Making War and Building Peace. By Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 400p. $24.95.

Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil Wars. Edited by Philip G. Roeder and Donald Rothchild. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 392p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The two books discussed in this review address the same substantive question: How does one establish sustainable peace after civil war? However, their approaches are quite different. The Roeder and Rothchild edited volume focuses on one aspect of establishing postwar peace—the post–civil war political institutions of the country. Doyle and Sambanis focus on the role of the United Nations in helping to establish sustainable postwar peace. I will first address the edited volume and then turn to the Doyle and Sambanis book before offering a few concluding remarks.

From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. By Charles W. Mills. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. 312p. $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

The author of the influential The Racial Contract (1997) has gathered together a provocative collection of his essays. These disparate papers do not form an argument for an overarching thesis. Nor do they converge on a single theme, for example, the need to shift away from a focus on class toward race, as the title might suggest. Rather, the essays reveal the recent changes in Charles Mills's philosophical interests, away from core problems in orthodox Marxism toward the project of developing a critical race theory. One constant throughout is Mills's attempt to demonstrate that the methods of analytic philosophy are not inherently “bourgeois,” as many radicals have supposed, but can be usefully applied to problems that concern leftists. Yet unlike much of analytic philosophy, these essays are never boring but instead are generously laced with the author's characteristic biting sarcasm and bold humor.

Bounded Divinities: Sacred Discourses in Pluralist Democracies. By Fred M. Frohock. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 272p. $69.95.

While authors such as Michael Perry challenge liberal thinkers such as Bruce Ackerman and John Rawls to move beyond their neutral rendering of political discourse in order to foster an ecumenical politics between secular and spiritual perspectives, Fred Frohock contends that the public discourse of liberal theory cannot grasp the supernatural basis of sacred discourses. Instead, Frohock contends that “thin” realism (p. 159), found in international relations theory, can better negotiate the tensions between secular and religious discourses in pluralist democracies: “[R]elationships between secular and the sacred, religion and politics, church and state, are settled by the great political languages of stability, efficiency, equity, and power (among other collective level terms), not the metaphors of walls and spheres” (p. 197).

Among the many scholarly attempts to reckon with the causes and consequences of Donald Trump’s rise, few have attracted popular attention on the scale of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die. Seldom do books by political scientists make it onto the New York Times best sellers list, but this one has, a testament to its broad influence. Levitsky and Ziblatt situate Trumpism within a broader comparative and historical context in order to assess its similarities to and differences from democratic breakdowns elsewhere, particularly in Europe and Latin America. Their broad argument is that modern slides into authoritarianism are not the result of revolutions or military coups, but rather the consequence of a steady erosion of political norms and the assault on such fundamental democratic institutions as an independent judiciary and a free press. In short, contemporary democracies die not as a result of men with guns attacking from outside the system, but rather because elected leaders from inside that system slowly undermine them. Judged from this standpoint, the authors argue that American democracy is now in real danger, and they offer a range of suggestions for saving it. How convincing is Levitsky and Ziblatt’s analysis of democratic breakdown, and how well does it apply to the American case? How useful are the solutions that they offer for rescuing American democracy? We have asked a range of prominent scholars from across the discipline to consider these questions in the present symposium.

Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945. By Mark N. Franklin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 294p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

According to Mark Franklin, “As the vexing questions of political science can be regarded as puzzles, the particular topic of voter turnout could be called the ‘grand enchilada’ of puzzles of political science…. [A]lmost everything about voter turnout is puzzling, from the question of why anyone bothers to vote at all to the question of why certain variables appear to explain voter turnout in some circumstances but not in others.” He makes this bold but true statement in the preface (p. xi) of his comparative study of turnout in more than 20 established democracies since World War II. Voter turnout is one of the more frequently studied topics in political science, but the results of all these scholarly efforts remain rather poor and unsatisfactory. We still know distressingly little about why some people vote and others do not, why turnout is much higher in some countries than in others, and why in so many countries there seems to be a steady and irrevocable decline in turnout in national elections.

If history is any judge, Republicans should lose control of Congress or the White House during one of the five elections to come between now and 2015. Since Democrats and Republicans became national competitors in 1855, unified party control has lasted on average just 5.9 years. Unified Republican control has endured a bit longer, averaging 6.3 years. Even at its longest (with the onset of the 1896 realignment), Republican control of government has lasted just fourteen years. With the current Republican regime emerging from the elections of 2000, Republican control of Congress and the White House should have run its course by the elections of 2014.Sarah A. Binder is professor of political science at George Washington University ([email protected]) and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. By Stephen Biddle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 312p. $37.50.

Stephen Biddle has written a worthy book on the never-ending debate over why land wars are won and lost. It contributes to the academic literature, and his policy judgments deserve attention. He puts forth the theory that “force employment” (i.e., doctrine for using military forces in battle) plays a major role in determining outcomes, as big a role as the size of contending forces and the sophistication of their technologies. He further argues that modern employment doctrine, which enables skilled ground forces to negate the effects of lethal fires against them, was born in late World War I, when attackers finally overcame entrenched defenses. A skilled operations research analyst of tactical battles, Biddle offers a multimethod approach that combines logical reasoning, case studies, mathematical models, statistical analysis, and dynamic simulations. His book can be read by nonspecialists, but many of its technical discussions (e.g., Lanchester equations) require expert knowledge.