The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terrorism. By Michael Ignatieff. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 160p. $29.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.

While Michael Ignatieff was no doubt motivated to write this book by the civil and human rights abuses justified by the Patriot Act and the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the framing question of it is decidedly more abstract: How can liberal democracies defend themselves against terrorism without violating their most sacred principles? The book is to be commended for the forthright way it confronts the uncomfortable moral dilemmas posed by democracy's encounter with terrorism, but Ignatieff is less successful in his attempt to articulate a coherent “lesser evil” approach to these encounters. More disconcerting, however, is the way the formal qualities of his argument potentially silence the kind of self-reflection and historical scrutiny that ought also to play a vital role in any democratic state's—much less a superpower's—response to terrorism.

Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency. By Anthony James Joes. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 360p. $35.00.

At the end of this book, Anthony James Joes has written a two-page epilogue entitled “Conflict in Iraq,” which notes the enormous task that the U.S. government has set itself in the long-term construction of a democratic order in the face of violent opposition and internal social conflict. And while the bulk of the book was obviously written prior to the war in Iraq, it can be read as a constructive critique of U.S. counterinsurgency policy in the months following the invasion. Joes draws on a wide range of cases from over two centuries of guerrilla warfare to illustrate what he sees as the key reasons for the success or failure of numerous counterinsurgency campaigns. His thoughtful and informative analysis provides a useful basis for a comparative perspective that has been largely absent from many of the assessments of the guerrilla war in Iraq and America's counterinsurgency policies.

Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives. By Judith G. Kelley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 264p. $35.00.

The subject of this study by Judith Kelley is the international factor in ethnic minority politics—the role of external institutions and norms in the democratic development of several countries and the policies regarding their ethnic minorities. These institutions, more specifically the European Union, the Council of Europe (CE), and the European Security Conference, have secured commitments and undertakings from national governments regarding human rights in general and the protection of minority groups in particular. This is especially true of the CE, which has admitted a number of states on the basis of promises only.

Egalitarian Capitalism: Jobs, Incomes and Growth in Affluent Countries. By Lane Kenworthy. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. 222p. $32.50.

Two decades of rising wage and household earnings inequality in the world's wealthiest nations make the guiding question of Lane Kenworthy's book both timely and important: “[M]ust we give up on the vision of a dynamic and productive yet relatively egalitarian form of capitalism?” (p. 1). To answer this question, Kenworthy presents a careful comparative analysis of income inequality in the countries of northwestern Europe, North America, and Australia during the 1980s and 1990s. He shows that there is not necessarily a trade-off between equality and income growth, although there may be a trade-off between equality and some categories of employment growth. Hence, he argues that with an updated, pro-employment version of the welfare state, we need not give into growing disparity in advanced capitalist societies. Whether this will be desired by all and achieved remains to be seen; nevertheless, the book is an important antidote to the “there is no alternative” type of thinking that pervades much contemporary discourse on economic globalization.

The Remnants of War. By John Mueller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 272p. $29.95.

Rarely does a cover convey with such accuracy a book's central argument as in John Mueller's The Remnants of War. Shot by Ron Haviv, maybe the most iconic photographer of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the cover picture shows a Serb soldier celebrating the fall of the town of Vukovar. The middle-aged soldier is drunk as he downs a bottle of liquor with the town's ruins in the background. In fact, he looks more like a homeless man in any European or American city than anything we would associate with the modern military profession—an observation that summarizes Mueller's four-tiered argument.

Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization. By William Tabb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 528p. $69.50 cloth, $29.50 paper.

Martin Wolf, the influential economic correspondent of Financial Times, concludes his book Why Globalization Works (2004): “What the successful countries all share is a move towards the market economy, one in which private property rights, free enterprise and competition increasingly took the place of state ownership, planning and protection. They chose, however haltingly, the path of economic liberalization and international integration. This is the heart of the matter. All else is commentary” (pp. 143–44).

Global Institutions and Social Knowledge: Generating Research at the Scripps Institution and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, 1900s–1990s. By Virginia M. Walsh. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 208p. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

What is the interrelating link between institutions and knowledge, primarily scientific knowledge? Conventional international relations literature focuses typically on the impact of knowledge on institutions. Virginia Walsh's interest, however, is to “turn the causal arrow” by focusing on the “institutional dimension” of knowledge creation: How do global political and economic, but also epistemic, institutions shape knowledge generation? (pp. 4–5, 38, 128, 130). Here, the scientific disciplines qualify as epistemic institutions (p. 34). From that point of departure, underscoring an institutional perspective, the emphasis concentrates on the “institutional mechanisms” through which knowledge is being formed. Groups leverage institutional mechanisms to “generate knowledge and fix beliefs” for the purposes of 1) establishing common understandings, 2) repairing uncertainties, and 3) directing inquiry by “fixing its direction” (pp. 3, 9, 38).

Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis. By Sandra Whitworth. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 225p. $49.95.

The rapid expansion in United Nations peacekeeping operations in the 1990s has inevitably led to official and scholarly scrutiny of their efficacy and shortcomings. Sandra Whitworth offers a critical eye and questions of gendered analysis by studying the subjects of the UN's peacekeeping operation in Cambodia, whose presence often meant greater insecurity as well as the (mis)conduct of soldiers from Canada—a country historically linked to major peacekeeping contributions—in Somalia. Using these two case studies, Whitworth highlights a basic contradiction inherent in peacekeeping that stems from its heavy reliance on soldiers whose training emphasizes masculine traits of violence, homophobia, racism, and aggression, yet whose tasks as peacekeepers require limiting violence to self-defense and providing a benign, altruistic presence. She uses gender analysis to examine these contradictions, to challenge peacekeeping's association with alternatives to military violence, to show how peacekeeping forces can increase local people's insecurity, rather than alleviating it, and to critique the use of soldiers for missions requiring unsoldierly skills.

Media and the Path to Peace. By Gadi Wolfsfeld. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 284p. $70.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

While the role of the mass media during conflict and war has been the subject of numerous studies in the field of mass communications, there is a paucity of research on mass media during peace processes. Media and the Path to Peace is an important step in remedying this lack. A study such as this confronts an unfortunate reality: The news media are attracted to war and conflict, while peace processes make for paltry news footage and thus are for the most part undercovered by the news media. Indeed, it is Gadi Wolfsfeld's thesis that news values and peace processes are inherently contradictory.

Crude Awakenings: Global Oil Security and American Foreign Policy. By Stephen A. Yetiv. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 256p. $35.00.

Steve Yetiv's central argument is that oil stability has improved in recent years in the sense that the market is resilient, enjoying a self-reinforcing equilibrium by its ability to deter, mitigate, and contain threats to supplies. The author explicitly distinguishes oil supply stability from oil price stability, as oil prices have become more volatile while supply volumes have stabilized. Implicitly, he argues that price flexibility stabilizes supplies and that the world oil market has become more competitive and less rigid, so that relations between oil exporters and importers have become more pragmatic and less politicized. Attention is on the physical availability of oil: Disruptions are unlikely, not on oil prices or their impact on incomes, inflation rates, and trade balances, but historically, oil has always been available in the world market, at a price. The book would have benefited from a more systematic elaboration of the key argument, early on. He examines the oil market from the perspective of international relations, emphasising the projection of U.S. military power in the Middle East.