European Union Enlargement. Edited by Neill Nugent. New York: Palgrave, 2004. 328p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The well-known difficulty of reviewing edited books is in this case enhanced by the high number of relatively short chapters (19) and also by the double ambition of this collective enterprise. On the one hand, the book deals, as the title suggests, with the recent and momentous enlargement of the European Union by the 10 Central and Eastern European countries finalized in 2004. The ambition of the editor is, however, broader. Actually, five to six of the 19 chapters deal with “enlargements,” that is, with the whole set of territorial accretions of the Community/Union, starting from the 1973 opening to the three northern countries (Great Britain, Ireland, and Denmark), the 1981/86 broadening to the southern (Greece, Spain, and Portugal), the 1995 inclusion of Austria, Finland, and Sweden, and, finally, the “10+2” enlargement, referring therefore also to the two pending candidates of Romania and Bulgaria.

Capitalists Against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden. By Peter A. Swenson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 448p. $24.95.

Peter Swenson has written a thought-provoking and edifying work of comparative political economy that examines the causal relationship between national differences in capitalist interests and divergent welfare state development. Given Swenson's ambitious challenge to many existing accounts of welfare developments and his detailed historical analysis, this book should attract some well-deserved attention.

New Risks, New Welfare: The Transformation of the European Welfare State. Edited by Peter Taylor-Gooby. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 264p. $115.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

The comparative welfare state literature has taken some important turns in the past decades, moving first from a focus on the causes of its growth to studies of retrenchment. Lately, scholarship has become more preoccupied with welfare state adaptation to the new risk and needs structure. This book falls squarely in the latter camp and includes European scholars, such as Bruno Palier, Guiliano Bonoli, and Peter Taylor-Gooby, who have been exploring this theme for some years now.

How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. By Kathleen Thelen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 352p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The theory of evolution is under attack. In this case, however, the attacker, Kathleen Thelen, comes armed with far more plausible evidence than the proponents of “intelligent design,” and the creatures being analyzed are not plants and animals but key economic institutions, such as vocational training systems, organized labor, and employer organizations.

Human Rights in Russia. By Jonathan Weiler. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 165p. $49.95.

This is a revisionist book. Jonathan Weiler breaks with the fundamentally positive vision of post-Soviet “reform and democratization” that prevailed among Western analysts of Russia during perestroika and the Yeltsin years, and still dominates American and European governments' policy.

Educating Citizens: International Perspectives on Civic Values and School Choice. Edited by Patrick J. Wolf and Stephen Macedo, with David J. Ferrero and Charles Venegoni. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004. 397p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Not to be confused with the Carnegie Foundation book carrying the same title, Educating Citizens is a very good resource for those who want to learn about how Western European societies have considered the issue of school choice. The editors have collected a series of reports on how private, generally religious, schooling has operated in the most developed countries of Europe, and they conclude that a variety of educational choices will benefit primary and secondary schooling in the United States. However, such choices must be well regulated to ensure the development of civic values among youth here. They argue for “a certain sort of publicly funded pluralism in education; pluralism justified by value differences but contained by significant regulation and tamed by systems that ensure accountability” (p. 4).

The Social Logic of Politics: Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior. Edited by Alan S. Zuckerman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. 368p. $72.50 cloth, $25.95 paper.

The central premise of this edited collection is set out with admirable clarity on the first page of the opening chapter: “It is both obvious and well-known that the immediate social circumstances of people's lives influence what they believe and do about politics. Even so, relatively few political scientists incorporate these principles into their analysis” (p. 3). Alan Zuckerman tackles this problem with a selection of chapters, written by authors with a range of intellectual pedigrees, that set out to show how what is “both obvious and well-known” can be incorporated into rigorous political science. The individual chapters are too numerous and diverse to review in detail here. What is perhaps more useful is to consider the extent to which, taken together, they map out a potentially fruitful line of future development for the discipline.

International Relations Under Risk: Framing State Choice. By Jeffrey D. Berejikian. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 152p. $40.00.

This book challenges the rational choice assumptions that undergird much of the extant international relations literature on deterrence, bargaining, cooperation, economic behavior, and the exercise of power. In an ambitious extension of his previous work, Jeffrey D. Berejikian attempts to construct “a new set of theoretical propositions about international politics securely anchored to empirical research in cognitive psychology” (p. 2). In the tradition of Graham T. Allison's (1971) Essence of Decision, Berejikian meticulously demonstrates the degree to which behavioral expectations regarding strategic interaction are tied to underlying conceptual models of decision making. He substitutes prospect theory's empirically grounded observations regarding framing effects and loss aversion for rational choice assumptions regarding invariance and net asset valuation. The result is a comprehensive cognitive model of state interaction that is capable of explaining preference reversals, risk acceptance, and nonmaximizing choice. The boldness of this enterprise more than compensates for minor flaws in execution.

The Limits of Transparency: Ambiguity and the History of International Finance. By Jacqueline Best. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 240p. $37.50.

While social constructivism has moved into the mainstream of international relations theory, informing scholarship in the subfields of security studies and international organization, its application and status in international political economy (IPE) has lagged behind. From the articles in the highest-status political science journals to the works on graduate syllabi across the major research universities, the study of IPE has been dominated by a single view of markets, drawn from neoclassical economics, premised on a narrow view of rationality, and rooted in materialist foundations.

Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation. By Roland Bleiker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 224p. $27.95.

This slim book combines six chapters and a conclusion in 124 pages. It intends to promote a new way of thinking about Korean security problems that “goes beyond conventional realist and state-centric approaches” (p. 1). The idea is not to offer new empirical insights but instead to focus “on underlying trends and conceptual challenges” (p. xlvi) in order to identify “broad patterns of conflict and possibilities for peace” (p. xlvi). The ethical aim is to promote dialogue based on an understanding that “the other's sense of identity and politics may be inherently incommensurable with one's own” (pp. xlii–xliii). In the case of this book, the incommensurable “others” are the two Koreas–North and South. The author's contention is that efforts toward peace have been periodically tried and always failed in the past because there has not been a sufficient acceptance of difference between North and South. Roland Bleiker is keen to stress that such an approach does not lead to political relativism but that it, in fact, makes for improved debates, such as over the ability to make more informed political choices between different political projects. Toward the end of the book he argues, for instance, that “[t]olerating different coexisting narratives does not prevent making judgments about their content or desirability” (p. 114).

Critical Security Studies and World Politics. Edited by Ken Booth. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005. 336p. $62.00 cloth, $24.50 paper.

Ken Booth has tasked himself and his contributors (particularly chapters by S. Smith, A. Linklater, H. Alker, and R. Wyn Jones) with sorting out the menagerie of theoretical criticisms often identified as either critical or in some way as alternatives to realism, including not only those that directly engage questions of security—“securitization” theorists and constructivists—but also the various “post” (modern, structural, positivist, colonial) theoretical critiques. Though on the whole the book rejects both realism and poststructuralism, the contributors do find some common ground with and among “critical,” “post,” and “alternative” writers on the question of improving the human condition (as an implicit goal of criticism), and applauds those who engage ethical issues to the extent that criticism is undertaken in order to reveal and confront, if not overcome, oppression.

Environmental Peacemaking. Edited by Ken Conca and Geoffrey D. Dabelko. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002. 200p. $35.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.

This book explores the proposition that cooperation on environmental issues can be instrumental in resolving local conflicts caused by environmental degradation and scarcity of resources. Such conflicts are not a new phenomenon. However, in the early twenty-first century, continuing degradation of the environment, coupled with ever-increasing pressures on resources due to an expanding population, has substantially increased the incidence of violent conflicts on environmental issues. Moreover, most of the present threats to peace are major intrastate conflicts (e.g., civil war and genocide) or ones that are occurring along ecologically fragile border regions, implying that researchers should concentrate on the regional or local level of analysis. At the same time, as the cause of such conflicts has risen on the political and discourse agenda, a corresponding large body of research has emerged, increasing our understanding of the ways in which environmental destruction can lead to conflict.

South Asia's Nuclear Security Dilemma: India, Pakistan, and China. Edited by Lowell Dittmer. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004. 296p. $69.95 cloth, $28.95 paper.

India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status. By Baldev Raj Nayar and T. V. Paul. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 302p. $70.00 cloth, $25.99 paper.

The 1998 nuclear tests by India and Pakistan caught the attention of international relations theorists as never before. While the earlier analyses of South Asia came primarily from those working on nonproliferation issues and regional conflict-prevention perspectives, the advent of overt nuclear weapon status of India and Pakistan presented IR scholars with the opportunity to explore a range of hypotheses about new nuclear powers. Was South Asia going to be able to take advantage of its backwardness/late entry into the deterrence game and learn from the considerable research and experience of the two superpowers during the Cold War? Were India and Pakistan as rational as the United States and the Soviet Union (if not more), and could they manage their rivalry without resorting to nuclear exchange? Will their overt nuclear weapons capabilities make India and Pakistan more careful in their responses to each other's provocative moves? Is a rivalry based in political ideology (like the U.S.-USSR one) more susceptible to rational decision making than a rivalry based in religious ideology (supposedly the primary basis of the India-Pakistan dispute)? A related set of questions raised by the tests focused primarily on the reasons/motivations behind Indian nuclear tests and their impact on the nuclear nonproliferation regime.

Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil–Military Relations. By Peter D. Feaver. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 400p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Most scholars work within established paradigms. Few have the temerity to challenge them—and fewer still succeed in causing fundamental reconsideration. Peter Feaver has accomplished the latter task. He has taken on the dominant long-standing theoretical framework for American civil–military relations and, in the process, provided a more accurate view of them in the early twenty-first century.

Remapping Global Politics: History's Revenge and Future Shock. By Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 380p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

This latest book in Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach's decades-long research collaboration is exceptionally ambitious. Starting from the controversial claim that current globalizing processes are decreasing states' capacity, legitimacy, and authority while increasing those of many of the other collectivities that populate global politics (p. 312), the authors argue that it is time to redraw “our mental maps of global politics” (p. xi). They set out to do so, proposing to “explain the forces shaping change” along the way (p. xi). Of course to either remap global politics or explain the forces that shape change is a formidable task. It is thus impressive that they have managed to argue their case as successfully as they have, especially in such a lively and often delightfully irreverent way.

The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. By V. P. Gagnon, Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 217p. $35.00

Publications focusing on Yugoslavia's collapse and the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo abound. One of the key category errors committed in much of this work—and especially in the mountains of journalistic output throughout the 1990s—has been to classify Yugoslavia's wars merely as wars of rival ethnicities and nationalisms, if not ancient hatreds. Conventional wisdom has it that Yugoslavia's wars in the 1990s were typical “Balkan” wars emanating from primordial nationalisms, heavily laden with historical baggage and rich in potent myth and symbols. The easiest way to explain Yugoslavia's violent disintegration in the late twentieth century was to relapse into cliché-ridden accounts of base, primeval ethnic rivalries that hitherto had been contained by a combination of the restraints imposed by Tito's brand of communism and the exigencies of a polarized Cold War international system in which Yugoslavia inhabited a very particular space.

Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961–1974: From “Red Menace” to “Tacit Ally.” By Evelyn Goh. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 316p. $75.00.

The constructivist approach to the study of international relations seems to have become popular today. Evelyn Goh's book uses the constructivist approach to study one of the most dramatic events in the history of international relations in the twentieth century: Richard Nixon's rapprochement with China. The traditional orthodox interpretation of Sino-American relations views bilateral relations in the 1960s as an extension of hostility and antagonism that started in the early 1950s; Nixon's dramatic departure in the early 1970s resulted from his realistic calculation of American strategic interests and the assistance China might provide in counterbalancing the increasing Soviet threat. This book analyzes the Sino-American rapprochement from a different angle. By identifying and tracing, throughout the 1960s within the U.S. government, the changing perception of China and the idea of a new China policy associated with the rapprochement, Goh tries to answer the question of how the rapprochement could have been achieved, rather than why it happened in 1972.

Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights. By Allen D. Hertzke. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 440p. $27.95.

Contemporary international relations scholarship has generally disregarded the role of religion in global politics. The two dominant IR paradigms—neorealism and neoliberalism—tend to neglect religion altogether, assuming that religious beliefs and institutions are an impediment to world order. To a significant degree, the skepticism about religion is rooted in the prevailing Western assumption that science and reason will make religion unnecessary in modern life. However, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the world has not become more secular. Rather, religion has become more prominent in society, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As a result, the leading secular IR paradigms have failed to take into account the religious dimension in international affairs.

International Relations and the Problem of Difference. By Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney. New York: Routledge, 2004. 276p. $80.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Can scholars of international relations dig themselves out from under the weight of several hundred years of world history and their own analytic baggage and remake themselves? This book asks for precisely this, delivering an important message for the discipline. Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney's opening premise is that IR, in spite of what one might logically expect, has always in fact been stymied and wrong-footed by the “problem of difference.” Far from being able to understand and deal sensitively with diversity and the other, the practices and discipline of IR have squashed it—internally the state has become an engine of homogenization, while externally international society is a hostile realm of danger and hierarchy, in which forces of an “empire of uniformity” operate to stigmatize difference and tame it. Instead of embracing and theorizing difference, IR is associated from the time of early modern Europe with the crippling dual “legacy of colonialism and religious cleansing” (p. viii). The authors are advocates instead of “heterology,” of the study of IR as a “study of differences” in which dominant Western perspectives and leaders are not afraid to be challenged and changed by encounters with diversity and the other, in which such encounters are open questions.

Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past. By Kimberly Zisk Marten. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 208p. $27.95.

This instructive volume aims to sort out the reasons that peacekeeping missions today so frequently fail. Kimberly Zisk Marten throws a wide net in investigating why. While her main case studies are Haiti, the Balkans, East Timor, and Afghanistan, she also makes more passing reference to a number of other recent or current interventions, including Iraq. As the subtitle of her book indicates, she also considers a variety of efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by liberal (for the times) colonial powers to ensure order and to restructure local societies and governments in line with what was perceived as beneficial both for the subject populations and the imperial homeland.