Book reviews International Relations theory Hedley Bull and the accommodation of power. By Robert Ayson. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2012. 256pp. Index. £57.50. isbn 978 0 23036 389 2. Available as e-book. Often commented upon, close study of Hedley Bull’s ideas of international order in their origins is rare. Robert Ayson’s study is doubly welcome, not only in its thoroughness, but in suggesting the relevance of Bull’s early experience and training for the formation of his ideas on the foundations of international order. The study emphasizes his encounter with the American strategic studies literature, and his work with and increasing disenchantment with disarmament. The Disarmament Conference of the 1930s, the subject of his work with Philip Noel-Baker, was critical in establishing Bull’s central propositions: not only that ‘[t]otal disarmament is an illusion’ but, eventually, that not disarmament but arms control—the ‘ideas, values and practices … which could be called on to help manage this material power’ (p. 32)—provided the central building blocks in creating a viable, and survivable, global order. Accordingly, his engagement with the nuclear balance as the central issue of international relations during the late 1950s and early 1960s was pivotal. Ayson convincingly demonstrates ‘how central questions of the nuclear balance are to the development of his thinking about international politics more generally’ (p. 41). They pointed to the requirement for Great Power management, to the relevance of the balance of power and to an evolving legal code on the use of force, all of which became central institutions in The anarchical society (Macmillan, 1977). In bringing together the two sides of Bull—strategic studies and international order— the study makes a substantial contribution to a neglected area. Most studies of Bull ignore the strategic studies side, or ind it incomprehensible in the light of the ‘international order’ side. My recent suggestion to a colleague that the systemic, as well as social, aspects of international life might be better comprehended by examining Bull’s writing on the nuclear balance, was met with a blank stare. Hence, I particularly welcome Ayson’s approach. The central position papers are all quoted, including the American responses to Bull’s central text during the early period—his Control of the arms race (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961; Thomas Schelling judged it the best book on arms control, ‘having written one myself ’). The important point Ayson makes is about the duality of Bull’s approach: on the one hand, the reality and durability of material power and diferent interests, but how equally they point to the requirement for conscious efort on the other hand, which in fact becomes Bull’s understanding of a Great Power—powers that understand ‘the need to cooperate with each other in managing the balance of power … and in imparting a degree of central direction’ (p. 119) to the whole. In the same fashion, Ayson argues that it was Bull’s attachment to the Australian National University at a time when Asia was rising that alerted him to the need for accommodating International Afairs 89: 5 (2013) 1303–1364 © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Book reviews rising powers, which he identiies as Bull’s second great contribution to International Relations theory. It would revivify the distinction between ‘satisied’ and ‘revisionist powers’, and set accommodation within a changing set of international norms as the signiiers of what was now the central question of his theory—the idea of order. How much a ‘rising power’ could accommodate to an existing international order, and how far that order could be stretched to accommodate rising powers became the central templates for understanding the meaning of any particular power’s rise. Ayson’s is an argument that throws light not only on Bull’s thought but also on the underlying impulses of the English School of International Relations, which The anarchical society and The expansion of international society (Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds, Clarendon Press, 1984) left in their wake. Cornelia Navari, University of Buckingham, UK The social evolution of international politics. By Shiping Tang. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 304pp. £55.00. isbn 978 0 19965 833 6. This is a book that will both inspire and irritate its readers in equal measure. It contains seriously original and insightful thinking that should stimulate reconsideration of some major positions and debates in International Relations (IR). But it gets important things wrong in ways that undermine some, though not all, of the author’s ambitions. The scale of Shiping Tang’s ambition, and his sparse, compressed and assertive style of argument, will put some readers of. But despite these laws this book deserves to be widely read by those engaged in IR’s mainstream theoretical debates. Quality big thinking like this does not come along often. Several of Tang’s theoretical moves deserve to be debated, and his broadsides against key aspects of IR’s orthodoxies score some impressive hits. Tang cuts quickly and deeply to the theoretical essentials, and sets his case for social evolution irmly into a world-historical context. Setting up and validating a social evolutionist approach to IR is the book’s main aim, and Tang’s advocacy for this is timely and convincing. He builds nicely on biological evolution, and makes a careful and thoughtful, if not all that user-friendly, adaptation of this to the somewhat diferent, and more complex, process of social evolution. Simply put, his argument is that mainstream IR theories, especially realism and liberalism, are appropriate to diferent phases of history. It is therefore pointless to pit them against each other as rival paradigms for the same periods of history. Tang provides a clear evolutionary logic to explain how and why the international system evolves from one phase to the next. Moreover, he does this with an internal logic showing how the operation of given types of system create the conditions for evolution to another type. This approach generates a very powerful critique of the debate between ofensive and defensive realists, allocating them clearly to diferent historical eras. His argument shares enough power logic with realism to deserve a serious response from their leading igures. Along the way we get thoughtful and trenchant but perhaps overly dismissive critiques of structuralism and the agent−structure debates, and an interesting, if rather preliminary, attempt to diferentiate the logic of system from what he sees as the empty logic of anarchy. This latter is, however, too sketchy, and is one of many areas in the book where readers will wish that the author had slowed down a bit and thought things through more thoroughly. Somewhat better done is a general critique of IR theory emphasizing the need to bring the physical environment of the system back in to system thinking, though again this idea needed more development and a better linkage to other literatures that also make this case. 1304 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. International Relations theory The main weakness is the discussion of institutionalism. Tang does not do enough to make a clear demarcation between the defensive realist world that he says emerges after 1945 and the rule-based one that supposedly follows on from it. Sometimes he talks as if the rule-based era is simply a derivative of defensive realism, sometimes as if it is a successor to it. More theoretically worrying is that Tang’s discussion treats institutions almost entirely in the liberal mode as designed, instrumental, organizations, i.e. secondary institutions. He does not take account of the deeper English School meaning of primary institutions as evolved and constitutive practices. This is ironic, because he gives quite a lot of space to discussing sovereignty and nationalism as important components of his evolutionary story, yet without seeing them as institutions. Treating institutions as essentially shallow and instrumental makes it easier for Tang to identify historical eras with speciic theories, but it also undermines some aspects of his argument. Tang does not explain how and why secondary institutions appeared in the middle of an ofensive realist era, and he does not deal at all with the primary institutions that are a longstanding feature of ofensive realist worlds. Primary institutions might be explainable through his preferred form of power analysis, but he does not do this, and doing so would, I think, change the argument signiicantly. Among other things it would require discussion of territoriality in relation to the changing practices of sovereignty. Other aspects of Tang’s theorizing seem rushed, incompletely worked out and sometimes worrying dependent on mere assertion. The list of system qualities, for example, feels arbitrary and without a logic of derivation. Some of his broadsides do no damage because he has not adequately researched his target. He is, for example, almost contemptuously dismissive of world government, yet he does not reference, or address, the powerful argument on this made by Deudney in his 2007 book Bounding power (Princeton University Press), which in some ways shares Tang’s perspective. These criticisms notwithstanding, this is a book that deserves a wide readership. It makes some big and important points about how to study IR, which the discipline would undoubtedly beneit from debating. Barry Buzan, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Is God happy? Selected essays. By Leszek Kolakowski. London: Penguin. 2012. 327pp. Pb.: £9.99. isbn 978 0 14138 955 4. Available as e-book. The irst sentence of Leszek Kolakowski’s unsurpassable trilogy on the main currents of Marxism reads memorably: ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher’. In the same way, one might preface any discussion of Kolakowski’s ideas with the words: Leszek Kolakowski was a Polish philosopher. When he passed away in 2009, he was universally acclaimed as the philosopher of ‘Solidarity’, the thinker who, together with John Paul II and the Polish dissidents, articulated the ideas that were to lead to the rise of a non-violent anti-totalitarian social movement, a working-class revolution if there ever was one, that toppled the communist regime in Poland and unleashed the upheaval of 1989. A masterful writer and most engaging thinker, Kolakowski embodied what Thomas Mann once deined as the nobility of spirit. Historian Tony Judt was right to call him ‘the last illustrious citizen of the Twentieth-Century Republic of Letters’. What makes Kolakowski’s thinking so appealing is its vibrant inner life, its uniquely original way of establishing intellectual associations, and the permanent presence of a moral perspective. He refused any monistic interpretation of history, yet he remained unlinchingly attached to the idea that truth exists and cannot be divided into competing fragments. At a time 1305 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews when radicalism seems to raise its head again, when liberalism’s values come under attack from the proponents of the ‘communist hypothesis’ (e.g. French Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou or Slovene maverick thinker Slavoj Žižek), Kolakowski’s writings are a sobering reminder that ideas matter and wrong ideas are conducive to cataclysmic efects. To the question that gives the title of the volume, Kolakowski responded in his wry manner: ‘Happiness is something we can imagine but not experience. If we imagine that hell and purgatory are no longer in operation and that all human beings, every single one without exception, have been saved by God and are now enjoying celestial bliss, lacking nothing, perfectly satisied, without pain or death, then we can imagine that their happiness is real and that the sorrows and sufering of the past have been forgotten. Such a condition can be imagined, but is has never been seen. It has never been seen’ (pp. 214−15). This volume, mostly translated by the thinker’s daughter, Agnieszka Kolakowska, who also writes a perceptive introduction, is an illuminating, truly engrossing collection of the philosopher’s seminal contributions to understanding the nature and the values of the left (radical and democratic) in the twentieth century, and the search for truth in an age of uncertainty and growing relativism. Kolakowski started his philosophical itinerary in the aftermath of the Second World War, in a Poland devastated by Nazi atrocities and dominated by Soviet imperialism. After a short-lived romance with Stalinism, he became, after the tyrant’s demise in 1953, the main voice of East European Marxist revisionism, as corrosive an intellectual dynamo as one can imagine. The revisionist ideas toppled the self-serving communist mythology and celebrated the rebirth of critical reason. The volume includes some of the most exhilarating pieces written (and banned by the communist censorship) to protest bureaucratic constraints on the free spirit and the perpetuation of despicable lies about the origins and consequences of Stalinism. Reading some of these essays, one is struck by the intense, contagious freshness of Kolakowski’s thought. It is easy to understand why the communist hacks resented his hypotheses on socialism, with their emphasis on the centrality of individual rights and rejection of the state’s claim to epistemic infallibility. No one has the right to monopolize truth, this was the thrust of Kolakowski’s interventions. He argued against the new forms of political alienation and protested the suppression of human imagination in the stultiied universe of Sovietism. During the irst stage of his intellectual rebellion, Kolakowski relied on Karl Marx’s early philosophical writings. Later, he moved away from Marxism altogether. He saw Marxism as a sophisticated rationalization of social and political resentment, a gigantic, cosmic fantasy of redemption bound to beget new forms of slavery. One of the most impressive essays included in the anthology deals with the Marxist roots of Stalinism. Many on the left were (and still are) ready to accept the Leninist heredity of Stalinism, yet they ind unacceptable connecting the advent of the Bolshevik dystopia to the ideas of Karl Marx. Kolakowski was suspicious of any mechanical determinism, not only in political history, but also in the history of ideas. He did not claim that Marxism did inevitably bequeath the totalitarian hubris. But he found in the Marxist dream of complete unity, in the repudiation of pluralism, the premise for the authoritarian experiments that followed. Leninist neo-Jacobin absolutism was rooted, in Kolakowski’s interpretation, in the absolute rejection of the rule of law and the demonization of private property. The volume includes one of the most important texts belonging to the history of leftist debates in the twentieth century: Kolakowski’s response to historian E. P. Thompson’s attempt to dissociate western radical thought and practices from the atrocious experiences in the Soviet bloc, not to mention China and other Asian communist experiments. Funda- 1306 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. International organization, law and ethics mentally, Kolakowski insisted, such visions are expressions of disingenuousness. Thompson was wrong to say that decades of totalitarian rule of Marxist inspiration in the East were irrelevant for the western battles in the name of the same utopia. The essay ends with a melancholy caveat, a warning against the never-ceasing endeavours to resume the Promethean utopian project: ‘Absolute equality can be established only within a despotic system of rule which implies privileges, i.e. destroys equality; total freedom means anarchy and anarchy results in the domination of the physically strongest, i.e. total freedom turns into its opposite; eiciency as a supreme value calls again for despotism and despotism is economically ineicient above a certain level of technology. If I repeat these old truisms, it is because they still seem to go unnoticed in utopian thinking; and this is why nothing in the world is easier than writing utopias’ (p. 139). In his whole work, a testimony to the endless search for dignity in a century when barbarism reappeared and totalitarian regimes murdered millions in the name of fetishized ideological lies, Leszek Kolakowski defended heroically such non-negotiable values as freedom, civility and responsibility. Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland, College Park, USA International organization, law and ethics* ‘Crimes against peace’ and international law. By Kirsten Sellars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. 316pp. Index. £70.00. isbn 978 1 10702 884 5. Available as e-book. While the title might lead one to think that the topic is the recent eforts by the International Criminal Court to deine aggression, Kirsten Sellars concentrates rather on the formative period in the development of the idea of crimes against peace in the years after the Great War through the Nuremberg and Tokyo prosecutions that followed the Second World War. And with this focus, Sellars does a masterful job. Drawing heavily on period documents, many of them unpublished at the time, she provides a highly readable account of the its and starts that accompanied the emergence of the notion that individuals may be prosecuted for a war of aggression. In her account of the Nuremberg Trials, Sellars explains issues that caused embarrassment to the Allies over their crimes against peace charge: the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 that suggested Soviet complicity in Germany’s invasion of Poland; a 1940 French−British plan to occupy Norway without Norway’s consent. In regard to the follow-on Tokyo prosecutions, Sellars relates how the Tokyo judges split over the question of whether individuals could be prosecuted for a crime against peace. The majority said individuals could be prosecuted, but Sellars inclines towards the view of those dissenting Tokyo judges who found no such prohibition in positive law. Throughout, Sellars usefully cites original documents in a way that will allow those inclined to follow up to do so. She makes frequent reference to League of Nations materials, to British Foreign Oice documents, and to the Foreign Relations of the United States series. One minor inaccuracy is her statement (p. 32) that the Senate of the United States ratiied the 1928 Pact of Paris, the treaty that purported to outlaw war. Under the US Constitution, the Senate consents to a treaty but the president ratiies. The Senate consented to the Pact of Paris, but it was President Calvin Coolidge who made the decision to, and did, ratify it. The Pact of Paris was prominently cited by the Nuremberg prosecutors for the proposition that the initiation of a war of aggression could entail individual responsibility. But Sellars’s analysis of the Pact supports the arguments made at Nuremberg by German defence * See also Patricia Clavin, Securing the world economy: the reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946, pp. 1332–33. 1307 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews lawyers that the Pact contemplated an obligation on the part of states only. Sellars inds no hint in the drafting history that the Pact might render an individual criminally culpable for aggressive war. While the title of the book refers to war as an individual crime, Sellars provides insightful analysis of the evolution of the international posture on war as an act prohibited for states. She points out that the deinition ultimately given by the UN General Assembly in 1974 (Resolution ‘Deinition of Aggression’) dates from discussions in the 1930s. In particular, the clause in the 1974 Deinition of Aggression about support of ‘armed bands’ as constituting aggression is seen in drafts tabled at that time. On the Nuremberg prosecutions, Sellars is on target in highlighting the Soviet role in devising the framework. Many writers on Nuremberg inaccurately portray the initiative and the groundwork as having come from the United States, including both the idea of aggression as a crime and the project of an internationally constituted tribunal. Sellars rightly criticizes those writers (p. 50, note 13). She notes that the idea for an internationally constituted tribunal was irst mooted on the Soviet side, by Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov. Drawing on the seminal work of George Ginsburgs (Moscow’s road to Nuremberg: the Soviet background to the trial, Martinus Nijhof, 1996), Sellars explains that it was Leningrad law professor Aaron Trainin who irst suggested during the war the concept of crimes against peace. She portrays Trainin’s goal as preventing a resurgence of Nazi-style fascism in the postwar period (p. 58). While this aim was to be sure put forward by Trainin, he also expressed, and this Sellars does not mention, an aim of directing public anger at Germany’s leaders rather than at the German people as a whole. At the time, public igures on the Allied side were advocating drastic sanctions that would impact the entirety of Germany’s population. Trainin’s hope was that if Germany’s leaders could be seen as those responsible for the war, public anger towards the German population might be lessened, and postwar harmony might be achieved. Sellars explains that the concept ‘crimes against peace’ was abandoned by the western powers after Nuremberg and Tokyo. Eforts at stopping war, she relates, thereafter focused on states, not on individuals. Only with the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, she notes, was the concept revived, and even there with hesitation. Sellars’s overall view—for which she makes a persuasive case—is that the concept ‘crimes against peace’ has thus far achieved little. John B. Quigley, Ohio State University, USA The international human rights movement: a history. By Aryeh Neier. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2012. 334pp. Index. £24.95. isbn 978 0 69113 515 1. The author of this book should be a large part of the story he writes about. Having been executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Aryeh Neier went on to found and then serve as executive director of Human Rights Watch before moving over to the Open Society Foundation where he has been president since 1993. The lyleaf photo shows a strong man, seemingly ever-youthful, pen poised, staring at the camera, conident in his capacity to defend freedom. But modesty or perhaps the pressures of time and the need for research assistance on a large scale (a ‘superb’ staf of ive are generously acknowledged) mean that the book never quite takes of as the semi-autobiography it really ought to be. True, we do get occasional tantalizing glimpses of the man behind the narrative: his central location at the core of the US-inspired resurgence of human rights in the 1970s (with the book interestingly broadly accepting Sam Moyn’s recent and already classic 1308 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. International organization, law and ethics account in The last utopia: human rights in history, Harvard University Press, 2010, reviewed in International Afairs 87: 6); his near-contempt for ‘so-called second and third generation rights’ (i.e. economic and social rights), which he strongly feels have diluted the impact of the traditional civil and political freedoms that ought to be the focus of any authentic human rights movement; his views on Amnesty International, which he clearly feels has lost its way (its 2009 report ‘barely mentioned Amnesty International’s traditional concerns. Instead, its focus was on the shortage of food, jobs, clean water, land and housing that it attributes to government abandonment of economic regulation in the interest of market forces’); the chapter tracing the emergence of Human Rights Watch out of the Cold War engagement with the subject after the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which includes an excellent retelling of Neier’s courageous and highly efective defence of the organization he founded (and in particular its then, and still, executive director Ken Roth) against allegations of partisanship against Israel levelled by lawyer Alan Dershowitz and other supporters of that state. These glimpses of the author’s own career left at least this reader wanting a more personal, engaged tone, a sense of the kind of guy Neier is—clearly remarkable, resilient, determined and above all (and why not?) sure of himself. What we get instead is a very good account of the rise of the international human rights movement. There is a decent history, some sensible if orthodox excursions into philosophy, and a very well-argued explanation of what this movement is, how it came about in the 1970s (Moyn again) and speciically and importantly how it difers from past progressive projects—being rooted in a general cause and driven by altruism that does not fall away on the achievement of this or that goal but moves on relentlessly to the next one, and then the next and the next. Neier captures this sense of momentum very well, particularly in his telling of how the logic of human rights eventually drove the United States to renege on its dictator friends in Central and South America, and also in his discussion of the establishment of the International Criminal Court where the interaction between the movement and state power is very well described. The challenge of 11 September 2001 and the West’s reaction to those attacks inevitably takes much attention, but as Neier—ever the pragmatic campaigner—points out, membership of civil rights/human rights groups actually went up during the irst decade of the twenty-irst century, state-inspired counterterrorism proving to be a very efective recruiting sergeant. Some might say, perhaps rightly, that by ignoring social and economic rights at a time when ‘austerity’ is impoverishing the lives of millions, Neier is missing the next big human rights story. But what you get here is an honest version of a vital social movement from a man who was there in the front when the crowd was irst gathering and has been at the head of various bits of it ever since. Conor Gearty, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Life in crisis: the ethical journey of Doctors Without Borders. By Peter Redield. Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press. 2013. 298pp. Index. Pb.: £19.95. isbn 978 0 52027 485 3. Closely following the medical humanitarian organization Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) through a long-term and ‘multi-sited’ (p. 3) ethnography, Peter Redield draws a particularly detailed picture of MSF in its complexity and contradictions. This nuanced exploration of the non-governmental organization brings a very welcome anthropological contribution to the current debate on humanitarian action, far away from any detached theoretical or abstract considerations. 1309 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews Redield’s study is primarily based on participant observation in MSF oices in North America and Europe, and on his experience with MSF teams in various missions in Uganda over the past two decades. It also draws on numerous interviews held both with international and local staf members, as well as on an extensive reading of the vast literature generated by the organization since its creation in 1971. These elements contribute to giving this ethnography historical and conceptual depth, tracing back MSF’s ‘ethical journey’ over time. As Redield stresses, this journey has been deeply inluenced by the organization’s intellectual roots in the Enlightenment (pp. 42−4) and its tradition of critical thought that runs from Voltaire up to Michel Foucault (pp. 34−6). The book powerfully shows how this heritage has shaped and continues to inform MSF’s self-conceptualization around a secular ‘ethic of action as well as refusal’ (p. 167), ‘a position that advances no universal or utopian solution’ (p. 101). Peter Redield writes from an epistemological posture that evolves from the insider’s view, as seen when he accompanies an MSF team in the ield in Uganda, to the outsider’s perspective he has from his oice at the University of North Carolina. This in-between standpoint confers a particularly rich position from which both to describe and analyse the organization’s identity and practices. On the one hand, following MSF in its everyday operations, he maintains a ine non-judgemental stance in the face of the quandaries a humanitarian organization confronts on a daily basis. In that sense, Redield’s subtle approach is well suited to the study of an organization like MSF, which since its beginning has embraced a strong tradition of ‘self-questioning’ (p. 5) and assumes an inescapable degree of ‘contradiction’ (p. 188) and ‘discontent’ (p. 97). It is with great levels of practical detail that he exposes the numerous ethical dilemmas this organization encounters, for example concerning its practice of témoignage (speaking out) when faced with moral outrage (chapter four); the problematic status of local staf in contrast with that of expatriates (chapter ive); or its engagement in the unavoidable practice of triage (the procedure that establishes priority of needs) (chapter six). On the other hand, Redield’s outsider’s perspective on the organization is also appreciable precisely because MSF’s self-critical sense may at times ‘have the side efect of inoculating it against external criticism’ (p. 5). We welcome the few instances where the author leaves his anthropological neutrality to raise questions that challenge the organization: ‘Why does MSF keep insisting it is not a paciist organization when it constantly inds itself in war zones? Why is it so tentative about issues related to poverty and so allergic to development?’ (p. 241). MSF’s ‘moral minimalism’ (p. 240) certainly keeps many questions open. Some might regret the ‘patchwork’ feel of a book made of nine chapters, the majority of which have been partly published in academic journals or collected books since 2005. Life in crisis nonetheless succeeds in delivering a coherent whole built around the ethical aspiration at the root of MSF’s engagement: to save lives and alleviate sufering in times of crisis through medical expertise. Behind this apparently clear moral objective, Redield’s exploration of MSF’s ethical commitment ultimately takes the reader to deep questions of life and death. Whose life is to be saved among all the unnecessary deaths of ‘expendable’ people (p. 165) globally every day? And even before the ‘who’ question, which life is to be saved? The biological life of the body or the social and political life of the person? The tension between these two notions of life, zoe or bios, is dramatically illustrated by the case to which Redield refers of young Somalis during the war in Mogadishu who refused life-saving amputation from MSF, preferring ‘to die with their entire body than to live with a visible mutilation’ (p. 158). Behind mere issues of cultural diference, this is where Redield’s ethnography eventually takes his readers to fundamental questions of the ‘value of life’ (p. 2) and the place of death 1310 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. International organization, law and ethics in an ‘ethic of life’ (p. 155). Ultimately, what makes life worth living and ighting for? In that sense, beyond its valuable contribution to the current relection on humanitarianism, Life in crisis also ofers an unusual and powerful relection on ethics. Anaïs Rességuier, University Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, France The terror courts: rough justice at Guantanamo Bay. By Jess Bravin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2013. 448pp. Index. $30.00. isbn 978 0 30018 920 9. Available as e-book. Jess Bravin’s The terror courts tells the story of the American military commissions at Guantánamo Bay. It is a cautionary tale. Most readers probably know that the military commissions have not been a great success, but the core accomplishment of Bravin’s book is to bring home the scope of the disaster, and the profound diiculties from which American justice will now have to extricate itself. Its excellence consists in telling this story on a scale that is human and engaging, mainly through people like military prosecutor Stuart Couch who were asked to work with the commissions, or like Salim Hamdan who appeared before them. This is a book that is not only important for those who care about American justice, and the problem of how the country can defend itself in an era of terrorist threats, but also one that they might enjoy in spite of its heavy theme. While the book adopts a dispassionate journalistic tone (at least until the epilogue), its theme is unmistakably the dismal failure of the military commissions. As originally outlined in President Bush’s November 2001 military order, they were intended to provide what Bravin describes as ‘rough justice’—quick, harsh sentences for terrorists, including those on whom the United States had employed enhanced interrogation (pp. 22−3). This latter group might otherwise be diicult to prosecute, both because their coerced statements would normally be inadmissible as evidence, and because their trials would focus a spotlight on what many would see as the US use of torture. But the military commissions have not been quick. After more than ten years, they have produced only a handful of convictions, mostly through plea bargains (e.g. David Hicks) or because the accused refused to contest the charges (e.g. Ali al-Bahlul). And some convictions have recently been vacated by the federal courts (Hamdan, Al-Bahlul). Moreover, as Bravin stresses, ‘Even plausible convictions will remain clouded for years, through mandatory appeals through the new Court of Military Commission Review, the DC Circuit, and, ultimately, the Supreme Court’ (p. 376). The sentences meted out by military commissions have also not been harsh. In fact, with the exception of Al-Bahlul, who refused to contest the charges, and whose conviction has at any rate been vacated, the sentences have been remarkably light. Bin Laden’s driver and bodyguard Salim Hamdan received only ive months and eight days (plus time served), later overturned; David Hicks, a young Australian captured ighting with the Taliban, received seven years but under a plea agreement was released after nine months in an Australian prison; and Ibrahim al-Qosi, who ran a training camp kitchen, was oicially given 14 years but based on a plea deal was released after two. In short, as Bravin has it, ‘a new system intended to deal harshly with aliens ended up being far more forgiving than the existing federal courts’ (p. 375). Finally, the commissions have, in Bravin’s words, ‘proven no solution to the dilemma created by American detainee practices following 9/11’ (p. 376), speciically coerced interrogation. Bush’s 2001 military order, which established the commissions, permitted the introduction of coerced evidence if it had ‘probative’ value, but as Bravin shows prosecu- 1311 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews tors and commissions were reluctant to use it. The 2006 and 2009 Military Commissions Acts each established new rules for commissions, gradually excluding coerced evidence, narrowing the scope for hearsay and giving the accused avenues of appeal. One efect has been to render some detainees who have been harshly interrogated, such as Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged twentieth 9/11 hijacker, seemingly untriable. Ultimately, Bravin argues that ‘All of the Guantanamo detainees prosecuted by commission could also have been tried in federal court, and the federal judiciary’s track record suggests that they likely would have been convicted more rapidly and received stifer sentences’ (p. 380). Sadly, however, he concludes that President Obama has now given the commissions a ‘bipartisan imprimatur’, which ‘virtually ensures they will be a ixture of American law for years to come’ (p. 381). The criticisms Bravin levels against the military commissions generally ring true, but he seems too quick to assume the federal courts are the appropriate venue for trying foreign combatants captured abroad. For one thing, this would give foreign combatants more rights and safeguards than we grant to our own soldiers, who are subject to the military justice system. Moreover, the stringent rules on admissibility of evidence (including chain of custody) and the right of accused to confront their accusers would impose a tremendous burden on prosecutors. In these respects, the impressive record of federal courts in dealing largely with domestic terrorism may not be a reliable guide to their capacity to process foreign combatants. Still, Bravin is probably right that federal courts would have been preferable to military commissions on balance. But that just goes to reinforce what I take to be most important message of The terror courts: we do not yet have any satisfactory process for trying detainees who cannot be released, and our current approach is in desperate need of a comprehensive rethink. Avery Plaw, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA The end of power: from boardrooms to battleields and churches to states, why being in charge isn’t what it used to be. By Moisés Naím. New York: Basic. 2013. 320pp. Index. £18.99. isbn 978 0 46503 156 6. Available as e-book. Moisés Naím’s book occasionally reads like the product of an elite mind-mapping exercise around the theme of ‘power’. From the increased churn rate of businesses on the New York Stock Exchange to the rise of Latin American Pentecostalism challenging the supremacy of Roman Catholicism, The end of power leaves no area of human activity untouched in its account of why, as the subtitle pithily asserts, ‘being in charge isn’t what it used to be’. Naím cites the bloody asymmetry between the number of casualties inlicted by cheap IEDs in Afghanistan and the amount spent by the Pentagon to counter them as evidence that, in the ield of warfare, the advantages once thought to accrue to large budgets no longer stack up as before. He shows how corporate CEOs have shorter tenures in oice even as their pay packages have ballooned. He notes the rise of insurgent politics everywhere, from Beppe Grillo in Italy to the Tea Party in the United States, via the Swedish Pirate Party and the Arab Spring. He describes a global order that seems much less governable than before, with shifting alliances, the end of American hegemony and global and regional communities unable to act in the larger common interest (e.g. climate change, the euro crisis). He writes about the transformation of the chess world from a sinecure of Soviet men in early middle age to a global battleield of younger, more numerous and more international contenders. 1312 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. International organization, law and ethics As beits a man who edited Foreign Policy for over a decade, Naím’s book is an excellent handbook to the world today, written with verve, insight and judgement. Business theory and economics—speciically the idea of ‘barriers to entry’—are marshalled in the service of the argument that it is easier than ever, across the board, to challenge incumbents. Wellchosen statistics, academic studies and apposite anecdotes back up the case. While it does not quite click on every occasion, there is much refreshing to Naím’s cross-disciplinary approach, challenging the comfortable assumptions of disciplines which evolved to describe another world. The idea that power is shifting to new actors in the global system—new companies, new states, new forms of philanthropy, from West to East and from North to South—is a commonplace. But Naím goes further. The difusion of power ultimately renders it more slippery, the author suggests, whoever may briely appear to hold it. Naím is not really suggesting that power no longer exists—indeed, as he points out, power exists in every human relationship. Quite rightly, he criticizes those who would quantify national power purely in terms of material assets—tons of coal produced, numbers of tanks, stockpiles of nuclear weapons—noting how quaint such assessments seem when intangibles such as attractiveness, reputation and cultural inluence, the very stuf of ‘soft power’, are more in vogue. Later, Naím divides power into four categories: ‘muscle’ (i.e. the ability to coerce); ‘code’ (i.e. norm-setting); ‘pitch’ (i.e. persuasion); and ‘reward’ (i.e. inducement). At one point Naím suggests that ‘power is decaying’ (his italics), implying a natural, one-way, ineluctable process. (‘Half-life’ is another expression of which the author appears particularly fond.) But if power is deined as a dynamic rather than a substance, as something which exists relationally, rather than as something which can be bottled like Coca-Cola, then can it really be said to decay in and of itself ? But this is to quibble. Naím’s central point, and on this he is surely correct, is that we are not so much witnessing a changing of the guard—China replacing the United States, for example—as an upending of our understanding of the relationship between power and organizational scale. The reasons for this, Naím suggests somewhat lightly, are threefold: ‘more’, ‘mobility’ and ‘mentality’. More people who are more prosperous are more diicult to control. Greater mobility equates to a disintegration of national boundaries and captive audiences or markets—for goods, political parties, traditional media outlets or beliefs. Both of these lead to shifts in mentality—in world-view, expectations and ailiations—which make people more prone to change preferences or to question authority. What to do, then? Naím’s prescriptions are less good than his descriptions. His irst is that we should get beyond the rise and fall of nation-states, and instead think more in terms of what happens within and between societies and people, avoiding black-box international relations. Naím expresses conidence that we are on the brink of a new wave of positive political and institutional innovations, which are going to make it all right. He points out that political innovation runs far behind technological, social or economic innovation. All our present-day political institutions, he notes, are inventions of the eighteenth century, bar those of the international system, which are from the post-1945 baby-boomer generation instead. Surely, something will turn up. This seems an upbeat conclusion to a book which is, in most respects, arresting for its unwillingness to accept that the ‘end of power’ is an unalloyed good. For until we adapt a new set of structures that marry principle, prosperity, participation and practicality we risk inding ourselves at sea, adrift. Charles Emmerson, Energy, Environment and Resources, Chatham House 1313 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews Conflict, security and defence* The thistle and the drone: how America’s war on terror became a global war on tribal Islam. By Akbar Ahmed. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. 2013. 400pp. Index. Pb.: £22.99. isbn 978 0 81572 378 3. Available as e-book. In this perceptive and interesting volume, Akbar Ahmed, a noted scholar of Islam and a former oicial in the tribal regions of Pakistan, deals with the central feature of President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy in this area: the use of drone strikes to destroy Al-Qaeda and the so-called ‘associated movements’ that operate along the border with Afghanistan. As many critics have noted, the deinition of ‘associated movements’ has expanded over time to include a number of indigenous tribal networks (such as the Haqqani network and the Tehrik-e-Taliban) whose primary opponent is the Pakistani government, not the United States. Over the last ive years, Ahmed argues, the US has gradually drifted into a war with the forces of ‘tribal Islam’, as he describes them. His book is both an analysis and a warning: a war on tribal Islam is not one that the US is likely to win. To make this case, Ahmed uses the metaphor of the thistle—a rugged, prickly lower that cannot be eradicated without causing signiicant harm to the eradicator—and the drone as the central framing device of the book. He argues that tribal societies like the ones he encountered in Pakistan are marked by characteristics such as ‘common ancestors and clans, a martial tradition, and a highly developed code of honor and revenge’ (p. 5) that make them particularly diicult to manage, no less to control. One of the most important contributions of this volume, especially for those not trained in anthropology, is his discussion of how the segmentary lineage system creates these thistle-like tribes which then must be managed by central governments through indirect control, including the provision of patronage to win their support. His chapter on the segmentary lineage system, which is common to tribes in ungoverned spaces throughout the world and remains a residual force even in well-governed places today, is useful particularly as he applies this model to explain some contemporary terrorist groups. For example, his discussion of Al-Qaeda as a tribal organization, linked together by these tribal, regional and family ties rather than by a transnational religious commitment, is a useful corrective to much of the crude accounts of its motivations in the contemporary terrorism literature. Another virtue of this book is his perceptive analysis, based on experience on the ground in Pakistan, of what it takes to govern the tribes efectively. To some extent, the problem can be cast as one between the centre and the periphery; as the central government grows stronger and more assertive, iercely protective tribes on the periphery attack it to maintain a balance and to preserve their autonomy and privileges. As Ahmed suggests through an exhaustive analysis of over a dozen centre–periphery struggles throughout the world, maintaining this balance is extraordinarily diicult to do and requires an adaptive, subtle strategy that makes minimal demands on these tribes and wins their loyalty, if not their full compliance. This also requires a tolerance of tribal customs and justice that is often at odds with the demands of centralized government. This is an important insight, as much of American counterterrorism policy over the last ten years has worked on an assumption that building a strong central state in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia is essential for reducing the threat of terrorism. Ahmed does not denigrate the role of the central state, but he favours a British-style indirect rule for the central government, rather than reassertion * See also Su Hoon Lee, ed., Nuclear North Korea: regional dynamics, failed policies, and ideas for ending a global stalemate, pp. 1355–56. 1314 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Conlict, security and defence of its authority. Seen from this vantage point, the task in these cases is not to build a strong, central Weberian state, but rather one that is adaptive and skilled at dispensing patronage to buy of its restless periphery. For these reasons alone, the book is valuable to experts in the South Asian region and to those who study counterterrorism. Yet the book is not without laws. The narrative sometimes drifts of topic for too long, ofering extensive detail on cases which are not in themselves directly essential to the argument. Throughout the cases, Ahmed’s sympathy clearly lies with the tribal peoples whose traditions and customs have been threatened by power-hungry leaders in central governments, as well as by foreign imperialists. But he never directly answers the question of what governments should do when it is the tribes that move irst against the centre. He tends to portray the thistle-like tribes as entirely defensive, when there is evidence (as in Pakistan in 2009) of tribes posing a mortal threat to the security of the central government. His criticisms of American foreign policy are often on target, but sometimes over-stated and tied to outdated conceptual frameworks, like the ‘clash of civilizations’, that oversimplify the motives of American policy-makers. Moreover, the title is somewhat misleading in that there is relatively little on drone warfare in the book. A more detailed analysis of how the drones transform tribal conlict dynamics, and what plausible alternatives exist for the United States, would be invaluable. The solution that he proposes—that the US invest billions in development as a way of closing the gap between centre and periphery that allows terrorist groups to thrive—is unlikely to be adopted by an Obama administration which is mindful of cost and drawn to short-term ixes. Michael J. Boyle, La Salle University, USA Investment in blood: the real cost of Britain’s Afghan war. By Frank Ledwidge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2013. 269pp. Index. £18.99. isbn 978 0 30019 062 5. This is Frank Ledwidge’s second book, after Losing small wars: British military failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (Yale University Press, 2011, reviewed in International Afairs 88: 2). Investment in blood follows the path of the irst book, constituting a biting criticism of the UK’s involvement in Helmand. Compared to Losing small wars, Investment in blood is the output of a more systematic research efort, trying to substantiate with data and hard facts the assertions already contained in the irst book. It is also fully dedicated to Helmand, whereas Losing small wars dealt with both Iraq and Afghanistan. In this sense Investment in blood is the irst published analytical efort to look speciically at the Helmand experience. In the irst two of the three parts into which the volume is divided, Ledwidge produces estimates of the human and inancial costs of the Helmand campaign. He is the irst one to do so, incorporating also the long-term costs of having fought in Helmand, for example taking care of wounded veterans. Ledwidge also looks at the human costs borne by the Helmandi population, although the quality of the data in this case is weaker. He succeeds, however, in showing that International Security Assistance Force’s counting of civilian casualties has been inadequate to say the least, and that casualties have certainly been signiicantly higher than acknowledged. In the third part, he asks whether the efort was worth the costs. Ledwidge’s answers are largely negative: the campaign was a failure from almost every point of view, with costs too high to justify gains that were modest and might well turn out to be very temporary as well. Ledwidge, a former naval intelligence oicer and lawyer, served in Helmand as a civilian adviser. He is not an academic researcher and this shows throughout the book, although in general his handling of sources is competent. Apart from published sources, Ledwidge 1315 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews has relied on interviews with veterans (military and civilians) of the Helmand campaign, as well as Afghan civilian and military oicers. One methodological criticism is that Ledwidge does not discuss his sources in detail, nor does he tell us how many interviews he has carried out, and with what categories of people; that would have helped in assessing the academic relevance of the book. Investment in blood, on the other hand, is not a book aimed primarily at an academic audience, despite having come out with an academic publisher. Ledwidge’s pessimistic assessment of the Helmand campaign will renew the debate that Losing small wars had started. The cost of the campaign (which he estimates at a grand total of £37 billion as far as the inancial aspects are concerned) drives Ledwidge’s argument that Britain cannot aford to blunder into such expensive and ill-planned campaigns again. Indeed, the failure to understand and to analyse properly the Helmand environment is, according to the author, the key to the waste of resources and to the ultimate failure of the campaign. Ledwidge also points out the damage deriving from the gap between a humanitarian rhetoric and a rather weak commitment to follow its implications. While the latter point derives more from Ledwidge’s own personal commitment to human rights than as a result of a stringent analysis, he is very efective in showing the real costs of ighting a war like that in Helmand. While not all readers will appreciate Ledwidge’s bitter criticism of the British military establishment, clearly such costs had been badly underestimated initially, and there is a strong argument coming out of the book in favour of more realistic and objective costing of military campaigns abroad. This is, after all, the subtitle of the book. Antonio Giustozzi, King’s College London, UK Confronting the bomb: Pakistani and Indian scientists speak out. Edited by Pervez Hoodbhoy. Karachi: Oxford University Press. 2012. 444pp. Index. £25.00. isbn 978 0 19906 833 3. Pervez Hoodbhoy’s edited volume is a compilation of essays, mostly authored by a group of academics hosted at Princeton University (out of 17 essays, only the irst and last essay have been singularly authored by Indian scholars. Almost all other essays are either reproduced, jointly written, or authored by Princeton-based authors. Seven essays are by the editor himself and others co-authored with Zia Mian and scholars from the Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security). The authors are respected professionals with a credible understanding of nuclear science and a publication record on the subject. Their views, however, are rooted in personal beliefs that form the basis of some speculative assertions and sweeping statements that yearn for validation. Hoodbhoy and his colleagues are part of a long tradition of atomic physicists who harbour deep reservations about nuclear weapons and their inluence on world politics. He and Mian question whether nuclear weapons actually provide security for Pakistan (and India) and surmise that the existence of the weapons creates more dangers rather than solving issues, essentially providing a false sense of national security. As scientists, they also lament the distortion of science away from the traditions of discovery and service to mankind in favour of the pursuit of ultimate security in the form of nuclear deterrence. Beneath their critique lies a deeper belief that nuclear weapons are an illegitimate form of power that should be abolished. Hoodbhoy et al. are acolytes of an intellectual tradition that is often dogmatic about banning the bomb; they believe that scientists are uniquely positioned to see the actual consequences of military applications of atomic energy for mankind. In short, the contributors represent an idealist tradition that believes conlict can and should be resolved through dialogue and accommodation, and not through military means. 1316 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Conlict, security and defence This staunch belief prevents the authors from making a dispassionate analysis of the realist calculations that underlie nuclear reality in South Asia. The authors present a simplistic vision of an alternative history that tragically never existed; to be fair, several of the chapters try to point the way back to a more peaceful future that would lessen the risk of nuclear war by putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle. Why do weak countries like Pakistan, and to a lesser extent India, seek security in nuclear weapons? For a country whose birth and existence were deemed illegitimate from the outset, which lost half of its territory in a humiliating military defeat in 1971, continues to face superior conventional forces on its border, and was forced to respond to India’s demonstrations of nuclear weapons capability in 1974 and 1998, it might be more surprising if Pakistan elected not to pursue nuclear weapons. The authors believe Pakistan (and the world) would be better of without them. Perhaps. But a strong argument can be made that nuclear deterrence kept the Cold War from going hot, and is doing the same in South Asia. For India, eyeing the rise of China and Pakistan, facing what it believes to be an existential threat from a powerful neighbour, nuclear weapons ofer a powerful deterrent to aggression. Without them, fear of being subjugated by hostile powers is unlikely to lead to peace. The book concentrates excessively on Pakistan: its structural fault-lines, national foibles and imperfect decision-making processes. Speciically, the authors display considerable sarcasm in their criticisms of the Pakistani military. Notwithstanding the diicult and often overbearing role of the military in Pakistani politics and national security policy, the principal authors’ longstanding antagonism towards the Pakistani Army prevents them from ofering deeper insights into the underlying motivations for Pakistan’s national insecurity and its compulsion to seek security in nuclear weapons. Appreciation for these underlying motivations would be essential for the authors’ prescriptions to have any chance of being seriously considered. A similar appreciation for India’s strategic thought and culture would lay the groundwork for the types of arms control measures the book advocates. How can the deep-seated attitudes that have stymied arms control in South Asia inally be overcome? The answers require a deeper level of analysis than will be found in this collection. Despite these gaps, Hoodbhoy is poignant in calling attention to Pakistan’s unwillingness or incapacity to deal with the internal security threats that beset Pakistan’s social cohesion and also produce cross-border terrorism. The potential terrorist threat to Pakistan’s nuclear assets has been exhaustively covered—some would say hyped—by the media. I have written elsewhere on the eforts of the Strategic Plans Division to ensure the safety and security of nuclear operations. The managers of Pakistan’s nuclear sites have seemingly left no stone unturned in developing and implementing best practices to meet persisting challenges, including steps to adhere to international safety standards, instil world-class security and export regulations, and pass legislation to establish legal authority for nuclear management. Nevertheless, Hoodbhoy and others are correct that nuclear security is a constant workin-progress—now and for all time. This is a burden that India and Pakistan must accept. The true costs of nuclear security are hard to calculate. Inevitably, Pakistani citizens are beginning to question spending on the national security apparatus when their basic societal needs are not being met: security, law and order, justice, health, education, energy. Similar rumblings may eventually arise in India, although nuclear weapons remain popular in both countries. Perhaps Zulikar Ali Bhutto’s rhetoric about ‘eating grass’ to obtain security will some day be eclipsed by peaceful relations between India and Pakistan. At that point, the ideas represented in this book may yet lead the way to a more peaceful and secure future. Feroz Khan, Naval Postgraduate School, USA 1317 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews The opportunity: next steps in reducing nuclear arms. By Steven Pifer and Michael E. O’Hanlon. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. 2012. 160pp. Index. £16.99. isbn 978 0 81572 429 2. Available as e-book. Any critical review of The opportunity: next steps in reducing nuclear arms by Steven Pifer and Michael O’Hanlon is aforded a great amount of hindsight owing to recent events, despite the book’s release only one year ago. Under such scrutiny, however, The opportunity is perhaps more timely now than when it was initially published. The book is a policy roadmap for further reductions in the US nuclear arsenal, including veriication considerations. Pifer and O’Hanlon situate their argument in the context of post-Cold War arms control and demonstrate further reductions as part of a trend, building on past successes. The authors’ recommendations are particularly worthy of review because of two recent events in US nuclear policy: the cancellation of Phase IV of the European Phased Adaptive Approach missile defence plan, which Russia portrayed as a major hurdle for further reductions; and President Obama’s recent speech in Berlin, in which he restated his goal to pursue the ‘security of a world without nuclear weapons’ and called for the United States to reduce its strategic deployed arsenal by a third. Pifer and O’Hanlon examine six diferent strands of arms control: strategic, tactical, aggregate, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Fissile Material Cutof Treaty (FMCT) and multilateral reductions. Within these strands, the authors ofer three diferent tools: transparency and conidence-building measures, unilateral steps and negotiated limits. The book’s penultimate recommendation is for an aggregate negotiated treaty with Russia: ‘The limit should be set at no more than 2,000−2,500 … Within that overall limit, deployed strategic warheads, the weapons of greatest concern, should be limited to no more than 1,000. The United States and Russia would be free to determine the mix of nondeployed strategic warheads and nonstrategic nuclear weapons’ (p. 111). Pifer and O’Hanlon also ofer the possibility of another strategic reductions treaty with Russia down to 1,000 warheads (p. 79), while also pursuing ‘transparency measures as a starter’ with regard to tactical nuclear weapons (p. 82). The latter recommendation certainly aligns with President Obama’s statements in Berlin. In terms of the way ahead and possible challenges, the book rightly acknowledges that the two greatest hurdles will be Congress and Russia itself; recent events, however, reveal that Pifer and O’Hanlon may have been overly optimistic about prospects for cooperation. White House−Congress cooperation has reached a standstill, largely owing to the sequester and slashes in the Department of Defense budget. In terms of nuclear weapons, the budget quagmire has jeopardized nuclear modernization funding that was allocated to secure the ratiication of the New START Treaty in late 2010. Pifer and O’Hanlon indirectly acknowledge the paradox that while these have historically been the ‘President’s weapons’ (p. 33), the president is seemingly restricted when it comes to pursuing further negotiated reductions, as they must be submitted to the Senate, along with the Senate’s request that any further reductions include tactical nuclear weapons. In addition to these practical challenges, further reductions and nuclear policy writ large will be forced to compete with other points on the President’s agenda, including CTBT ratiication. And yet before getting to Congress, the president must irst get through to Moscow. This is the area where The opportunity is, retrospectively, most overly optimistic. The 2009 ‘reset’ in US−Russia relations has soured thanks to the return of Vladimir Putin to the presidency, dispute over Syria, and the Edward Snowden debacle, among other issues. When The opportunity was published one year ago, Russia claimed it was not interested in further 1318 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Conlict, security and defence negotiated reductions until the issue of missile defence was resolved. Pifer and O’Hanlon recommended that the United States increase transparency with Russia, along with ‘a commitment that US missile defences would not be directed against Russian strategic missiles’ (p. 114). Since then, the United States has cancelled the most contentious step of its missile defence plan, though allegedly not in concession to Moscow. The removal of this barrier would seemingly open the way for further reductions, but that has not proved to be the case, as Russia now insists on multilateral arms control. Pifer and O’Hanlon explore this in a separate chapter and ofer a four-step multilateralization process, with the understanding that this may take decades to achieve (p. 180). Yet multilateral arms control, like missile defence, may prove to be a red herring in Russia’s negotiating position. Moscow either has minimal interest in further reductions and is looking for an excuse for its recalcitrance, or is jockeying for a stronger diplomatic position. In terms of the latter, as Pifer and O’Hanlon acknowledge, further reductions will be challenged by Russia’s reliance on nuclear weapons in its strategic policy; its unwillingness to reduce or remove tactical nuclear weapons until the United States removes all of its nuclear weapons from Europe (p. 97); and, most importantly, the symbolism and prestige of the ‘nuclear priesthood’ (p. 65). It is perhaps for this reason that Pifer and O’Hanlon titled the book ‘arms reductions’ rather than ‘arms control’: the United States may be reducing alone. Heather Williams, International Security, Chatham House Terrorism: a philosophical enquiry. By Anne Schwenkenbecher. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2012. 200pp. Index. £55.00. isbn 978 0 23036 398 4. Available as e-book. What is ‘terrorism’ and can it ever be justiiable to resort to terrorist means? A common approach in the literature draws on just war theory and uses the term to refer to acts that inlict unjustiied harm on innocent parties. Terrorism, in this view, is a violation of the in bello principle of discrimination. Sometimes innocence is identiied with the category of ‘civilian’ or ‘non-combatant’ but this raises problems, as philosophers have noted. Civilians might not always be innocent in the relevant sense, and soldiers who ight for a just cause, or who are non-culpably ignorant that their cause is unjust, or who ight under duress, might be. Similar problems go for ‘non-combatants’ but with the additional worry that the word relects a distinction that is meaningful only in a recognized state of war. Although she draws on just war theory to consider whether terrorism is ever justiiable, Anne Schwenkenbecher rejects the just war approach towards the question of what the word denotes. She maintains that even if it was able to capture an important dimension of the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, it would exclude some paradigm cases such as the attack on the Pentagon since it could plausibly be regarded as a military target. But if it is to tackle the conceptual and moral questions raised by terrorism, then she thinks philosophical analysis ought to be directed towards what people ordinarily mean by ‘terrorist’. Schwenkenbecher therefore seeks a semantically more conservative strategy, adopting a deinition that she believes will encompass all the relevant cases: ‘terrorism is an indirect strategy of using fear or terror induced by violent attacks or force (or the threat of its use) against one group of people (direct target) or their property as a means to intimidate and coerce another group of people (indirect target) and inluence their actions in order to reach further political objectives. The violent acts that form part of such a strategy should be called terrorist acts’ (p. 2). In one other respect, however, Schwenkenbecher’s approach runs against the grain of ordinary usage. Usually the use of the word ‘terrorist’ connotes disapproval in a way that 1319 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews words like ‘war’ or ‘guerrilla’ do not. But like Virginia Held, Schwenkenbecher thinks terrorism should be seen as merely one of several diferent forms of political violence. Its use, she argues, can be evaluated morally just as the resort to war can. Adopting a deinition that is descriptively broad enables her to maintain this more morally neutral stance since it gives rise to a category that includes attacks both on those who are morally innocent and on those whose culpable involvement in the injustices that sometimes justify resort to armed force makes them morally liable to attack. Schwenkenbecher’s analysis opens up a distinctive and promising line of enquiry by raising this latter possibility: where the injustices to which non-innocent people have contributed and their involvement are both suiciently serious, then she argues that terrorist attacks against them could be justiiable. Not so in the vast majority of cases where the targets are innocent: only in the face of the most disastrous consequences could the resort to terrorism in this sense ever pass the threshold for a consequentialist justiication, as she argues in her critical analysis of supreme emergency justiications. One possible problem with Schwenkenbecher’s deinitional strategy (and an issue which she acknowledges, p. 20) is what to do if there are acts of political violence that appear to be paradigm cases of terrorism but that prove not to involve the intentional inliction of fear. Jeremy Waldron, for instance, discusses various other goals that terrorists try to reach by similar means, including drawing attention to a cause or revenge, which raises a tricky question (Waldron, ‘Terrorism and the uses of terror’, Journal of Ethics 8, 2004, pp. 25−33): what if an attack similar to 9/11 was launched, but the perpetrators were indiferent to the fear that their actions would be likely to cause, perhaps aiming solely to inspire revolt? In such a case, the act would have an intended audience and an intended psychological efect (awe, for instance) but not one of fear. Or what if the use of violence in some particular cases was intended to draw attention to a cause by its spectacular nature? Again it would address itself to an audience but it is not clear that fear necessarily has to have a role in gaining the audience’s attention. Neither type of case would seem to count as terrorism on Schwenkenbecher’s account and if they correspond to any real cases, it would seem to run contrary to her aim of encompassing ‘paradigmatic instances’ (p. 2). She is prepared to bite this bullet, and of course it would be churlish to suggest that this is a major problem since one might presume that causing fear is commonly at least one of the goals within the relevant class of actions. But it is worth noting that the just war family of approaches does not have this problem even if it seems to have others. It is probably evident from the foregoing that this reviewer is quite wedded to a just war approach. This does not, however, prevent me from appreciating a sophisticated study in the theory and ethics of non-state political violence, one that manages to illuminate it in a new and suggestive way. It is a worthy addition to the literature and I recommend it to scholars and students of international political theory, security studies and ethics. Christopher Finlay, University of Birmingham, UK The Routledge companion to UK counter-terrorism. Edited by Andrew Staniforth and Fraser Sampson. Abingdon: Routledge. 2013. 365pp. Index. £125.00. isbn 978 0 41568 585 6. Written by current British counterterror practitioner Andrew Staniforth, this text is intended to ensure ‘that counter-terrorism practice and the lessons we have learned must be captured in our organizational memory and passed from one generation of counterterrorism practitioners to the next’ (p. xxvi). Casting back to 1859, it rather serves as a 1320 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Conlict, security and defence history of the evolution of counterterrorism practice in the United Kingdom with a particular focus on the evolving roles of Special Branch and then the intelligence agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Drawing on interviews with key practitioners from across the agencies, the text ofers a rapid trip through British counterterrorism history from political violence in Ireland, through anarchists and other elements to the current threat from violent jihadist terrorists. Given the body of expertise it draws from it is not surprising that the book has a number of interesting nuggets from various terrorism cases over the years. Particularly interesting are the historical parallels that the book repeatedly throws up. For example, London’s underground system was irst targeted on 30 October 1883 by Irish Fenian terrorists, who detonated two devices, killing none but injuring 60 (p. 12). This was the beginning of a wider campaign that caused some limited loss of life, but highlighted the absence of any sort of informant network that the security services could rely on to alert them to possible incidents. As Staniforth repeatedly highlights, however, it is misjudged state responses to problems that have often helped lay the foundations for future problems. In the case of the Troubles, the decision to execute a number of activists led to their beatiication within the movement: a counter-reaction that exacerbates a threat (p. 36). This is something that repeatedly is seen within the context of the conlict in Northern Ireland and then suggested later in the struggle against Islamist terrorism, where allegations of torture and detention without trial are highlighted as ‘counter-productive to the aim of upholding the values of a liberal, pluralist democracy, and they damage conidence in security forces’ endeavours’ (p. 312). Even later in the book Staniforth highlights the problems with the Prevent strategy to counterterrorism in the UK—the key pillar of British eforts to prevent people from being drawn to terrorist narratives—and the current Conservative government’s interest in redrawing the policy. He quotes Home Secretary Theresa May: ‘the Prevent programme we inherited from the last government was lawed. It confused the delivery of government policy to promote integration with government policy to prevent terrorism’ (p. 333). Nevertheless, his conclusion about the strategy is a positive one: ‘Prevent had proved a vital point to Parliament and to the public: communities could defeat terrorism’ (p. 334). The book does not really come to any clear conclusions, nor does it aim to, intending as it is simply to be a reference book for understanding the evolution of British counterterrorism. But in concentrating so intently on the oicial narratives and the security services’ responses, we slightly miss the voice of either the communities or the terrorists themselves. Some of their stories are woven into the narrative quite efectively, but there is little evidence that many at the sharper end of the Prevent programme were engaged with in this oicial history. This is unfortunate, as it is possible that an added dimension is missed that might help explain why it is that Islamist terrorism emerged in the UK in the manner that it did. For example, there is not much mention of Bosnia and the conlict in the Balkans in the 1990s, a key battleield that helped open up radicalization in a British context and set in place a network that was to help nurture problems that expressed themselves repeatedly in subsequent years. There is also a confusing focus on the 11 September attacks—odd in that while it is true that more British citizens died in that incident than had in any previous terrorist incident, it was an event that took place in the United States and had a more direct impact on American counterterrorism than British. Of course it changed the operating environment for British counterterrorists, ofering them an apocalyptic vision of what the new 1321 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews generation of international terrorists were after, but it is unclear that a chapter on the 9/11 Commission (pp. 148−63) is necessary to explain the evolution of British counterterrorism. Very much an oicial history of British counterterrorism, this book ofers an easily accessible and well-supported vision of how British thinking on counterterrorism evolved. Crafted from interviews with a number of key government oicials and oicial texts, it will ofer the lay and informed reader with a detailed view of how Britain has developed its current counterterrorism strategy. Rafaello Pantucci, The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, UK Commercialising security in Europe: political consequences for peace operations. Edited by Anna Leander. Abingdon: Routledge. 2013. 228pp. Pb.: £25.99. isbn 978 0 41550 989 3. For the past decade, scholarship on military contracting has concentrated overwhelmingly on the United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain. This attention is not without good cause—the scale and scope of American security commercialization are sui generis among western militaries. But the Americans are not alone in the military outsourcing venture. Very quietly, European militaries have been integrating private military and security companies (PMSC) into their operations. Commercializing security in Europe sheds much needed light on this unexplored corner of the security market. The volume’s contributors deal with the political consequences of security commercialization in Europe as states grapple with their commitments to the Afghan mission and shrinking military budgets. It inds that there is no singular ‘European’ mode of security commercialization. Instead, what prevails is a spectrum of approaches, each informed by distinctive political contexts, practices and strategic cultures. In short, this collection takes a ‘varieties of contracting’ approach to security commercialization. Taking this approach makes for an important contribution to the literature on PMSCs. By shifting focus away from the Anglo-Saxon forms of military contracting, it opens the ield of study to continental practices and pays immediate dividends. It reveals that security commercialization in Europe is already well under way and that the market is characterized by multiple hybridized public−private security partnerships. As one contributor puts it, commercialization is not a question of ‘if ’ but rather ‘to what extent’. To explore this extent, the volume is organized around national contexts that inscribe meaning upon security contracting in Afghanistan, the actual practices of contracting, and the political consequences of these practices. There are three types of contextual analysis at work: institutional (state), structural (state location in the EU and NATO) and international (Afghan war). Institutionally, the principal focus is the historically inscribed rule framework within each country. The contributors compare the diferential historical practices (strategic cultures), legal/regulatory frameworks, and lexica—the generative grammars of security privatization. Variation is explored through nine national case-studies organized into three state-types. France, Germany and Italy are bundled together as states whose national contexts are inscribed by the World Wars, previous colonial ambitions and contemporary concern for the European security architecture. Denmark, Norway and Sweden form the Scandinavian contingent, marked by a strong welfarist imprint on the relationship between the state and the armed forces. Hungary, Romania and Poland are marked by their status as post-communist states with legacies of strong central state control over force and uncertainty surrounding 1322 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Political economy, economics and development national sovereignty. The unique characteristics of each context yield diferent pathways to contracting and regulation. Structurally, the contributions uncover the signiicance of each state’s location within the European Union and in NATO as a driver of commercialization. France, Germany and Italy seek to play leading roles in the alliance and turn to the private sector for technical capabilities and to reduce cost. Romania, Hungary and Poland seek to strengthen ties with the alliance, especially as a bulwark against Russian power. Denmark, Sweden and Norway have shifted towards closer integration within NATO, embracing multilateralism as a principle consistent with their respective strategic cultures. Internationally, the contributors observe the efects of participation in the Afghan conlict on approaches to security commercialization. Similar to the United States, their engagements in Afghanistan have accelerated the pace of contracting but in a largely improvised manner. In this sense, security commercialization came irst, followed by regulation. This sequence, the volume makes clear, is not widely acknowledged in Europe, where security commercialization is viewed as a state-initiated and directed process. Such misperceptions obscure the broader implications that states would be well advised to deal with. Hybrid security partnerships have long-term policy consequences for the organization and execution of international military operations. Among the many insights in the book is one unexpected revelation: security commercialization is as varied as it is inscrutable. A valuable point to this efect is made in the concluding chapter: conducting research on this subject is no easy task. There is very little publicly available information and policy-makers are not particularly forthcoming when confronted on the matter. Indeed, it is clear that European security commercialization is not a comfortable topic of conversation among policy-makers who tend to retreat to the safety of obfuscation under questioning. This stands in contrast to the United States, where military contracting, though still opaque, is publicly and vigorously debated among policymakers. In bringing these varieties of contracting to the fore, Commercialising security in Europe is entirely successful. Its comparative exploration of European military outsourcing reveals a set of valuable studies that expose underreported developments in the security market. Moreover, it sets a new research agenda for enquiries into national varieties of security contracting that will grow more pertinent with time. Aaron Ettinger, Queen’s University, Canada Political economy, economics and development The locust and the bee: predators and creators in capitalism’s future. By Geof Mulgan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2013. 335pp. Index. £19.95. isbn 978 0 69114 696 6. The Gospels teach us that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter Heaven. Virtually every major religion preaches against excessive accumulation of wealth, yet free trade, production and inance have made possible the aluence in which the world thrives—or to which it aspires. Modern capitalism can trace its roots to the trade and inancial innovations of Flanders and the Italian city-states in the thirteenth century, and reached its full lowering in the twentieth century, as it apparently triumphed over its ideological enemies. We accept capitalism as a given, rarely considering its nature, consequences or future development. The sorry record of shenanigans that led 1323 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews to the inancial crisis and great recession of 2007−2009 now forces us to rethink the meaning of capitalism. Geof Mulgan suggests that capitalism is anything but static and, because it is a dynamically evolving system, we need to ponder carefully where we want it to go and what we want it to do for us. The beauty of Mulgan’s analysis is its simplicity. Capitalism is both a creative and a predatory system, hence the titular images of productive worker bees and devouring locusts. Capitalism’s defenders are in continuous denial about recurrent predation, with the economic elite suggesting that inequality and wealth concentration are actually good for everyone. Mulgan begins with the recent inancial crisis, noting that there was no beginning, middle and end; instead it was a ‘series of seismic shocks’ (p. 17) with no single cause: greedy businessmen, global production−consumption imbalances, endemic inancial instability and the evolution of inance ‘further away from the real economy’ (p. 20). Adapting Fernand Braudel’s image of capitalism as a ‘series of layers built on top of the everyday market economy’ (p. 29), Mulgan employs the annual World Economic Forum meetings in Davos to illustrate capitalism’s hierarchical organization. These hierarchies are now world-wide in scope, resulting in a ‘stretched and disaggregated capitalism’ encompassing everyone from British designers and Chinese producers to Brazilian consumers (p. 31). But capitalism is also much more: it is a ‘single-minded pursuit of growth in value’ (p. 35), a moral desire to enhance productivity, a prop for the modern state and the embodiment of human freedom (for neo-liberals). Capitalism’s two opposed strategies for success mean creating new value by applying resources to human needs (the productive way), or by seizing resources or money from others (the predatory approach). Capitalism’s productivity is widely credited to efective educational development, cultures conducive to business and entrepreneurialism, efective institutions, technological creativity or spillover efects, and ubiquitous property rights. Predation arises from extraction of income via non-productive activities (‘rent-seeking’, p. 64), tendencies towards monopolies in various industries, or exploitation of workers. Capitalism’s critics have followed ive lines of attack: it gives power to the strong over the weak; destroys valuable traditions and values; promotes mindlessness; abets misery; and threatens life. Many of these critics have constructed post-capitalist utopias; Mulgan believes that, while useful as heuristic devices, most are unrealizable since they call for the sort of wholesale social changes that never happen all at once. The most intriguing chapters outline the ways that economic systems actually change. Mulgan suggests that Marxism’s focus on instabilities and contradictions within capitalism makes it a good starting point. Major drivers of recent change include demographic shifts that slow down growth by ageing the developed world, productivity improvement that ironically reduces industry’s share of the macroeconomy, and saturated consumption which leads people towards non-material interests; an even bigger challenge is environmental collapse. This new complexity suggests that overall change in the twenty-irst-century economy will be multifaceted, proceeding at a diferent pace in each ield. Four conservative forces nonetheless ensure that adjustments will follow a leisurely pace: the need to build eicient systems, the power of vested interests, the tendency of economic woman/ man to be a creature of habit, and relationships based on mutual commitment. All of these become unstuck during times of economic crisis, and people ‘peel away’ from their various commitments, seeking ‘new partners and allies’ (p. 136). Since the centres of power in the contemporary economy have become more difuse, conservative forces can now turn into change agents. Socio-political experimentation à la the New Deal, Mulgan insists, results in more constructive adaptations than does planned policy. Governments must choose 1324 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Political economy, economics and development to support creative scientiic impulses over predatory arrangements, since the emerging economy is based largely on relationships, less on making stuf, as shown by booms in health care, green industry and civil society. As a stimulus to thinking about the character of capitalism and its future direction, there is little for which to fault this book. Mulgan suggests ten ‘accommodations’ that can aid creation of a more humane capitalism (p. 230), but more attention could have been paid to the next step: having weathered the worst crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression, in the short term how do we return to the productive side and reform capitalism to make it more human-centred? How do we release the honey bees while restraining the locusts? Regulation, criminal codes and tax incentives traditionally have been among the most efective prods for altering economic behaviour. Let us begin by pruning regulations for small businesses (positively bees), while tightening them for the bad-boy inancial industry (deinitely locusts). Can we then comprehensively cut taxes for the kinds of economic behaviours that could be our salvation in this century, e.g. buying electric cars, recycling most of what we use, employing green technologies in most businesses, and saving at least a ifth of our incomes in interest-bearing bank accounts? After a century of remoulding capitalism, and using this book as a guide, maybe we can all crawl through an ever-widening eye of the needle. Joel Campbell, Troy University, Global Campus, Japan−Korea Symbolic power in the World Trade Organization. By Matthew Eagleton-Pierce. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 260pp. Index. £55.00. isbn 978 0 19966 264 7. In this thought-provoking book, Matthew Eagleton-Pierce argues that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is structured by relations of symbolic power, and that the variable mastery of the rules of the game creates a highly unlevel playing ield for member states and their Geneva representatives. Symbolic forms including systems of classiication, technical jargon and economic orthodoxy are key resources in a mostly hidden struggle for power and inluence. As Eagleton-Pierce puts it, ‘the most privileged WTO members draw upon a repertoire of methods in order to control other actors. For outsiders, however, these forms of power are not always directly observable. Some of these techniques may be viewed as “underhand”, “silent”, or “gestural”. Behind the Doha Declaration thus stands a whole other “declaration” of power relations’ (p. 2). The book contains two main parts. In chapters two and three, Eagleton-Pierce makes the case for his power-analytical approach. A concept drawn from the political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic power relies on justiication and legitimation claims based on systems of meaning, thus allowing relationships of domination to pass as something else. At the WTO, for instance, western countries deine what counts as orthodox and heterodox opinion on trade policy, an ‘act of magic’ that cloaks, to an extent, their domination of the bargaining and adjudication processes: ‘A power left unvarnished or naked is always vulnerable to critique and thus will tend to seek out ways to secure its own reproduction. These methods of justiication take a variety of forms in the WTO arena, including appeals to historical principles of political exchange, such as reciprocity; disciplinary systems of knowledge, such as neoclassical trade theory; as well as references to speciic rules and codes of conduct’ (p. 13). Chapters four and ive provide empirical illustrations of how symbolic power works at the WTO. The irst case tells the story of the Cotton 4, a group of poor African countries that sought to construct a ‘competitive victim frame’ in order to oppose western protectionism. Posing themselves as orthodox competitors, C4 sought to use the rules of 1325 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews the game in order to redeine the cotton trade dispute. This is a case of ‘how less-privileged actors … are able to engage with the techniques of legitimation that are prized in the WTO environment’ (p. 101). What is striking, however, is that in the end the C4 were defeated by the counter-frame produced by the United States and its allies, who successfully divided up cotton issues into trade-related and development-related aspects. The contributions of this book are many. In theoretical terms, it pushes the study of power in new directions. Eagleton-Pierce’s greatest achievement lies in showing how Bourdieu’s symbolic power supplements Foucault’s discursive power by bringing agency back in. Further, this book joins a small but important body of literature that approaches political economy from a political sociology perspective. On a more critical note, the book at times errs in how it locates its theoretical contribution in the larger literature about power. To take one example, Eagleton-Pierce’s critique of materialism, by which power stems from market capacity (e.g. Richard Steinberg), is correct but uncontroversial. By comparison, engaging with Randall Stone’s Controlling institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2011) might have been more productive. Stone argues that market shares are key in providing bargaining leverage, but he also shows ( just like Eagleton-Pierce) how power works through informal governance at the WTO. Put diferently, the key contending explanation here is not materialism or idealism, but rational choice and its functionalist explanation of institutional design. Finally, the book is slightly disappointing in terms of the methods it employs and the empirical materials it draws on. As regards the former, ‘process tracing’ is invoked (p. 21) but what this catch-all entails in actual research practice remains obscure. It is also not clear how the information collected in the 37 interviews was analysed and used. When it comes to data, they mainly consist of written texts, with little in the way of artefacts or non-verbal gestures, for instance. In a sense, this is itting, because Eagleton-Pierce, like Bourdieu, insists on the importance of language in symbolic power. But it also points to a daunting challenge for practice-theoretical studies of world politics, to get access to the action loor and apprehend what is going on, for instance inside the WTO’s so-called Green Room. Diplomacy, with its secrecy, forms a particularly vexing object for the would-be ethnographer. In that sense, Eagleton-Pierce’s book reminds us that if practice theory is to lourish in International Relations, it will need to cope with fundamental methods and data limitations sooner rather than later. Vincent Pouliot, McGill University, Canada From miracle to maturity: the growth of the Korean economy. By Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins and Kwanho Shin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2012. 382pp. £29.95. isbn 978 0 67406 675 5. From one of the poorest economies on the planet 50 years ago, to a middle-income country, a member of the OECD, and home to some of the world’s leading industrial corporations— there is no denial that the economic trajectory of South Korea has been a remarkable success story. Why, then, are so many Koreans less than satisied with their country’s economic performance? Is it because of the continuing inancial volatility and slower growth since the Korean economic crisis of 1997−1998? How can structural change explain such deeprooted angst? Is the economy really underperforming? Or is this slowdown the natural consequence of the newly found maturity of the Korean economy? From miracle to maturity is part of the multivolume study Rising to the challenges of democratization and globalization in Korea, 1987−2007. Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins and 1326 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Political economy, economics and development Kwanho Shin ofer a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of the sources of growth of the Korean economy, concentrating on the standard neo-classical factors (growth of the labour force, the stock of capital and productivity). They look at South Korea’s 50-year transformation from poverty to aluence in a new way—through data they believe show what the country must do next. The bottom line—growth still matters more than welfare and redistribution of income—runs somehow against the mode that permeated the 2012 presidential campaign. On that occasion, both the centre-right and the centre-left candidates suggested making certain sectors of the economy the preserve of small enterprises; on the other hand, one of the book’s basic recommendations is for the government to retreat and stop picking winners and losers. Crucial to the authors’ recommendations is enhanced liberalization in the service sector, where two-thirds of employment is. Korea is a middle- to high-income country and that proportion is going to go up over time, so raising productivity is the factor that will determine whether the country lurches along at 3 per cent annual growth or boosts itself up to the 4−6 per cent range. There are some signs of entrepreneurs springing up around the edges outside the chaebol, but nurturing an entrepreneurial ecosystem will be a challenge. Reducing dependence on exports, attracting foreign investment and liberalizing service markets—achieving these goals would be an enormous success. In Korea people criticize the prescriptive rule-setting regime of the 1960 and 1970s and the large conglomerates it unleashed to do whatever they want—and yet in 2012 voted for a president who is closely associated with those economic policies. To complicate this delicate balancing act, people blame deregulation for the 1997 crisis and its painful cost, as well as for the inability of the post-crisis recovery to generate enough stable jobs. At the same time, history teaches us that fundamental reorientations of policy rarely occur without crises to prompt them. The inancial crisis in the United States and elsewhere has made it clear that competition and consumer protection laws are at least as important as privatization and liberalization. Having a clear, coherent discussion about how to protect the interests of consumers is a very diicult thing to do in Asia, where growth has been promoted by keeping currency down at the expense of consumers. What about the risk of South Korea failing to reform and innovate, and becoming a stagnant economy like Japan’s? The authors do not really delve into this scenario, maybe considering that it is really hard to do an awful lot of things wrong all at the same time. In fact, short of getting into the mess that Japan got itself into, Korea may not succeed in boosting productivity in the service sector signiicantly—and yet achieve growth of 3 per cent a year that is in line with the best-performing OECD economies and considerably in excess of what other countries have done after reaching per capita GDPs of $20,000. This is an important book, making a very persuasive case for wide-ranging reforms. It understandably leaves unanswered a number of questions concerning implementation, how to change attitudes towards the chaebol, inward foreign direct investment and women. Hopefully, these will be addressed in the forthcoming overview volume to the series. Andrea Goldstein, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris 1327 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews Energy, environment and global health Land. By Derek Hall. Cambridge: Polity. 2013. 204pp. Index. Pb.: £12.99. isbn 978 0 74565 277 1. Derek Hall’s evocatively titled volume, Land, provides a very good introduction to and overview of the ‘transnational politics of land’ in the early twenty-irst century. Hall argues that because of land’s immobility, the heterogeneity of its uses and values, its indispensability for all human activity, and the facts that it is often rented and strong cultural identities are tied to it, analytical frameworks normally used in studies of resource politics are inappropriate for studying the political economy of land. He ofers an alternative explanation of contemporary land politics along three analytical axes: land as territory, land as property and the regulation of land transactions. On land as territory, Hall argues that advances in geographical knowledge and mapping practices in the ifteenth century made it possible to create political units with clearly deined borders. Later, nationalism created new territorial units, and also motivated their fragmentation into newer national units. Warfare remained a key legitimate mode of acquiring territory both within Europe and in the rest of world as empires and colonies, where novel entities like the East India Company held leases of sovereignty over some of these territories. European global expansion homogenized bordering practices worldwide. While Hall’s historical account of the changes in international territorial politics is welcome, he omits a discussion of international law. Also, while promising earlier a transnational account of land politics, he limits himself to questions of its international aspects. Hall notes that after the Second World War and decolonization the number of states increased sharply. But war lost its salience as the chief way to establish control over territory. Indeed, since 1975 no territorial redistribution has resulted from war. Instead, secession and state breakup have become the common routes for forming new nation-states. Hall argues that wars have declined in salience because of nuclear deterrence and US dominance, the numerous international treaties and institutions that provide mediation, and the UN’s peacekeeping and peacebuilding actions. For Hall, capitalism causes decline in wars over territory, as it fully separates ownership of land from rule over it. State wealth now is measured on not agricultural but industrial output. In capitalist democracies, war is no longer a preferred mode to gain personal status. Besides, Hall argues, territorial conquest today is costly and unnecessary. Instead, dominant states ensure that other sovereign states are amenable to their interests, and are engaged in projects of ‘strengthening’ weak or failed states to that end. Disputes over homeland, frontier and ofshore territories persist, sometimes motivated by international treaties like UNCLOS, which gives sovereign rights to states over a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) inclusive of all mineral or marine wealth. What is also new, Hall notes, is that today non-state entities, for example indigenous peoples, are involved in territorial disputes, making exclusive or prior claims without forming states. This chapter combines standard International Relations theory with some counter-intuitive insights, but it does not elaborate on the categories of disputes considered in any detail. Also, the author’s omission of the question of control over territory for resources, such as oil or other minerals, occludes a fuller exploration of the point about capitalism’s role in reducing the role of war in the politics of territorial control. Hall next examines how states exert control over frontiers. He argues that while states try to ‘settle’ them, and deploy surveillance over them, frontiers are sites of ‘transnational 1328 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. International history life’ and beyond the control of states whose capacities have been already diminished by structural adjustment programmes. Hall’s arguments here would have been aided by an explication earlier of what he means by ‘transnational’. On ongoing ‘land booms’, Hall identiies complex networks of actors, institutions, policies and discourses regulating land acquisition and use, in which the domestic and transnational are enmeshed. This is the strongest chapter in the book in terms of analyses and arguments. As exemplars of projects justiied on the ‘will to improve’, Hall explores the politics of ‘titling’ and conservation. Titling means the recognition by the state of full formal property rights—including rights to sell and to exclude others—over land, and is popular among policy-makers as it is seen to clarify land rights, give tenure security, enable the title holder to use it as collateral for loans, and make transactions easier. Importantly, it makes land rights legible to states. Conservation projects, too, invoke the will to improve, following new moral imperatives to save nature worldwide. Hall surveys some ‘fortress’ models of conservation that exclude humans, as well as some of community-based management. In either case a transnational assemblage is in evidence. In reality, however, conservation areas are often ‘paper parks’; that is, they exist on paper but do not actually have the limits to use prescribed by the law. The book ends with an account of the movements of those who are losing access to land as a result of the processes described above, speciically indigenous peoples and small farmers. Hall makes this set of connected arguments, steering clear of the jargon that often characterizes writings on the subject. The book is accessible and informative, and takes an approach that is unique in its focus on territory, regulation and property. Inevitably, a short and concise book will be unable to cover the whole panoply of issues connected to the transnational politics of land, and indeed Hall anticipates possible criticisms by stating in the introduction that his focus is land, not mining and resource extraction, or speciic conlicts over territory. Yet one did expect more on agriculture, including plantations and contract farming, from a book with this title. Finally, a more explicit discussion of transnationality as a structuring concept for the book might have helped sharpen the arguments. Subir Sinha, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK International history The undivided past: history beyond our diferences. By David Cannadine. London: Allen Lane. 2013. 340pp. Index. £20.00. isbn 978 1 84614 132 4. David Cannadine’s The undivided past is an admonition of a range of histories and historians over the last few centuries. The targets of his invitation to write history beyond our diferences are the ‘big name’ historians who have conceptually advanced or moved the historiography in particular directions. Their theses last because they speak to a particular concern at a particular time. Whether it is a Gibbon, a Toynbee or a Huntington, whether a Braudel, Bloch or Febvre, or Hegel or Marx, whether an E. P. Thompson or Eric Hobsbawm, or the numerous other historians and philosophers that have shaped certain ways of knowing, they are targets of this book because they have created a variety of ‘truth regimes’. That is, they deal with dominating discourses that have shaped and inluenced various structures of thought. They are popular because their concepts are accessible; they remain in memory and resonate in discourse beyond the internecine, sophisticated and nuance that is brought to much history that lies beyond the popular scope. Each of these and many others 1329 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews in Cannadine’s book have come to represent a concept that relates the story of division: the chapters low accordingly, covering the story of historians and religion, nation, class, gender, race and civilization—perhaps the highest form of identity politics which has been much to the fore since 9/11, when the discourse in the United States latched back onto Huntington’s 1993 thesis on the ‘clash of civilizations’. As Cannadine relates, the book investigates the ‘most resonant forms of human solidarity’ centred on the six concepts listed above. These narratives, according to Cannadine, have been instrumental in shaping and forming antagonisms throughout history, exempliied in its most simplistic form in the language of George W. Bush’s rhetoric on ‘us versus them’. Each, as Cannadine also recounts, rests on a ‘shared narrated memory’ and frequently historians are thus serving the interests and the objectives of the powerful and those who seek to perpetuate these diferences and the hostility associated with them. The irst chapter on religion sets up the story from the third century ce of Mani, whose conceptual division of the world gave rise to the term Manichaean. Cannadine cites many who deplore the simplicities associated with these divisions and sets out to tell a history that moves beyond them to emphasize the common human story and the commonalities that exist between the periods of hostility and stark contrast. Those who emphasize the common, Cannadine argues, tend towards the philosophical rather than the historical and write about more recent periods rather than the distant past. Cannadine seeks to redress the imbalance as he sees it; to write ‘from a longer-term historical perspective’. Through the six concepts he seeks to draw ‘attention to the excessive and inaccurate claims that have invariably been made for them in terms of their unity, homogeneity, and shared consciousness’ (p. 7). He seeks to move between and across these boundaries to investigate the interactions and the shared humanity and concerns that exist throughout the periods and eras of history: ‘The real world is not binary—except insofar as it is divided into those who insist that it is and those who know that it is not’ (p. 9). It is a book that has to be admired in terms of the breadth of its scope, its style and its study of the engagement and interaction between the big ideas and histories of the West and the stories of transcendence and interaction. Of course, history is not constantly characterized by conlict and division. Of course, there are periods when these concepts are brought to the fore for particular purposes and provide useful narratives that explain essential conlicts that have animated history from the religious clashes, through to nationalist antagonisms, to wealth, poverty and class warfare within the nation and globally and so forth. Yet the common humanity that Cannadine also seeks to address seems to be somewhat of an aspiration and an imaginary igment. Perhaps Hobsbawm centred his ‘age of extremes’ on the short twentieth century, but the period before and after, though relatively less divided, still exhibits division, extremism and exclusive narration on each of the concepts. Moreover, a good deal of history is also and simultaneously breaking down the simplicities of some of the conceptual regimes of truth. Historians examine the intellectual ammunition and the cultural production that perpetuates these diferences. Though one might admire the sweep of the thesis, and though there are exceptions within the ‘undivided past’ that provide a ‘history beyond our diferences’, the book might have moved beyond the dominance of western historiography and included historians that populate the works of Georg Iggers, Edward Wang and Supriya Mukherjee. Their Global history of modern historiography (Pearson Education, 2008) demonstrates the wide historiographical diferences and methods in the West (also considered as a fragmented entity), the Middle East, India, East and South-East Asia and China, from Islamic historiography to Confucian historiography. In works such as this you are provided with a rich variety of 1330 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. International history historical voices, as opposed to the criticism Cannadine levels at mainly western voices. If there was a search for a common humanity, historiographical inclusion might have helped to tell a more all-embracing story. David Ryan, University College Cork, Ireland The emergence of international society in the 1920s. By Daniel Gorman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. 387pp. Index. £60.00. isbn 978 1 10702 113 6. Available as e-book. During the last couple of decades historians of international political thought have presented us with a rich and multifaceted account of the intellectual history of early and mid-twentieth-century internationalism. In doing so, they have challenged—without fully displacing—conventional narratives that caricatured the thinkers (and many of the political actors) of the era as wildly optimistic idealists, notable chiely for being on the wrong side of history. Less well charted, however, has been the complex interaction between internationalist ideologies and the plethora of international organizations and transnational movements which emerged after the First World War. It is thus a pleasure to read Daniel Gorman’s illuminating discussion of the emergence of international society. It will be of value to those studying both the history of international thought and international/world history. Gorman, whose previous book Imperial citizenship (Manchester University Press, 2006), ofered a valuable analysis of ideas about political belonging in Edwardian imperial discourse, seeks to establish that internationalism ‘came of age’—as a set of practices and ideas—during the 1920s. Drawing loosely on Hedley Bull’s notion of ‘international society’, he argues that ‘the concept emerged to underwrite the international peace and functional cooperation projects of the 1920s’, and that it reconceptualized pre-First World War internationalism ‘as a more robust vision of international relations at the nexus of supra-state, state, and sub-state politics’ (p. 16). In the ensuing chapters, Gorman ofers a compelling and richly documented argument to back up this claim. The book is based on a prodigious amount of research, deploying a vast trove of primary materials to great efect. Gorman also makes a valuable methodological move—an attempt to mediate between intellectual history (focused on the analysis of texts) and diplomatic/political history (largely focused on state archives and governments). While cognizant of developments in both during the period under investigation, he concentrates on ‘political middle-men’ (and women) and their interlocutors—‘thoughtful pragmatists, and pragmatic thinkers who acted in the space between academic politic theory and the sturm und drang of party politics’ (p. 10) and international organizations. He places a particular emphasis on non-state actors: associations, voluntary organizations, pressure groups and individual activists. This research strategy allows him to write subtle accounts of how ideas, individuals, institutions and publics interacted in often unpredictable ways. Gorman traces two main vectors for the propagation and institutionalization of international society—what he terms ‘imperial internationalism’, which concentrates on the ‘internationalization’ of the British Empire (the impact of empire on internationalism and vice versa) and the role of Anglo-American ideas and institutions in shaping internationalism. One of the great strengths of the book is Gorman’s analysis of the intersection of imperialism and internationalism, a topic that remains only partially understood. Gorman ranges across an impressive array of examples. To track the circuits of imperial internationalism, in the chapters in section one he discusses the shifting nature of metropole–dominion 1331 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews relations after 1918, the role of the inluential administrator Rachel Crowdy at the League of Nations, human traicking, debates over imperial citizenship, and the role of sporting competitions within the Empire. Section two, dedicated to Anglo-American internationalism, traces visions of international society emanating from public intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1920s, the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, and attempts to outlaw war (culminating in the Kellogg– Briand Pact). Cumulatively, Gorman makes a strong case for seeing in their manifold activities the expansion and deepening (albeit uneven and fragile) of an international civil society. As well as a richly documented historical narrative, Gorman peppers the text with a number of theoretical claims. For example, he suggests that interwar internationalism, in contrast to prewar geopolitics, was premised on a ‘de-territorialization of world politics’ and that ‘the path to international peace lay in separating politics from spatial ordering’ (p. 9). These ideas are certainly suggestive, but Gorman does not spend enough time defending them—or elaborating their presuppositions or implications—to make a fully convincing case. They do, though, ofer interesting hypotheses for future research. Overall, then, this is an impressive piece of scholarship. Its chief value lies in deepening our understanding of the social, cultural and political dynamics of interwar Anglo-American internationalism, and in particular the role of empire within it. It is well written, clearly argued and exhaustively researched, and serves as an example of how to write historically about the intersection of political ideas and institutions. Duncan Bell, University of Cambridge, UK Securing the world economy: the reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920−1946. By Patricia Clavin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 400pp. Index. £65.00. isbn 978 0 19957 793 4. This volume comes out of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford, and from one of a group of scholars (which includes Anne Deighton and Martin Ceadel) dedicated to the interwar social movements and to the obscure bits of the League. Dedicated not so much to revisionist history, although there is plenty of that in the volume, but to relevant history, they are concerned with the growth, reinement and institutionalization of international cooperation during the interwar period. Patricia Clavin not only reminds us, but brings it home with a precision and detail that highlights but also clariies how most of the areas on which the United Nations prides itself for its progress, such as health, drugs, protection of women and children, agriculture and food provision, were well advanced, were already recognized for their salience and were protected by their relocation at the end of 1940 to Princeton where they became the basis for the specialized agencies of the United Nations. She also reveals something that we all know but whose signiicance has somehow eluded us: that the League was the centre for almost all intellectual eforts dedicated to economic and social (and even political) reform of the global order during the interwar period. Everyone who mattered in the intellectual landscape of internationalism was in Geneva or came to Geneva, and the secretariat of the League’s Economic and Financial Organisation kept the records of and evaluated almost every plan for economic, political and even social reform. The accounts that will most stir in the present climate are the Economic and Financial Organisation’s attempts during the 1920s to combine diferent national wage levels with a more open international trading order; the preparations for the World Financial and Economic Conference of 1933, where the Economic and Financial Sections had to grapple 1332 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. International history with the fact that it was ‘in countries where distress is greatest’ (then in Central and Eastern Europe) that ‘interest rates had to remain high and their balance of payments brought into equilibrium’; and the discussions, increasingly intense from late 1935, that the purposes of war prevention ‘could perhaps be more readily and efectively served by the consolidation of peace than by the repression of violence’. The most dramatic are the accounts of Secretary General Avenol’s desperate (though wrong-headed and even perverse) attempts to retain a universalist League and to prevent the League from becoming an instrument of the coming Anglo-American alliance during 1940, and the League staf ’s eventual lights to Lisbon and Princeton. There are so many insights that it is impossible to do justice to them all. First, Clavin makes it clear from the historical record that the League’s economic and social functions, so important in the revised structure of the UN, were not the antidote to political quarrels as so often assumed, nor were they intended as such—they were political. Increasingly, as the League failed to avert hostilities among the Great Powers, its economic and social functions came to be seen by the League functionaries as the basis for reorienting the League on a popular basis. Second, in respect of the Bruce Report and the genesis of the functional model of international organization often attributed to it, she demonstrates that Loveday and Bruce ‘consistently rejected any notion of an autonomous economic and inancial organization’ (p. 249). The third, so frequently ignored in present studies of global governance, is the degree to which the League was conined not only by individual Great Power policies (for example, the refusal of the British Treasury between 1933 and 1939 to entertain inancial reforms without a resolution of war debts) but also by the pattern of Great Power relations. (Vichy, for example, refused to become a new ‘home’ for the League, as Avenol seems to have hoped in the dark days of late 1940, because of its delicate status as a defeated but not occupied power.) Fourth, and particularly important for any account of the contribution of interwar institutionalized international cooperation to the postwar period, and against the popular wisdom, Britain, its allies and the United States believed it ‘essential to maintain the League as a basis of whatever co-operative international efort is built up after the war’ (p. 265); and the degree to which the move to Princeton dynamized the ‘specialised agencies’ of the League and the (large) contribution they made to the new structures of the United Nations. This book is a major contribution not just to the history of international organization in the twentieth century, but to an understanding of the actual social and political processes that underpinned the amazing leap into institutionalized international relations witnessed by its second half. Cornelia Navari, University of Buckingham, UK Stalin’s curse: battling for communism in war and Cold War. By Robert Gellately. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 477pp. Index. £20.00. isbn 978 0 19966 804 5. Available as e-book. Stalin’s curse, by the distinguished Florida State University historian Robert Gellately, is the latest and most comprehensive history of Stalin and the Cold War to appear since the sporadic opening in the early 1990s of the Russian archives on the Soviet period. Gellately covers the period of the Stalin revolution in the late 1920s and 1930s, his chess game with Hitler, leadership at war, mastery of the Grand Alliance, and his conduct of the Cold War, which is at the core of the book’s narrative. Gellately ranges widely, including Soviet domestic history, as well as Soviet−American relations, China, Korea, and West and East European confrontations and crises. What, after all, is ‘Stalin’s curse’? The terrible legacy 1333 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews the dictator left behind him in a country and a region still recovering from his policies and his ideology (Stalinism). To scholars of the Cold War, much of Gellately’s text is familiar; the materials he uses are well worked through. Topics like ‘the percentages agreement’, the Marshall Plan, the Yugoslav split, the Berlin Blockade, and the origins of the Korean War have a rich and well-developed historiography. But Gellately is an unusually engaging writer and an acute observer, so the book should reach a wide audience of interested readers. When confronting controversial questions he invariably demonstrates sound judgement and a willingness to allow for multiple interpretations. He also reads prodigiously and wisely in the secondary literature, including the important recent Russian historiography of the Cold War. This is not a book driven by archives—his story is too all-encompassing for that. But Gellately may be the irst historian studying the Soviet side of the Cold War who has made such broad use of online archival sources, plus the rich document collections published on the Soviet Union and the Cold War since the turn of the century. It would have been advisable to include a short section on how he used (and cited) online archival materials, something that will become increasingly important to historians of this and other periods of twentiethcentury international history. Gellately’s primary emphasis is on the crucial role of ideology in motivating Stalin and the Soviet leadership in their policies towards the threat of Hitler, the Second World War and the Cold War. In Gellately’s view, Stalin’s actions derived neither from traditional national security concerns nor from a resuscitated ‘imperial paradigm’. When Stalin spoke of Soviet ‘security interests’, this was nothing more than ‘a mask, behind which he concealed his ideological and political ixations’ (p. 66). Gellately sees Stalin launching a ‘Communist ideological ofensive’ in 1939 and following through on his determination to spread communism as far as possible throughout the period (p. 10). The Nazi−Soviet Pact can be seen in this perspective, as can Stalin’s periodic concessions to the western Allies during the wartime negotiations at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. At these meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin, despite his ostensible readiness to compromise, held nothing but pure ‘contempt for them’ (p. 81). Gellately also believes that Stalin’s support of national roads to socialism in Eastern Europe after the war was simply a smokescreen for his real goal of integrating the region into a permanent Soviet-dominated communist empire: ‘It was strictly a transition stage to quiet the fears of his Western Allies as well as the local population’ (p. 13). This period lasts only until the Soviet insistence on East European rejection of the Marshall Plan; Gellately argues that ‘by rejecting the Marshall Plan, the Soviets in efect lung open the doors to the Cold War’ (p. 305). Although his attempt to demonstrate the ideological determinants of Stalin’s policies needs to be balanced by a consideration of Stalin’s thoroughgoing attachment to realpolitik, determination to regain the former territories of the Russian Empire, and willingness to sacriice the interests of world communism to those of the Soviet state, Gellately is open-minded and not at all dogmatic in examining speciic cases of Soviet policy-making. Gellately episodically ofers some tantalizing revisions to the historiography of the Cold War, though sometimes they are rather perfunctory and pose more questions than they answer. For example, he believes that Truman was ‘far from the cold warrior he is often depicted to be’, and that the so-called Truman Doctrine should not be interpreted as an escalation of Cold War rhetoric (p. 197). This may or may not be the case, but he does not give us much material to evaluate the counter-argument. He indicates that Stalin was ‘hopeful about a Red future for Austria’, which contradicts much of the recent Austrian scholarship and documentary publications on the subject (p. 294). And he interprets Stalin’s 1334 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. International history postwar anti-Semitism in the light of Stalin’s worries about Jews becoming objects of world sympathy, threatening ‘the very identity of his idealized “Soviet citizen”’, which strikes me as unlikely, not to mention diicult to prove (p. 192). But these kinds of issues are very rare in this lively, interesting and reliable history. This is a well-done book, one that should satisfy the interests of non-specialists, students and the general public in the subject-matter. Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University, USA In search of power: African Americans in the era of decolonization, 1956−1974. By Brenda Gayle Plummer. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. 372pp. Index. Pb.: £19.99. isbn 978 1 10765 471 6. Brenda Plummer’s In search of power—a sequel, albeit with some overlap, to her earlier book, Rising wind: black Americans and US foreign afairs, 1935−1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)—considers the imprint of African Americans on domestic and foreign afairs during a period that witnessed a major transformation in the international system occasioned by the drawn-out decolonization of Africa and the Caribbean. The parameters of the study are delimited, not by events in the standard US chronology, but by a secret all-male conclave at Capahosic, Virginia, in March 1956 of conservative-minded African Americans concerned at the popular mobilization involved in the burgeoning civil rights movement and by the holding in June 1974 of the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam, which revealed not dissimilar tensions over the statism of newly independent African states and the popular participation espoused by radicals, eager to confront the last bastions of white supremacy in southern Africa. Employing a mix of primary research in the personal papers of leading African American players, interviews, unpublished dissertations and the abundant secondary literature on discrete topics, this panoramic work provides a unique marriage between strands in the African American experience that have usually been analysed separately. Plummer demonstrates how the civil rights struggle was intertwined with the promise of decolonization and how both eventuated in a degree of disillusionment at the end of the period in question over the partial nature of what had been achieved. She stresses throughout the diversity of African American responses: the diferent stances of ‘integrationists’ and ‘nationalists’ towards the legislative ending of segregation and persisting socioeconomic inequalities thereafter; and the shifting and uncertain attitude towards individual African countries as the 1960s progressed—the conidence reposed in Nkrumah’s Ghana in the late 1950s, the subsequent appeal of the non-Marxist African socialism practised in Tanzania, the inability to identify with the Algerian revolution and the confusion caused by the Nigerian civil war after 1967 following the secession of Biafra. The author discusses a number of subjects that have not hitherto been accorded much salience in the literature. She retrieves the history of black nationalist activities in the 1950s— including the continuing existence (until the early 1960s) of a back-to-Africa movement— that have been subsumed by the integrationist politics of the civil rights movement. Conversely, she argues that African American history in the 1970s cannot be understood ‘solely through the lens of radical organizations’ (p. 270), such as the Black Panthers. The rarely noted protests in 1959 against France’s nuclear tests in the Sahara, she also claims, marked ‘the arrival of Africans as conscious stakeholders in global politics’ (p. 83). Plummer ranges broadly within the conines of each chapter, moving sometimes quite abruptly from purely internal developments to the external dimension. Chapter six, for instance, encompasses a discussion of the growing fascination with Tanzania, the 1335 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews connection between African Americans and Europeans, the revived interest among some African Americans in Marxist prescriptions as a result of continued overt racism, the US state’s internal monitoring of black radicals, the attitude of the Canadian authorities towards them, the impact of the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney, and pan-African culture. Plummer throughout the work collates a diverse and fascinating range of sub-topics that will doubtless propel the reader in pursuit of further detail—the littleknown existence of a Black Panther Party of Israel; and race and gender discrimination at NASA, for example. In respect of the latter, it should be noted that the author is not at all shy about taking African American men to task over gender issues. Readers hoping to learn from this book something about the civil rights struggle per se will be disappointed, as the author’s treatment of it is rather cursory; that story has of course been well told elsewhere. More puzzlingly, the author does not have much to say about the attitude of African Americans towards the process of decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean beyond noting the widespread discontent felt by the 1970s over the lack of systemic change, ignoring entirely ongoing racial tensions in British Guiana in which there was surreptitious US involvement; in fact, she evinces more interest in race relations in the Dominican Republic prior to and during the 1965 US military intervention. Surprisingly too, given the symbolism of Haiti’s struggle for independence and Plummer’s authorship of an earlier work on US−Haitian relations, we learn nothing about the attitude of African Americans towards the consolidation of the Duvalier dictatorship in the late 1950s and its confrontation with the Kennedy administration during the early 1960s. Judicious in its assessments, passionately written and with some memorable turns of phrase, Plummer has brought together a lot of information from disparate sources to provide a well-etched portrait of a particularly turbulent era in African American history. Philip Chrimes Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960−1965. By Lise Namikas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2013. 350pp. Index. £50.95. isbn 978 0 80478 486 3. This substantial new study, which traces the Soviet and US struggle over the Congo from its independence in 1960 to Mobutu’s second coup in 1965, makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the reasons behind the ‘abuse of power and … sufering’ (p. 223) of the Congolese people. Until recently, historical studies of the Congo have relied heavily— often exclusively—on sources from the US and the former European colonizers of Africa. But in Battleground Africa, Lise Namikas presents and analyses a range of new information that has recently emerged from the former communist world, including newly released oicial documents in Moscow and Berlin. It is not easy to write clearly on the history of the Congo: there are so many threads, so many actors, and so many diferent political interests. But Namikas marshals her material well. She makes intelligent use of sub-headings and brings key actors and situations alive through careful detail. Nikita Khrushchev’s down-to-earth style of diplomacy, she explains, appealed to many African leaders because they were tired of the pageantry of imperialism (p. 29). ‘Stinky’, she writes, was the code name for Patrice Lumumba in discussions in the US National Security Council. At times in the book, the Cold War framework seems absolute—as if the conlict between the superpowers explains everything. This has a tendency to diminish other key factors in the Congo crisis, such as the determination of whites in the region to hold on to power. ‘In another of his classic misjudgements’, writes Namikas, the Prime Minister of 1336 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Europe the neighbouring Central African Federation, Roy Welensky, ‘sided with Katanga’ (p. 151). But this was not a misjudgement: for Katanga was key to the plan of white supremacists to put up a barrier against the tide of African nationalism, sweeping down from the north of the continent. This barrier, stretching between Portuguese-ruled Angola and Mozambique and including the Federation, was a putative Berlin Wall in a diferent kind of war: a race war. But it had important links with the Cold War, because much of the rhetoric that was used to justify white rule in Africa was dressed up as a ight against the evil of communism. Today there is great and growing interest in the role of China in Africa and many assume this role is new. To this topic, Namikas makes an important contribution. For she instructively reminds us that China is not a new player on the scene, but has been in Africa for a long time. She outlines the growing cooperation between Asia and Africa, which was reinforced at the irst Afro-Asian conference of 1955 in Bandung; she also observes that the Sino-Soviet competition over Africa ‘was not marginal, but central to their respective agendas’ (p. 15). Namikas writes movingly of the assassination in 1961 of the irst democratically elected leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, rightly observing that the jury is still out on the extent of US-Belgian cooperation. She also gives attention to another death that year which played a key role in the Congo crisis—that of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia. But here, Namikas makes some mistakes. For example, she writes that the plane crashed into the side of a mountain (p. 152); in fact, it was an ant-hill. ‘There is evidence’, she asserts, ‘that the crash was an accident, perhaps a faulty map or landing instructions’ (p. 153). But no such evidence has emerged at any time. In an endnote, Namikas comments: ‘The fact that the crash had occurred in British colonial territory aroused suspicion of a British connection. But since Hammarskjöld was negotiating a cease-ire, the British would have little reason to become involved in his death’ (p. 295, note 71). Yet this conlates the British government in London with the Federal government in Salisbury; in fact, they diverged and overlapped in complicated ways. It also assumes that a ceaseire must necessarily be a good thing; but as Hammarskjöld was keenly aware, it was not so much a ceaseire that was important, as the terms on which a ceaseire would be agreed. As it turned out, the ceaseire reached just days after Hammarskjöld’s death was efectively a victory for Tshombe, the Belgian-backed leader of the Katangan secession. In her conclusion, Namikas comments on the damaging legacy of the Cold War—‘its thinking, prescriptions, and excuses, all in the name of combating the single evil of communism’. Subsequent war-making ‘against another “ism” (terrorism)’, she warns, ‘could easily degenerate into another era of illegal and immoral actions’ (p. 224). Sadly, she has already been proved right. Susan Williams, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, UK Europe Shaping Europe: France, Germany, and embedded bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to twenty-irst century politics. By Ulrich Krotz and Joachim Schild. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 368pp. Index. £55.00. isbn 978 0 19966 008 7. Franco-German relations remain the most important bilateral partnership in the EU. Ulrich Krotz and Joachim Schild’s new book puts the spotlight on how France and Germany have sought to build institutional cooperation and preserve a largely shared vision of the centrality of European integration. What this book demonstrates most efectively is how 1337 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews despite often diverging interests, a long-term institutionalized relationship between France and Germany has been maintained. Krotz and Schild base their argument on what they term ‘embedded bilateralism’. Their model seeks to highlight how Franco-German relations based primarily on the Elysée Treaty of 1963 have been institutionalized to the extent that their cooperation has become a relexive aspect of French and German politics, irrespective of government make-up. By highlighting how France and Germany have fostered political, economic and cultural ties they then demonstrate how this has enabled the two states to shape the direction of the European Union. As Krotz and Schild point out, bilateral studies have been few and far between as analysis of European integration has shifted to a focus on Brussels decision-making. There have been relatively few book-length studies of Franco-German relations, despite its centrality to many of the decisions which have shaped the EU. Thomas Pedersen’s 1998 study, Germany, France and the integration of Europe (Pinter, reviewed in International Afairs 75: 3), made the compelling argument that Germany and France exercised cooperative hegemony in the EU due to their political and economic strength and close cooperation. Krotz and Schild’s timely book suggests that perhaps the greatest challenge to the future of this relationship is a growing asymmetry between the two partners since the emergence of the euro crisis. The perception that German hegemony is deining the Eurozone has the potential to unsettle Franco-German cooperation. Few states have managed to break up the exclusivity of the Franco-German tandem. Bodo Hombach’s and Peter Mandelson’s attempts to forge closer ties between Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder ultimately failed to provide a framework for a concerted long-term relationship. Neither has the Weimar Triangle of France, Germany and Poland taken on the depth of commitments which Berlin and Paris have made to one another. Krotz and Schild outline how the depth and range of consultations between France and Germany has developed resilience in the relationship. Krotz and Schild make a powerful argument within the book that institutions matter, which should make their study of great interest to scholars of European integration and International Relations. The institutional links which Krotz and Schild outline have been central to how Franco-German relations have been able to adapt to changing European and international developments. The Franco-Germany partnership within the EU has come under a number of challenges. First, with EU enlargement their formal powers within the EU have waned. Additionally, under present conditions, Germany’s economic power has demoted France to a more junior position in the EU, causing very public arguments between the French and German governments over how to respond to the euro crisis (see William E. Paterson, ‘The reluctant hegemon? Germany moves centre stage in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies 49: 1, 2011, pp. 57−75). Krotz and Schild do an excellent job of demonstrating the extent of cooperation between Berlin and Paris and detailing many of the successes of their work together. There are, however, a number of issues which present areas of disagreement. The euro crisis has demonstrated that the two governments do not have a shared blueprint for how to resolve the problem. In foreign policy, France and Germany have difering views on the use of military force in crisis management operations, most recently in evidence over the decision to enforce United Security Council Resolution 1973 in Libya. Simon Bulmer and William E. Paterson have highlighted the tensions caused by Germany’s economic weight but relatively weak inluence on the EU’s foreign policy agenda compared to France and the United Kingdom (‘Germany and the European Union: from “tamed power” to normalized power?’ International Afairs 86: 5, 2010, pp. 1051−73). 1338 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Europe Krotz and Schild have produced an excellent book, which will become the new standard text for students of Franco-German relations. It presents a compelling analysis of how France and Germany have been able to overcome diferences and play a leading role in the construction of the EU. It should also be of wider interest to scholars interested in the efects of institutional cooperation on states. The challenge facing France and Germany is to what extent their respective governments will continue to adapt the relationship to respond to developments in European integration, or whether diverging interests and relative weight within the EU will reduce its role. Alister Miskimmon, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK The lost continent: the BBC’s Europe editor on Europe’s darkest hour since World War Two. By Gavin Hewitt. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 2013. 368pp. Index. £20.00. isbn 978 1 44476 479 6. Available as e-book. As a growth industry, the ield of euro crisis analysis is still in its infancy. The causes of the tumult that broke in Greece in late 2009 are well known and generally agreed, but there remains a division of opinion about where we go from here. Will the problem be resolved soon, or ever? Will the euro ever really get back on track? And what does the crisis mean for the future of the European Union? The questions remain many, the answers (so far) remain few, and the academic analyses of the efects of the crisis remain both thin on the ground and divided. All the more reason, then, to welcome this assessment by Gavin Hewitt, the BBC’s Europe editor since 2009 and someone well placed to provide the kind of insights that only journalists close to a story can ofer. The result is the story of what Hewitt calls ‘the biggest political drama in Europe for sixty years’, whose outcome is still uncertain. He begins by looking at the birth of the euro in the forces surrounding German reuniication and French eforts to continue blending Germany into Europe (rather ignoring the eforts to encourage exchange rate stability dating back to the 1950s). He then looks at the economic booms in Spain and Ireland that left both countries dangerously overexposed; the new realization of the debt crisis in Greece; the diferences between the French and German governments over how to respond; and how life changed for those living in the countries most severely afected. Along the way, there are plenty of good anecdotes of the kind that journalists are best at collecting and telling, including the multiple barbed exchanges between Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. Hewitt emphasizes the development of events in Greece, Italy and Ireland, with a chapter also on how Britain itted in to the crisis. He writes about the political debates that took place during the crisis, exploiting the access that he enjoyed to many of the policymakers and the insights they gave him into how the problems of the euro evolved. The book is, in short, telling a story, ofering something of a behind-the-scenes look into the most dramatic crisis that the European project has faced in its history. What it does not do, however, is provide the reader with much insight into the mechanics of the decisions that sparked the eurozone crisis or that drove the response to that crisis. As the cover notes for the book point out, it is ‘rich in anecdote, weaving together the stories of ordinary people with the high politics and drama of Europe in crisis’. While this has the efect of telling us much about the atmosphere that prevailed during those deeply troubled times, the approach leaves the reader short on context. It is one of the failings of most academic writing that it is heavy on analysis and light on anecdote, while journalism often sufers exactly the opposite problem. It is also remarkable how quiet academics have been in ofering commentary on the eurozone crisis; it is 1339 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews hard, for example, to ind sources that explain its causes and efects in terms that are easily understood by the casual observer. Journalists such as Gavin Hewitt have meanwhile been covering the crisis energetically, have been our key source on events as they have evolved, and have the potential of providing us with some clarity. But while his book ofers a readable documentary of the events in the eurozone crisis between 2009 and 2012, it does not ofer much explanation. The result is that his book unfortunately ofers little more than a series of vignettes, and while these can inject life into the deeper analyses to be found elsewhere, the result is a missed opportunity: the book does not add much to our understanding of the eurozone crisis, does not give us many insights into the nature of the policy process at the European level, and is unlikely to have a life much beyond the brief era it describes. John McCormick, Indiana University, USA Britain and the European Union. By Andrew Geddes. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2013. 304pp. £70.00. isbn 978 0 23029 194 2. Today it seems anything connected to the European Union provokes a largely negative and acrimonious debate in British politics. Texts such as Andrew Geddes’s book therefore provide a welcome attempt at adding more objectivity to the debate. Building on his 2004 book, British politics and the European Union (Palgrave), this new edition provides a solid introduction to the role the EU plays in British politics. As Geddes makes clear in the very irst line: ‘The debate about Britain and the EU is about the past, present and future of British politics, about Britain’s place in the world and about national self-understandings’. The book sets out the profound changes the EU has efected in the United Kingdom, making clear that the UK’s response has not been the product of some national DNA that programmes the British to be instinctively hostile to the Union. Instead, successive British governments have made clear choices, which, if not entirely rational in the eyes of either pro- or anti-Europeans, do relect conscious attempts to manage the UK’s relationship with European integration. But this is not a book concentrating solely on the EU in Britain. It is also about Britain in the EU, showing how much British governments have shaped the modern Union. In this they might have been more ambitious both politically and in championing their successes to an increasingly Eurosceptic British public who have remained largely unaware of the proactive approach taken by various governments. As Geddes makes clear, Euroscepticism is nothing new in British politics, but today it is so widespread that any attempt to discuss the EU objectively soon falls foul of strong emotions and political point-scoring. The book is set out logically with its main body concentrating irst on a chronological analysis of Britain’s relationship with European integration. This is followed by a series of chapters examining the relationship in policy areas, institutions and party politics, and the nature of the British state. Geddes assumes no prior knowledge of the EU, meaning parts of the book stand as a mini-introduction. These parts can be easily skipped by those familiar with the operation of the EU. Geddes’s approach of historical institutionalism means the centre of attention is government bureaucracy and decision-making. His chronological analysis ends with some brief analysis of the Conservative−Liberal Democrat coalition government. As with any discussion of Britain and the EU, a series of recurring themes appear, such as Britain’s ‘awkwardness’; the question of how such a Eurosceptic country could still be so changed by the EU; and how Europe has long since moved from the realm of foreign policy to that of daily domestic politics. Chapters are complemented by sections 1340 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Europe providing either extracts from important speeches about Europe or brief descriptions of institutions, events and ideas. This is done in such a way that they do not clutter the book. The whole book provides welcome insights, but it is the opening and concluding chapters that will be of most interest to those familiar with the topic. The concluding chapter provides concise answers to questions that run through the book. Overall, the book is well written and as such a good, solid text for students of both British politics and the EU. It is also accessible to the more general reader. There are a few minor errors, but nothing of import. The Britain in the book’s title is that of the institutions of government; limited consideration is given to the social, economic and cultural dimensions of the UK−EU relationship, although they are mentioned in passing to help show how Britain is more European than it likes to think. When the 2005 book was published, there seemed a real prospect of a UK referendum on the then European constitution, anticipated by some as a ‘critical juncture’ in Britain’s relations with Europe. Geddes himself turns to this idea in the book’s inal section ‘In search of a critical juncture?’. Despite this heading, Geddes does not explain what this critical juncture is or how Britain might ever face such a juncture. Can a referendum, such as the one David Cameron recently committed the Conservative Party to, provide the opportunity for it? As Geddes’s book shows, Britain is in a strange position of being ‘with but not of Europe’. As a result both Euroscepticism and the EU are now deeply embedded parts of British life. A vote to stay in the EU is therefore unlikely to kill of Euroscepticism, but voting to leave is equally unlikely to kick the EU out of Britain. Tim Oliver, Johns Hopkins University, USA EU climate policy: industry, policy interaction and external environment. By Elin Lerum Boasson and Jørgen Wettestad. Farnham: Ashgate. 2013. 223pp. Index. £49.50. isbn 978 1 40940 355 5. Available as e-book. The climate change policies of the European Union have developed rapidly in the past decade, spurred by both internal developments and international climate negotiations. Yet the burst of the inancial crisis and failure of the 2009 Copenhagen international climate conference sounded the end of an exceptionally productive period. It is to the analysis of this period that this volume is dedicated. There is no shortage of literature on EU climate policies, an area of European studies which has lourished recently. Several edited volumes already ofer comprehensive overviews of this policy domain (Andrew Jordan et al., Climate change policies in the European Union, Cambridge University Press, 2010; Sebastian Oberthür and Marc Pallemaerts, The new climate policies of the European Union, Brussels University Press, 2010). Yet Elin Lerum Boasson and Jørgen Wettestad’s monograph stands out as the irst theoretically driven, comparative analysis of the factors that drive the development of EU internal climate policies. The authors concentrate on three elements considered especially important in the existing literature: the role of industry, the inluence of policy interactions and the impact of the external environment on internal policies. Unfortunately, they provide little explanation as to why these three aspects were selected in the irst place. This is all the more regrettable since throughout the book the discussions on the role of industry are more developed, which tends to convey a sense of imbalance. The impact of these three factors is analysed through the prism of three broad theoretical approaches inspired by European integration theories: a liberal-intergovernmentalist perspective (LI), which emphasizes the role of national economic interests and asymmetric bargaining between member states; a 1341 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews new institutionalist approach (NI), which concentrates on the structure and speciicities of the organizational ields in which climate policies are embedded; and a multi-level governance approach (MLG) which stresses the role of political entrepreneurs in pushing issues forward in the European multilevel system of governance. From these theoretical perspectives, the authors derive diferent mechanisms through which industry, policy interactions and the external environment (independent variables) have potentially afected the outcome of EU internal climate negotiations (dependent variable). The empirical part of the book consists of a general contextual chapter, which outlines the historical development of EU climate policies, followed by four case-studies. The cases analyse successively the negotiations on the EU emission-trading scheme (ETS); the renewable energy directive (RED); the carbon capture and storage directive (CCS); and the energy performance of buildings directive (EPBD). The last chapter systematically compares the four cases and draws some general conclusions on the relative importance of each factor. Boasson and Wettestad put a lot of efort into operationalizing their theoretical framework, which makes the analysis, comparison of the cases and theory-testing especially efective. One of the main cross-case conclusions is that the distribution of authority and logic of the diferent organizational ields are key explanations for the variation in policy outcomes. The structure of each ield has inluenced both the degree of policy centralization— national (EPBD) vs Europeanized (ETS)—and the steering method—market instrument (ETS) vs technology development measures (RED, CCS, EPBD). The authors also point out the importance of agency and stress the crucial role that policy entrepreneurs played in the negotiations. The European Commission (ETS, RED), but also the European Parliament (RED, CCS), industry (RED, CCS) and various individual member states all left their mark on climate policies. Entrepreneurs were especially important in seizing windows of opportunity created by the external environment to foster new policy developments. As regards theory-testing, the analysis shows that EU climate policies are best explained by a combination of NI and MLG and inds limited support for LI. One may regret that constructivist theories are not discussed: they could have helped to shed light on the decisive but somewhat neglected role of normative and ideational factors in climate policies. Not everything is new in this volume: the ETS case draws heavily on work previously published by Wettestad, and the negotiations on the RED have already been studied at length elsewhere. Yet it also covers aspects that have received less attention such as the EPBD and CCS negotiations. All cases are carefully researched and bring a wealth of new empirical evidence, based on in-depth analyses of the secondary literature, policy documents, news reports and more than 60 interviews with key policy-makers. Especially remarkable are the discussions on the role of industries, which appear as multifaceted actors, far from the traditional image of ‘an obstructive braking block’ (p. 182). Overall, the richness of the empirical material and well-structured framework of EU climate policy make it a must-read for those interested in energy and climate policy-making in Europe and beyond. The book undoubtedly constitutes a sound basis for further theoretically informed comparative research on these issues. Pierre Bocquillon, University of Cambridge, UK 1342 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Russia and Eurasia Russia and Eurasia* Bear traps on Russia’s road to modernization. By Cliford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. 2013. 130pp. Index. Pb.: £23.99. isbn 978 0 41566 276 5. Available as e-book. Bear traps is the latest in a stream of books and articles by Cliford Gaddy and Barry Ickes dealing with the post-communist Russian economy. They are invariably thoughtful, well informed and provocative, and they are, quite rightly, widely cited. Their latest work continues this tradition. As academic books go it is short, but there is a considerable amount of analysis packed into it. The World Bank recently reclassiied Russia as a ‘high-income’ country. So far so good. But further progress looks—as it does in much of the world at present—problematic. GDP growth in the irst half of this year seems to have been at less than an annual rate of 2 per cent. The standard recipe for improvement, Gaddy and Ickes argue, is modernization and market reform, often presented as though all that is needed is political will. (This is a little unfair to the conventional liberal version, but never mind.) They seek instead to show that the fundamental obstacle to improvement is the distorted production structure which was inherited from the Soviet past, and which abundant natural resource rents have been used to preserve. This extends the line of argument put forward in their earlier works, most strikingly in Russia’s virtual economy (Brookings, 2002). They have consistently portrayed a protected sector of industrial dinosaur enterprises as the key to understanding Russia’s problems. In this book they set out the ways in which the unreconstructed production structure creates a series of ‘bear traps’ on the way to economic improvement. The book contains, apart from an introduction and conclusion, ive chapters. The titles convey a good deal about the coverage: ‘Historical prelude’ (primarily about the outcome of privatization); ‘Investment and physical capital’; ‘The economics of location’; ‘Marketimpeding federalism’; and ‘Human capital’. Each of the core chapters contains some economic modelling, but is accessible to non-economists. Gaddy and Ickes show, among other things, that Russia’s investment rate (as a share of GDP) is less at international prices than at the usual domestic-price valuation, because of the relatively high prices of investment goods. They show how Soviet location decisions put many people and factories in places that were uneconomically cold and distant, and how post-Soviet propping up of those factories has kept them there. They compare changes over time in ‘per capita temperature’ between Canada and Russia. This is the average of the temperatures of the places where the population resides, weighted by the share of population in each place. They show that Russian federalism has not worked to allow regional populations to shrink (by migration) where it would be better for Russia’s overall wealth for them to do so. And they provide strong evidence that the average quality of Russian education is weaker than is generally believed: Russia looks much better on years of secondary and tertiary education in the workforce than it does in the light of the OECD’s and other pupil performance assessments. They conclude that Russia’s economic problems are too easily misdiagnosed. Yes, corruption, weak property rights and the usual litany of defects are real enough, but they ‘are the outgrowth of speciic Russian institutions that help preserve a legacy of misal* See also Robert Gellately, Stalin’s curse: battling for communism in war and Cold War, pp. 1333–35. 1343 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews location’ (p. 96). The way ahead requires a switch of natural resource revenues from the propping up of industrial dinosaurs to the pursuit of Russia’s comparative advantage in oil and gas and closely related industries. This is a compelling account but it raises some questions which the authors do not try to answer. First, a rather nerdy point about investment rates: Russian machinery and equipment investment is relatively costly, Gaddy and Ickes point out, but about half of the machinery installed in recent years has been imported. It is not clear whether their measure of relative price includes imports. It is not obvious that German and Japanese machinery should cost more in Russia than they do in, say, the United States. Some clariication would help. Second, just how large and persistent as burdens are the ‘manufacturing dinosaurs’? Yes, they are subsidized and, yes, they continue to employ people in locations that are cold, distant and ineicient. But in 2009 manufacturing employed only 15 per cent of the workforce, and that was down from 20 per cent in 2000. Finally, are the more conventional critics singing from such a very diferent hymn-sheet, as Gaddy and Ickes suggest? If one argues that the political elite resists the establishment of a rule of law because its members beneit personally from informal lows of natural resource rents, that is not incompatible with the Gaddy and Ickes story. Still, it is an important, well argued and (mostly) persuasive story. Philip Hanson, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House Can Russia modernise? Sistema, power networks and informal governance. By Alena Ledeneva. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. 314pp. Index. Pb.: £19.99. isbn 978 0 52112 563 5. Available as e-book. Before Can Russia modernise? Alena Ledeneva wrote several other books and many academic articles concentrating on diferent aspects of informal politics in Russia; all these excellent writings could be compiled into one single book that should tell the (primarily western) reader ‘how Russia really works’. The idea that there is a discrepancy between how things are supposed to work in Russia and how they work in reality is not new among the western public. It is part of the Russian enigma that has always made this country challenging and exciting to explore. Those who were born in Russia or lived there for a long time are expected to know somehow how to solve this puzzle. Usually, this knowledge is based on some sort of intuition or simply trial and error. Only a few would be able to describe their experience in theoretical terms, let alone to explain the hidden links and workings of the Russian state and society. Alena Ledeneva does this in a masterly fashion as she translates the luid and uncertain reality of Putin’s Russia into a comprehensive study of informal networks, political power and governance. In this book she builds on her earlier works, including both the methodology (a mélange of social-anthropological research, media and popular culture analysis, connecting ‘local knowledge’ and general theoretical discussion) and the case-studies, e.g. exploring the practices of ‘telephone justice’ and blat (personal networks for getting things done, pulling strings). She takes these indings further by tracing the evolution of Russia’s formal and informal politics of the 1990s into a speciic system of power created by Vladimir Putin in the 2000s. Very elegantly, she illustrates that evolution by several illuminating examples, such as the replacement of the old Soviet apparatchik’s privilege of having access to a special telephone network known as vertushka by the use of luxury gold-clad Vertu mobile phones among Putin’s elite. 1344 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Russia and Eurasia But Ledeneva’s book is more than just a clever description of the visible contours of Putin’s political system. She uncovers the inner workings of what she calls the sistema: a set of common perceptions of power and the system of governance in Russia. The book identiies six key aspects of the sistema: embeddedness, difuse nature, complexity, ambivalence, open secret and the leadership trap. These aspects are analysed together with the factors of continuity and change in Russia, which include the elements of the Soviet administrative system, Russian patrimonial rule, globalization and the social network culture. Ledeneva argues that Putin’s sistema is a collective outcome of all these factors. Its logic informs the daily practices of governance at all levels, making the leadership (including the omnipotent President Putin and his one-time not so powerful regent Medvedev) at once a master of and a hostage to the sistema. Analysing Putin’s and Medvedev’s reforms and attempts to modernize Russia, Ledeneva makes a compelling argument that their policies are not regulated by laws but rather by complex horizontal and vertical ties, inighting between and within power networks, personal interests, endless bribes and kickbacks. Such a system cannot be reformed or modernized other than through ‘relexive modernization’, i.e. recognition of the degree of reliance on informal governance. It is diicult to expect that the present leaders of Russia would choose that path and start dismantling the elements of the system that shelters them. Unfortunately, by presenting the reader with this conclusion, Ledeneva does not answer the question whether there are any possibilities of an alternative system of governance in Russia. Is Russia bound to go through diferent reincarnations of the same old system throughout its entire history? Is the sistema equally strong at every level of governance or might there be variations, perhaps even parallel systems, depending on the level of governance, or policy area, or region in Russia? Is there anything to the state in Russia other than the sistema? Obviously, answering these questions would require testing Ledeneva’s framework in diferent contexts and the book serves as an excellent entry gate to further research of Russia’s informal governance. Vadim Kononenko, The Finnish Institute of International Afairs, Finland Russia, the near abroad and the West: lessons from the Moldova-Transdniestria conlict. By William H. Hill. Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press with The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2012. 271pp. Index. £28.50. isbn 978 1 42140 565 0. Moldova gets short shrift in histories of Europe. A sliver of land wedged between Ukraine and Romania, the new and independent Moldovan state that emerged from the Soviet collapse has been no exception to the rule. Relatively ignored in analysis of the former Soviet Union, Moldova has remained a country on the margins of the broad stream of European development, to which only the devoted pay attention. Except, that is, at rare moments, when Moldova has briely taken centre stage—or, more accurately, when Moldova becomes the stage for the drama of wider forces. This book tells the story of one of those moments. It is a fascinating story, well worth knowing and told by the right person. William H. Hill is a retired US Foreign Service oicer, currently Professor of National Security Strategy at the US National War College. Between June 1999 and November 2001, and then again between January 2003 and July 2006, he served as Head of the OSCE Mission to Moldova, playing a key role in seeking to negotiate a political settlement of the conlict between the central authorities of Moldova and the separatist region of Transnistria. The story he tells draws on his personal experience as an actor during a period of heightened 1345 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews activity in the resolution of the conlict and on his insight as a diplomat−scholar, able to situate questions in the right context. The conlict between Chisinau and Tiraspol has long been seen as the easiest to solve in the former Soviet Union—in Brussels, it is often referred to as the ‘lowest hanging fruit’ on a tree that includes the conlicts in Georgia and over Nagorno-Karabakh. William Hill shows why the image is false, explaining the causes and course of the conlict, and its place in Europe’s strategic landscape. The focus of the book falls on the failure of the last major attempt to resolve the conlict in 2003—a failure that revealed clashing interests and divided perceptions, and which created a chasm from a gap in relations between Russia and the European Union. Tensions came to a boil on 24/25 November 2003, when then Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin received telephone calls from Javier Solana, then EU high representative, and Walter Schwimmer, then secretary general of the Council of Europe, among others, to reject the peace settlement proposal known as the ‘Kozak memorandum’, named after its author, Dmitry Kozak, special envoy of President Putin. At some time between 4 and 6am, according to William Hill, Voronin called Putin to cancel a signature ceremony planned with great pomp in Chisinau. Putin’s plane had been readying for departure and was stood down—the Russian President never forgave Voronin, and relations with the European Union turned sour. As William Hill puts it, what the EU saw as a ‘minor matter of blocking an unworkable political settlement’ was seen in Moscow as a direct geopolitical challenge in its self-declared sphere of vital interests (p. 7). The timing was important, as the collapse of Russian plans for Moldova occurred two days after the Rose Revolution in Georgia. The Kozak debacle marked the beginning of a concerted Russian policy to contain and roll back western inluence in its ‘near abroad’. From this angle, the 2008 war in Georgia really started in Moldova ive years earlier. This book is the irst to explore in detail what happened in Moldova in 2003, told by a key player on the ground. It starts with strong chapters that set the wider context of Russian−western relations and developments in Europe, before turning to the evolution of events in 2003. The annexes contain drafts of the settlement proposals made during that year. On the whole, this is outstanding work that ills a gap in the literature that most are not even aware of, useful for students, specialists and policy-makers. The focus is analytical and not personal—and this is perhaps one point of weakness. I would have wished for more insight into the personalities involved: Vladimir Voronin’s scheming, Dmitry Kozak’s ambitions, Igor Smirnov’s proclivities. I also would have wished for more on the strange place that is Transnistria, on the forces that sustain its existence and the political economy of its separatism. These are touched on but not explored fully. The full story of the EU position, in which I played a very minor role, is not told here. It would also have been interesting to learn more about the causes of the conlict and the evolution of relations between both banks of the Dnestr river—on the lines of Thomas de Waal’s Black garden (New York University Press, 2003) on the Nagorno-Karabakh conlict—but this is for another book. This one, by William Hill, is an excellent start in itself. Dov Lynch, Paris School of International Afairs, Sciences Po, France 1346 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Middle East and North Africa Middle East and North Africa Of empires and citizens: pro-American democracy or no democracy at all? By Amaney A. Jamal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2012. 296pp. Index. Pb.: £19.95. isbn 978 0 69114 965 3. Available as e-book. The health of Arab democracy has been sorely tested after the initial hope and optimism that came at the start of the Arab Spring. The grinding, near apocalyptic, conlict in Syria means that images of protesters illing the streets of Homs in 2011 have been replaced by those of a city in virtually complete ruin. In Egypt, the squares that illed with those demanding the ousting of a dictator now compete with each other over the legitimacy of the supposedly post-revolutionary era. Progress in Tunisia and Libya remains pockmarked by violence. In ‘liberated’ Iraq, July of this year saw the worst violence in over ive years. Talking to Agence France-Presse, one Iraqi bemoaned recently how under Saddam, ‘I was not allowed to talk; now I can talk but nobody will listen’. Against such a backdrop, Amaney Jamal, an associate professor at Princeton University who has written extensively on democracy, looks to explain better what she terms the ‘persistence of authoritarianism’ across the region. The book relects a huge academic efort, a ‘massive data collection efort in three countries’, Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait. The efort is relected by the thorough presentation of evidence: the work includes detailed foot- and endnotes, chapter appendices complete with snippets of the author’s methodology, questionnaires and further hypotheses. In essence, Jamal argues that the client−patron relationship between the United States and the region is so strong that only when inluential opposition movements become increasingly pro-patron can they ‘reduce the fear that democracy will yield results that harm the patron−client relationship’. Conversely, when inluential opposition movements become increasingly anti-patron, they may ‘overthrow the regime and risk hostile relations with the patron’ (p. 18). Hence the authoritarian status quo persists. Through this evidencebased look into the relationships between client and patron and between state and society, Jamal explores a simple idea, demonstrated well. The agents in this political equation are the United States, authoritarian governments, Islamists movements and the population at large. Jamal explains US dominance of the Arab world in the form of development assistance (the region is the largest recipient of aid since 1991), physical military interventions and relationships that have spawned economic and security dependence. Islamists are somewhat simply explained as emerging from their ‘positions on anti-colonialism, democratic and economic reforms, and their reconnection with core Islamic values’ (p. 63), with their emergence linked to the ‘longest time Islamists could use the institution of the mosque as a site for political mobilisation’ (p. 71). The questionnaires and interviews carried out conirm Jamal’s theory, with Kuwait’s more pro-US Islamist opposition allowing increased democracy because of reduced fear of ofending the patron, contrasted to Jordan where ‘citizens are cautious about the efects of democracy. Allowing more democracy could allow anti-American movements like the Islamic Action Front (IAF) to seize greater power in ways that would undermine the patron– client relationship’ (p. 33). The beneits of the US relationship are explained, including nuggets on how the kingdom’s exports to the US increased by 453 per cent between 2001 and 2005 and the economic backdrop that Jordan needs to grow ‘at least 6 percent per year if it is going to be able to absorb the 45,000−65,000 new workers that enter the Jordanian workforce annually’ (p. 50). 1347 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews The author expands the theory out into Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian experience, balancing heavy data well with anecdotal quotes. Jamal gets somewhat carried away, however, with describing aspects of this tension between regimes, Islamists and the US as ‘a paradigm that structures the daily interaction of citizens with their regime’ (p. 102). Nor does she fully analyse how this paradigm explains the explosion of the Arab Spring in Egypt that led initially to success for the Muslim Brotherhood. The luid nature of the present situation makes it diicult to know if a military-backed authoritarian rule will be able to reassert itself in Egypt, and whether this, rather than the period of President Morsi’s reign, will prove more challenging to US−Egypt relations. Perhaps using the same methodology to test the theory in Egypt will provide extra insight for the book’s second edition. James Denselow, King’s College London, UK The Six-Day War and Israeli self-defense: questioning the legal basis for preventive war. By John Quigley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. 266pp. Index. Pb.: £18.99. isbn 978 1 10761 002 6. Available as e-book. So much has been written about the Six-Day War that readers of this journal would be forgiven for feeling a little jaded when they learn that another book has been published about it. Yet the book under review provides many new insights into the origins of the war. As the subtitle of the book suggests, the Six-Day War has been used as a precedent for preventive war, or what legal scholars call anticipatory self-defence, as outlined in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States. The 2002 National Security Strategy attracted controversy because it marks a departure from the deinition of self-defence in Article 51 of the UN Charter, which only allows states to resort to the use of force without prior Security Council authorization ‘if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations’. The whole idea of anticipatory self-defence is to forestall an imminent threat by acting in anticipation to thwart it, but the problem is that it can be abused for ideological reasons to justify going to war on the limsiest of pretexts based on a belief that another state is preparing to attack. Indeed, scholars arguing in favour of anticipatory self-defence often cite the Six-Day War as authority. And yet, as John Quigley convincingly explains, the Six-Day War should not be used as a precedent for an argument justifying the irst use of force based on anticipatory self-defence because Israel never advanced such an argument in 1967. Quigley, President’s Club Professor in Law at the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University, tells us that his interest in the Six-Day War began during his studies at the Faculty of Law at Moscow State University in 1967. It was there that he irst heard about the war from the Communist Party newspaper Pravda. What surprised him, and what motivated him to write this book, was the disparity between the western and Soviet media accounts of the war that became evident when he returned to complete his law studies at Harvard. In preparing his manuscript for publication, Quigley utilized his impressive linguistic skills to scour oicially declassiied government documents from the US, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United Nations. What leaps out from the pages of this book is the striking dissonance that still exists between the facts of the Six-Day War and legal scholarship that has been published since these documents were declassiied. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including statements by Israeli military leaders who planned the war, legal scholars, particularly in America, continue to argue that Israel acted to ‘anticipate’ an Egyptian attack in 1348 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Sub-Saharan Africa June 1967. This view is based on a belief that the Security Council discussed anticipatory self-defence during the debates in 1967. It did not. How can Quigley be so certain about his views? Because the documentary evidence disclosed by the four Great Powers is solid, as are the records of the Security Council and General Assembly meetings in 1967. With regard to the events leading up to the Six-Day War, consider the following facts: irst, Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran was not a casus belli. Israel’s main port was in Haifa, not Eilat, and Israel had a four-month supply of oil on hand. Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister Zvi Dinstein thought it feasible to purchase oil from other countries for delivery at ‘Israel’s Mediterranean ports’ (p. 22). Second, the Egyptian troops sent to the Sinai were not poised to strike. On the contrary, they were ‘arrayed in a shield formation designed to stop the advance of Israeli forces’ (p. 31). As President Johnson told Prime Minister Eshkol: ‘All of our intelligence people are unanimous regarding the assessment; that an attack is not imminent, and that if the UAR [United Arab Republic] attacks “you will whip the hell out of them”’ (p. 33). Third, Nasser’s army was in no state to defeat Israel on the battleield. He knew it, the Israelis knew it and the Americans knew it. Fourth, the Israeli military generals who led the Six-Day War also admitted to planning and preparing for the war in advance. Rabin told Le Monde in response to a reporter’s question in 1968: ‘I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an ofensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it’ (p. 128). ‘When we were mobilizing all our forces’, General Matitiahu Peled told an audience at the Zavta political-literary club in Tel Aviv in 1972, ‘no sensible person believed that all this power was needed to defend against the Egyptian threat. To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel’s existence … is especially an insult to Tsahal [the Israeli army]’ (p. 129). In light of the evidence Quigley has compiled in this lucid and splendidly readable account of the Six-Day War there is no longer an excuse for scholars of international law to cite it as the irst instance of anticipatory self-defence. Indeed, those scholars who argue in favour of a rule of international law justifying anticipatory self-defence on the basis of the Six-Day War—such as the 11 April 2003 report authored by American attorney David Ackerman for Congress, justifying the pre-emptive use of force against Iraq—will ind they have based their argument on a house of cards. Victor Kattan, National University of Singapore, Singapore Sub-Saharan Africa* The dying Sahara: US imperialism and terror in Africa. By Jeremy Keenan. London: Pluto. 2013. 326pp. £17.50. isbn 978 0 74532 961 1. Available as e-book. This book is the second of two volumes on what the author terms the ‘so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT)’ (p. viii). In the irst volume, The dark Sahara: America’s war on terror in Africa (Pluto, 2009), Jeremy Keenan explores the cooperation between Algeria and the United States in developing a Saharan front in the GWOT. In The dying Sahara, he continues his analysis of the GWOT, exploring the impact of the war on the peoples of the Sahara and Sahel, especially the Tuareg. British anthropologist Keenan is uniquely positioned to examine current events in the Sahara and Sahel. He irst visited the region in 1964, spending time with the Tuareg ‘in * See also Lise Namikas, Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960−1965, pp. 1336–37. 1349 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews order to document their history and explain the circumstances of their lives’ (p. x). Since that time, he has published six books and dozens of articles on the Sahara and its peoples. Serving for many years as a consultant on the region for a variety of international organizations including the United Nations, he authored the European Commission’s Study on political Islam in the Sahel and neighbouring countries, published in 2010. Kennan is currently a Professional Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. A central theme of this book is the impact of US policy in the region on the Tuareg minority in the Sahara and Sahel. Keenan’s detailed account of the origins and consequences of the Tuareg rebellions in Mali and Niger in the irst decade of this century in particular, should be required reading for anyone trying to understand political events in the region today. In an impoverished and volatile area, the impact of the war on terror on the indigenous Tuareg populations of northern Niger, northern Mali and the extreme south of Algeria has been catastrophic, decimating the local tourism industry and related livelihoods and leading to widespread hardship. As a result, an increasing number of young men have been pushed into alternate means of supporting their families, including traicking, smuggling and direct banditry. Ironically, this has led governments in the region, together with the United States, to disparage Tuareg rebels as nothing more than bandits, criminals and drug traickers, conveniently forgetting that US policy in the region over the last decade was a major contributor to the current state of afairs. Not surprisingly, the loss of livelihoods in the Tuareg community has contributed to a growing sense of frustration and anger against the governments of Algeria, Mali and Niger. In detailing the plight of the Tuareg, Keenan unveils the full extent of little-known US military machinations in Africa after 9/11. In a well-written, well-reasoned and damning indictment of US policy, he argues that its African military buildup was always more about oil, natural gas and uranium than it was about democracy and human rights. In the process, the author makes a number of controversial claims that are diicult to prove, charging the United States with ‘fabricating terrorism in the region’ (p. 121) to justify the US Africa Command (AFRICOM); claiming Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is a ‘construct’ (p. 245) of the Algerian security apparatus, namely the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS); and suggesting the United States ‘has continued to collaborate with the DRS in the fabrication and orchestration of terrorist activities in the region’ (p. 5). The author is at his best raising provocative questions, challenging suspicious documents and events and highlighting odd behaviour. In so doing, he shines light on the many times in recent years that the Algerian and American governments have been less than forthright in discussing their policies and actions in the region. In the process, he succeeds in weaving an alternate, often convincing, scenario for much of what has happened in the Sahara and Sahel over the last decade. Unfortunately, the evidence cited by Keenan is often circumstantial and based on what he describes at one point as a ‘consensus of speculative opinion’ (p. 208), instead of the ‘smoking gun’ he needs to prove conclusively his many charges and claims. Whether this is because of the ability of the United States and its allies to mask their intentions and cover their tracks or simply because hard facts are diicult to come by in one of the remotest areas of the world is diicult to say; but the thrust of Keenan’s analysis certainly rings true. In any case, the one issue on which Kennan’s critics must agree with him is that US policy in the Sahara and Sahel has led to what the Obama administration now recognizes to be a ‘long war’ (p. 264). Ronald Bruce St John 1350 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Sub-Saharan Africa Mandela and Mbeki: the hero and the outsider. By Lucky Mathebe. Pretoria: UNISA. 2012. 354pp. Index. zar280.00. isbn 978 1 86888 660 9. Lucky Mathebe sets out to debunk what he calls the ‘popular press’ portrayal of Nelson Mandela as the ‘symbol of African democracy’ and Thabo Mbeki as a contrasting Machiavellian character of a ‘despot’ (p. 104). Yet to argue as he does—that the popular South African media monolithically projected Mandela in a more positive and Mbeki in a more negative light—is not entirely true. The South African media are not as all-powerful as Mathebe suggests. Neither are they very monolithic, nor were they overwhelmingly against Mbeki. The ownership of South Africa’s post-apartheid media has been very diverse—ranging from the traditional white to black and foreign ownership—as have been its political stances. The readership of South Africa’s newspapers is tiny, compared to the more pro-ANC viewer- and listenership of state-owned media. The print media are mostly read by the middle classes and do not reach the black poor in the townships and rural areas on whose views the ANC depends to stay in power. The state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation and its radio stations have the biggest audiences. They are largely sympathetic to the ANC and were sympathetic to Mbeki also. The author argues that Mbeki faced media opposition because he was a ‘more of a risk-taker’, whereas Mandela, after becoming president in 1994, ‘maintained a monolithic silence’ on major policies (p. 63). Yet Mandela took real risks during his presidency: even his policy of racial reconciliation between blacks and whites, when blacks were left so badly of materially by apartheid, was risky. Mandela managed the risks better than Mbeki. Balancing often harsh criticisms of opponents with mollycoddling, for example, was one of those risk-managing strategies used by Mandela. The author also argues that Mbeki, in contrast to Mandela, was a ‘consensus’ leader; Mandela was the consensus leader. He set up the government of national unity, which included members of all opposition parties. He also deliberately appointed individuals into his oice who span the racial and political divide. Mathebe is right when he argues that Mbeki often made his judgements based on the modus operandi of the ‘old’ ANC—the exiled liberation movement. Because Mbeki focused his leadership style on one particularly ‘invented’ tradition of the ANC—the exile tradition—he risked alienating not only the other ‘invented’ traditions of the ANC—the internal wing, trade unions or long-term prisoners at Robben Island—but also non-ANC members. This approach was his fatal law. Mbeki’s presidency faltered because the ANC ‘invented’ traditions in 2007 were not the ‘old’ ANC ‘invented’ traditions of the Party in exile. And of course, Mbeki was also replaced as the Party’s leader at the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane national congress because, given his ‘dynastic’ succession in the ANC, he had not built a popular base among the grassroots, beyond the small black middle and upper class. Mbeki was only supported because he was leader of the ANC. Mandela, the author rightly argues, gained popularity beyond the ANC ‘because [people] believed in him’ (p. 53) as an exemplary leader in his own right, not because he was leader of the ANC; and because Mandela’s consensus style of leadership wooed supporters beyond the Party. Mathebe argues that Mandela did not take independent decisions. The opposite is true: the ANC’s national executive often had to rein in Mandela—and it speaks volumes to his democratic credentials that Mandela deferred to democratic opposition. Mathebe insightfully compares the dynastic succession of the ANC leadership from Mandela to Mbeki to the leadership succession in The godfather. In the ilm, Don Vito Corleone, the head of a maia family, is succeeded by his son Michael, who must keep the family together, and maintain its traditions and ways of thinking amid rapid social change. 1351 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews Oliver Tambo, the ANC president in exile, is described by Mathebe as the Don Vito Corleone-like ‘godfather’, who was widely accepted to have kept the ANC ‘family’ together through the inculcation of ‘struggle’ rituals, practices and loyalty. Tambo mentored Mbeki into his role of future leader of the ANC ‘family’. Mbeki, when he became leader of the ANC, used his power to defend the ANC ‘family’ through attempting to consolidate the ‘old’ (‘invented’) ways—which meant for Mbeki, the ANC exile ways of Tambo. Dramatic social changes in post-apartheid South Africa, the amalgamation of the multiple ‘traditions’ (the exile movement, the internal wing and the long-term former political prisoners) of the ANC when it was unbanned in 1990, and the transformation from opposition movement to governing party, combined to forge new ANC ‘traditions’. Mbeki’s mistake as president was not to recognize this fully. Mandela, because of his time in Robben Island Prison, was as leader not as socialized in the ANC’s exile ‘family’ tradition. He could therefore make an easier transition into becoming a leader who could direct the ANC membership from the ‘old’ ANC traditions, as well as members of the white establishment from their ‘old’ apartheid traditions, and attempt to forge new uniied democratic national traditions for the ANC and South Africa. Mbeki was unable to take the banner from Mandela and complete this necessary conversion of the Party as he was too steeped in the ‘old’ ANC traditions. Mbeki did try to modernize the ANC; however, his tragedy was that ironically his detractors in the ANC perceived him to proceed too fast on this front, while his opponents outside the ANC believed he was too deeply steeped in the ANC’s ‘old’ ways. Mandela was unable to turn the political miracle into an economic one, which would bring material beneits to the expectant black majority whom apartheid had robbed of economic capital. Mandela freely admitted he did not grasp the complexities of economics and deferred to Mbeki. Mbeki set about securing the economic transformation for blacks in order to deliver them the widely expected economic beneits of ending apartheid. Yet his strategy of boosting the black middle class and of making highly connected ANC leaders-turned-businessmen into business tycoons through black economic empowerment delivered the economic nirvana to the black elite but left the black masses behind. The combination of being perceived as only serving the black elite, and not the poor masses, and not being perceptive enough to recognize that dramatic social change had changed the ANC’s ‘old’ traditions, was the undoing of the Mbeki presidency. In spite of some of its shortcomings, Mathebe’s book is an important contribution to the understanding of the enigmatic Mandela−Mbeki relationship. William Gumede, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa South Asia* Pakistan: the garrison state: origins, evolution, consequences 1947–2011. By Ishtiaq Ahmed. Karachi: Oxford University Press. 2013. 508pp. £25.00. isbn 978 0 19906 636 0. As Pakistan witnessed its irst democratic transition of power from the Pakistan People’s Party-led government to that of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in May 2013, the role of the military in Pakistani politics appeared no longer to be centre stage. Analysts and global leaders praised the highest voter turnout in Pakistan’s history and the clear mandate that the Pakistani people had given its new government. * See also Pervez Hoodbhoy, ed., Confronting the bomb: Pakistani and Indian scientists speak out, pp. 1316–17. 1352 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. South Asia While this is undoubtedly a positive step, Pakistan’s history is complicated and interspersed with military rule and ongoing civil−military tension. While the military may have stayed in their barracks on this occasion, the army’s role in politics is embedded in the domestic, economic and foreign policy of the country. Through the chronological examination of the evolution of Pakistan’s military since the country’s inception in 1947, this monograph seeks to tease out how the country’s military gained such vast power and the role it has had in creating a ‘garrison state’. Applying Harold Lasswell’s thesis of a garrison state, Ishtiaq Ahmed aims to uncover the internal and external factors that led to the rhetoric behind leaders such as General Musharraf referring to Pakistan as ‘Islam ka Qila’ (‘Islam’s fortress’). The author adopts a structured historical and chronological approach, for example citing the army’s role in each conlict from the irst Kashmir war in 1947, to the civil war and partition of East Pakistan, the Afghan jihad to the present-day withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Much of it is a historical overview which is useful to irst-time readers; the more interesting parts for people looking at Pakistan and the region, however, are the latter chapters which concentrate on the latest dynamics between the United States, Pakistan, India, the war in Afghanistan and the civil−military machinations of the past decade. Ahmed uses Lasswell’s main argument, which deines a garrison state as one that grows out of perpetual fear of foreign aggression, to explain how Pakistan has evolved into a postcolonial garrison state—an army with a country—that leaves little room for democracy to grow and strengthen. Democracy therefore becomes stunted and reduced to ritual. The author goes beyond this theoretical framework, however, to argue that in Pakistan’s case democracy had limited prospects from the start. Citing poor leadership, the entrenchment of Pakistan’s powerful landowning classes in politics from the beginning, combined with the divisive nature of the debate over the purpose of Pakistan and its identity, has left the country with a weak foundation to build democratic values and principles. He argues that authoritarianism was irmly rooted in Pakistan’s political fabric from the coup of 1958 onwards, and was consolidated under the various leaders both civilian and military, from Ayub to Zia and Musharraf. Furthermore, he contends that the fear of foreign aggression existed from the outset of Pakistan’s creation, with Jinnah indicating to the Americans that Pakistan could be an ally against Soviet aggression, which has had deleterious consequences for Pakistan’s democratic exercise and national security. As Pakistan’s current Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)-led government hopes to make strides on peace with India, the author’s emphasis on putting the notion of the Indian threat into perspective and underscoring the distinction between a real threat and threat perception is necessary to moving the India−Pakistan peace process forward. For the irst time in Pakistan’s history, in a recent statement issued by the army, it acknowledged the growing military threat from within, not just the external threat posed by India. Throughout the book, Ahmed goes into exhaustive detail of events to trace the social, ideological and economic factors that converged at pivotal moments in Pakistan’s history to ‘render the Pakistan military a coveted institution’ (p. 461). One of the minor drawbacks of the structure of the book is that the analysis is largely separated into a chapter at the very end instead of being woven into the chronological narrative. Students of Pakistan’s history and politics, or those wishing to learn the basics about Pakistan and its military’s role, will beneit from the in-depth historical overview. For those who are long-time analysts and scholars of Pakistan, however, it is the more recent chapters from General Musharraf ’s rule onwards that prove to be the most interesting, as Ahmed uses excerpts from biographies and archives to provide both context and compelling interview excerpts and commentary 1353 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews to events, such as the decision-making in the aftermath of 9/11 or the killing of Osama bin Laden. Pakistan: the garrison state is a richly detailed account of how Pakistan’s military has become so embedded in the political, social and economic arenas of the country. It leaves the reader with little doubt that as Pakistan attempts to make slow but steady steps to strengthen democracy in the country, there are signiicant internal and external factors that will make it extremely challenging to dilute the rhetoric of Pakistan as the ‘fortress of Islam’. Rosheen Kabraji, Asia Programme, Chatham House Samudra manthan: Sino-Indian rivalry in the Indo-Paciic. By C. Raja Mohan. Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 2012. 360pp. Pb.: £13.99. isbn 978 0 87003 271 4. Available as e-book. Perhaps no rivalry has lent itself to quite as much zoomorphic imagery as the Sino-Indian rivalry: panda versus tiger, dragon versus elephant, and so on. C. Raja Mohan, a veteran Indian journalist and strategic analyst, opts for a more original metaphor. His book is titled Samudra manthan, in reference to a Hindu fable describing how the churning of the oceans by angels and demons is arbitrated by the Lord Vishnu, a pre-eminent deity, who tilts the ield in favour of the angels. The strained and not-so-subtle suggestion is that ‘the incipient rivalry between India and China’ will be ‘inluenced decisively by the kind of policies that the United States as the leading maritime power in the Indo-Paciic might adopt’ (p. 236). The phrase Indo-Paciic—notably used by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—relects Mohan’s contention that the two oceans are seamless arenas, connected from the shores of East Africa to Guam, via the hotly disputed shoals and islands of East Asia and the Australasian littoral. His book is a meticulous, and in consequence often dense, exposition of each point of friction. He explains China’s well-documented forays into India’s traditional spheres of inluence, such as Bangladesh and the Seychelles, and India’s more embryonic incursions into those of China, such as the disputed waters of the South China Sea (chapters six to nine). He tells the story of how two landward powers—the Indian Raj and Republic both preoccupied with their northwest frontier, and China focused on territorial consolidation—that have progressively overcome the ‘curse of continentalism’ (p. 36), rediscover a centuries-old maritime tradition. In a dynamic that would be familiar to anyone acquainted with the Anglo-German arms race of the early twentieth century, growth in both India and China has begotten a curious mixture of conidence and insecurity. On the one hand, growth rates that would make Europeans green with envy have enabled a naval renaissance. India is set to outstrip its erstwhile colonial master, Britain, in both numbers of aircraft carriers and naval airpower. China is making strides with its own carrier, planned as the irst of many (pp. 53−64). Yet at the same time that growth has brought with it new vulnerabilities: dependence on far-lung raw materials and energy, access to which might be severed by instability (India has just abandoned oil ields in Syria) or adversaries (China itself cut of exports of rare earth material to Japan in 2010 as a coercive tool, and fears chokepoints like the Malacca Strait being exploited in wartime). The result is a tussle for allies along those stretched sea lanes, leaving India the worse of. Mohan quotes India’s National Security Adviser as saying, after one bruising encounter over Sri Lanka, that ‘we are the big power in this region. Let us make it very clear’, only to ind that China has become a key arms supplier to Colombo (p. 150). 1354 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. East Asia and Pacific The problem is that Samudra manthan never quite gels. Mohan keeps hedging his bets, declaring that ‘the relationship is rivalrous but not yet hypermilitarized’ (p. xi), that maritime cooperation will be hostage to the border dispute (p. 199), and that there will continue to be a mix of cooperation and competition (p. 234)—all unremarkable observations. Given his position in the Indian establishment (he currently serves on India’s National Security Advisory Board, a panel of retired oicials and experts who advise the government), Mohan would have done well to dig beneath the surface of oicial statements and speeches—from which he quotes frequently and at length—to explain the private fears and interests of policy-makers, at least those in New Delhi. He might also have explained issures within these countries: the Indian Army is not wild about losing cash and attention to a three-carrier blue-water navy and continues to search for relevance in a nuclear environment. Moreover, many Indian military elites complain that the Ministry of External Afairs is unduly lenient towards China, a sentiment ampliied by an April/May 2013 border standof. Amidst the high geopolitics, these domestic debates are lost in what is otherwise a useful text with a wide, ambitious sweep. Shashank Joshi, Royal United Services Institute, UK East Asia and Pacific Nuclear North Korea: regional dynamics, failed policies, and ideas for ending a global stalemate. Edited by Su Hoon Lee. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 2012. 227pp. Index. Pb.: £19.50. isbn 978 8 98421 335 7. The struggle to have North Korea (The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK) abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions has been the dominant issue in Korean security studies for the last two decades. Though there were hopes in the past that Pyongyang might be persuaded or coerced into giving up these weapons, these days have come and gone. Nuclear weapons have become a core element of Pyongyang’s national security strategy, and it is unlikely to give them up willingly. Nuclear North Korea brings together a diverse set of chapters with difering perspectives and methodologies that together pursue the answers to three fundamental questions. What are North Korea’s motivations for acquiring nuclear weapons? Could North Korea have been persuaded to relinquish its nuclear weapons ambitions had the United States pursued diferent policies during the Clinton and Bush years? How might diferent policy approaches yet obtain the goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula? These are diicult and controversial questions with multiple answers. This volume assembled by Su Hoon Lee provides important perspectives to consider when answering these questions. The book contains six chapters that deal with diferent dimensions of the problem. Wade Huntley begins with a helpful review of the history of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions followed by an assessment of the impact its programme has had on the military spending and defence posture of others in the region. Jian Cai, a Chinese scholar from Fudan University in Shanghai follows with an examination of China’s strategy and relationship with the DPRK. The chapter provides a detailed assessment of Beijing’s interests and policies while laying out a set of recommendations for Chinese policy-makers. In perhaps the most interesting theoretical chapter, Kyung-Ae Park identiies and examines diferent balancing strategies—internal, soft and omni—that help to explain North Korea’s actions rather than bandwagoning, the typical strategy of small states. Her chapter demonstrates the complex context of the problem, and the change over time 1355 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews of these relationships along with North Korean strategy in the region. Gregory Moore provides a detailed critique of the Bush administration’s North Korea policy, arguing that it not only failed to achieve denuclearization but actually pushed North Korea further down the path of acquiring nuclear weapons. Instead, Moore maintains that the United States should approach Pyongyang with an ofer of full diplomatic relations and a peace treaty without preconditions as conidence-building measures. Samuel Kim follows with a review of the North’s strategy and the external and internal factors that shape the strategy. Kim believes that Washington fails to see how it has been a continuing threat and the chief motive behind North Korean behaviour. Finally, Kim Keun-sik concludes by arguing that blame for this policy problem does not lie solely with North Korea. Both Washington and Pyongyang have done much to contribute to the tension and mistrust present in this relationship. One element that would have improved the book is increased attention to updating the material contained in several of the chapters. The chapters were all previously published journal articles with ive ranging from 2008 to 2010. Keeping pace with events on the Korean Peninsula is a challenge and a particularly diicult task for the production cycle of books. Yet several of the chapters would have beneited from further updates since their original publication dates as articles. For example, one chapter notes ‘Christopher Hill’s recent attempts via bilateral meetings with the Six Party Talks’, a reference to 2007−2008 that is in need of revision. With a copyright date of 2012, some of the chapters pay scant attention to any events since the Obama years began. In itself, this would not be a problem if the book were presented as an assessment of the Bush years. Yet the introduction leads one to believe that the analysis will include some of the events since Obama took oice but the lack of detailed coverage beyond 2008 is readily apparent. Assessing North Korean actions and US policy towards North Korea has been a regular exercise for the past two decades. This work adds some well-crafted arguments to one side of that evaluation that will contribute to the ongoing policy debate. While political scientists and policy analysts have been the primary authors weighing in on these questions, eventually it will become the task of historians to determine North Korean motivation for its nuclear weapons programme and whether diferent US policy choices could have succeeded in denuclearizing the DPRK. Indeed, if access to North Korean sources is ever achieved in a way similar to those of Eastern Europe, we may truly have answers to these questions. In the meantime, we must continue to do the best we can, and the authors in Nuclear North Korea make an important and detailed contribution to that discussion. Terence Roehrig, US Naval War College, USA 3.11: disaster and change in Japan. By Richard J. Samuels. New York: Cornell University Press. 2013. 216pp. £18.50. isbn 978 0 80145 200 0. Available as e-book. When going through this book I kept wondering to whom it might be useful. It contains a record of a vast mass of statements by prominent Japanese of sundry positions and functions about three subjects: the country’s reliance on nuclear energy; attitudes towards the military of Japan and the United States; and a weak movement for decentralization of administrative responsibilities, all in the wake of Japan’s worst disaster since the Second World War. On 11 March 2011, a combination of the most powerful earthquake on record, a tsunami that wiped out entire villages and parts of cities along the coast of north-eastern Japan, and the meltdown of several reactors of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture hit the nation with an extraordinary force, also psychologically. Richard Samuels records some of 1356 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. East Asia and Pacific the horriied responses a year after what has become known as 3.11; compares the calamity and its aftermath to earlier ones as well as to similar disasters elsewhere in the world; and sets out to investigate how the disaster has inluenced, or may still inluence, policies in his three chosen areas. In passing he ofers a useful account of Japan’s energy policies, controversial because of vested interests and popular distrust, and of relations between Tokyo and local governments that are dimly perceived, if at all, in non-Japanese literature. Two things are wrong with the book. One relects a problem with American political and economic Japanology more generally; the other is the ‘social science hat’ that Samuels appears to be incapable of wearing lightly. In some sections (chapter two above all) you would never know that he is a professor and director of the Center for International Studies at MIT and author of half a dozen highly regarded studies, rather than a PhD candidate with an incumbent duty to demonstrate homework done by endless footnoted references to the obvious. Samuels approaches his subjects with preordained conceptual models that are not only tiresome, but hide the pertinent questions that he should have been exploring. And so we get layer upon layer of detail, organized through simplistic main lines derived from standard assumptions about Japan’s resistance to change; and an enormous amount of facts of who said what and when, without a pattern that would reveal crucial aspects of the dynamics among the diferent participants in Japanese political life. The catastrophe did not bring about signiicant changes, as had widely been expected. But Samuels does not ask why, and fails to provide a political perspective to help make sense of all the details that smother the few storylines he ofers. The calamity and Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s handling of its immediate aftermath took place a year and a half into a hugely important phase in the nation’s political life: a longawaited attempt by a new ruling party, the originally reformist Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), to end half a century of a de facto one-party system, and a tradition of bureaucratic rule with a minimum of input from politicians. Aside from the crucial question whether elected politicians could gain a degree of leverage over the career oicials, enabling them to introduce some policies based on political instead of administrative decision-making, the other question was whether Japan could make a start with more independent diplomacy towards its neighbours, China in particular. The irst DPJ cabinet of Hatoyama Yukio failed because of sabotage by the bureaucrats, who have time-honoured methods at their disposal to ensure that members of the cabinet will not actually run their ministries; by the big national newspapers, whose senior editors are in bed with the career oicials; and, most efectively, by a Washington whose Japan-handlers caught a case of worse-than-jitters when Hatoyama began talking about a ‘more equal’ relationship, took seriously designs for a regional grouping known as ASEAN Plus Three, and made overtures towards China for better party-to-party and people-to-people relations. Washington had made an unfeasible project relating to Marine bases on Okinawa, which would have triggered rebellion if carried out, the test-case for the new ruling party, and essentially helped overthrow this irst cabinet. The second DPJ Prime Minister, fearful that the same fate might befall him, distanced himself far from his fellow activists in the party, deepened a split in the DPJ from which it never recovered, and as a result found himself at a great disadvantage when having to cope with the consequences of disaster and a recalcitrant bureaucracy and nuclear power industry. Reading Samuels’s crisis book will not make you any the wiser about this relevant background, and his remarks about Kan distrusting bureaucrats and his leadership crisis in general come out of nowhere. This absence of context for numerous themes is among the book’s major laws. Samuels’s 1357 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews scientist models do not demand it, and internalized assumptions about the US−Japan relationship prevent it; the possibility to engage in politically neutral scholarship when the subject is politically controversial is a common illusion. Samuels dwells at length on ‘Operation Tomodachi’, in which the American military excelled in a major efort to help clear tsunami debris and in giving assistance to the stricken population, but stays away from delving to a decent depth in what is highly controversial about a relationship that is erroneously identiied by the commonly used term ‘alliance’. The problem of American bases on Okinawa receives cavalier treatment. Samuels gives no hint of an understanding that the Japanese confusion he writes about in connection with this, or yet another three prime ministers playing musical chairs, or Kan’s leadership crisis, has much to do with a vassalage relationship that has become pathological and dysfunctional. Samuels’s study represents a wasted opportunity. If this sympathetic witness had come out of the social sciences cocoon and, using his language skills and connections, had applied his considerable intellect to this crucial period in Japan’s political life we might have had a more readable, thrilling and multifariously useful account of what did and did not change as a result of 3.11. Instead we get a tepid, ‘too early to tell’, conclusion at the end of it. Karel van Wolferen North America* Presidential leadership and the creation of the American era. By Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2013. 183pp. Index. £19.95. isbn 978 0 69115 836 5. Joseph Nye has produced a book that is timely in the context of two successive US presidents mired in domestic discontent, global crises of legitimacy and the ‘rise’ of new powers, and a period of less than a decade in which the United States changed from being viewed as a victim of terror to being seen as a global menace. Nye’s book is a whisper in the ear of the American president in the twenty-irst century to rethink how to be a more efective leader. Nye’s credentials are impressive: ive decades at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; several treatises on power; government service in the Carter and Clinton administrations; and board membership of the Council on Foreign Relations, at the heart of the establishment. A critical friend to White House incumbents, especially of a liberal bent. Nye considers an aspect of power that has been much neglected among political scientists: presidential leadership. Did US presidents really count in the United States’ rise to primacy and what should they be doing now that there are credible challenges to US hegemony? Having examined soft power, contextual intelligence and the several levels of power on a three-dimensional chessboard (indicating overwhelming US military superiority, increasing global economic multipolarity and, inally, a third dimension of global problems demanding global solutions), Nye turns his attention to the several presidents at the helm during the creation of the American century. His analysis takes into account structure, agency and contingency. Some leaders were deined by how they managed crises—FDR, for example, during the great depression and the rise of fascist aggression. He concludes that though structural factors are the more powerful in explaining outcomes, presidents can count in various ways. The United States has had a series of eight presidents during the rise of the American era; few have been truly transformational and, had they not been in the White House, things would have been very diferent. He ends by ofering advice to current and future presidents which they might read with proit. The book is not quite an American * See also Jess Bravin, The terror courts: rough justice at Guantanamo Bay, pp. 1311–12. 1358 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. North America version of Machiavelli’s The prince but it comes close: a soft-powered Machiavellianism. Challenging the tendency among leadership experts Nye argues that so-called transformational leadership, committed to radical change, is not necessarily best; that transactional leaders like Eisenhower can be more efective. Examining eight presidents from McKinley to Bush senior (with a inal chapter on Bush junior and Obama), Nye concludes that ‘contextual intelligence’, i.e. judgement, is the most vital leadership skill—‘an intuitive diagnostic skill that helps a leader understand change, interpret the outside world, set objectives, and align strategies and tactics with objectives to create smart policies in new situations’ (p. 13). Contextually intelligent leaders can also ‘balance the desirable with what is feasible’ (p. 14). One can see why Nye would be more impressed with President Obama than with his immediate predecessor; and with FDR and Truman, Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush—Democrats and liberal Republicans. But if power, as Harold Lasswell argued, is all about who gets what, why and how, I am not sure that Nye’s book tries to answer some really big questions about who beneits from ‘American’ power—either at home or abroad. While he recognizes deep-seated US domestic problems of growing social and economic inequality and crumbling infrastructure, Nye does not address the global (mal)distribution of the beneits of US power. Given that the US president is, in efect, the world’s president in terms of sheer global impact, why does Nye fail to deal with global questions? And even when he does, he takes as a given that good US leadership—‘with’ and not necessarily ‘over’ others—will deliver public goods from which ‘all can beneit and none can be excluded’ (p. 157). I wonder if Nye invests too much faith in the American system to rectify world poverty, inequality and hunger. At heart, I fear, there remains an unchanged belief in the natural laws of trickle-down economics around which broad bipartisan agreement prevails within the American political elite. As a liberal internationalist, and soft power proponent, Nye might be asked how diferent US foreign policy would be if it followed his contextual intelligence prescriptions. I think the answer might lie in the diferences between the leadership of George W. Bush and Barack Obama: lots of stylistic changes, greater levels of deliberation, weighing of consequences of rival courses, more open debate, more sober language, a more overtly rational approach to policy; but no fundamental change in policy; some change in the mix of means used to achieve ends remarkably similar. In the hands of a power like the United States, such shifts can be meaningful—the diference between, for example, war on Iraq and the continuation of containment and sanctions. But it also meant complete agreement on Afghanistan, extended use of drone strikes, changing the name but not the methods of the war on terror, humanitarian intervention rather than regime change rhetoric in Libya, and so on. But the sting in the tail, for Obama, is implicit given the signiicance of crises that Nye argues are fundamental in transformational leadership, liberating ‘a gifted leader from the accumulated constraints of vested interest groups and bureaucratic inertia that normally inhibit action in the American system’ (p. 11). President Obama, elected on a wave of change rhetoric and expectation, failed to mobilize his support base—among electors, media and congress, not to mention ‘world opinion’—signiicantly to change US foreign and national security policy. Nye would clearly prefer the Obama method. Yet this may indicate the outer limits of American leadership’s ability to adapt to changing domestic and global conditions, an establishment that remains mired in its own US-centric mindsets and ambitions, albeit with greater emphasis on partnership. Thus, for large parts of the world that experience US military power, the diferences are likely to be marginal. Inderjeet Parmar, City University London, UK 1359 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews Latin America and Caribbean Criminal insurgencies in Mexico and the Americas: the gangs and cartels wage war. Edited by Robert J. Bunker. New York: Routledge. 2013. 209pp. Index. Pb.: £28.00. isbn 978 0 41553 375 1. This collection of works was previously published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies in 2011. The focus of this volume is to contextualize drug cartel and gang activities within the larger epochal changes occurring in the international system. The volume is rich in theoretical detail that contributes to existing International Relations literature on conlict, warfare and insurgencies to include the threat violent and politicized non-state actors pose to states. This edited volume begins with a preface detailing the evolution of one of Mexico’s most notorious drug cartels, Los Zetas, and neatly dovetails into the cautionary tone set in the introduction concerning the inluence these changes have had on the state and conlict, and whether the United States is capable of confronting said realities. The remainder of the volume is broken into three parts. The irst part (chapters two and three) provides the theoretical underpinning by expanding on the notion of spiritual and commercial insurgencies, originally termed by Steven Metz in The future of insurgency (US Army War College, 1993), to include criminal insurgencies such as drug cartels and gangs. This chapter is followed by an interesting reclassiication of Richard J. Norton’s work on the three-level feral cities model: it incorporates two additional levels by including third-phase cartels and third-generation gangs. This reconstructed ive-level feral cities model allows for analysis when ferality or de-institutionalization results in ‘criminal re-institutionalization of urban social and political structures around new patterns of living’ (p. 51). This ifth level represents the epochal changes noted in the introduction that may ultimately result in a confederation of criminal networks that could rival state power. The case-study section (chapters four to eight), dedicated to Mexico and Central America, ofers a stark view of the corruptive inluences of drug cartels and gangs both domestically and internationally. The three chapters on Mexico explore allegations that political parties in Mexico are colluding with the Sinaloa Cartel against other drug cartels; detail the origins and sophistication of drug cartel weaponry; and demonstrate the counterintelligence capabilities of drug cartels to corrupt law enforcement oicials and breach security in several US agencies. The two chapters on Central America focus on drug cartel and gang activities that raise several concerns regarding state legitimacy, weak institutions and corruption. Steven S. Dudley’s chapter is particularly noteworthy as he emphasizes that while Mexico has received much of the attention, the real problem lies in Central America. ‘Weak, decentralized states are struggling to modernize with little resources or support from the elite who are not willing to pay for these shifts, or from the general populace, which remembers all too clearly what an unchecked central government is capable of ’ (p. 178). Dudley provides a breakdown of gang and cartel penetration throughout Central America, reairming the core theme of this volume about the potential threat to national security if these issues are not dealt with. One of the key weaknesses of this edited volume is the limited discussion about how transnational criminal organizations have not only emerged but also expanded in Mexico and Central America. Government capacity throughout the region, particularly in rural areas, has remained relatively weak since independence. Ironically, Mexico’s transition towards democratization has created opportunities for drug cartels to begin to challenge openly prior arrangements with government oicials. In rural areas where the state traditionally 1360 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Latin America and Caribbean has had limited reach, authoritarian enclaves persist and power is less democratic in structure and contingent on strong patron−client relations. States in Central America remain weak and possess limited resources to rebuild after decades of civil war. Another potential problem for the volume is the assumption that drug cartels and gangs are politicized, which is not clearly evident. Drug cartels and gangs may have illed the void of the state, and in some cases exercise dual sovereignty, but that does not necessarily mean these actors are politicized, merely that the state itself lacks the capacity or legitimacy of its people, leaving a void for other non-state actors to ill. Robert J. Bunker and John P. Sullivan reinforce this point with their quote by Vanda Felbab-Brown who contends that state capacity matters. ‘In strong states that efectively address the needs of their societies, the non-state entities cannot compete’ (p. 60). The inherent danger lies where states remain weak. Overall, the edited volume is a solid contribution to International Relations theory and ofers readers a sobering glimpse into the emerging challenges that confront states. What would have enhanced this volume is a focus on policy prescriptions to strengthen institutional capacity, and speciically on what alternatives exist to confront this failed drug war. Emily Acevedo, California State University, Los Angeles, USA Bolivia: processes of change. By John Crabtree and Ann Chaplin. London: Zed. 2013. 196pp. Index. Pb.: £14.99. isbn 978 1 78032 376 3. Available as e-book. Mobilizing Bolivia’s displaced: indigenous politics and the struggle over land. By Nicole Fabricant. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2012. 257pp. Index. Pb.: £18.99. isbn 978 0 80787 249 9. Given the unrealistically high expectations in some quarters of a revolutionary transformation, scholars have been understandably sharply divided over the political direction and actual accomplishments of Evo Morales and the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) since the party came to power in Bolivia in 2006. On the one hand, Kepa Artaraz, in Bolivia: refounding the nation (Pluto, 2012, reviewed in International Afairs 88: 5), though not uncritical of the Morales government, posited that the MAS was truly forging a path towards a new kind of political and democratic practice. Jefery Webber, on the other hand, from a Marxist perspective, has argued forcefully that the MAS project amounted to little more than ‘reconstituted neo-liberalism’ (From rebellion to reform in Bolivia, Haymarket Books, 2011, reviewed in IA 87: 6). The two books by John Crabtree and Ann Chaplin, and Nicole Fabricant conform to a certain degree to these contrary positions. Crabtree and Chaplin contend that the Morales government, while obviously keen to brandish its ‘revolutionary’ credentials, is part of a historical continuum, so that its break with the past could never have been absolute. Economic and political realities have obliged it to continue—with some modiications—an economy based on the extraction of inite natural resources, despite all the rhetoric about the environment, and to privilege the ‘productive’ revolution—the pressing need to feed the growing urban population— over the ‘agrarian’ revolution, i.e. land reform, which has facilitated in turn a modus vivendi with the agro-industrial wing of the Cruceño elite in the years since the confrontations of 2007−2008. The 2009 constitution, nonetheless, in their view, represents ‘a political victory for indigenous groups’ since it enshrines ‘a number of important rights into law which will not be easily reversed’ (p. 23). The overall feeling of empowerment and social advancement, especially for the historically disfranchised indigenous population, and a perceptible improvement in material well-being, are likely to ofset the frustration felt in some sectors 1361 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews of the population at the slow and uneven pace of change and the fact that not all social sectors have been brought fully into the decision-making process. The MAS will continue to ind a bastion of support in the city of El Alto, the crucible of the popular revolt of October 2003 that paved the way to its assumption of power, and among the coca growers (Morales having retained the presidency of the Federación del Trópico); elsewhere, support for the party will be contingent. Fabricant, in her politically engaged ethnography of the MST (Movimiento Sin Tierra, or Landless Movement), a much less well-known social movement than the coca growers of the Chapare and the Yungas and its much-analysed namesake in Brazil, decries the monoculture (soy) export-oriented model that has come to dominate the lowlands of eastern Bolivia because it is ‘detrimental to sovereignty over food and natural resources’ (p. 178). That model has been espoused, moreover, by a racist neo-colonial elite based in the city of Santa Cruz that has often used violence against those who have sought to challenge its regional hegemony, mainly peasant colonists from the highlands. Whereas Crabtree and Chaplin accentuate the positive in the new constitution, Fabricant regards it as severely ‘compromised’ for not making the ceiling on the permissible size of landholdings retroactive. She extols the MST for promoting a highly democratic collective system of governance based on the traditional ayllu of the highlands and an alternative form of production that is ecologically sound. The author recognizes, however, that this ‘utopian project’ is not without its laws in practice, as she has observed at irst-hand, in respect of the meting out of communitarian justice, the presence of an element of corruption and abuse of power, and residual discrimination against women. She also concedes that the MAS government is certainly preferable to the neo-liberal administrations that preceded it. Both works are reliant to a great extent on the testimony of informants and participant observation—on a range of supporters and one-time adherents of the MAS in the case of Crabtree and Chaplin, the list of them at the end of their book being their only nod in the direction of the standard scholarly apparatus; apart from one token interview with a member of the Santa Cruz agricultural elite, on a fairly close relationship over a period of time with a number of MST activists on the part of Fabricant. The latter is certainly the most proactive of the authors, having joined a gruelling month-long MST protest march from the lowlands to La Paz in 2006, which results in a rare extended dissection of a type of event that has been quite commonplace in modern Bolivia. Crabtree and Chaplin, although sympathetic to the MAS project, manage to maintain a suicient degree of aloofness to allow for a balanced assessment of the conlicting interests at play in the many diferent regions of the country that they visit, including areas oft-neglected by commentators such as Tarija in the south-east and northern Beni and Pando. Their lucidly written book may be highly recommended for readers in search of an overview of the problems and prospects of Evo Morales’s Bolivia as the 2014 elections approach. Fabricant, by contrast, appears much too personally involved with her subject and, of course, focused on just one part of this multifarious country; her rather verbose conclusion, written with a strong sense of urgency, is a virtual manifesto about how to avert an impending ecological disaster through a close alliance of social movements and a strong, non-comprador state. Still, her work provides a unique insight into the MST’s vision of a more egalitarian society. Philip Chrimes 1362 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Latin America and Caribbean La cooperación Sur−Sur y triangular en América Latina: políticas airmativas y prácticas transformadas. Edited by Bruno Ayllón and Tahina Ojeda. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata. 2013. 243pp. Index. €18.00. isbn 978 8 48319 805 6. It is no secret that the international development assistance landscape is changing. Most attention has been paid to the big new players, namely China, India and to a lesser extent Brazil and South Africa. Lost in this pile of BRICS is the sustained and quietly strengthening role that many Latin American nations are playing as providers of development assistance. The book reviewed here concentrates on nine Latin American cases, setting out what these countries are doing in terms of South−South cooperation and triangular development assistance provision. Equating South−South cooperation with the oicial development assistance (ODA) provided by the big OECD members is something of a contentious pursuit in Latin America. Aid carries with it a stigma of hierarchical relationships and beggar−patron dynamics that are anathema to the logic of solidarity and mutual assistance that drives a great amount of the foreign policy in Latin America and the sorts of activities set out in this book. For the Latin American countries the challenge is often that while the will may be there to provide more assistance to their neighbours and other southern countries, the resources are often lacking. One solution that has been rising in popularity is the provision of trilateral cooperation, which often involves a large OECD country providing the funds to leverage the technical expertise of a successful Latin American country. The irst two chapters in the book—José Ángel Sotillo Lorenzo’s prologue and the triangular cooperation chapter by Christian Freres and Daniel Castillo—map out the evolution of South−South cooperation and triangular development cooperation provision, creating a useful conceptual map for the subsequent chapters. The bulk of the book is taken up with detailed case-studies: Argentina ( Javier Surasky), Brazil (Bruno Ayllón Pino), Chile (Guillermo Santander Campos), Colombia (Fernando Nivia), Cuba (Tahina Ojeda), Ecuador ( Javier Surasky), Mexico ( Juan Pablo Prado Lallande), Uruguay (Martín Fittipaldi) and Venezuela (Tahina Ojeda). In many respects the real strength of this useful volume lies in these detailed country case-studies. Each provides a clear explanation of how their subject moved from being just a recipient to oftentimes both a donor and a recipient. Moreover, the authors make it clear that provision of ODA-like South−South cooperation has in many cases been going on for more than 50 years and has formed a crucial part of the giver’s national development strategy. The overall picture that emerges is that while the sums of money involved in these projects are not large, their impact is signiicantly bigger because the focus is on the direct transfer of policies and programmes that work by the individuals that have made them a success. This latter aspect has prompted OECD-member donors—in keeping with its Madrid publication the book concentrates predominantly on Spain—to seek out Latin American partners for trilateral programming in other regional countries as well as in nations in Africa and South-East Asia. Ayllón and Ojeda’s volume ofers an important contribution to our understanding of emerging market countries in the development assistance provision scene because it so clearly sets out and catalogues how South−South cooperation is institutionally provided in each country and in which issue areas each country is particularly active. While some of this story is now being actively researched and published on Brazil in English and Portuguese, the other eight cases remain woefully under-explored, something which has prompted a lurry of report commissioning by several established OECD-member development agencies. 1363 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Book reviews What the authors collectively could explore further is the question of why South−South cooperation is provided. Further attention could also be given throughout the case-study chapters to hiccups that have arisen in the provision and management of triangular cooperation; this policy option looks fantastic on the surface, but the practicalities of actually doing it reveal all sorts of issues with how the big donors manage aid and what they expect to get from it. To be fair, following up on these two sets of issues is efectively another book project, one that would make an enlightening follow-up to this excellent primer on the rising tide of Latin American development assistance provision. As it stands, this book is one of the best primers available in any language on the Latin American provision of South−South cooperation. Sean W. Burges, The Australian National University, Australia 1364 International Afairs 89: 5, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Afairs.