Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. By Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 286p. $27.95.

Rarely have I enjoyed (and learned from) reading a book as much as this one, whose parts are quite brilliant on occasion but whose overall argument falls well short of its claim and aim. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson argues with verve and conviction that the Federal Republic of Germany's creation and its subsequent joining in alliances with the United States and its European partners would not have occurred without the invention, the implementation, and deployment of “the West” as a unifying concept of political, cultural, and social identity. Challenging the explanatory powers of realist theories, as well as their international relations constructivist, Marxist, and liberal counterparts, Jackson develops something he calls a “transactional social constructionist conception of social reality: transactional because the analytic focus is on social ties and transactions rather than putatively solid and stable actors with relatively fixed interests, and social constructionist because the causal mechanisms producing policy outcomes involve the social production and reproduction of patterns of meaning” (p. 15, italics in original). This self-labeled “post-structural approach” (ibid., again italics in original) allows Jackson to navigate a fine line between the Scylla of contingency and the Charibdis of determinism even though he comes closer to the “agency” side of the ubiquitous agency—structure tension that will remain forever unresolved.

Human Rights in the Global Information Society. Edited by Rikke Frank Jørgensen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 324p. $25.00.

The various authors in this book are activists and scholars associated, in one way or another, with the Human Rights Caucus of the World Summit on the Information Society held in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005). They share a “firm commitment to promoting human rights standards as an essential baseline for the assessment and governance of the GIS [global information society]” (p. 7). To that end, the book analyzes how the development of public policy on GIS issues affects the protection and promotion of human rights. How are rights like freedom of expression, to privacy, to freedom from discrimination, and women's rights affected by the rapid spread of the GIS? As the book's introduction suggests, “there is a pressing need to think through how these rights apply in a globally networked and information-intensive world, identify specific policies and practices that could be contrary to their preservation and promotion, and suggest specific reforms that would rectify such problems” (p. 26).

Why Race Matters in South Africa. By Michael MacDonald. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 245p. $45.00.

Given that more than a decade has passed since the initiation of the “new dispensation,” a book about the present and future of South Africa that reassesses connections with the past seems appropriate. In this book, Michael MacDonald investigates the evolution of racism and racialism and their linkages to state legitimacy and governance. This empirical examination of South African politics and political economy is well ensconced in the literature. The author provides a rigorous case analysis within the literature of race and class.

Fairness in Adaptation to Climate Change. Edited by W. Neil Adger, Jouni Paavola, Saleemul Huq, and M. J. Mace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 319p. $62.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Fairness in Adaptation to Climate Change moves away from the scientific debate on the environmental impacts of climate change and mitigation strategies to an acceptance of the fact that countries and even localities within countries will have to adapt to changes in their climate. The authors also acknowledge that there will be both winners and losers, again, sometimes within countries as well as across international borders. They also note that there are relative winners and losers, and that losses of life, health, and species must be treated differently from economic losses. Although equity has been an important part of the international debate on climate change policy, previous texts have focused on the question of mitigation and whether developing nations should be allowed to continue emitting greenhouse gasses in order to improve their economic conditions, while developed nations are required to reduce emissions.

Globalization and Egalitarian Redistribution. Edited by Pranab Bardhan, Samuel Bowles, and Michael Wallerstein. Princeton: Russell Sage, 2006. 329p. $35.00

Despite their divergent overall verdicts, critics and supporters of economic globalization each typically affirm that a defensible global economic order would be one under which the living standards of less advantaged persons throughout the world were significantly higher than they currently are. The goal of Globalization and Egalitarian Redistribution is to provide detailed empirical assessment of the ways that economic globalization—understood as “the reduced impediments to the movement of goods, people, information, and finance across national boundaries” (p. 2)—can both enable and thwart the efforts of states to adopt “egalitarian” policies and institutional arrangements that aim to enhance the living standards of less advantaged persons, whether by redistributing income to them or by insuring them in various ways against economic risks.

The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey. By Sam Kaplan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 254p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories. By Gyanendra Pandey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 228p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

There were relatively few states when the modern discipline of political science came into being, and the most thoroughly institutionalized among them became intellectual as well as normative templates for what states should be. Our initial expectations for the political development of the vast number of new states—an increase from fewer than 60 to more than 200 since the end of World War II—had been conditioned by ahistorical takes on the roles of the social and the cultural in state formation and nation building (see Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas, 1960; and not excepting the contributions of Charles Tilly and associates in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, 1975). Two such expectations were that, over time, states' populations would exhibit more coherent political cultures and increasing social order (with diminishing violence) within frameworks of state-delineated laws and state-centered institutions. The authors of these two books suggest that those expectations are more likely to be met in form and illusion than in substance. For Thomas Hobbes, stateness is hardly sufficient for social cohesion or nonviolent civil existence. They also give reason to ask how well they have been met in the model states of the historic West.

Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment. By Isabela Mares. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 288p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

Just three years after publishing The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development, a prize-winning book on the role of employers in the development of European welfare states, Isabela Mares offers an overarching explanation of labor market performance in postwar Europe. She builds on the institutionalist literature in political economy, but combines its best-known models of labor markets with other elements. As foundations, she takes the Calmfors-Driffil model, which stressed that unemployment varies with labor union centralization (since more centralized unions are better at delivering wage moderation), and the Soskice-Iversen model, which stressed that unemployment varies with the independence and policies of central banks (since union moderation is encouraged by nonaccommodating monetary policy, which adjusts to cancel out wage inflation that exceeds productivity growth). Mares notes, however, that in most cases, neither union centralization nor monetary policy institutions have varied as much as unemployment over time—leaving these models better able to account for cross-national variation than for cross-temporal patterns.

Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics. By Carol Lancaster. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. 284p. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

This book addresses an important issue—namely, why governments give aid—and offers a comparison of five countries since 1945: the United States, Japan, France, Germany, and Denmark. Each country occupies its own chapter, with systematic comparison being assisted by a common set of headings relating to the main domestic sources of influence: ideas, institutions, interests, and government organization. Two opening chapters set the stage and offer a brief history of aid's purposes. A rather short concluding chapter sums up the findings. No other book has the same agenda. Carol Lancaster's analysis benefits greatly from her position as an “insider” for 13 years on and off in the U.S. government, working on aid issues, and from the opportunity to interview around a hundred aid officials and expert commentators in the five countries during 2002–3.

Citizenship in Britain: Values, Participation and Democracy. By Charles Pattie, Patrick Seyd, and Paul Whiteley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 364 pages. $70.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

What does it mean to be a British citizen in the early part of the twenty-first century? The authors of Citizenship in Britain address this question through the lens of the Citizen Audit, comprehensive surveys carried out as part of the Economic and Social Research Council's democracy and participation program. The Citizen Audit had three components: “wave 1” face-to-face interviews of 3,145 respondents (62.2% response rate) conducted between September and December 2000, “mail-back survey” questionnaires with 9,023 respondents (37.5% response rate) between January and May 2001, and follow-up “wave 2” face-to-face interviews with a subset of the original interviewees (809 respondents; 67% response rate) between September and December 2001. The wave 1 interviews consisted of 62 questions, while the mail-back surveys and wave 2 interviews included a subset. The authors weighted the raw data by age, sex, and employment status to make them consistent with census data to compensate for nonresponse.

State Feminism and Political Representation. Edited by Joni Lovenduski with Claudie Baudino, Marila Guadagnini, Petra Meier, and Diane Sainsbury. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 315p., $34.99 paper, $85.00 cloth.

This latest volume from the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State (RNGS), inspired by Amy Mazur and Dorothy Stetson's 1995 Comparative State Feminism, explores women's campaigns for political representation in 10 European Union countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden) and the United States. The introduction and conclusion outline the RNGS framework, hypotheses, and findings, based on 33 debates (the basic unit of analysis) over three decades. Eleven chapters present each country's debates. RNGS promotes a theory of state feminism defined as “the advocacy of women's movement demands inside the state” (p. 4).

Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians. By R. Charli Carpenter. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. 230p. $89.95 cloth.

On the occasion of Remembrance Day in grade six and as my classmates and I cut small poppies out of red construction paper, we learned about the brave young Canadian men who died fighting for our freedom and were laid to rest in Flanders Field. A striking memory of this history lesson was that I secretly congratulated myself for being a girl. If I ever found myself in the midst of a war, it was the boys who would have to fight. A narrow escape from a dreadful fate!

Deterring International Terrorism and Rogue States: U.S. National Security Policy after 9/11. By James H. Lebovic. New York: Routledge, 2007. 240p. $135.00 cloth, $37.95 paper.

Recent literature on terrorism and so-called “rogue” proliferation states is vast, and James Lebovic's book stands out among the very finest for its original arguments, richly documented presentation, and engaging and thought-provoking discussion. Overall, it is critical of the post-9/11 view dominant in U.S. strategic thinking that the main adversaries are undeterrable. It shows that terrorists and leaders of renegade regimes are neither mindless nor irrational, but rather are often sensitive to the costs of punishment and thus susceptible to the logic of deterrence. Deterrence doctrines should therefore not be abandoned as Cold War relics, and the book makes a remarkable contribution toward bridging the doctrinal issues and debates from the Cold War (nuclear deterrence) past to the current problems of antiproliferation and counterterrorism.

Economic Autonomy and Democracy: Hybrid Regimes in Russia and Kyrgyzstan. By Kelly M. McMann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 259p. $75.00.

Kelly M. McMann's work is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on democracy and democratization with the discussion of a new form of government, namely the hybrid regime. McMann uses a multidimensional approach to understand a complex and conceptually messy issue: democratic participation. Like other scholars, she uses this hybrid regime framework, which has been described as containing both democratic and authoritarian elements (e.g., see Larry J. Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13 [April 2002]: 21–35). Her work is a significant contribution to the understanding of how formerly transitional governments currently operate in relation to citizens and citizen political participation. Utilizing the hybrid regime concept illustrates the true nature of such regimes to the same degree that the terms “electoral,” “minimal,” “illiberal” democracies and “transitional” regimes obfuscate it. Perhaps regimes such as those in Russia and Kyrgyzstan have completed their transitions—to some combination of democratic and authoritarian elements, rather than to liberal democracy.

Mediating Globalization: Domestic Institutions and Industrial Policies in the United States and Britain. By Andrew P. Cortell. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. 243p. $70.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Economic Interdependence and Conflict in World Politics. By Mark J. C. Crescenzi. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. 173p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Given the context of globalization, these two books generate and answer substantive puzzles in security, trade, and industrial policy. Building on the Kantian hypothesis, Mark Crescenzi asks: “Does economic interdependence lead to peace or conflict?” Taking off from the neoliberal convergence hypothesis, Andrew Cortell asks if globalization entails the end of state-led industrial policies or economic intervention. The “it depends” answers that may be expected come down to “it depends on the domestic bargains and opportunity costs for states,” therefore providing us with a common conceptual anchor for adjudicating together the quality of these works. For Crescenzi, interdependence poses exit costs in terms of the relative scope, ranking, and importance of the trading relationship for the two countries.

Political (In)Justice: Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. By Anthony W. Pereira. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 280p. $27.95.

Pereira's new book is a fascinating comparison of the legal systems of the military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. It focuses on the concept of “authoritarian legality,” which at first seems to be an oxymoron. As the book unfolds, however, and the differences among the regimes' legal strategies become clear, the usefulness of the concept becomes apparent. This book highlights the importance of the legal dimension of authoritarian regimes, thereby providing important new insights into the nature of both authoritarianism and judicial systems. A broadly comparative chapter also extends the argument to Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, and the United States after 9/11.

Regime Change: U.S. Strategy Through the Prism of 9/11. By Robert S. Litwak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. 424p. $65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Robert Litwak focuses his book on how the United States should respond to the potential post–Cold War proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—especially nuclear weapons—to so-called rogue states and nonstate actors like Al Qaeda. Litwak makes three central arguments: 9/11 transformed America's conception of national security; U.S. policy toward rogue states oscillates between the contradictory objectives of regime change versus behavior change; and in the post–9/11 world, the main security threat to the United States is the nexus of nonstate actors like Al Qaeda that want to acquire WMDs and states that might—either passively or actively—facilitate their acquisition by such organizations.

Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. By Mathijs Pelkmans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 240p. $59.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Although much has been said for modern principles of self-determination, there is often comfort and security in established, even externally imposed, sources of self-identity. If the Soviet Union was a prison of nations, then it was—whether imperfectly, perniciously, or opportunistically—also an answer to national questions that might otherwise have been solved with more difficulty and less satisfaction. In the aftermath of the USSR efforts to ask and to answer those questions have sometimes been coupled with semicompulsory expectations of self-determination that have threatened to substitute one form of repressive identification for another. Nowhere has this led to greater problems than in the Caucasus.

Social Movements and State Power: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador. By James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005. 288p. $90.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Anyone interested in the recent renewal of social movement activity and the rise of ostensibly left or center-left governments in Latin America might be tempted to pick up this book, with its provocative jacket photo and appealing title. Unfortunately, the book cover is nearly the only thing going for this sectarian jeremiad from James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer. If one is looking for serious scholarship, or even solid journalism, neither can be found here. Instead, one finds a poorly organized collage, including descriptions of recent history, critiques of government policies, and tendentious and contradictory evaluations of left strategy. Despite the promise of the title, the authors do not engage the literature on social movements, nor do they contribute much in the way of new analytical perspectives. The class analysis announced in the introduction only emerges occasionally in the subsequent chapters, and even then it is applied mechanically and reductively, yielding an extremely limited capacity to help us understand the character and trajectory of social movements or the nuances of political behavior in diverse contexts. Important cross-national differences in terms of political institutions, ethnic composition, and international constraints are not addressed, much less systematically compared. Furthermore, the book lacks consistent citations of sources, and serious empirical and orthographic errors are sprinkled throughout. Those knowledgeable about the countries in question might be amused by the almost congenital inability to spell correctly the names of politicians, political parties, and labor confederations; those without such knowledge, especially undergraduate students, will only be confused or misinformed.

Power and Principle: Human Rights Programming in International Organizations. By Joel E. Oestreich. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007. 243p. $59.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The power of human rights to shape the mandate and operations of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) is vividly illustrated in this timely study. Highly readable and original, it holds great appeal for both students and scholars in the fields of international organizations (IOs) and human rights.

The Political Economy of Terrorism. By Walter Enders and Todd Sandler. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 292p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

The study of terrorism has come a long way since the pioneering research in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The events of 9/11 have greatly accelerated the proliferation of books and articles on a topic that is now of major academic and policy concern. Throughout the development of research, there has been a growing attempt to apply empirical and methodological approaches to understanding the causes, dynamics, and outcomes of terrorism. Walter Enders and Todd Sandler have been at the forefront of this work, and their book, The Political Economy of Terrorism, is a fine illustration of their continuing research agenda.