Children's Human Rights: Progress and Challenges for Children Worldwide. Edited by Mark Ensalaco and Linda C. Majka. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005. 288p. $82.50 cloth, $32.95 paper.

Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food. By George Kent. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 290p. $49.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

The body of literature on international human rights has grown tremendously in the last three decades or so. The two books under review here expand this body of literature and aim to contribute to our understanding of the development and growth of human rights regimes—systems of norms, rules, and decision-making procedures—in two different but related areas: The volume edited by Mark Ensalaco and Linda Majka deals with the rights of the child; George Kent's work focuses on the right to food, or, more precisely, on what he calls the right to adequate food.

Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics in Taiwan and South Korea. By Joseph Wong. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 222p. $39.95.

Popular perceptions of social policies in East Asia are terribly out of date. Besides, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have rapidly established social programs that are comparable to those found in Western countries but are often still described as welfare laggards. While public expenditure on social programs is still low, it will rise rapidly as the population ages and programs mature. Commentators on the region are yet to fully grasp the fact that governments there are no longer as single-mindedly focused on economic growth as the stereotypes suggest.

Globalizing Critical Theory. Edited by Max Pensky. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. 264p. $82.50 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This is a welcome and innovative book, at least in its basic intent. The innovation resides mainly in the correlation between a prominent strand in Western social and political thought—the Frankfurt School program of “critical theory”—and a major phenomenon of contemporary political life: the process of globalization. In many ways, this correlation goes against the dominant academic grain. At least as cultivated in American academia, political theory tends to be mainly retrospective and concerned with the rehearsal of time-honored texts, often with a pronounced slant against contaminating theorizing with mundane affairs. On the other hand, examination of current developments—including the process of globalization—tends to be left to journalists or else to specialists in international politics with little or no background in traditions of political thought. In this respect, the present volume is a breakthrough. It deliberately seeks to bring the insights of the Frankfurt School program to bear on ongoing discussions about global politics, economics, science, and aesthetics. All the contributors, including the editor, are distinguished scholars with solid reputations grounded in the traditions of critical theory and adjacent theoretical paradigms.

American Power in the 21st Century. Edited by David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004. 299p. $64.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

American primacy is destined to be one of the defining features of international politics for years to come. David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi have assembled essays on the topic by a high-powered stable of scholars. Michael Cox, one of the most prolific and penetrating analysts of American power today, kicks off the volume with a learned tour d'horizon of scholarly debates on whether empire is a useful concept to apply today, whether the United States is one, and whether its primacy will endure. Michael Mann and Mary Kaldor present skeptical views on the latter issue. Mann briskly makes his case that as strong as it is militarily, the United States lacks the other wellsprings of power any self-respecting empire needs. And Kaldor goes on to disparage the real utility of the one kind of power that everyone in the book agrees the United States possesses in abundance. High-technology military force, she argues, “rarely confers a decisive advantage in conflicts between armed opponents” (p. 187).

Social Movements in India Poverty, Power and Politics. Edited by Raka Ray and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. 320p. $34.95.

In an era of liberalization, should social movements shift strategies to mirror the state in demoting poverty alleviation as a central concern? In their edited collection on social movements and the Indian state since Independence, Raka Ray and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein examine the complex historical legacy and current conundrums confronting the strategies of social activists and their implications for the poor. While most scholars of Indian politics have focused on the state and economic elites to explain the persistence of poverty in India, Ray and Katzenstein argue that “the picture is incomplete and distorted” (p. 10), without also considering the role of organized social forces that have mobilized constituents and confronted and/or cooperated with the state in ways that have important implications for the success or failure of poverty alleviation. The editors adopt a broad conception of social movements, including labor unions, political parties, mass organizations, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as protest-oriented movements.

Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population. By Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 329p. $37.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

One in six Chinese men is unlikely to ever find a wife, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing (p. 261). There are currently over 111 million more men in China than women, and 120 men to every 100 women in the 15–34 age category. India's skewed sex ratio is also rapidly approaching the 120:100 ratio. What happens to societies that explicitly select for disproportionate numbers of male offspring, through abortions of female fetuses, infanticide of girls, neglect of female infants, or other forms of direct and indirect violence against girls and women? It is to this question that Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer turn in their extensively researched and richly detailed book.

Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States. By Jeremy A. Rabkin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 350p. $29.95.

Many people complain that American foreign policy is self-interested, unilateralist, and brutish, and wish that the United States would participate more enthusiastically in multilateral institutions, such as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto Treaty. Defenders of American foreign policy argue that these institutions just do not serve America's interest. Jeremy Rabkin offers an alternative version of this argument: He says that yielding sovereignty to global institutions violates America's constitutional traditions, and the attractive mixture of freedom and security that these traditions support. Global governance is bureaucratic, insensitive to democratic pressures, and indifferent to local variation in values and interests. Further, liberty requires the rule of law, and the rule of law can prevail only in a sovereign state. Global governance undermines sovereignty and thus undermines the rule of law and freedom as well.

Protecting Human Rights: A Comparative Study, Advancing Human Rights. By Todd Landman. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 218p. $54.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Political scientists have finally begun to take international law seriously. Todd Landman's new book is an admirable example of this new trend. Situated at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics, it is a sustained study of the role of democratization, development, international socialization and international law on governments' human rights practices since the mid-1980s. It is a global quantitative study that comes to some very different conclusions from the existing literature in this genre. In contrast to the pathbreaking work of Cona Hathaway (“Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?” Yale Law Journal 111 [8, 2002]: 101–99) and Linda Camp Keith (“The United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Does It Make a Difference in Human Rights Behavior?” Journal of Peace Research 36 [no. 1, 1999]: 95–118), the key finding in Landman's study is that international treaty law has contributed to improvements in human rights behavior. How does he come to this unorthodox conclusion, and what does this mean for our understanding of international law and democratic development?

The Network Society. By Darin Barney. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 198p. $57.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Democracy Online. Edited by Peter M. Shane. New York: Routledge Press, 2004. 279p. $28.50 paper.

Political science has a lot to contribute to—and learn from—the study of the politics of information and communications technologies (ICTs). The two books under review illustrate these possibilities and limitations as the academic discourse on “IT” is currently configured.

Partisan Interventions: European Party Politics and Peace Enforcement in the Balkans. By Brian Rathbun. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. 242p. $39.95.

Brian Rathbun's book is an important contribution at the interface of international relations and comparative politics, providing a fascinating, well-researched analysis of the impact of domestic politics on the formulation of foreign and defense policy in three major European states: Great Britain, Germany, and France. Rathbun makes two key claims: Parties articulate and implement different policies in the area of peace enforcement and European defense cooperation due to their different ideologies. Second, contrary to the view that parties formulate policies to win elections, he argues that, in general, parties win elections to formulate policies. In an empirically rich account of the effects of partisan politics, Rathbun analyses the views of—and disagreements among—the main parties in the UK, France, and Germany regarding peace enforcement in Bosnia and Kosovo, and regarding the establishment of an European Union capacity for carrying out peace enforcement operations.

Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order. By Jeffrey W. Legro. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 272p. $39.95.

When do states (decision makers and their publics) rethink their world? Why and how does this happen? Change in ideas, shifts in paradigms, the overthrow of ruling ideologies have long been the focus of various theoretical perspectives. Here these questions are framed and analyzed through constructivist lenses.

War and Human Nature. By Stephen Peter Rosen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 211p. $29.95.

Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict. By Bradley A. Thayer. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 425p. $40.00.

Any general theory of politics assumes a theory of human nature. A small but growing number of political scientists have been applying a Darwinian theory of human biological nature to various topics in political science. The final aim of such work would be to turn political science into a biopolitical science. These two books contribute to that end by showing how research in human biology and Darwinian theory can illuminate the study of international relations.

United We Stand? Divide-and-Conquer Politics and the Logic of International Hostility. By Aron Belkin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 161p. $60.00 cloth.

This book presents a new thesis that attempts to explain threats to civil–military relations from a different perspective. In the process, it makes a useful, albeit limited, contribution to the civil–military relations literature.

The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century. By Robert J. Lieber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 268p. $28.00.

This volume joins a cottage industry of books on the proper American role in a post-9/11 world. In it, Robert J. Lieber advocates an active U.S. foreign policy based on American primacy.

Defensive Internationalism: Providing Public Goods in an Uncertain World. By Davis B. Bobrow and Mark A. Boyer. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005. 411p. $65.00 cloth, $34.95 paper.

Davis Bobrow and Mark Boyer address a topic of considerable current importance in both scholarly and policy circles—international cooperation, particularly among advanced industrial democracies—to produce what the authors call “progress,” that is, “improvements in actual and perceived conditions in fundamental terms—physical security, economic prosperity, ecological sustainability, and cultural continuity” (p. 6), and to avoid “regression,” defined as “worsening of those conditions in one or more of those respects” (p. 6). Their stated goal is to understand (in a clever reframing of the famous Harold Lasswell [1936] quote) “who gives, what, when, and how” (p. 1), since they believe that understanding this question is key to dealing successfully with a range of current global problems.

The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 256p. $22.50.

The postcommunist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have generated a rich body of literature over the past 15 years. Most works on CEE transitions have drawn from the comparative politics literature and treated international factors, at best, as secondary. Yet with the recent eastern expansion of the Council of Europe, NATO, and the European Union, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the impact of international institutions on domestic changes in this region.

The Scourge of War: New Extensions on an Old Problem. Edited by Paul F. Diehl. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 280p. $70.00.

This volume is dedicated to J. David Singer, and it is designed to be a collective reflection on Singer's work and the Correlates of War (COW) research program that he initiated more than 40 years ago. It accomplishes much more than simply revisiting or lauding previous COW research, however. As Paul Diehl (p. xi) notes in the preface, the “collection is one in which leading scholars look back in order to move the study of international relations forward.” Because it is so successful in this challenging task, the volume deserves a wide audience.

Demilitarizing Politics: Elections on the Uncertain Road to Peace. By Terrence Lyons. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005. 232p. $49.95.

When a peace agreement is negotiated in civil wars today, there is a seemingly reflexive turn toward democratization as a way to move social conflicts from the battlefield to the halls of parliament; such agreements invariably entail a political transition requiring divisive and inherently difficult electoral processes. Terrence Lyons captures the complex and often contradictory dynamics of elections in the wake of civil war peace agreements in his well-designed, thoroughly researched, and coherently argued book. The principal argument of Demilitarizing Politics is that the conduct of war itself creates institutional structures of conflict that linger into the postwar period and that critically inform postwar electoral politics.

Political Parties and Terrorist Groups. By Leonard Weinberg and Ami Pedahzur. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 179p. $125.

Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism. Edited by Leonard Weinberg and Ami Pedahzur. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2004. 178p. $115 cloth, $37.79 paper.

Two decades ago, Christopher Hitchens denounced the use of the label “terrorist” as a Medusa's head, which unveiled would “turn all discussion into stone…. Whisk, whisk … and there goes history, there goes inquiry, there goes proportion” (“Wanton Acts of Usage,” Harper's, September 1986, p. 68). Perhaps most social concepts, embedded as they are in wider communities of shared meaning beyond the arena of scholarly discourse, prove susceptible to rhetorical corruption as they become weapons of political denigration. The degradation of the concept of terrorism, however, seems especially severe. Add religious fundamentalism into the discourse, and our expectations sink even further.

The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World. By Ann Florini. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005. 271p. $45.

The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and the Politics of Global Order. By Nicolas Guilhot. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 286p. $18.95.

Nicolas Guilhot and Ann Florini appear to have hold of rather different parts of the democratic elephant: While the two books are not in direct dialogue with each other, they do provide quite different accounts of some closely related phenomena. Guilhot regards transnational “democracy promotion” and its agents—the World Bank, the U.S. state, nongovernmental organizations, corporations, think tanks—as engaged in the propagation of a neoconservative economic and political agenda around the world. Florini is much more charitably disposed toward a putative global democracy and its proponents, and indeed maintains that unless states, corporations, NGOs, international governmental organizations, and citizens in general are integrated into activism on its behalf (as well as on behalf of other goals), global and national futures look rather bleak.