy that in the past two decades have come to dominate not just the regime literature but also the democracy promotion work of a whole host of external donors in what Guillermo O'Donnell calls the East and South. While more countries have been able to sustain minimally democratic political regimes than early pessimists feared, the paramount failings of democracy nevertheless have been of growing concern to academics and citizens alike. According to the argument advanced in this book, understanding the performance of these new democracies—and identifying strategies for strengthening democracy—requires that we move beyond regime type “toward other spheres where political power is exercised” (p. 1). In much of Latin America, for example, political regimes experienced democratization while many of the state's authoritarian legacies were maintained more or less intact. In addition to conceptualizing democracy in a richer and more complex way, the book goes on to show how this more comprehensive view of democracy can be measured and evaluated, which it does by describing an actual democracy audit in one important Latin American case: Costa Rica.

Paths to Democracy: Revolution and Totalitarianism. By Rosemary H. T. O'Kane. New York: Routledge, 2004. 288p. $110.00 cloth, $33.95 paper.

In this book, Rosemary O'Kane seeks to restore a political dimension to the comparative historical analysis of paths to democracy. Reacting against the focus upon social structure that has been so prominent in the analysis of democratic and nondemocratic regime trajectories, she attempts to provide an explanation of the paths to the contemporary situations of three countries, France, Germany, and Russia. She argues that these cases contrast with one another in ways that help to illuminate a range of hypotheses generally accepted about the relationship between democracy, on the one hand, and such variables as economic crisis, economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization, on the other. In broad terms, she sees the cases contrasting in the following ways: Russia contrasts with France and Germany in respect to democracy, Germany with France and Russia in respect to revolution, and France with Germany and the Soviet Union in respect to totalitarianism.

Studies in Public Opinion: Attitudes, Nonattitudes, Measurement Error, and Change. Edited by Willem E. Saris and Paul M. Sniderman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 384p. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This edited volume contains a series of papers, which address a key issue in public opinion research. The issue could not be more general or more important. It is this question: Do members of the mass public actually have opinions about political issues? The question has been debated from the earliest work on public opinion, but was raised in a particularly stark form in a seminal paper by Philip Converse published in 1964. As is well known, he suggested that most people did not have meaningful opinions on most issues, due to the instability of their responses across different waves of a panel survey. The contributors to this volume are leading authorities in the field of political psychology and public opinion research, and the papers collectively make an important contribution to addressing this question. Paul Sniderman and John Bullock in the concluding chapter summarize the existing research agenda on this issue in the following terms: “The dominant themes of two generations of research have been that citizens tend to be muddle-headed (the lack of constraint theme), empty headed (the non-attitude theme) or both” (pp. 337–38).

Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. By Stephen Biddle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 312p. $37.50.

Stephen Biddle has written a worthy book on the never-ending debate over why land wars are won and lost. It contributes to the academic literature, and his policy judgments deserve attention. He puts forth the theory that “force employment” (i.e., doctrine for using military forces in battle) plays a major role in determining outcomes, as big a role as the size of contending forces and the sophistication of their technologies. He further argues that modern employment doctrine, which enables skilled ground forces to negate the effects of lethal fires against them, was born in late World War I, when attackers finally overcame entrenched defenses. A skilled operations research analyst of tactical battles, Biddle offers a multimethod approach that combines logical reasoning, case studies, mathematical models, statistical analysis, and dynamic simulations. His book can be read by nonspecialists, but many of its technical discussions (e.g., Lanchester equations) require expert knowledge.

No End in Sight: The Continuing Menace of Nuclear Proliferation. By Nathan E. Busch. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 512p. $40.00.

This new work on the core issue of nuclear proliferation is somewhat unique in its focus and organization. Most of the works on this subject have a virtually standard organization involving a country-by-country breakdown of the most recent and most likely proliferators (India, Pakistan, Israel, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, etc.), according to their motives (why they want to go nuclear) and their capacity to do so, either by themselves or with the help of existing nuclear powers. The focus of these works is, therefore, on what often is called “horizontal proliferation,” having to do with the addition of extra members to the “nuclear club.” Regarding the Cold War superpowers, the United States and former USSR, there has been a largely separate literature devoted to “vertical proliferation,” and associated arms control measures and possibilities, in the context of nuclear deterrence theories and concepts. The uniqueness of Nathan Busch's book is that he combines these two genres, treating various aspects of the nuclear programs of the long-existent large nuclear powers, as well as the emerging nuclear programs of Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and so on as an integrated subject.

National Governance and the Global Climate Change Regime. By Dana R. Fisher. Latham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 206p. $69.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Debate continues among scholars in a variety of disciplines over the impact (positive, negative, or neutral) of transboundary environmental problems on the sovereignty of nation-states, especially in the developing world (see, for example, Karen Litfin, ed., The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics, 1998). Expanding this debate to “economically advanced or postindustrial nations,” sociologist Dana Fisher addresses three important questions in her book. First, what is the role of the nation-state relative to other actors (civil society, market, and scientific) in negotiating international agreements when transnational environmental issues are involved? Second, how best can the disparate reactions of governments to the development of these international environmental pressures be explained? Third, how does the interaction of international and national factors affect the substance of international agreements?

Deterrence. By Lawrence Freedman. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2004. 160p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The concept of deterrence—the effort to make an adversary's costs and risks of going to war greater than the political incentives pushing in that direction—was the centerpiece of academic national security studies and the core policy concern of Western governments throughout much of the Cold War. Today, in the post-9/11 world, deterrence has taken a back seat to a different set of strategic concepts: preemption and prevention. Both involve destroying an enemy's capabilities before he can harm you, the former when the threat is imminent, the latter when it is potential (pp. 85–89). In his timely and useful book, Lawrence Freedman offers a compelling account of the decline of deterrence and creatively seeks to revitalize it as a subject of scholarly inquiry and as a viable policy in the post-9/11 world.

The Limits of International Law. By Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 272p. $29.95.

The Politics of International Law. Edited by Christian Reus-Smit. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 344p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Is international law really law? If it is law, is it effective in constraining state behavior against interest? These two questions have vexed international lawyers and those international relations scholars interested in international law who until the last 15 years or so were relatively few in number. There has been a proliferation of scholarship on these questions, and on bridging the gap between international relations and international law (IL). (To note only one recent survey piece, see Anne-Marie Slaughter, Andrew Tulumello, and Stephan Wood, “International Law and International Relations Theory: A New Generation of Interdisciplinary scholarship,” American Journal of International Law 92 [July 1998]: 367–397).

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terrorism. By Michael Ignatieff. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 160p. $29.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.

While Michael Ignatieff was no doubt motivated to write this book by the civil and human rights abuses justified by the Patriot Act and the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the framing question of it is decidedly more abstract: How can liberal democracies defend themselves against terrorism without violating their most sacred principles? The book is to be commended for the forthright way it confronts the uncomfortable moral dilemmas posed by democracy's encounter with terrorism, but Ignatieff is less successful in his attempt to articulate a coherent “lesser evil” approach to these encounters. More disconcerting, however, is the way the formal qualities of his argument potentially silence the kind of self-reflection and historical scrutiny that ought also to play a vital role in any democratic state's—much less a superpower's—response to terrorism.

Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency. By Anthony James Joes. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 360p. $35.00.

At the end of this book, Anthony James Joes has written a two-page epilogue entitled “Conflict in Iraq,” which notes the enormous task that the U.S. government has set itself in the long-term construction of a democratic order in the face of violent opposition and internal social conflict. And while the bulk of the book was obviously written prior to the war in Iraq, it can be read as a constructive critique of U.S. counterinsurgency policy in the months following the invasion. Joes draws on a wide range of cases from over two centuries of guerrilla warfare to illustrate what he sees as the key reasons for the success or failure of numerous counterinsurgency campaigns. His thoughtful and informative analysis provides a useful basis for a comparative perspective that has been largely absent from many of the assessments of the guerrilla war in Iraq and America's counterinsurgency policies.

Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives. By Judith G. Kelley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 264p. $35.00.

The subject of this study by Judith Kelley is the international factor in ethnic minority politics—the role of external institutions and norms in the democratic development of several countries and the policies regarding their ethnic minorities. These institutions, more specifically the European Union, the Council of Europe (CE), and the European Security Conference, have secured commitments and undertakings from national governments regarding human rights in general and the protection of minority groups in particular. This is especially true of the CE, which has admitted a number of states on the basis of promises only.

Egalitarian Capitalism: Jobs, Incomes and Growth in Affluent Countries. By Lane Kenworthy. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. 222p. $32.50.

Two decades of rising wage and household earnings inequality in the world's wealthiest nations make the guiding question of Lane Kenworthy's book both timely and important: “[M]ust we give up on the vision of a dynamic and productive yet relatively egalitarian form of capitalism?” (p. 1). To answer this question, Kenworthy presents a careful comparative analysis of income inequality in the countries of northwestern Europe, North America, and Australia during the 1980s and 1990s. He shows that there is not necessarily a trade-off between equality and income growth, although there may be a trade-off between equality and some categories of employment growth. Hence, he argues that with an updated, pro-employment version of the welfare state, we need not give into growing disparity in advanced capitalist societies. Whether this will be desired by all and achieved remains to be seen; nevertheless, the book is an important antidote to the “there is no alternative” type of thinking that pervades much contemporary discourse on economic globalization.

The Remnants of War. By John Mueller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 272p. $29.95.

Rarely does a cover convey with such accuracy a book's central argument as in John Mueller's The Remnants of War. Shot by Ron Haviv, maybe the most iconic photographer of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the cover picture shows a Serb soldier celebrating the fall of the town of Vukovar. The middle-aged soldier is drunk as he downs a bottle of liquor with the town's ruins in the background. In fact, he looks more like a homeless man in any European or American city than anything we would associate with the modern military profession—an observation that summarizes Mueller's four-tiered argument.

Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization. By William Tabb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 528p. $69.50 cloth, $29.50 paper.

Martin Wolf, the influential economic correspondent of Financial Times, concludes his book Why Globalization Works (2004): “What the successful countries all share is a move towards the market economy, one in which private property rights, free enterprise and competition increasingly took the place of state ownership, planning and protection. They chose, however haltingly, the path of economic liberalization and international integration. This is the heart of the matter. All else is commentary” (pp. 143–44).

Global Institutions and Social Knowledge: Generating Research at the Scripps Institution and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, 1900s–1990s. By Virginia M. Walsh. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 208p. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

What is the interrelating link between institutions and knowledge, primarily scientific knowledge? Conventional international relations literature focuses typically on the impact of knowledge on institutions. Virginia Walsh's interest, however, is to “turn the causal arrow” by focusing on the “institutional dimension” of knowledge creation: How do global political and economic, but also epistemic, institutions shape knowledge generation? (pp. 4–5, 38, 128, 130). Here, the scientific disciplines qualify as epistemic institutions (p. 34). From that point of departure, underscoring an institutional perspective, the emphasis concentrates on the “institutional mechanisms” through which knowledge is being formed. Groups leverage institutional mechanisms to “generate knowledge and fix beliefs” for the purposes of 1) establishing common understandings, 2) repairing uncertainties, and 3) directing inquiry by “fixing its direction” (pp. 3, 9, 38).

Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis. By Sandra Whitworth. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 225p. $49.95.

The rapid expansion in United Nations peacekeeping operations in the 1990s has inevitably led to official and scholarly scrutiny of their efficacy and shortcomings. Sandra Whitworth offers a critical eye and questions of gendered analysis by studying the subjects of the UN's peacekeeping operation in Cambodia, whose presence often meant greater insecurity as well as the (mis)conduct of soldiers from Canada—a country historically linked to major peacekeeping contributions—in Somalia. Using these two case studies, Whitworth highlights a basic contradiction inherent in peacekeeping that stems from its heavy reliance on soldiers whose training emphasizes masculine traits of violence, homophobia, racism, and aggression, yet whose tasks as peacekeepers require limiting violence to self-defense and providing a benign, altruistic presence. She uses gender analysis to examine these contradictions, to challenge peacekeeping's association with alternatives to military violence, to show how peacekeeping forces can increase local people's insecurity, rather than alleviating it, and to critique the use of soldiers for missions requiring unsoldierly skills.

Media and the Path to Peace. By Gadi Wolfsfeld. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 284p. $70.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

While the role of the mass media during conflict and war has been the subject of numerous studies in the field of mass communications, there is a paucity of research on mass media during peace processes. Media and the Path to Peace is an important step in remedying this lack. A study such as this confronts an unfortunate reality: The news media are attracted to war and conflict, while peace processes make for paltry news footage and thus are for the most part undercovered by the news media. Indeed, it is Gadi Wolfsfeld's thesis that news values and peace processes are inherently contradictory.