God Willing: The Politics of Islamism in Bangladesh. By Ali Riaz. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 232p. $69.00 cloth, $28.95 paper.

Ali Riaz's book may be too easily dismissed as either glib or alarmist. It opens with an attention-getting question that is the title of Chapter 1: “Is Bangladesh Becoming a Taliban State?” Riaz's answer is startling: For reasons elaborated upon, “it becomes clear that a variant of Talibanism is on the horizon” (p. 11). The rest of the book is divided into chapters that support his thesis. There are copious detailed footnotes, an extensive bibliography, appendices that provide a useful chronology of political events, and descriptions of the leaders of Bangladesh.

Election Timing. By Alastair Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 286p. $75.00.

Alistair Smith has written, no doubt, the definitive book on the timing of elections in the United Kingdom. This, together with two party swings, is a subject that greatly concerns politicians and commentators in Britain. The conventional wisdom is that the choice of election date is a crucial decision for the incumbent prime minister, and that this choice gives the incumbent a considerable advantage. This follows from the ability of the incumbent to engage in “political surfing” (holding election when the government's popularity is at its highest) or to actively manage the political business cycle to achieve favorable economic conditions at the time of the election. Smith argues, however, that this advantage is overstated. The very act of calling an early election sends a signal to voters that the government has information about future performance that it wishes to hide from the voters. As a result, when governments call early elections, their actual vote share tends to be considerably less than the opinion polls before the announcement would suggest. For example, when Margaret Thatcher called early elections in 1982, she got 42% of the vote, as opposed to preannouncement polls of 48%.

Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. By Edward E. Telles. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 336p. $35.00.

Edward E. Telles's consideration of race in Brazil is a landmark study. It brings scholarly perspective, the careful application of quantitative data, systematic analysis, a thoughtful reading of contemporary conditions, and a deep familiarity with the subject to a frequently fragmented, contradictory, and anecdotal area of scholarship.

Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China. By Dali L. Yang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 432p. $60.00.

Dali L. Yang argues a thesis many would like to find true. In China, he argues, markets have created pressure for limited, effective, and transparent government. Crises in the 1990s and since led Chinese leaders to implement reforms with these goals. They have achieved considerable if not complete success, and this leaves China better prepared for democracy. This thesis is most clearly stated in the conclusion. The first chapter offers an introduction and historical overview. Each of the intervening seven chapters documents and assesses a particular type of reform.

People out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights, and the Citizenship Gap. Edited by Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir. New York: Routledge, 2004. 272p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The original essays in this anthology make a significant contribution to the ongoing debates about citizenship, human rights, and the future of the nation-state by exploring the contradictory impacts of globalization on the provision of individual rights. On the one hand, the transnational flows of people, capital, and technology associated with globalization have led to a deflation of citizenship rights, particularly for members of vulnerable groups, and created large noncitizen populations with significantly fewer rights than citizens. Yet on the other hand, the cosmopolitan aspects of globalization, such as the evolution of human rights and the expansion of liberal legal norms, create new levels of membership and new venues in which to claim rights. The book has two related goals. The first is to describe the complicated processes by which globalization is altering the nature of nation-state citizenship and creating a “citizenship gap” among global elites, legal citizens, marginalized citizens, and migrants. The volume's second goal is to determine whether the cosmopolitan aspects of globalization can remedy the citizenship gap. Will existing nation-state citizenship and emerging universal rights regimes be sufficient to protect the rights of marginalized citizens and noncitizens? Or must human rights be embedded in global governance in order to close the citizenship gap?

Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law. By Allen Buchanan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 520p. $35.00.

Allan Buchanan is well known for his work on justice, secession, and self-determination. The volume under review draws on and builds upon his past work, developing and updating previously stated positions and setting new ground in formulating a moral approach to international law. The title of the book clearly encapsulates its content and the intentions of the author. Buchanan's first line in the book explains that it is “an attempt to develop moral foundations for international law” (p. 1). Undoubtedly this is a formidable and complex task, but one to which he skillfully addresses himself. His goal is to set out manageable frameworks for establishing and developing ideas and practices of justice and legitimacy that, in turn, will act as guiding principles in international law and relations. He certainly succeeds in achieving this and goes even further to set out interesting and provocative suggestions for reform of the international system. In short, this book is to be highly recommended, if not required, reading for anyone interested in the future of the international system.

Parties and Unions in the New Global Economy. By Katrina Burgess. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. 224p. $27.95.

In Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela during the 1980s and 1990s, labor-backed political parties in power adopted market-oriented reforms that strained the parties' alliances with their union base, generating a “loyalty dilemma” for labor leaders. In response, unions in all three countries initially pursued strategies of demand making based on norms that had traditionally governed their interactions with the party (“norm-based voice”). Over time, however, labor leaders' responses to the loyalty dilemma diverged. Katrina Burgess explains why. She argues that whether unions chose norm-based voice, norm-breaking voice, or exit depended on two main factors: the relative power of the party and workers to punish labor leaders for disloyal behavior, and the party's capacity to act autonomously from its own government.

New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism. By Barry Cooper. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. 264p. $44.95.

Barry Cooper argues that a characteristic of modern terrorism is the rise of “new political religions” that claim to be engaged in spiritual conflicts that transcend the political realm and that involve waging spiritual warfare in order to realize an idealized spiritual kingdom on this earth. Thus, in order to understand contemporary terrorism, Cooper states, one must look at the “spirituality that terrorists experience as central to their own activities” (p. 7), while recognizing that religious terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and Japan's Aum Shinrikyô, do not operate within the frameworks of cost-benefit analysis that political terror groups have generally espoused (p. 55). He further contends that religious terrorists groups are on a continuous treadmill of violence that is self-generating and will never cease (p. 12), leading him to advocate extreme measures (negotiation not being one of them) to counteract it. Here he seems not to consider that similar arguments were once advanced to suggest that political terrorists were equally bound up in a cycle of violence from which they could not escape, yet there are many examples (the African National Congress and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), for example) that have disproved such perceptions.

From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations. By Amitai Etzioni. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 272p. $29.95.

Amitai Etzioni is a seasoned political sociologist and leading voice in the communitarian program to offset the narcissistic and alienating individualism of liberal modernity. Communitarians emphasize the affective bonds that make community an indispensable feature of the human condition and, thus, the local conditions within which individual human beings are best able to understand and act on the common good. Notwithstanding republican antecedents, communitarians have effectively abandoned the universalistic tendencies of cosmopolitan Enlightenment republicanism to rights-minded liberals. In doing so, most communitarians have neglected international relations.

The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees. By Matthew J. Gibney. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 298p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

This book is an important contribution at the interface of contemporary political theory and international relations. Political asylum is a defining issue of our time because of the scope and impact of the refugee crisis and its roots in deepening global inequities. Matthew Gibney addresses the conflict between the ethical and political claims of refugees and the claims of citizens that are embodied in asylum issues. In the process, he demonstrates the intellectual and policy value of treatments that interactively engage normative political theory and international relations.

Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. By David Held. New York: Polity, 2004. 216p. $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

David Held lays out a detailed design for an “alternative” global order to the one promoted by the United States. He vigorously rejects the approach to the world of George W. Bush and instead offers a social democratic agenda, which has three main parts: economic, political, and legal. For each part, Held provides both the overarching principles that ought to guide us and a considerable list of specific steps that should advance his design. Readers should not stop reading just because the list of values that Held beseeches us to pursue is as impressive as it is lofty: He calls on us to uphold the principles of equal moral worth, equal liberty, equal political status of human beings, legitimate political authority “on all levels,” and a “deeper” commitment to social justice, among other such values. He buttresses his agenda with a list of measures to be undertaken both in the short and in the longer run, most of which deserve careful attention. It is here that ultimately the rubber does not meet the road.

Violence and Democracy. By John Keane. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 226p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

This is a very readable discursive essay. In consequence, John Keane's many digressions are provocative and informative, for example, his meditation on death on page 40 or his short history of the British peace movement on pages 83–88. His method also adds greatly to the reader's pleasure: He identifies key authors in a wide range of related fields, summarizes their key works, links them together, one generous summary after another, and finally, criticizes the synthesis he has just created. For example, after summarizing and synthesizing Hans Mangus Enzensberger's, Martin van Creveld's, and Robert D. Kaplan's views on post–Cold War “uncivil wars,” Keane remarks: “The temptation to think of contemporary uncivil wars as ‘primitive’ is itself primitive. It should be resisted” (p. 115). He then resists the temptation by discussing primitive warfare among Muslim desert tribes and Native Americans, as described by Ernest Gellner and Pierre Clastres, respectively. The value of this method is that one learns in a critical manner what others think. The disadvantage is that the issues in hand are never addressed.

The Limits of Protectionism: Building Coalitions for Free Trade. By Michael Lusztig. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2004. 288p. $27.95.

This is an ambitious and useful book that takes the reader through eight cases of governments that tried, with mixed results, to guide their countries from protectionism to free trade. A successful strategy requires the government to make allies of the industries that can transform themselves and survive in a more competitive environment (“flexible rent-seekers”) and quickly to kill the industries that cannot (“inflexible rent-seekers”). Michael Lusztig adopts from the classic public choice literature the term rent-seekers, a group that seeks to effect a zero sum transfer from others to itself, usually resulting in a negative sum game for society, by the amount of the transaction costs necessary to effect the transfer.

Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights. By Rosalind Pollack Petchesky. New York: Zed Books, 2003. 320p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

In her book, Rosalind Petchesky sets herself the ambitious task of analyzing the development and impact of transnational movements for women's health in the last two decades of the twentieth century. She examines them not only in relation to the changing concepts of human rights and major United Nations conferences, but within the broader political and economic context of the spread of neoliberalism, religious fundamentalisms, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and militarism. Originally commissioned by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development for a five-year review of the World Summit for Social Development, the book assumes a fair degree of sophistication in regard to transnational politics although the text is punctuated by short boxes that give readers a useful introduction to key policy developments.

Spatializing International Politics: Analyzing Activism on the Internet. By Jayne Rogers. New York: Routledge, 2003. 184p. $96.95.

Recent anxiety about variable electoral turnout, falling party membership, and opinion polls depicting the disaffection of young people with politics has led some commentators to suggest that democratic politics in many countries is in crisis. While these concerns may reflect a significant dissatisfaction among citizens with their politicians and representative institutions, it may however be far too early to conclude that people have ceased to be interested in participating in the political arena.

The EU, NATO, and the Integration of Europe: Rules and Rhetoric. By Frank Schimmelfennig. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 338p. $80.00 cloth, $28.99 paper.

At the European Union meeting in December 2004, one of the topics for discussion was Turkey's accession. Although it appears that negotiations regarding this topic and the specific requirements regarding membership (e.g., Turkey's recognition of Cyprus) will continue for the next few years, this time it also appeared that EU member states were willing to engage in serious discussion about this issue. For Turkey, this has been a long time in coming; it initially applied for membership in 1987 and has been rebuffed each time since then. Although a member of NATO since 1951—the only Muslim member-state of the alliance—Turkey has been kept at a distance by the EU for a number of reasons. Justified largely on economic grounds, an underlying issue clearly has been whether the countries of first Western and now Eastern Europe really want to admit a country that is so “different.” In other words, what values and perspectives, as well as political and economic structure, are important for a country to really become a member of “the community”? The decision calculus regarding the admission of new states to both NATO and the EU are at the heart of this monograph by Frank Schimmelfennig, and the arguments he puts forth are especially germane now as the EU considers Turkey's membership and as NATO ponders its own future in light of the divisions caused by the war in Iraq.

Models, Numbers and Cases: Methods for Studying International Relations. Edited by Detlef F. Sprinz and Yael Wolinsky-Nahmias. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 424p. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

This volume, which originated in conversations among the editors at the 1997 meeting of the International Studies Association, is an attempt to provide an introductory handbook covering three categories of research methods now widely used in the study of international relations: case studies, statistical data analyses, and formal models. Thirteen chapters discuss the application of these methods to studies of international political economy, international environmental politics, and international security; an introduction and conclusion complete the volume.

Collective Preventive Diplomacy: A Study in International Conflict Management. By Barry H. Steiner. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 255p. $50.00.

In recent years, international scholars and policymakers have focused considerable attention on the moral and political challenges of collective action by major states to defuse ethnic conflict within smaller states. Among the most important recent studies examining these issues are the United Nations General Assembly Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004) and the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (2001). Barry H. Steiner's study of collective efforts to prevent and resolve conflict is a welcome contribution to this literature. Steiner examines how and why major states join together for preventive diplomacy purposes. He draws from eight cases, ranging from the Greek revolution of the 1820s to the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s, and employs Alexander George's method of focused, structured comparison to distill lessons about the nature of great-power collective action.