Transformation of the Welfare State: The Silent Surrender of Public Responsibility. By Neil Gilbert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 224p. $39.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.

For more than a decade, students of social policy have debated the argument that welfare state development is a path-dependent process that makes radical change difficult (see Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State? [1994]). From this perspective, existing policy legacies create powerful constraints for policymakers seeking to enact retrenchment measures or to alter the functioning of the welfare state. As a result, most reforms tend to reinforce existing institutional patterns instead of changing them in a strong way. In recent years, authors such as Neil Gilbert have challenged this view. In Transformation of the Welfare State, he challenges Pierson's argument through a broad analysis of social policy development in the United States and Western Europe during the 1980s and 1990s.

Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment. By Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 327p. $62.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

This book is a welcome addition to the literature on global environmental politics. Research on global environmental politics is well established, and within this branch of political science a number of excellent overview texts have been written on the politics of the global environment. However, students of the global political economy of the environment have lacked a comprehensive and accessible text until the publication of this book. Furthermore, many chapters on this subject in textbooks have narrowed the field to discussion of regime formation and the salience of institutional structures. While Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne recognize the importance of institutional arrangements, their focus is on the intersection between economic process and environmental problems. The book consists essentially of three main sections. The first section provides the theoretical framework, the second investigates the relationship between globalization and the environment, and the final section provides a number of case studies of the political economy of environmental change.

The Impact of Norms in International Society: The Latin American Experience, 1881–2001. By Arie M. Kacowicz. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. 232p. $40.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

With this book, Arie Kacowicz addresses the ongoing “norms debates” in the international relations literature and attempts a synthetic perspective on norms. The attempt at synthesis is an important one and well done, even if problematic at points.

The Politics of Sexual Harassment: A Comparative Study of the United States, the European Union, and Germany. By Kathrin S. Zippel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 274p. $80.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Why was Germany so much slower than the United States to outlaw sexual harassment? What role have feminist organizations, academics, women in political parties, and femocrats (governmental equality officers) played in generating this policy change? How did the European Union act to require member states to legislate given that most member states were opposed? Does it matter that German policymakers have framed the problem largely as a gender-neutral violation of dignity, rather than as an individual right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex? Is it better to rely on individual litigants to enforce the law or work through collective bargaining agreements and labor councils? And what are the implications of the findings of sexual harassment policy for the future of this issue, feminist policy change, and the policy process more generally? Kathrin Zippel answers these questions and more in her well-researched, comprehensive, and clearly written book.

Peace Operations and Global Order. Edited by Alex J. Bellamy and Paul Williams. New York: Routledge, 2005. 242p. $115.00.

The literature on peace operations has been dominated by case studies and by efforts to glean policy-relevant lessons in order to improve ongoing or future peacekeeping operations. More explicitly theoretical studies that seek to embed such interventions within the broader debates in international relations or comparative politics are more recent and less developed. Peace Operations and Global Order contributes to these debates by bringing insights from critical theory that raise new questions about how peace operations and the post–Cold War international system shape one another.

The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy. By Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 320p. $39.95.

Short of rebelling, how do powerless peasants under a domineering Stalinist state influence policy? Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet's book offers not only a persuasive answer to this question but also a useful theoretical framework for understanding the power of “everyday politics.”

Legitimacy in International Society. By Ian Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 288p. $55.00.

Ian Clark's book offers the most comprehensive analysis of legitimacy in international relations available today, in the process breathing new life into the concept of international society. Organized into two main sections—a historical review of major peace settlements and an analysis of contemporary international society—the book develops a framework designed to disentangle the complex threads of discourse that make up both scholarly and public discussions of international legitimacy. The author refines and brings the tradition of the English School into direct dialogue with mainstream U.S. international relations discourse, to productive effect.

Trust and Mistrust in International Relations. By Andrew H. Kydd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 284p. $39.50.

That cooperation is at best difficult and at worst impossible in the anarchic international system is an established idea. Analyses usually assume that state preferences put them in a prisoner's dilemma where defection is the strictly dominant strategy. Explaining cooperation means showing why actors forgo the short-term benefits of exploiting others. Mechanisms involve conditional play, institutional arrangements, and hegemonic leadership, which help overcome coordination, monitoring, enforcement, and free-rider problems.

Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War. By Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 300p. $32.95.

Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder's article “Democratization and War” (Foreign Affairs 74 [May/June 1995]: 79–97) arrived in 1995 like a thunderclap, riveting me to questions about domestic political changes and their implications for peace and conflict between states. The article appeared when the intellectual wars over the democratic peace were hot, and when research critical of democratic performance in general was receiving heightened scrutiny. In general, the early response to the authors' claim that democratization significantly increases the war-proneness of states focused narrowly on their research design. However, my review of Mansfield and Snyder's book-length treatment of the subject focuses on the broader weaknesses in the book, of which there are few, and the book's strengths, of which there are several.

The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy. By Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 240p. $24.95.

There are two commonly held beliefs among Cuba specialists about the United States embargo on Cuba. The first is that the embargo is a frozen relic of the Cold War that has hardly changed over the years. The second is that the strongest lobbying group among Cuban Americans, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), is responsible for the endurance of this relic. This book's mission is to dispel these beliefs, and for the most part, it succeeds.

Welfare State Change: Towards a Third Way? Edited by Jane Lewis and Rebecca Surender. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 248p. $99.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

We do occasionally reach moments at which important bodies of academic scholarship have crystallized into a coherent shape, and at which the political practices to which they are addressed have been with us long enough to permit the construction of generalizations of value. Those are the moments at which high-quality stock takings are often essential. We are at such a moment with the literature on the “Third Way” and on its social policy, and in Jane Lewis and Rebecca Surender's Welfare State Change we have just such a stock taking.

Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge. Edited by Thomas Carothers. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006. 350p. $50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The checkered history of rule-of-law promotion is only one part of a larger program of external intervention that has aimed to reshape economic policies and political institutions throughout the post–Cold War world. Those efforts—labeled good governance, state building, and postconflict intervention—have, if anything, intensified and broadened since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This dispassionate and valuable evaluation of rule-of-law promotion reflects directly on the record of international assistance for legal reform, as well as the likely success of that even more ambitious agenda. Two introductory essays by Thomas Carothers, well known for his research on democracy promotion, offer a critical account of international assistance for legal reform, emphasizing the knowledge deficit that plagues claims of successful international influence. The following chapters attempt to fill that knowledge gap, at the same time underlining obstacles to sharper evaluation and learning on the part of donors and practitioners.

Environmental Policymaking: Assessing the Use of Alternative Policy Instruments. Edited by Michael T. Hatch. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 265p. $85.00 cloth, $25.95 paper.

There is by now a sizable collection of books that compare the environmental politics and policies of different countries. Some approach environmental policymaking as an exercise in political theory and examine how local political and economic considerations drive local and international environmental regulations (The Political Economy of Environmental Protection: Analysis and Evidence, R. D. Congleton, 1995). Others examine the determinants of such policies or address international questions of negotiation, regulation, and compliance (Globalization and the Environment, Schulze and Ursprung, 2001; The Political Economy of Environmental Regulation, Stavins, 2004). This book focuses on contemporary policies and policy tools themselves, broadly interpreted. What kinds of policies do we see adopted? How were those policies justified, and how well have they succeeded in advancing environmental ends?

Institutions and the Politics of Survival in Jordan: Domestic Responses to External Challenges, 1988–2001. By Russell E. Lucas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 185p. $65.00.

As the title suggests, this work seeks to explain the staying power of the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. To his credit, Russell Lucas eschews essentialist arguments that rely on religion or culture to explain the staying power of Arab authoritarianism. He opts instead for an institutional approach, examining “regime manipulation of domestic political institutions … to quiet discontent caused by unpopular policies” (p. 1). Lucas argues that the regime has focused what he calls throughout the analysis “survival strategies” on three centers of political and civil society: political parties, the parliament, and the press. These strategies have enjoyed varying degrees of success, and the analysis concentrates on three factors—he does not prioritize them or give an indication of how much they explain—that have influenced the success or failure of the survival strategies: “the resourceful use of constitutional rules by the regime; the reinforcement of the opposition's disunity of collective action [sic] against the survival strategy and the regime's policies, and the attention to not imposing costs on sectors of the regime coalition that could fray its unity” (p. 2).

The Politics of the Global. By Himadeep Muppidi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 130p. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Himadeep Muppidi has written a short, sophisticated, and provocative book that pushes its readers to think hard about global politics. His main hypothesis is that a thorough analysis of the “contestations over the social meaning of the global” (p. xvii) allows us to explore new “spaces and strategies for resisting the colonialization of the global” (p. xviii). In the end, however, the reader feels a little puzzled regarding the fruits of the exercise, including whether we have really gained a better understanding of global politics or whether we have been offered new possible ways for doing politics globally.

Trading Blocs: States, Firms, and Regions in the World Economy. By Kerry A. Chase. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 322p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The focus of this book by Kerry Chase is that the process of international trade liberalization has resulted in the development of three major regional economic blocs: the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and a partial regional agreement in Asia largely driven by Japan. These three economic blocs are known in business schools as the “triad” of Europe, North America, and Asia. In The Regional Multinationals (2005), I have shown that the majority of international trade and investment takes place within these triad blocs rather than between them, and that even the world's largest 500 firms average over 72% of their sales within their home region. Basically, the analysis by Chase is fully consistent with such findings.

The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. By Thomas M. Hawley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 282p. $22.95.

The central thesis of this book is that the unresolved issue fueling the continued divisiveness of the Vietnam War is the key legacy of the unaccounted-for remains of America's missing in action (MIAs) in Indochina. It is a thesis that Thomas Hawley propounds at several levels. His argument is empirical in its depiction of the investigative processes and results of the actual searches for these men. It is semiotic in its focus on the symbol of their bodies as “signing” for the larger issues still surrounding the war. It is an investigation into the impact on the American popular and political culture of these bodies—those of the visible veterans and of the invisible, fragmented missing soldiers—in terms of how they are depicted in the arts (Hollywood mostly) and in memorials. Finally, it aspires to a more profound philosophical level in assessing the moral and political implications of this thesis for our larger understanding of the Vietnam War itself. Although this book is well worth reading, its success at all these levels is only intermittent.

Renegade Regimes: Confronting Deviant Behavior in World Politics. By Miroslav Nincic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 232p. $29.50.

The term rogue states gained currency in the 1990s, and was applied by policymakers, pundits, and a few scholars to regimes worthy of moral condemnation and political-military coercion. The Clinton administration introduced the less offensive appellation “states of concern,” but the current Bush administration, not one to shy away from inflammatory rhetoric, brought “rogue states” back into use and made them a more central focus of its foreign policy. Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba head the administration's list, and the charge also has been leveled against Syria, Yugoslavia, and Libya (before its recent about-face).

Governing Water: Contentious Transnational Politics and Global Institution Building. By Ken Conca. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 456 p. $70.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.

Ken Conca presents what is close to a definitive statement of the transnational politics of water, but his larger purpose is to demonstrate and correct the inadequacies of current theories of international environmental politics (IEP). This well-written and well-argued book is a theoretical advance on the regime theory commonly used in IEP and has garnered two prestigious prizes: the Harold and Margaret Sprout award and the Chadwick F. Alger Prize.

Crafting Democracy: How Novgorod Has Coped with Rapid Social Change. By Nicolai N. Petro. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 255p. $39.95.

In examining the reasons why Russia is now having problems making the transition to democracy, many scholars cite the absence of a democratic past. Seeing Russia as a country unremittingly ruled by authoritarian leaders, analysts increasingly are viewing Vladimir Putin's turn away from democracy as “natural” and part of Russians' yearning for a ruler with a “strong hand.”