The Order of Genocide. By Scott Straus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 273p. $27.95.

Studies of the 1994 Rwandan genocide have moved, Scott Straus argues, beyond simplistic interpretations in terms of “tribal” or “ancient” hatreds (interpretations that were, in truth, more those of the media and politicians than of the early academic literature) toward a “new consensus” that this was a modern genocide based on elite planning, nationalist ideology, and media manipulation. Straus argues that while this is not wrong, it does not go far enough to explain why genocide happened and why so many Hutus were mobilized to kill their Tutsi neighbors as well as moderate Hutus. Emphasizing the need to link the national, elite level on which most study has focused with the local level in the rural areas where most killing was done, Straus undertook a unique study, interviewing more than two hundred confessed and convicted male perpetrators in Rwanda's jails.

The editors of Perspectives on Politics thank the following scholars, who served or agreed to serve as manuscript reviewers from July 1, 2006 through June 20, 2007.

The United States Contested: American Unilateralism and European Discontent. Edited by Sergio Fabbrini. New York: Routledge, 2006. 224p. $120.00 cloth, $35.95 paper.

Why has anti-Americanism become a fact of life in Europe? How is this phenomenon related to the rise of neoconservatism in the United States? These are important questions, and this new volume, based on seminars held at the University of Trento in 2003 and 2004, provides—if not the definitive answer—certainly a richer understanding of transatlantic relations.

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.

Feminist Methodologies for International Relations. Edited by Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 316p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

This volume presents a marvelous account of feminist methodologies. Mainstream scholars might find it all too easy to dismiss when confronted immediately with its refusal to define feminist methodologies and its jabs at quantitative methodologists for presumably assuming their work to be value neutral. Such a dismissal, however, would be a grave mistake. For the book presents a collage of perspectives on feminist methodology. The essays address the questions feminists ask, why they ask such questions, what we learn from these approaches, and how this research contributes to our knowledge. This is not a “how to” book, as you do need to reach your own conclusions—to find your own way methodologically. But this apparent lack of direction is more of an invitation to experiment and to add to our knowledge. And this unrestrained quest for knowledge is precisely the point of feminist methodology as conceived by the authors.

Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions. By John Foran. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 410p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

John Foran's book draws faithfully from the rich literature on revolutions from the 1970s and beyond and extends this work in useful ways. It presents a well-crafted synthetic argument that finds a nice balance between international and domestic sources of revolution and between structural constraints and political agency. It also examines thoughtfully an extraordinary number of cases in a relatively compact form. The author develops his argument using the tools of Boolean algebra to explain 10 cases of revolutionary success and 29 additional cases of reversed revolutions, unsuccessful attempts, political revolutions that did not lead to social transformations, and revolutionary movements that never emerged despite conditions that might have been expected to generate such movements.

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.

Scare Tactics: The Politics of International Rivalry. By Michael P. Colaresi. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005. 232p. $34.95.

The emerging research program of international rivalries is an important branch of study within the international relations subfield. Rather than focus on rare events such as war, this research program seeks to understand the dynamics at work for what many scholars perceive to be the most dangerous pairs of interstate enemies in the system. Those enemies are historical rivals, typically coded as strategic or enduring rivals. In a rivalry, hatred is endemic and cooperation may be rare. These actors clearly are of a different sort than the rest of the system and need to be studied in their historical context.

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.

The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. By Harold James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 166p. $24.95.

This book has a clear argument. History shows that globalization needs a system of international and domestic rules for advancing trade, making possible cross-national exchanges of labor and capital, promoting economic growth, and achieving peace. The latest stage of globalization, from the end of the Cold War until September 11, is not an exception. Indeed the 1990s were a decade of intense discussion on new international rules and institutions (epitomized by the creation of the World Trade Organization). At the same time, the promotion and implementation of an international regulatory system will inevitably breed discontent and tensions in different areas of the global system. Some countries, groups, or individuals perceive the new regulatory system as imposing on them patterns of behavior and distributive relations proper of or advantageous to dominant countries, groups, and individuals. This generates a reaction against the globalizing process (and the regulatory systems that justify and support it). Each phase of the globalization process has ended in conflict, either in the form of an interstate rivalry that degenerated into war, or in the form of an asymmetrical conflict degenerating into terrorism (with the assassination of individuals representing universal symbols, such as New Yorkers in 2001 or the Austrian Empress “Sissi” one century earlier in 1894).

Fostering Fundamentalism: Terrorism, Democracy and American Engagement in Central Asia. By Matthew Crosston. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. 186p. $89.95 cloth.

In his book, Matthew Crosston lays out an interesting and worthwhile argument: that by focusing on short-term security assistance and long-term democracy building in authoritarian regimes, the United States is unwittingly creating conditions for extremism and anti-American sentiments throughout the world. His case study is the region of Central Asia—one that had largely been ignored by policymakers until the need for non-OPEC energy that increased in the 1990s and the military actions in Afghanistan that began in October 2001. According to Crosston, given the newfound strategic importance of Central Asia in its “global war on terrorism,” the U.S. government has all but abandoned the notion of advocating democracy in the region. He emphatically states, “There has been no real oversight to gauge whether vibrant democracies are being established [in Central Asia]. And there has certainly not been a process where regimes have been singled out and denounced for the fact that they have consistently denied their citizens the right to chose their leaders and engage their governments in peaceful opposition and open debate” (p. 18). This particular theme runs throughout the book under the moniker “Wonka Vision of Democracy”—a reference to the children's tale of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—which suggests that U.S. policymakers ignore the “reality of democracy” while professing “admiration for the fantasy democracy supposedly emerging.” Crosston quotes excerpts from various public statements of U.S. government officials in a variety of settings to show that this is a “bipartisan effort” to avoid the difficult challenges raised by providing assistance to authoritarian regimes.

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.

The English School of International Relations: A Contemporary Reassessment. By Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 302p. $80.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The English School, although still not mainstream, is now increasingly recognized as one of the significant approaches to the study of international relations. In their attempts to map the parameters of the field, for example, both Steven D. Krasner in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999) and Alexander Wendt in Social Theory of International Politics (1999) position the English School alongside more familiar schools of thought. There is also now a section of the International Studies Association devoted to the English School and it sponsored more than a dozen panels at the 2007 convention in Chicago. As the prominence of the English School has risen, so has the need for a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of its development and defining ideas.

Democracy as Human Rights: Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization. By Michael Goodhart. New York: Routledge, 2005. 256p. $95.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Globalization, which had its modern origins in the capitalist expansion of the nineteenth century, has reached a level of development that challenges the sovereign independence, power, and authority of the nation-state, the primary actor in international politics for the last three hundred years. In so doing, it undermines popular sovereignty as traditionally understood in contemporary democracies. In his book, Michael Goodhart provides a tightly reasoned analysis of globalization's challenge to sovereignty and democratic theory, and puts forward a provocative redefinition of democracy that, he argues, can withstand globalization, even flourish in a globalized world.

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.

The Global Dynamics of Racial and Ethnic Mobilization. By Susan Olzak. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 288p. $55.00.

Susan Olzak's new monograph is a milestone in comparative research on ethnic mobilization and conflict. Not only does it chart new theoretical and methodological territory. It also offers the most rigorous proof yet that globalization promotes collective action by ethnic groups. The book's main claim is that transnational networks diffuse “ideologies, strategies, tactics and leaders” rapidly across national borders, enabling ethnic mobilization and “leaving political regimes more vulnerable to internal challenges” (pp. 32, 152). Global processes, in other words, interact with forces at the group and state level to promote violent and nonviolent activism by communal groups.

Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm. Edited by Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 367p. $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

This is an interesting collection of essays about what the editors call “digital formations.” A social formation is something in society that is emerging without a single founding event, in its early stages of development, and tending toward a variable structure and nature (p. 9). Despite this, “you should be able to identify a coherent configuration of organization, space, and interaction” (p. 10). Several of the social formations studied by the authors in this volume are only partly digital: that is, they combine digital and nondigital elements. They are all, however, subject to “digitization,” which involves the “rendering of facets of social and political life in a digital form” (p. 16). One important reason for studying digital formations is that some are potentially “destabilizing of existing hierarchies of scale and nested hierarchies” (p. 19), while others reinforce them. An example of the former is the open-source software movement (as chronicled here by Steve Weber); an example of the latter is what Dieter Ernst in his chapter calls the “global flagship networks” created by large multinational corporations.

Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. By Mark Poster. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 393p. $79.95 Cloth, $22.95 paper.

In this book, Mark Poster attempts to provide a philosophical framework for understanding the significance of the rise of computers, the Internet, and the other digital technologies. His argument is that the diffusion of these new technologies results in “complex couplings of humans and machines” (p. 9) that call into question some of the central ideas of our time. The discussion starts with postcolonial theory and then moves on to recent theories of empire, citizenship, identity, ethics, psychoanalysis, intellectual property rights, everyday life, and consumer culture. It is an ambitious work and difficult to read in passages, but the effort is worth it.

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.