Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations is a fine work which is right to defend the “moral reality” of war and to dismiss relativist approaches. But he does not provide a defense of his position against beliefs (for example, in absolute pacificism, in revolutionary war, or in collectivist approaches) fundamentally at loggerheads with his own. If the discussion of just war is to be more than an exchange of opinions, there must be attention to ethical foundations.

The authors draw on a natural experiment to demonstrate that states can reconstruct conflictual interethnic relationships into cooperative relationships in relatively short periods of time. The article examines differences in how the gentile population in each of two neighboring territories in Romania treated its Jewish population during the Holocaust. These territories had been part of tsarist Russia and subject to state-sponsored anti-Semitism until 1917. During the interwar period one territory became part of Romania, which continued anti-Semitic policies, and the other became part of the Soviet Union, which pursued an inclusive nationality policy, fighting against inherited anti-Semitism and working to integrate its Jews. Both territories were then reunited under Romanian administration during World War II, when Romania began to destroy its Jewish population. The authors demonstrate that, despite a uniform Romanian state presence during the Holocaust that encouraged gentiles to victimize Jews, the civilian population in the area that had been part of the Soviet Union was less likely to harm and more likely to aid Jews as compared with the region that had been part of Romania. Their evidence suggests that the state construction of interethnic relationships can become internalized by civilians and outlive the life of the state itself.

New weapons, and the new strategies and tactics which they make possible, alter the conduct of wars.† But they may also induce changes in the conduct—warlike or peaceful—of international affairs. This happens for either or both of two quite different kinds of reason. First and least importantly, a new weapon may tilt the balance in favor of those nations pre-eminent in the skill to use or the resources to produce it. Second and more profoundly, it may cause the major contending Powers to adopt new or radically extended strategies, calling in their turn for a complete reassessment of national interests, and of the value of resources, alliances, and conventional armaments.

The international trade problems of the 1980s stimulated an expansion of scholarship on trade policies by economists and political scientists. At least four distinct theoretical perspectives weave their way through recent literature that concentrates on the United States—emphasizing market conditions, policy beliefs and values, national political institutions, and global structures, respectively. New studies in each of these traditions advance beyond the work of their predecessors, but none of the perspectives has yet proved adequate as a single unifying vehicle. Nevertheless, we can also see clear movement toward a synthesis, with single works blending insights from several traditions. Thus, the books under review do not all fall neatly into the familiar exclusive categories of “economics” or “political science.” The emerging synthesis needs strengthening in several ways, including the development of “conditioning hypotheses” that will reduce remaining apparent confusions.

Nothing compels the reexamination of basic constitutional postulates so much as the possibility of their peaceful revision. Hence the much-advertised United Nations Review Conference underscores the need for contrasting the theoretical structure of the Charter with the reality of the practices which have evolved within its framework. Such an effort, while it might give support to those who strive for severe alterations of the structure, may also lead to the conclusion that even though the operational practices of international organization fail to meet the specifications of the Charter, peace might be more secure in the Cold War era if it is permitted to depend on operational vagaries rather than on legal precision. What, then, is the basic theory of the Charter and what the actual practice?

Scholars have long identified political bias in the way African politicians distribute state resources. Much of this literature focuses on the role of group identities, mainly ethnicity, and partisanship. This article shifts the focus to local governments, which have become increasingly important players in basic social service provision, and argues that public goods allocation under democratic decentralization is intimately shaped by historical identities. Specifically, the author highlights the role of identities rooted in the precolonial past. To explain this, she articulates a theory of institutional congruence, arguing that greater spatial overlap between formal institutional space and informal social identities improves the ability of elites to overcome local coordination problems. Looking to the West African state of Senegal, the author deploys a nested analysis, drawing on interviews with rural Senegalese elites to understand how the precolonial past shapes local politics today via the social identities it left behind. She also tests the argument with a unique, geocoded data set of village-level public goods investments in the 2000s, finding that areas that were once home to precolonial states distribute goods more broadly across space. These patterns cannot be explained by ethnic or electoral dynamics. Two brief examples from on-the-line cases illuminate how the presence of precolonial identities facilitates local cooperation. The article thus calls into question the tendency to treat identities as static over time, highlighting the interactive relationship between institutions and identities while drawing attention to emerging subnational variation in local government performance following decentralization reforms across the developing world.

This article examines how repression in semiauthoritarian regimes affects collective action by comparing antiwar protesting during Russia's first (1994–96) and second (1999–) Chechen wars. Vladimir Putin's creeping authoritarianism acts as a "natural experiment" where we can study collective action before, during, and after the introduction of restrictive measures. Two key findings emerge. First, despite the Kremlin's increasingly heavy hand, antiwar actions have grown in size and frequency over the course of Putin's tenure. Second, the movement's failure to replicate its Yeltsin-era success in forcing a peace, albeit temporary, in Chechnya is due to organizational culture, not state repression. Indeed, the antiwar movement's prevailing cultural norms have undercut mobilization by locking activists into using symbolic appeals that ring hollow among Russians. Activists are thus unable to wield latent antiwar sentiment as a cudgel to entrap the Kremlin into reversing course. This argument is supported by a protest data set, primary documents, interviews, and participant observation.

The scheduling of a joint section meeting of the American Political Science Association and the American Sociological Society on “The Understanding of a Foreign Culture” may be taken as evidence that American social scientists feel the study of foreign societies to be a problem of increasing concern. It may perhaps also indicate that they are not fully satisfied with the progress made to date. Since this is a period given to radical innovations in social science, however, it seems appropriate to offer the caution that our problem cannot properly be defined as one of developing a new science of foreign societies. There cannot be one social science for the study of one's own country and a different one for the study of other nations. The primary task is not that of making our research methods more adequate for the study of foreign societies, but of improving our conceptual tools and methodological equipment to make us more effective in the study of any society.

How can outgoing autocrats enforce promises of amnesty once they have left power? Why would incoming opposition parties honor their prior promises of amnesty once they have assumed power and face no independent mechanisms of enforcement? In 1989 autocrats in a number of communist countries offered their respective oppositions free elections in exchange for promises of amnesty. The communists' decision appears irrational given the lack of institutions to enforce these promises of amnesty. What is further puzzling is that the former opposition parties that won elections in many countries actually refrained from implementing transitional justice measures. Their decision to honor their prior agreements to grant amnesty seems as irrational as the autocrats' decisions to place themselves at the mercy of their opponents. Using an analytic narrative approach, the author explains this paradox by modeling pacted transitions not as simple commitment problems but as games of incomplete information where the uninformed party has “skeletons in its closet”—that is, embarrassing information that provides insurance against the commitments being broken. The author identifies the conditions under which autocrats step down even though they can be punished with transitional justice and illustrates the results with case studies from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.

This article argues that the problems identified in the literature on public choice should critically affect our research on public opinion and our understanding of the impact of public opinion on foreign policy. While a robust literature has emerged around social choice issues in political science, there has been remarkably little appreciation for these problems in the literature on public opinion in general and on public opinion and foreign policy in particular. The potential importance of social choice problems for understanding the nature and role of public opinion in foreign policy making is demonstrated through an examination of American public attitudes about military intervention abroad. In particular, drawing on several common descriptions of the underlying dimensionality of public attitudes on major foreign policy issues, it is shown that there may be important intransitivities in the ordering of public preferences at the aggregate level on policy choices such as those considered by American decision makers in the period leading up to the Gulf War. Without new approaches to public-opinion polling that take these problems into consideration, it will be difficult to make credible claims about the role of public opinion in theforeignpolicy process.

Ideology shapes militant recruitment, organization, and conflict behavior. Existing research assumes doctrinal consistency, top-down socialization of adherents, and clear links between formal ideology and political action. But it has long been recognized that ideological commitments do not flow unaltered from overarching cleavages or elite narratives; they are uneven, contingent, fraught with tension, and often ambivalent. What work does ideology do in militant groups if it is not deeply studied, internalized, or sincerely believed? How can scholars explain collective commitment, affinity, and behavioral outcomes among militants who clearly associate themselves with a group, but who may not consistently (or ever) be true believers or committed ideologues? I argue that practical ideologies—sets of quotidian principles, ideas, and social heuristics that reflect relational worldviews rather than specific published political doctrines, positions, platforms, or plans—play a key role in militant socialization through everyday practices. Ethnographic evidence gained from fieldwork among Palestinians in Lebanon demonstrates how militants and affiliates render ideas about ideological closeness and distance accessible through emotional, intellectual, and moral appeals. This approach reaffirms the role of discourse and narrative in creating informal mechanisms of militant socialization without expressly invoking formal doctrine.

Although there are important differences between the rational theory of deterrence and the theory of deterrence that is emerging from the psychology and case-study literatures, it is necessary for adherents of both to appreciate the ways in which they complement each other and the problems they share. For example, rational deterrence theory will not describe the way the world works until certain heuristics and biases that can only be discovered through case studies and other inferential methods are either eliminated or integrated into the theory. On the other hand, psychologists and case-study researchers will find it difficult to trace through the implications of their discoveries for strategic behavior until they adopt some relative of formal methods.

For a long time, the Soviet pattern of development and use of computing differed from the West in terms of time-scale, philosophy, institutional arrangements, capital decisions, and applications. Starting in the late 1950s, a major political, military, and economic reassessment of the value of computing took place; during the next dozen years, the overall Soviet view moved much closer to that of the rest of the developed world. This new perception has been backed by large political and economic commitments. Apparently the Soviet leadership is hoping that computer technology will make the existing economic system more efficient and effective, and will thus help to avoid fundamental reforms that are politically unacceptable. A massive transfer of foreign technology over the last decade has made the Soviet computer industry less isolated than during the 1960s, but its interfaces with the outside world are still narrowly defined. Serious difficulties remain in trying to transplant a sophisticated and pervasive technology into a systemic environment very different from that in which it originated and thrived.

Most writers on international relations and international law still examine the relationship between international law and politics in terms of the assumption that law either should or does function only as a coercive restraint on political action. Textbook writers on general international politics like Morgenthau, and Lerche and Said, as well as those scholars who have specialized in international law like J. L. Brierly and Charles De Visscher, make the common assumption that international law should be examined as a system of coercive norms controlling the actions of states. Even two of the newer works, The Political Foundations of International Law by Morton A. Kaplan and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach and Law and Minimum World Public Order by Myres S. McDougal and Florentino P. Feliciano, in spite of an occasional reference to the non-coercive aspects of international law, are developed primarily from the model of international law as a system of restraint. Deriving their conception of the relationship between international law and political action from their ideas on the way law functions in domestic communities, most modern writers look at international law as an instrument of direct control. The assumption that international law is or should be a coercive restraint on state action structures almost every analysis, no matter what the school of thought or the degree of optimism or pessimism about the effectiveness of the international legal system. With an intellectual framework that measures international law primarily in terms of constraint on political action, there is little wonder that skepticism about international law continues to increase while creative work on the level of theory seems to be diminishing.

In the Confederal phase of integration in the European Communities since 1969, governments on the one hand have been confirmed as essential actors because of the way in which decisions are taken and because of their reaction to the growing range of interdependencies among member states. On the other hand, they are compelled to enter into alliances with other governments and with other actors within the state: they have lost some of their traditional powers and authority, as nongovernmental actors have increased theirs; the Commission of the European Communities reflects these changes in abandoning its claim to be a European government in embryo. Consequently, governments tend to oscillate, in their policies toward each other, between advanced schemes for integration and the reassertion of their separate interests.

The purpose of this essay is twofold. First, it proposes to undertake, in introductory form, one of the many tasks a historical sociology of international relations could perform: the comparative study of one of those relations which appear in almost any international system, i.e., international law. Secondly, this essay will try to present the rudimentary outlines of a theory of international law which might be called sociological or functional.

International law is one of the aspects of international politics which reflect most sharply the essential differences between domestic and world affairs. Many traditional distinctions tend to disappear, owing to an “international civil war” which projects what are primarily domestic institutions (such as parliaments and pressure groups) into world politics, and injects world-wide ideological clashes into domestic affairs. International law, like its Siamese twin and enemy, war, remains a crystallization of all that keeps world politics sui generis. If theory is to be primarily concerned with the distinctive features of systems rather than wim the search for regularities, international law becomes a most useful approach to international politics.

Between the late eighteenth century and 1945, the economic and political differentiation of the European continent has followed a neatly regressive geographical pattern. The origin of this pattern goes back to the agricultural revolutions of the early modern age, and to the diffusion of agricultural technology along the Northwest-Southeast axis. It was subsequently reproduced by both market and political forces operating within the context of material aspirations, themselves the product of the economic revolutions of the Northwest. The experience suggests a potential model for peripheral societies in the Third World, though the relevance of the historical analogy may be limited by currently unfolding changes in the nature of technology and in the terms of exchange between core and peripheral regions in the contemporary world.

This article develops and tests a theory to explain why perceptions of good government performance are a necessary but insufficient condition for the poor to trust their local government. The authors theorize that independent of partisan sympathies, the poor evaluate local government on the basis of government performance and the economic disparities that they observe in their neighborhood of residence. Accordingly, even if the poor hold positive perceptions of government performance, they are less likely to trust their local government when they live in a context of high economic inequality. To test their theory, the authors rely on census, public opinion, and systematic observation data collected within resident-identified neighborhood borders in each of seventy-one neighborhoods sampled from six municipalities in El Salvador. The findings are consistent with the hypotheses and indicate that economic inequality at the neighborhood level may produce a reservoir of distrust in local government among the poor. The results further highlight the political relevance of neighborhoods for the formation of citizen attitudes toward local government in the Latin American context.

This article proposes a model that provides a tool to gauge the preparedness of ethnic and other groups for political mobilization. It argues that successful ethnic mobilization requires a well-specified bundle of “mobilization prerequisites” that can be used to evaluate political and social movements in a variety of contexts. The model is applied to elucidate the East European Gypsy communities' modest success at ethnic political mobilization. The article assesses the explanatory power of the independent variables and explains Gypsy electoral politics and behavior.

The analysis of the relationship between inequality and economic growth in distinct politi-coeconomic environments has been one of the central preoccupations of the extensive theoretical and empirical work on growth in the last decade. The authors argue that the empirical evidence available to date strongly indicates the relevance of this work for understanding the elusive causal connection between economic development and democracy. The state of the literature suggests considerable sophistication in conceptualizing the direct economic effects of inequality and contains critical insights into politically unconstrained policy-making aimed at the alleviation of their negative economic impact. However, the political feasibility of the recommended policy measures and the politically mediated effects of inequality and redistributive policy on growth and on the strength and stability of democratic regimes are understood less well. The authors discuss the critical factors influencing these effects and sketch several approaches to creating a comprehensive politicoeconomic account of the interaction between inequality, redistributive policy-making, and political regimes.