This work is edited by three Canadian academics and discusses the Inter-American system from a series of mainly historical and institutional perspectives. Chapters cover subjects such as the nature of the Organisation of American States (OAS) itself, hemispheric security arrangements, efforts to protect regional democracy and to enforce the criminalisation of human rights abuses, and the status of trade agreements within the Americas. The work is competently edited and the general quality of the contributions is good, but it is narrower in focus than its title suggests. The sub-title of the volume is a more accurate indicator of its contents than the main title. It would be more accurate still to describe the work as being a set of studies on some selected aspects of hemispheric governance and their change over time. Global institutions that are not hemispheric in nature, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are barely discussed. Broader issues to do with development are touched upon, but not discussed as fully as they might have been.

Several of the chapters are descriptive and in some cases technical to the point that they will be of interest mainly to specialists. They include studies of the relationship between the OAS and the Interamerican Development Bank, a detailed piece on the internal governance of the OAS itself, and a chapter on the NAFTA that deals largely with the so-called rules of origin. Other chapters are broader and raise interesting intellectual issues. These include Legler's discussion of the Inter-American Democratic Charter which was signed on 11 September 2001. Although the world had other things on its mind that day, this charter was seen as a historic document intended to guarantee the stability of democracy in the region. However, a few months later there was a coup attempt in Venezuela, which the US government seemed to welcome. While there may be no conclusive evidence of US government involvement in the coup attempt as such, there is no serious doubt that the overthrow of Chávez was an outcome that the Bush administration wanted. Apart from raising the obvious question as to whether the USA should be seen as part of the solution to the issue of democracy or as part of the problem, there is also the familiar question of whether diplomatic pressures can have much impact on compelling domestic realities. It is true that a number of Latin American governments indicated their opposition to the Venezuelan coup attempt when it took place, but the reason for its failure had less to do with any internationally-approved democratic Charter than with Chávez' domestic popularity. If the overthrow of Chávez had proved popular there would have been little that the Inter-American Democratic Charter could have done because an unpopular and overthrown head of government is likely to be beyond rescue by democratic means. Legler's chapter, as well as pointing out that the Charter has not lived up to its promise, raises interesting points about the difficulties of exporting democratic institutionalisation and the skepticism of his concluding section is well judged.

The Inter-American human rights system, however, seems to have been more effective than the democratic Charter. Duhaime's chapter on this subject was evidently completed before the arrest of Fujimori and his imprisonment in Peru, although he does discuss the end of the Fujimori government at the end of 2000. He is probably right to make the claim that strong criticism of Peru from the Inter American Court of Human Rights played some role in the events leading up to Fujimori's resignation. Duhaime's chapter, however, is another one that adopts rather a narrow focus. For example, the arrest of General Pinochet in Britain in 1998 and the legal processes that resulted must surely have had an impact on the intellectual context within which the Inter-American Court made its judgments about human rights, but Duhaime's chapter contains little if any discussion of this. He may well be right to suggest that human rights law has developed autonomously of the rest of the inter-American system, but there is an international zeitgeist to do with human rights issues in the broadest sense, which is surely relevant to the workings of purely hemispheric systems.

Chapters dealing with trade and economic institutions are also rather descriptive, which is both a strength and a weakness. Robert's chapter lists the most important trade agreements and covers what now seem like abortive negotiations for a Free Trade of the Americas project. However, this lacks any discussion of the actual magnitude of the trade flows that currently exist or might develop in the future. Belanger's chapter on the NAFTA does not fill the gap either, being based instead on a discussion of some shortcomings in NAFTonian institutional arrangements. Neither chapter has any discussion about the relative magnitudes of trade or investment flows (investment flows are important in the case of NAFTA), or any sense of the broad economic impact of the trade agreements that are in place. While some might claim that this is not specifically a ‘governance’ issue, the motivations of the participating parties toward trade agreements are evidently economic in nature and relevant to the institutionalisation of the agreements themselves.