Rethinking Islam and Liberal Democracy: Islamist Women in Turkish Politics. By Yesim Arat. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 150p. $55.00.

Since the advent of competitive politics in Turkey in 1946, Islamist parties have assumed increasing importance. During the 1970s, the National Salvation Party, headed by Necmettin Erbakan, was a participant in a series of coalition governments. The Welfare Party, also led by Erbakan, came in first (barely) in the 1995 election, catapulting its temperamental leader into the position of prime minister. In 2002, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) won an overwhelming electoral victory, capturing two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. Although the JDP denies that it is an Islamist party, its leader, the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been a leading Islamist politician, including especially his stormy career as mayor of Istanbul, and both its supporters and opponents regard it as such today. The result of this dramatic rise of Islamist political forces in the formally and solidly secular Republic of Turkey has aroused a great deal of controversy. Not least of the questions raised is the popular conundrum of the compatibility of Islam and democracy.

Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today. By Marc Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 293p. $ 24.50.

The book delves into the crucial subject of the new independent media and politics in the Middle East. It examines the changing landscape of Arab public discourse consequent to the proliferation of the new Arab media—al-Jazeera, Abu Dubai TV, al-Manar, al-Arabiya, al-Hurra, and a host of other satellite television stations—over the past decade. The study contends that these new Arab media outlets have freed the dissemination of information from the shackles of state control, challenged old taboos on open discussion, and generated free debate about pertinent political and social issues—culture and identity, political reform, Palestine, Islam and modernity, and Iraq, among others. All this marked the birth of a new diverse Arab public sphere, which ended the previously controlled and muted Arab public discourse and posed a challenge to the future of Arab politics and to U.S. diplomacy.

The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media and International Activism. By Clifford Bob. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 237p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

Clifford Bob seeks to understand why some rebels receive more attention and support from the international community than others. Rather than arguing that some groups are inherently more deserving, Bob takes a novel and very insightful perspective on the international relations of contention by applying the dynamics of marketing. “Despite its promise, today's ‘global civil society’ is for many a Darwinian arena in which the successful prosper but the weak wither” (p. 8). His answer focuses on how well groups market themselves in a competitive realm where large numbers of movements are seeking support from nongovernmental organizations with limited resources. He focuses on this key inequality—that the rebels around the world need help from the NGOs far more than any NGO needs to support any one group of dissidents—insisting that it is a buyer's market.

The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Politics, Law, and Economics of the GATT and the WTO. By John H. Barton, Judith L. Goldstein, Timothy E. Josling, and Richard H. Steinberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 256p. $29.95.

The scope of this book is impressive. Eight chapters detail the history and institutional design of the World Trade Organization and its forebear, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), analyze their successes and failures over nearly 60 years, and outline challenges that the regime must manage to remain politically viable. As the subtitle suggests, the authors examine the politics that have shaped and sustained the trade regime; legal issues, particularly in the settlement of trade disputes; and economics as an underlying factor in the regime's evolution, along with the trade effects of its presence.

Contesting Globalization: Space and Place in the World Economy. By Andre C. Drainville. New York: Routledge, 2004. 208p. $145.00 cloth, $41.95 paper.

The literature on globalization has come a long way. The first-generation scholarship debated the “decline of the nation-state” thesis. Globalization critics predicted widespread regulatory races to the bottom. They blamed technological innovations that allow firms to decouple various stages of the production processes for privileging capital over other societal actors. While the globalization optimists agree with the causal story of the critics, they welcomed the emergence of a “borderless world.” For them, capital mobility leads to good governance because it privileges economic efficiency over rent-seeking politics.

The Future of the Welfare State: Crisis Myths and Crisis Realities. By Francis Castles. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 208p. $99.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

As Francis Castles observes, quantitative comparative political economy has generated a “cacophony” of explanations for the welfare state crisis from 1980 to 1998. Political economists have identified causal factors including globalization, de-industrialization, population aging, declining birth rates, weak economic performance, welfare program maturation, political institutions, and partisanship. To Castles, however, these explanations rest on faulty empirical evidence. Methodological problems—in particular, unreliable comparative social expenditure data and overreliance on pooled designs and statistical techniques—have made it impossible to distinguish “crisis myths” from “crisis realities.” His proposed solution is to combine cross-national designs with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's SOCX database on social spending, and he argues that doing so reveals that dominant theories are myths. His sweeping account is a spirited contribution, but it is bound to attract significant criticism.

The Russian Military: Power and Policy. Edited by Steven E. Miller and Dmitri V. Trenin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 272p. $50.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

When Russia became an independent state at the end of 1991, it inherited the bulk of the Soviet armed forces and the Soviet defense industry. The Russian government initially tried to persuade the other former Soviet republics to preserve a unified military force, but in May 1992, after those efforts had proven fruitless, Russian President Boris Yeltsin established a separate Russian army on the basis of what had been left over from the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet military had been deteriorating since the late 1980s, sweeping reform of the new Russian army seemed an urgent priority. Economic, military, social, demographic, and political considerations all pointed to the need for a much smaller army equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry and configured for plausible combat scenarios. Advocates of reform hoped to place the Russian military under strict civilian control, including parliamentary oversight, and to replace the mass, conscript-based system of the Soviet army with a fully professional force. They also hoped to devise a completely new military doctrine that would be appropriate for the realities of the post-Soviet era.

Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and the Changing Calculus of Conflict. By Stephen G. Brooks. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 316p. $35.00.

If commerce among nations truly undermines their proclivity to settle differences by resort to arms—as philosophers like Montesquieu and Kant believed so ardently—then globalization should portend a new era of world peace. More than a few overly optimistic liberals like Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000) have made just such a claim. But the world is hardly such a simple place, as we learn in Stephen Brooks's carefully crafted book. Brooks begins by unpacking the multifaceted nature of economic globalization itself, and through the main body of the book he closely examines how individual threads of this phenomenon may pull some nations toward more pacific relations while tugging others in more dangerous directions. A great deal of case-based and anecdotal evidence is marshaled along the way, and some of his arguments are made more convincingly than others. But in the end, he has given us a clear, comprehensive, and forward-looking treatment of a question that has heretofore been dismissed with oversimplified answers.

Global Justice Reform: A Comparative Methodology. By Hiram E. Chodosh. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 240p. $45.00.

This book is a greatly needed assessment of the methodologies used to study and implement justice reform. By asking a range of pointed questions on judicial reform whose answers have largely been assumed, Hiram E. Chodosh lays bare basic concepts and debates in order to understand whether they are truly logical, consistent, and useful. The scrutiny with which the author subjects the field of comparative law helps make it much more rigorous, since, as he points out, even an empirically rich comparative framework will result in poor findings if its methodology is inconsistent and its objectives unclear. He carefully explains comparative method, illuminates approaches ranging from cross-national comparisons to intranational comparisons, and analyzes benefits of comparisons, such as the creation of continuums. With this comprehensive and insightful assessment, he criticizes comparative law's failure to adopt a method for objectively assessing the results and value of a comparison that is “flexible enough to grasp a wide variety” of processes and institutions (p. 17). He shows how classifications, prototypes, evaluation mechanisms, and other building blocks of comparative study are often too deterministic or unclear, and how the lack of objective criteria leaves central debates—such as over the wisdom and practicality of transferring a feature of one country's legal system to another—unresolved. “Without clarity of purpose,” he concludes,” it is difficult to determine the content of what to report” (p. 16).

Darfur: A Short History of a Long War. By Julie Flint and Alex de Waal. New York: Zed Books, 2005. 176p. $60.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.

Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. By Gérard Prunier. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. 232p. $24.00.

In the last two years, the Darfur region in western Sudan has moved from relative international obscurity to become a symbol of humanitarian crisis and mass violence. Political scientists who research genocide, ethnic conflict, civil war, humanitarianism, and African politics all have taken interest in the region, and Darfur is likely to command scholarly attention in years to come. Yet the academic literature on the region remains thin. To date, scholars have relied primarily on journalistic accounts and human rights reports, which detail the violence but, by their nature, provide only cursory historical background. With the publication of these two short but informative books, Darfur's political history and the path to mass violence are substantially clearer. That said, the books are not designed to build theories of ethnic violence or genocide, nor do the authors explicitly engage in hypotheses testing. The books are useful primarily as detailed, lucid case histories from two sets of well-informed observers.

Federalism and the Welfare State: New World and European Experiences. By Herbert Obinger, Stephan Liebfried, and Francis G. Castles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 378 pages. $75.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Decentralizing the State: Elections, Parties, and Local Power in the Andes. By Kathleen O'Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 286 pages. $70.00.

As the literature on federalism and decentralization experienced a revival in recent years, comparative research has tended to fall into two categories. The first examines the origins of institutions, seeking the causes of decentralization and federalism. The second explores the consequences of decentralization and federalism for such outcomes as fiscal performance, economic growth, and the welfare state. The two books under review respectively make important contributions to each field. In both instances, we see that federalism and decentralization remain lively topics of concern for comparative politics.

The United States and the Great Powers: World Politics in the Twenty-First Century. By Barry Buzan. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004. 222p. $69.95.

American Foreign Policy in a New Era. By Robert Jervis. New York: Routledge, 2005. 184p. $22.95.

While Barry Buzan and Robert Jervis share similar starting points but take us down different paths in their respective analyses, they reach a largely similar conclusion. The common point of departure is the present standing of the United States as the sole remaining superpower and the absence of Great Power challengers. Both authors note that this condition is significant because war among the Great Powers has been the driving force in world politics. Their common end point is the expectation that this condition may well endure and general agreement on the appropriate response strategies that should be followed by the Great Powers.

The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. By Fawaz A. Gerges. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 358p. $27.00.

The 9/11 attacks have already produced a substantial literature that seeks to explain the roots of Al Qaeda's strategy of targeting the United States. Explanations range from simplistic statements—“They hate us,” “They hate freedom”—to arguments about revenge or punishment for various American policy choices, to more complex arguments that Osama bin Laden and his associates sought to draw America into a trap of sorts. One problem, of course, is that no one really has much of an idea of precisely what led bin Ladin and his top associates to plot the 9/11 attacks. Scholars do not, quite frankly, have a lot to work with here.

Europe and the Politics of Capabilities. Edited by Robert Salais and Robert Villeneuve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 328p. $90.

This innovative edited collection seeks to help shape the academic and policy debate over the future of the welfare state in Europe by introducing and advocating Amartya Sen's “capabilities approach.” Since the editors' primary objective is to promote a particular set of policies, there is little effort by contributors to explain policy variation across European Union member states or over time, which is the collection's main weakness. Rather, this distinguished group of academics and practitioners evaluates European economic development policies and prescribes a course of action consistent with the capability approach.

Contingent States: Greater China and Transnational Relations. By William A. Callahan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 297p. $68.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

International relations scholarship has moved beyond debates between realists and liberals, yet much of the literature on the growth of Chinese power, or on China's regional and global interests, reflects theories of balance of power or peace through trade and engagement. Many of the most popular and well-known works on China (for example, Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro's 1998 book The Coming Conflict with China) view the economic success and modernization of China as a threat to U.S. interests and to the larger international order. William Callahan's Contingent States not only avoids this standard refrain but actively rejects and criticizes it. Callahan accomplishes two important goals in his book. First, he shows how conventional international relations paradigms can mislead us about the “true” aims of Chinese foreign policy; and secondly, he uses “Greater China” as a theoretical framework to examine four issues in Asia: the South China Sea dispute, Sino-Korean relations, the return of Hong Kong, and cross-straits relations between China and Taiwan. In addition to an introduction, theoretical chapter, and conclusion, one chapter is devoted to each of these issues.

Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective. By Jon Elster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 310 p. $26.95.

This book makes an important contribution to the evolving field of transitional justice on both a theoretical and a practical level. In terms of theory, it ably complements other volumes in this area, such as those written or edited by Neil Kritz, James McAdams, Ruti Teitel and James Gibson, and others. On a practical level, it provides a conceptual framework, analyses, and conclusions from which countries undergoing transition from authoritarian rule, civil war, or violent conflict can draw in order to make informed choices.

Democracy Without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State. By Ethan Scheiner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 286p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

The resilience of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is the most remarkable feature of the Japanese political system. The party sustained majorities in both houses of the Diet and ruled the cabinet alone from its founding in 1955 until 1989. It was one of the few ruling parties in the industrialized democracies to survive the oil crises of the 1970s, and it somehow managed to escape the voters' wrath over innumerable corruption scandals. The party's image in public opinion surveys became so negative in the middle to late 1970s that political scientist Ichiro Miyake coined the term “negative partisans” to describe the many voters who backed the LDP in elections despite professing negative images of the party.

Nation-States and the Multinational Corporation: A Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment. By Nathan M. Jensen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 224p. $35.00.

The dramatic increase in flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) during the last two decades of the twentieth century has been accompanied by an extensive literature dealing with the impact of multinational corporations (MNCs) on issues such as economic growth, poverty and inequality, the environment, and cultural diversity. As many of the concerns about these impacts, positive as well as negative, revolve around the question of markedly increased competition among states for MNCs, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the political and economic factors that attract FDI.

Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany. By Joel S. Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 224p. $60.00 cloth, $14.99 paper.

The central question of Joel Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper's well-written and highly accessible book—how to explain the disparate political responses to the religious concerns of Muslims in Britain, France, and Germany—is clearly important. Indeed, while the question was pertinent before the tragedy of September 11 in 2001 and the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, it has become exponentially more urgent since. Although the difficulties of incorporating Muslim populations into the countries receiving them were neither a cause of nor directly connected to the aforementioned events, the negative chain reaction they subsequently precipitated within and outside of the diverse Muslim community within Western Europe nevertheless exposed serious tensions between many of the community's religious practices and the dominant cultural, social, and political mores of the host societies. In short, the answer to the book's organizing question very much matters for Western Europe's political, religious, and social tranquility.

Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class. Edited by Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair. London: Routledge, 2004. 324p. $125.00 cloth, $34.95 paper.

What do a French-educated Algerian revolutionary, a Lakota traditionalist, Kim Dae Jung, a Romanian sex worker in Cyprus, a Guyanese cricket star of South Asian origin and his Afro-Guyanese fans, a Muslim living in Europe, a Tibetan nationalist, a child rug maker in India, and Aung San Suu Kyi have in common? Mainstream theorists of international relations would say: nothing. According to Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, however, the members of this unlikely crowd expose the incapacity of IR to explain or usefully contribute to some of the most important debates taking place within and between countries and regions. The stories they compile also reveal the complicity of IR in the justification and reproduction of the class, race, and gender inequalities constitutive of European and U.S. domination from the fifteenth century to today. Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations argues that although the last decade has seen much criticism of the ahistorical gender- and race-neutral rational actor model that dominates IR scholarship, its critics have neither adequately explained why this model persists nor analyzed its effects on both the participants in and the objects of international conflicts.