Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law. By Allen Buchanan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 520p. $35.00.

Allan Buchanan is well known for his work on justice, secession, and self-determination. The volume under review draws on and builds upon his past work, developing and updating previously stated positions and setting new ground in formulating a moral approach to international law. The title of the book clearly encapsulates its content and the intentions of the author. Buchanan's first line in the book explains that it is “an attempt to develop moral foundations for international law” (p. 1). Undoubtedly this is a formidable and complex task, but one to which he skillfully addresses himself. His goal is to set out manageable frameworks for establishing and developing ideas and practices of justice and legitimacy that, in turn, will act as guiding principles in international law and relations. He certainly succeeds in achieving this and goes even further to set out interesting and provocative suggestions for reform of the international system. In short, this book is to be highly recommended, if not required, reading for anyone interested in the future of the international system.

Civil Society and Political Change in Asia: Expanding and Contracting Democratic Space. Edited by Muthiah Alagappa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 552p. $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper.

Muthiah Alagappa has assembled an impressive number of essays in this volume, which is the product of two workshops in Honolulu and Phnom Penh held in 2002. It offers contributions covering 12 countries by 14 contributors, organized by country.

Educating Citizens: International Perspectives on Civic Values and School Choice. Edited by Patrick J. Wolf and Stephen Macedo, with David J. Ferrero and Charles Venegoni. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004. 397p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Not to be confused with the Carnegie Foundation book carrying the same title, Educating Citizens is a very good resource for those who want to learn about how Western European societies have considered the issue of school choice. The editors have collected a series of reports on how private, generally religious, schooling has operated in the most developed countries of Europe, and they conclude that a variety of educational choices will benefit primary and secondary schooling in the United States. However, such choices must be well regulated to ensure the development of civic values among youth here. They argue for “a certain sort of publicly funded pluralism in education; pluralism justified by value differences but contained by significant regulation and tamed by systems that ensure accountability” (p. 4).

Electoral Competition and Institutional Change in Mexico. By Caroline C. Beer. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. 208p. $45.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

A growing literature argues that understanding Mexico's protracted transition from one-party rule requires exploring the dynamics of political competition as they emerged at the state and local levels. Caroline Beer makes an important contribution to this approach to Mexican democratization by examining state-level electoral competition in the 1990s and its impact on institutional development, particularly of state legislatures, and on political recruitment, especially of gubernatorial candidates. She argues that democratization resulted from a “complex interplay between opposition victories in subnational elections and important democratic advances in the national political arena” (pp. 9–10).

Parties and Unions in the New Global Economy. By Katrina Burgess. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. 224p. $27.95.

In Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela during the 1980s and 1990s, labor-backed political parties in power adopted market-oriented reforms that strained the parties' alliances with their union base, generating a “loyalty dilemma” for labor leaders. In response, unions in all three countries initially pursued strategies of demand making based on norms that had traditionally governed their interactions with the party (“norm-based voice”). Over time, however, labor leaders' responses to the loyalty dilemma diverged. Katrina Burgess explains why. She argues that whether unions chose norm-based voice, norm-breaking voice, or exit depended on two main factors: the relative power of the party and workers to punish labor leaders for disloyal behavior, and the party's capacity to act autonomously from its own government.

The Social Logic of Politics: Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior. Edited by Alan S. Zuckerman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. 368p. $72.50 cloth, $25.95 paper.

The central premise of this edited collection is set out with admirable clarity on the first page of the opening chapter: “It is both obvious and well-known that the immediate social circumstances of people's lives influence what they believe and do about politics. Even so, relatively few political scientists incorporate these principles into their analysis” (p. 3). Alan Zuckerman tackles this problem with a selection of chapters, written by authors with a range of intellectual pedigrees, that set out to show how what is “both obvious and well-known” can be incorporated into rigorous political science. The individual chapters are too numerous and diverse to review in detail here. What is perhaps more useful is to consider the extent to which, taken together, they map out a potentially fruitful line of future development for the discipline.

Interpreting British Governance. By Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes. New York: Routledge, 2003. 256p. $150.00 cloth, $40.95 paper.

Those tempted to pick up this volume and read a straightforward and unambiguous analysis of British governance in the modern era should consider the following: By the seventh page of the introductory chapter, the authors are engaged in a discussion of the contributions of Michel Foucault to postmodern and interpretive theory (giant, by the way), while narry a drop of ink has been spilled about either Britain or governance. In fact, this book will be of interest to many political scientists who are less than interested in the substantive case, but who are engaged in reflections about the epistemological characteristics of modern political science and the ontological claims that it makes. Interpreting British Governance is a fascinating entry into the debates that are raging in our profession, and it stakes out a clear set of claims in unequivocal terms.

International Relations Under Risk: Framing State Choice. By Jeffrey D. Berejikian. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 152p. $40.00.

This book challenges the rational choice assumptions that undergird much of the extant international relations literature on deterrence, bargaining, cooperation, economic behavior, and the exercise of power. In an ambitious extension of his previous work, Jeffrey D. Berejikian attempts to construct “a new set of theoretical propositions about international politics securely anchored to empirical research in cognitive psychology” (p. 2). In the tradition of Graham T. Allison's (1971) Essence of Decision, Berejikian meticulously demonstrates the degree to which behavioral expectations regarding strategic interaction are tied to underlying conceptual models of decision making. He substitutes prospect theory's empirically grounded observations regarding framing effects and loss aversion for rational choice assumptions regarding invariance and net asset valuation. The result is a comprehensive cognitive model of state interaction that is capable of explaining preference reversals, risk acceptance, and nonmaximizing choice. The boldness of this enterprise more than compensates for minor flaws in execution.

New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism. By Barry Cooper. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. 264p. $44.95.

Barry Cooper argues that a characteristic of modern terrorism is the rise of “new political religions” that claim to be engaged in spiritual conflicts that transcend the political realm and that involve waging spiritual warfare in order to realize an idealized spiritual kingdom on this earth. Thus, in order to understand contemporary terrorism, Cooper states, one must look at the “spirituality that terrorists experience as central to their own activities” (p. 7), while recognizing that religious terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and Japan's Aum Shinrikyô, do not operate within the frameworks of cost-benefit analysis that political terror groups have generally espoused (p. 55). He further contends that religious terrorists groups are on a continuous treadmill of violence that is self-generating and will never cease (p. 12), leading him to advocate extreme measures (negotiation not being one of them) to counteract it. Here he seems not to consider that similar arguments were once advanced to suggest that political terrorists were equally bound up in a cycle of violence from which they could not escape, yet there are many examples (the African National Congress and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), for example) that have disproved such perceptions.

The Nationalization of Politics: The Formation of National Electorates and Party Systems in Western Europe. By Daniele Caramani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 347p. $75.00 cloth, $28.99 paper.

Daniele Caramani endeavors to document and explain the nationalization of party systems in Western Europe, the process by which the localized and territorialized politics of the nineteenth century (clientelistic politics dominated by local personalities) was replaced by nationwide functional alignments on the basis of class, in particular. This nationalization process was a crucial step in the structuring of party systems in the first century of electoral (democratic) politics. Although central to Western European electoral developments, it has received little scholarly attention, a gap that Caramani means to fill through empirical verification.

From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations. By Amitai Etzioni. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 272p. $29.95.

Amitai Etzioni is a seasoned political sociologist and leading voice in the communitarian program to offset the narcissistic and alienating individualism of liberal modernity. Communitarians emphasize the affective bonds that make community an indispensable feature of the human condition and, thus, the local conditions within which individual human beings are best able to understand and act on the common good. Notwithstanding republican antecedents, communitarians have effectively abandoned the universalistic tendencies of cosmopolitan Enlightenment republicanism to rights-minded liberals. In doing so, most communitarians have neglected international relations.

The Limits of Transparency: Ambiguity and the History of International Finance. By Jacqueline Best. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 240p. $37.50.

While social constructivism has moved into the mainstream of international relations theory, informing scholarship in the subfields of security studies and international organization, its application and status in international political economy (IPE) has lagged behind. From the articles in the highest-status political science journals to the works on graduate syllabi across the major research universities, the study of IPE has been dominated by a single view of markets, drawn from neoclassical economics, premised on a narrow view of rationality, and rooted in materialist foundations.

The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees. By Matthew J. Gibney. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 298p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

This book is an important contribution at the interface of contemporary political theory and international relations. Political asylum is a defining issue of our time because of the scope and impact of the refugee crisis and its roots in deepening global inequities. Matthew Gibney addresses the conflict between the ethical and political claims of refugees and the claims of citizens that are embodied in asylum issues. In the process, he demonstrates the intellectual and policy value of treatments that interactively engage normative political theory and international relations.

Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation. By Roland Bleiker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 224p. $27.95.

This slim book combines six chapters and a conclusion in 124 pages. It intends to promote a new way of thinking about Korean security problems that “goes beyond conventional realist and state-centric approaches” (p. 1). The idea is not to offer new empirical insights but instead to focus “on underlying trends and conceptual challenges” (p. xlvi) in order to identify “broad patterns of conflict and possibilities for peace” (p. xlvi). The ethical aim is to promote dialogue based on an understanding that “the other's sense of identity and politics may be inherently incommensurable with one's own” (pp. xlii–xliii). In the case of this book, the incommensurable “others” are the two Koreas–North and South. The author's contention is that efforts toward peace have been periodically tried and always failed in the past because there has not been a sufficient acceptance of difference between North and South. Roland Bleiker is keen to stress that such an approach does not lead to political relativism but that it, in fact, makes for improved debates, such as over the ability to make more informed political choices between different political projects. Toward the end of the book he argues, for instance, that “[t]olerating different coexisting narratives does not prevent making judgments about their content or desirability” (p. 114).

Native to the Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia. By Allaine Cerwonka. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 269p. $74.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

It is unusual for a book on Australia to be written by an outsider and published by an American press. This is to be welcomed. Outsiders are often free of local myths and attitudes, which are well entrenched in Australia, despite its character as a relatively new nation. Allaine Cerwonka did intensive fieldwork in two inner-city suburbs of Melbourne, Australia's second city. As a resident for 10 years in neighboring Carlton, I found her sensitivity to the nuances of the complex areas of East Melbourne and Fitzroy quite unusual.

Shocking Mother Russia: Democratization, Social Rights, and Pension Reform in Russia, 1990–2001. By Andrea Chandler. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 260p. $60.00.

The pension system of a given state is a mirror that reflects many dimensions of that state's political processes, political and social values, historical experience, and economic conditions. Had Andrea Chandler presented her analysis of Russian pension politics oriented toward those four categories or analogous ones, her study would have been much more understandable and would have made a greater contribution to our understanding of post–Soviet Russian politics. Instead, Chandler presents a mostly chronologically based account of Russian pension politics that makes a significant contribution to the subject but one that is harder to understand than it needs to be. The reader must tease out the important themes, such as democratization, from a book that is more chronological than thematic. Shocking Mother Russia is less than the sum of its valuable parts.

Critical Security Studies and World Politics. Edited by Ken Booth. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005. 336p. $62.00 cloth, $24.50 paper.

Ken Booth has tasked himself and his contributors (particularly chapters by S. Smith, A. Linklater, H. Alker, and R. Wyn Jones) with sorting out the menagerie of theoretical criticisms often identified as either critical or in some way as alternatives to realism, including not only those that directly engage questions of security—“securitization” theorists and constructivists—but also the various “post” (modern, structural, positivist, colonial) theoretical critiques. Though on the whole the book rejects both realism and poststructuralism, the contributors do find some common ground with and among “critical,” “post,” and “alternative” writers on the question of improving the human condition (as an implicit goal of criticism), and applauds those who engage ethical issues to the extent that criticism is undertaken in order to reveal and confront, if not overcome, oppression.

Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. By David Held. New York: Polity, 2004. 216p. $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

David Held lays out a detailed design for an “alternative” global order to the one promoted by the United States. He vigorously rejects the approach to the world of George W. Bush and instead offers a social democratic agenda, which has three main parts: economic, political, and legal. For each part, Held provides both the overarching principles that ought to guide us and a considerable list of specific steps that should advance his design. Readers should not stop reading just because the list of values that Held beseeches us to pursue is as impressive as it is lofty: He calls on us to uphold the principles of equal moral worth, equal liberty, equal political status of human beings, legitimate political authority “on all levels,” and a “deeper” commitment to social justice, among other such values. He buttresses his agenda with a list of measures to be undertaken both in the short and in the longer run, most of which deserve careful attention. It is here that ultimately the rubber does not meet the road.

Environmental Peacemaking. Edited by Ken Conca and Geoffrey D. Dabelko. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002. 200p. $35.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.

This book explores the proposition that cooperation on environmental issues can be instrumental in resolving local conflicts caused by environmental degradation and scarcity of resources. Such conflicts are not a new phenomenon. However, in the early twenty-first century, continuing degradation of the environment, coupled with ever-increasing pressures on resources due to an expanding population, has substantially increased the incidence of violent conflicts on environmental issues. Moreover, most of the present threats to peace are major intrastate conflicts (e.g., civil war and genocide) or ones that are occurring along ecologically fragile border regions, implying that researchers should concentrate on the regional or local level of analysis. At the same time, as the cause of such conflicts has risen on the political and discourse agenda, a corresponding large body of research has emerged, increasing our understanding of the ways in which environmental destruction can lead to conflict.

Violence and Democracy. By John Keane. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 226p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

This is a very readable discursive essay. In consequence, John Keane's many digressions are provocative and informative, for example, his meditation on death on page 40 or his short history of the British peace movement on pages 83–88. His method also adds greatly to the reader's pleasure: He identifies key authors in a wide range of related fields, summarizes their key works, links them together, one generous summary after another, and finally, criticizes the synthesis he has just created. For example, after summarizing and synthesizing Hans Mangus Enzensberger's, Martin van Creveld's, and Robert D. Kaplan's views on post–Cold War “uncivil wars,” Keane remarks: “The temptation to think of contemporary uncivil wars as ‘primitive’ is itself primitive. It should be resisted” (p. 115). He then resists the temptation by discussing primitive warfare among Muslim desert tribes and Native Americans, as described by Ernest Gellner and Pierre Clastres, respectively. The value of this method is that one learns in a critical manner what others think. The disadvantage is that the issues in hand are never addressed.