John Sislin and Frederic Pearson have written a fine book that addresses a complex and understudied issue: the role of arms in ethnic conflict. While it is abundantly clear that arms and ethnic conflict are closely intertwined, we have little systematic knowledge on the nature of the relation. What kinds of weapons—tanks versus small arms, say—play the greatest role? Whatever the weapon, how does its influence vary at different stages in the process of ethnic conflict? As unpleasant as the thought might be, are there conditions under which armaments play a positive role in such conflicts—for example, by promoting a situation of stalemate or bringing about outside humanitarian intervention? The signal contribution of this compact volume is to shed much-needed light on these and many other questions.

The puzzle of European monetary cooperation—namely, why sovereign nation-states would relinquish monetary autonomy in return for some measure of exchange rate stability—has produced a growing body of highly informed and theoretically strong works on European integration. Matthais Kaelberer's account fits nicely into this mold. The author argues convincingly that European monetary cooperation—especially Germany's leading contribution to the European Monetary Union (EMU)—is the result of a structural conflict of interest between weak and strong currency countries over the rules of monetary cooperation. In laying out his “structural” argument, Kaelberer's analysis, as he notes in his own words, “complements rather than substitutes for other explanations of European monetary cooperation” (p. 6). In making this claim, his work will not settle the extremely lively theoretical debate on European integration, and European monetary cooperation more specifically. However, it is an important contribution to the literature and fills in some of the theoretical void involving concepts of “leadership” and “asymmetry” of power that help explain European integration.

German unification presents conceptual puzzles of which comparativists dream. Has this monumental change, which boils down to full German sovereignty, growth of German power, and the emergence of new domestic political interests, altered Germany's relationship to Europe? Is Germany withdrawing from or dominating European institutions? Does the new Germany still tread its well-worn postwar path of the model “European”? The questions are important for our understanding of the sources of policy change and continuity as well as the process of regional integration in general and the course of European integration in particular. In which issue areas has Germany's postunification policy broken with the past? Is the break caused by changes in domestic politics or the increase in the power of a unified and fully sovereign Germany? Have policy changes impeded or enhanced the speed and character of European unification? Are important continuities evident? If both policy continuity and change are present, why the variation? These are the questions Jeffrey Anderson tackles in this timely and important volume.

Public diplomacy, or foreign policy rhetoric, is an increasingly important dimension of international relations. As modern media extend their global reach, they bring national foreign policy actions out of the diplomatic closet into full public view. Public relations experts market foreign policy as they do other products and services. Foreign policy marketing uses rhetoric strategically to legitimize national actions, mobilize support from allies, and counter the propaganda efforts of opponents. McEvoy-Levy's work contributes to the growing literature of such modern international communication.

Stuart Kaufman's Modern Hatreds is a serious, original contribution on a highly policy relevant question, which is strengthened by his scrupulous case study design and deep regional expertise. Kaufman asks: when do intercommunal rivalries escalate to large-scale ethnic wars? His answer integrates a number of existing strands of explanation around the central idea that myths, or as he calls them, ethnic symbols, are the root cause of ethnic violence. His core claim is that “people make political choices based on emotion and in response to symbols” (p. 29). Ethnic wars results from the lethal combination of two particularly noxious types of myths: myths justifying the political domination of specific territory, and myths of past atrocities by others that lead to widespread fears of genocide. The realities behind these myths are far less important than that they are pervasive “in each group's mainstream history texts written before the conflict began” (p. 30).

This collection of essays celebrates more than four decades of international relations research by the distinguished scholar and practitioner Richard H. Ullman. The book demonstrates the dilemma faced by the organizers of a Festschrift for a prolific author with wide-ranging interests: Should the chapters focus on, and collectively do justice to, one topic alone; or should the book take a wide-ranging approach that is more representative of the broad spectrum of subjects analyzed by the honoree? The editors of this volume have some success in following both routes simultaneously, albeit with some necessary trade-offs.

This excellent book is a worthwhile acquisition for anyone and any library, but it is an essential one for those concerned with international law, international organization, and war crimes. Bass combines the best of his scholarly political science training with his experience as a former correspondent with The Economist.

Since the end of the Cold War, development studies have fallen to the wayside as attention has shifted to the democratization process in Eastern Europe, the increased integration of the European Union, and the effects of economic globalization in the advanced industrialized countries. The developing world was seen as an afterthought or, in some cases, as arenas of misunderstandable ethnic or religious conflict, structural poverty, disease, and other hardships. However, in the context of September 11, more attention now is on the developing world, perhaps not so much on economic development, but more on containing various terrorist organizations. Yet development studies still exist, and this area of study maintains an historical connection to several decades worth of academic research. Scholars persistently ask such questions as why the South is poor and politically weak compared to countries in the North. Answers generally are located in the dependency literature of unequal economic relations leading to unequal power relations. Darryl C. Thomas, in The Theory and Practice of Third World Solidarity, asks this question but provides a somewhat different response. The economic and political inequality in the world is not necessarily due to economic ideology but to the color of skin (p. xi). The solidarity of the Third World that Thomas sees in the past is one based on race, and racial solidarity should be the means by which the poor and powerless of the Third World transform unequal power relations. Thomas refers to this relationship as global apartheid, defining it as a structure of the world system that combines political economy and racial antagonism (p. 26). He states that global apartheid refers to the continuation of white-minority dominance of political, social, legal, cultural, and economic decision-making apparatuses within the world system (p. 111) and that this form of racial capitalism has become a permanent feature in the world system.

Anthony F. Lang's Agency and Ethics is an effort to reinterpret international intervention from a normative perspective, normative in this instance referring to activities that construct identities and provide policy guidance. Although he describes himself as a “realist” (p. 3), Lang sets out to explain the outcome of military intervention in terms of the interaction between the normative dimension and the “political,” which he defines as the competitive elements in a situation. He argues that states intervene in one another's affairs owing to what they believe are the norms that define their role(s) in international politics, and he shows how norms produce conflict as well as cooperation. In the cases that follow, Lang focuses on three norms—liberalism, colonialism, and humanitarianism: The first focuses on democracy, individual rights, and national self-determination; the second on responsibility for politically and economically less developed societies; and the third on assisting those in need. He ascribes the failure of intervention to normative disagreement among both friends and adversaries within and between participating countries, and he uses what Alexander George calls a “focused comparison” of cases to illustrate his claim.

This book takes the reader through the complexities of the search for peace in the first chapters and through the provision of the UNTAC operation up to 1993. It concludes with an overview of the 1998 elections, and in between there is a section dedicated to the period between the two polls. The first section is reasonable, but the text is repetitive and it repeats what several others have already written (Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC, 1995, and various works by David P. Chandler, Ben Kiernan, and Michael Vickery). The analysis reflects that by several of the recognized Khmer scholars, and is useful to read, but while the analysis is insightful regarding Western peacemaking processes and the Khmer resistance at various points, it does not question assumptions regarding the overwriting of Western peace paradigms onto Khmer political culture. This has a distinctly different historical evolution and an equally dissimilar set of contemporary values regarding the notions of opposition, power sharing, and social harmony. The limits of this type of analysis are present throughout the work and are probably best illustrated by the statement that the violence of July 1997 “transformed UNTAC's enterprise from what may have been termed a [limited success' to a failed rescue of a failed state” (p. 265).

For too long, nuclear deterrence theory has been treated as a casualty of the end of the Cold War. During the preceding period of superpower rivalry, debates over the credibility of nuclear deterrence attracted the attention of sophisticated game theorists in diverse disciplines. But with the end of the Cold War, this research tradition virtually ground to a halt. In this important new book, two long-term contributors to this body of research revisit these issues and effectively recast these models as representations of policy dilemmas of long-standing and continuing relevance. For instance, their models of U.S. strategic doctrines of massive retaliation and flexible response prove relevant to any situation in which the parties perceive two levels of conflict to be significantly different, even if neither level involves the use of nuclear weapons.

Edited collections usually have relatively clear provenance. Most often they are brought to life by colleagues who are intrigued by an issue or a question; they then organize a conference (or a collection) around that theme and seek a publisher for the resulting collection. Such works are commonly marked by the putative expectations associated with an edited book: There is an attempt by the editors to present the unifying theme desired (if not demanded) by most university presses and the academic reviewers whose reports determine which way the thumbs go. Usually the editors attempt to herd the cats they have invited to participate—and ask that the contributors address unifying themes or take desired approaches. Even if the cats do no more than tip a ritual bow in the direction of the unifying theme, the editors normally use the introduction and conclusion to craft at least the appearance of unification.

The last decade of the nineteenth century was a traumatic time for many Americans. The federal constitution was a hundred years old, and it no longer fit the nation so neatly as it once had. A new class of economic warlords, commonly called robber barons, made a mockery of some hallowed democratic principles; from behind the walls of their well-defended monopolies they laughed at notions that business should serve the public. “The public be damned!” jeered William Vanderbilt. Meanwhile, millions of immigrants flooded American shores; to many of the native born (or merely earlier arrived), the newcomers appeared an alien horde that would drive down wages, depress the standard of living, and change the character of America even as they were already changing its face. In the West, the frontier was disappearing—in fact, had already disappeared, in the statistical judgment of the director of the 1890 census—depriving the country of the demographic and psychic safety valve that had long bled off the worst of American discontent. As if all this were not enough, the 1890s witnessed the worst depression in American history to that point, closing hundreds of banks and factories and throwing hundreds of thousands of breadwinners out of work and onto the streets and highways.

The obvious advantage of edited collections, such as this interesting book, is that they allow a range of authors with a huge cumulative breath of knowledge about a subject to cover virtually all aspects of it. This they certainly do in Alliance Politics, Kosovo, and NATO's War, examining the way in which both NATO as a whole and its most important members reacted to and handled the Kosovo crisis of 2000.

Early accounts of the development of the discipline of international relations (IR) attribute causal significance to changes in the “real” world. In this respect, historigraphy was a reflection in history's looking glass, such that World War I created idealism, and World War II prompted the revival of realism. The editors of International Relations—Still and American Social Science? remind us that the identity of the discipline is also a reflection of geopolitical and cultural circumstances. The sixteen essays seek to reawaken the question of the identity of the discipline and how this has been transmitted and contested. There is no doubt that the book will be widely read and is likely to find its way onto many postgraduate course lists. It is also likely to find critics and supporters in fairly equal number, which is reason alone to applaud the labors of the editors.

Robert Pinkney, a respected British Africanist, takes on an ambitious task: examining the interaction of three Anglophone states (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) with the international community since independence, but primarily since the end of the Cold War opened up new avenues for mutual influence.

Learning would seem to be a natural topic for the academic study of international politics. Interest in dynamic processes, however, and in learning, in particular, has been uneven, while the impact of contributions to date has been mixed. State Learning and International Change provides a thorough, thoughtful application of a complex biological learning model to international politics. The text is engaging and well written. Modeling and philosophy of science issues are addressed with aplomb and humor. For example, the author refers to the residue from social Darwinist applications of biological models to social science as “pesky,” discusses stocasticity and pleiotropy with reference to striped and spotted cross-eyed bandersnatches, and mentions “deranged mutant-killer-monster snow goons” as a possible method of biological selection, all in the space of a few pages (pp. 59–67).

Joel Fetzer is to be congratulated for a serious attempt to bring a public opinion approach to comparative immigration politics. His book represents an ambitious step toward bridging the gap between policy input and output in the immigration equation of advanced industrialized democracies. Its occasional choppy organization and underdeveloped data analysis tend to distract from the import of the work and leave the reader yearning for a deeper and more substantive discussion.

The 1990s saw a resurgence in demand for economic sanctions. The United States imposed extraterritorial sanctions on Cuba through the Helms-Burton Law and on Iran and Libya through the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. Environmental and human rights activists also sought, albeit with limited success, to impose sanctions against the military regimes in Burma and Nigeria.

Clausewitz once observed that in war everything is simple, but the simplest things are very complicated. This seems to apply doubly so to nuclear deterrence. The principle is very simple: A potential enemy is persuaded not to do anything rash by the prospect of devastating retaliation. But it soon gets complicated. What difference does it make if the idea is not only to protect the homeland but also allies? As potential enemies acquire their own means of devastating retaliation, issues of preemption arise, and this requires close attention to the details of force structure. How varied, overwhelming, and surprising need the attacker be, especially if there is little interest in preemption? How much need the defender disperse, conceal, or protect forces, or develop antimissile defenses, just in case the other side is contemplating preemption? What happens if both sides are contemplating preemption at the same time? Can understandings, tacit or negotiated, between potential enemies ease the dangers of a crisis getting out of hand?