The United States Contested: American Unilateralism and European Discontent. Edited by Sergio Fabbrini. New York: Routledge, 2006. 224p. $120.00 cloth, $35.95 paper.

Why has anti-Americanism become a fact of life in Europe? How is this phenomenon related to the rise of neoconservatism in the United States? These are important questions, and this new volume, based on seminars held at the University of Trento in 2003 and 2004, provides—if not the definitive answer—certainly a richer understanding of transatlantic relations.

Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions. By John Foran. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 410p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

John Foran's book draws faithfully from the rich literature on revolutions from the 1970s and beyond and extends this work in useful ways. It presents a well-crafted synthetic argument that finds a nice balance between international and domestic sources of revolution and between structural constraints and political agency. It also examines thoughtfully an extraordinary number of cases in a relatively compact form. The author develops his argument using the tools of Boolean algebra to explain 10 cases of revolutionary success and 29 additional cases of reversed revolutions, unsuccessful attempts, political revolutions that did not lead to social transformations, and revolutionary movements that never emerged despite conditions that might have been expected to generate such movements.

The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. By Harold James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 166p. $24.95.

This book has a clear argument. History shows that globalization needs a system of international and domestic rules for advancing trade, making possible cross-national exchanges of labor and capital, promoting economic growth, and achieving peace. The latest stage of globalization, from the end of the Cold War until September 11, is not an exception. Indeed the 1990s were a decade of intense discussion on new international rules and institutions (epitomized by the creation of the World Trade Organization). At the same time, the promotion and implementation of an international regulatory system will inevitably breed discontent and tensions in different areas of the global system. Some countries, groups, or individuals perceive the new regulatory system as imposing on them patterns of behavior and distributive relations proper of or advantageous to dominant countries, groups, and individuals. This generates a reaction against the globalizing process (and the regulatory systems that justify and support it). Each phase of the globalization process has ended in conflict, either in the form of an interstate rivalry that degenerated into war, or in the form of an asymmetrical conflict degenerating into terrorism (with the assassination of individuals representing universal symbols, such as New Yorkers in 2001 or the Austrian Empress “Sissi” one century earlier in 1894).

The English School of International Relations: A Contemporary Reassessment. By Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 302p. $80.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The English School, although still not mainstream, is now increasingly recognized as one of the significant approaches to the study of international relations. In their attempts to map the parameters of the field, for example, both Steven D. Krasner in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999) and Alexander Wendt in Social Theory of International Politics (1999) position the English School alongside more familiar schools of thought. There is also now a section of the International Studies Association devoted to the English School and it sponsored more than a dozen panels at the 2007 convention in Chicago. As the prominence of the English School has risen, so has the need for a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of its development and defining ideas.

The Global Dynamics of Racial and Ethnic Mobilization. By Susan Olzak. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 288p. $55.00.

Susan Olzak's new monograph is a milestone in comparative research on ethnic mobilization and conflict. Not only does it chart new theoretical and methodological territory. It also offers the most rigorous proof yet that globalization promotes collective action by ethnic groups. The book's main claim is that transnational networks diffuse “ideologies, strategies, tactics and leaders” rapidly across national borders, enabling ethnic mobilization and “leaving political regimes more vulnerable to internal challenges” (pp. 32, 152). Global processes, in other words, interact with forces at the group and state level to promote violent and nonviolent activism by communal groups.

Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. By Mark Poster. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 393p. $79.95 Cloth, $22.95 paper.

In this book, Mark Poster attempts to provide a philosophical framework for understanding the significance of the rise of computers, the Internet, and the other digital technologies. His argument is that the diffusion of these new technologies results in “complex couplings of humans and machines” (p. 9) that call into question some of the central ideas of our time. The discussion starts with postcolonial theory and then moves on to recent theories of empire, citizenship, identity, ethics, psychoanalysis, intellectual property rights, everyday life, and consumer culture. It is an ambitious work and difficult to read in passages, but the effort is worth it.

Peaceful Resistance. Advancing Human Rights and Democratic Freedoms. By Robert M. Press. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. 227p. $99.50.

The New Transnational Activism. By Sidney Tarrow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 258p. $55 cloth, $19.99 paper.

Two new books argue that recent claims asserting the power of transnational activism have overstated the influence of those external forces. Robert Press uses the case of Kenya to show that a domestic culture of resistance, not donor pressure or transnational activism, set the nation on a path toward democratization during the late 1980s and 1990s. Sidney Tarrow takes a more subtle approach by reminding us how exceedingly difficult it is to create and maintain transnational coalitions for social change in the first place. Whereas Press pits domestic against international factors, Tarrow incorporates both, theorizing a set of transnational processes to elaborate the opportunities and challenges of organizing for social and political change across borders.

Politicizing the International Criminal Court: The Convergence of Politics, Ethics, and Law. By Steven C. Roach. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 213p. $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

No political scientist predicted that the world would witness the establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC) by 2002, and as of yet, there are few compelling explanations for this phenomenon. Steven Roach addresses the next set of questions that the ICC raises for political scientists, namely, how it will impact international political outcomes, and how it will be forced to cope with pressures from states and other actors. Roach's work is an important first step toward a political understanding of the role of the ICC in world politics and demonstrates political scientists' growing interest in international law.

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. By Saskia Sassen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 502p. $35.00.

The globalization literature has now reached a level of maturity that allows one to distinguish between different schools of thought. Whereas the first two stages broadly dealt with the process at large (its development and manifestation), the latest generation of scholarship seems mostly concerned with its current and future governance. Saskia Sassen's latest contribution to this dialogue is similar to Andrew Drainville's recent volume (Contesting Globalization, 2004) for which she wrote the introduction. Both defend the need to situate the globalization discourse in concrete locations to gain a fuller understanding of it. More specifically, in Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Sassen presents an extensively developed criticism of the globalization literature. Sassen argues that both critics and proponents of the globalization concept in its latest iteration miss crucial developments of the transformative processes captured by the term “globalization” in their focus on established actors and institutional forms. She argues for the need to situate globalization more concretely and broadly, in terms of both space and place (i.e., territory), and for the establishment of new organizing logics, which manifest themselves in new combinations of authority and rights. Even though Sassen builds on her previous scholarship, this is a novel work—and a most welcome and important contribution to this field, as she not only points out the shortcomings of existing approaches, but provides a well-theorized proposition on how to remedy them.

Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power. By Randall L. Schweller. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 200p. $29.95.

In this insightful and elegantly written book, Randall Schweller examines the phenomenon of underbalancing, which he defines as situations in which “threatened countries have failed to recognize a clear and present danger, or, more typically, have simply not reacted to it or, more typically still, have responded in paltry and imprudent ways” (p. 1). The study is motivated by the failure of many states throughout history to act in accordance with the cardinal prediction of structural realist theory that states will tend to balance against rising powers that threaten their survival, through the acquisition of arms and/or allies. Schweller argues that domestic political factors account for this discrepancy, enhancing or diminishing the ability and/or willingness of states to mobilize their national resources in response to systemic dangers.

Deterring America: Rogue States and the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. By Derek D. Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 197p. $75.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

By the early 1990s, scholars and policymakers alike began voicing reservations about the ability of deterrence strategies to counter nuclear, chemical and biological arsenals as these weapons proliferated into the hands of state and nonstate actors. Some observers doubted if it was technically feasible to create credible deterrent commitments given the possibility that there might be no significant targets in the opposing camp to hold at risk, that potential opponents were irrational or suicidal, or that it might be impossible to identify the culprits who launched the attack itself (e.g., the origins of an epidemic might never be identified). Others doubted the strategic wisdom of relying on deterrence, given that the costs of policy failure were potentially catastrophic. And, as the September 11 terrorist attacks demonstrated, overwhelming military superiority cannot deter or defend against terrorist cells that are willing to sacrifice themselves to achieve their objectives. Because of the inherent limitations of deterrence, many suggested that preventive war and preemption were the best way to deal with rogue states and terrorist organizations that were acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change. By David A. Welch. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 312p. $35.00.

In this book, David A. Welch delivers a nuanced and parsimonious theory of foreign policymaking and policy change. Welch also addresses a perennial concern in international relations, namely whether the search for a general IR theory is futile. His answer, and a persuasive one at that, is that such a search can be fruitful if we ask the right questions.