Book reviews International Relations theory* Fighting hurt: rule and exception in torture and war. By Henry Shue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. 528pp. £50.00. isbn 978 0 19876 762 6. Henry Shue’s Fighting hurt brings together 22 essays, all but one published since the beginning of the ‘war on terror’. Their common concern is with the ethics of war and the use of violence—particularly torture—by states and those acting on their behalf. One of Shue’s central preoccupations, and a thread running through many of the pieces, is the vexed question of how moral, legal and political philosophers ought to think about cases in which important norms come under pressure to bend for the sake of morally important values. These putative ‘exceptions’ arise in scholarly debate from a variety of sources. Sometimes it is the legal philosopher or ethicist who introduces them as a thought experiment. Shue is generally wary of the temptation to take the initiative in starting or accelerating debate in this way, by putting forward hypotheticals in which the bombs are known to be ticking; the captive is certainly a terrorist and knows where the bombs are, and the interrogator has no other choice but to use torture, etc. This sort of theory, he thinks, raises important questions about how philosophical accounts of practical ethics ought to orientate themselves vis-à-vis political practice and human behaviour in institutional contexts. But Shue maintains that ethics ought to take the complexities of practice as a starting-point rather than ‘applying’ an ethical theory that has been prepared in abstraction from them.One of the many great strengths of Shue’s work is the way it engages, at multiple levels, not only with philosophical issues narrowly conceived, but also with the legal and political ramifications of putting into practice principles that have been shaped around hypothetical hard cases. More often than not, however, the initial challenge of the putative exception arises not so much from academia, as from the exigencies of national emergencies and war and from the initiatives of politicians, practising lawyers and military leaders. They are only later expanded on (and sometimes rendered even more dangerous) through abstract treatments in the philosophical literature. Michael Walzer’s doctrine of ‘supreme emergency’, for instance, takes its name from a phrase used by Churchill at the beginning of the Second World War (p. 248) and its central ideas originate in the practices of Allied bombers over German and Japanese cities that had set out conditions in which the rule of non-combatant immunity in war might justifiably be breached. Characteristically, for Shue, the argument for narrowing such putative exceptions is based not only on a careful weighing of moral principles and a refinement of the sorts of consequences that philosophers ought to consider important enough to violate them, but also on a direct challenge to the empirical assump* See also Dale Jamieson, Reason in a dark time, pp. 1536–7. International Affairs 92: 6 2016 1517–1562 © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Book reviews tions just war theorists make in asserting such a hypothetical possibility. Terror bombing, crucially, is generally counterproductive and there is little or no evidence of its effectiveness (p. 15). Likewise, torture—a topic that is taken up by six pieces in the volume—became increasingly prominent as a philosophical theme in the wake of disclosures about military behaviour in various conflicts in the twentieth century and since. Current debate on how torture ought to be defined and whether the ban on torture expressed in the international Convention Against Torture should be seen as both comprehensive and absolute dates, of course, back to 9/11. But, as Shue’s classic article from Philosophy and Public Affairs (‘Torture’)— reprinted here—stated as early as 1978, the objection that philosophers should steer clear of reopening controversy where public consensus had already put such dangerous issues to bed, so to speak, was already moot: ‘Pandora’s box is open’, as he wrote then. The ‘ritualistic’ condemnation of all torture had proved insufficient to withstand the fact that ‘torture is widespread and growing’ (p. 39). Shue’s reluctant and extremely cautious engagement with the theme of torture starts out with his influential argument that the peculiar horror with which it is widely viewed is justified by the fact that it inflicts terrible suffering on the defenceless (a retort to the argument that if killing is justifiable in a just war, then surely the seemingly lesser harm of non-lethal torture must be too). Responding to the debate among lawyers under the presidency of George W. Bush, as well as academics addressing themselves to the wider public, later essays in Shue’s volume pay meticulous attention to the contextual surrounds of the torture debate. ‘Torture in dreamland: disposing of the ticking bomb’, first published in 2006, responds to the dangers of idealized, abstract thinking that exaggerates hypothetical emergencies while failing to take due account of the practical effects of admitting exceptions in institutional contexts. As Shue declares: ‘One can imagine rare torture, but one cannot institutionalize rare torture’ (p. 65). And his detailed textual analyses in ‘Target-selection norms, torture norms’, from 2011, exposes the way in which restraining principles in morality and law can be subverted through successive and incremental redefinitions of terms, a kind of semantic mission creep. The volume also includes essays on pre-emption and preventive war, proportionality and humanitarian intervention, as well as Shue’s important contributions to the recent debates on the jus in bello and the relationship between morality and the law of armed conflict. Shue’s defence of the moral equality of combatants and the equal application of the laws of war to all soldiers, regardless of whether they fight for a just cause or not— developed both in solo performances here such as ‘Do we need a “morality of war”?’ and in work co-authored with Janina Dill on ‘the St Petersburg Assumption’—challenges the conclusions of revisionist just war theory, defending a richly argued variant of the so-called ‘orthodox’ view that corresponds to and helps support key components of the Law of Armed Conflict. Fighting hurt is an enormously rich volume, animated throughout by an insistence on paying careful attention to the political dimensions of ethics and to the potentially dangerous consequences of applying abstract moral theory in complex institutional and practical contexts. It is an important book that ought to be on the shelf of anyone seriously engaged in scholarship on the ethics of torture, war and political violence more generally. Christopher Finlay, University of Birmingham, UK 1518 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. International Relations theory Political vices. By Mark E. Button. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. 228pp. £47.99. isbn 978 0 19027 496 2. Available as e-book. This relatively short political theory monograph, though intelligently enough conceived and admirably motivated, is not executed with the mental and linguistic crispness that one would ideally wish. Nor is the book as pristine as one might at first imagine: earlier versions of the second and third chapters have already appeared in print, in 2011 and 2012 respectively. All the same, the book is eminently worth persevering with. Democracy, both ancient and modern—very different animals, actually—has always had its intellectual critics, but most of those have been hostile and destructive, rather than charitable and constructive. One thinks of Plato in antiquity and any number of his fascist or authoritarian successors in more recent times. Mark Button is not, therefore, unusual in exploring and dwelling on democracy’s vices, rather than singing its virtues, but he does so in order to preserve democracy from them and to enhance it as a socially and communally worthwhile political practice and system. To that extent, perhaps, his work recalls a recent book by John Dunn, Breaking democracy’s spell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), in which the Cambridge sage characterized the term ‘democracy’ as one that ‘equivocates … between a standard of right conduct and the practical character of an existing regime’ and thereby sows confusion ‘even for those professionally dedicated to keeping their own thinking and speech clear’ (p. 135). After a lengthy opening chapter that seeks to offer a general theory of political vice, Button explores in turn three particular vices: sovereignty (chapter two), wholeness (chapter three) and exceptionalism (chapter four), before concluding with a call for their remedy through accountability (chapter five). Or rather not concluding: a massive and dense section of scholarly endnotes follows (pp. 161–200), constituting fully one-fifth of the total text. Since those vicious terms are not immediately transparent, and certainly not being used in any ‘ordinary language’ sort of way, a little further investigation is required. Help is immediately at hand—in the shape of the titles, as opposed to subtitles, of those three central chapters: ‘The anti-politics of hubris’, ‘Moral blindness’ and ‘Political recalcitrance’. Hubris in ancient Greece was an actionable crime, comprising physically or psychologically violent transgression of status boundaries, for example between free and unfree people or between citizens and foreigners. Button’s hubris is not merely our everyday arrogance or overweening pride, but something much closer to the ancient Greek original; he even has a section drawing on Sophocles’s Antigone, that he entitles the ‘Creon complex’ (pp. 41–9). The chief complaint is that such hubris shuts down reciprocal political communication. Blindness here is both moral and political blindness, especially culpable when it is wilful. Against this, the author invokes the, to me rather opaque, notion of the ‘pathos of distance’, one of a series of collective political practices that can allegedly ‘forestall our political vices and help account for their worst effects’ (p. 78), such as a critical inability to ‘live in the world with diverse others’ (p. 82). As is not uniquely the case, the snappiest formulations are to be found not in the text but in an endnote (p. 186, n. 29): recalcitrance is seen by Button as a vice when it forms a barrier to practical wisdom and reciprocal justice by either ignoring or denying the morally valid claims of others or undermining the political and moral value of revisability. Accountability was a central aspect of the earliest ever defence in political theory of a version of democracy (preserved in the Histories of Herodotus). But Button’s accountability 1519 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews is predictably more complex. It is a critical and discursive practice with a decentring focus, that requires ‘an extensive amount of cognitive work on the part of individual moral actors enmeshed in social relations with others’ (p. 132), especially when democratic voter preferences and electoral politics are at stake. Shakespeare’s Edgar was of the view that ‘The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us’. Button has little truck with any god or gods (though religion does get a few mentions), and regards the vices he discusses as a plague on all our democratic houses, one that the sort of political thinking and practices he advocates ought ideally to prevent or at least cure. He has my unequivocal support. The book concludes aptly with a brief ‘Afterword’ (pp. 157–9), an urgently Nietzschean rallying cry not only to ‘take our political vices seriously’, but also to fight against them in the name of the ‘hope for a more just and decent society than the one we live in today’ (p. 159). Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge, UK International history* From Washington to Moscow: US–Soviet relations and the collapse of the USSR. By Louis Sell. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. 2016. 408pp. £76.26. isbn 978 0 82236 179 4. Available as e-book. Kenneth Waltz, in his Theory of international politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), wrote about patterns that emerge throughout history. Even though realism as a theory is nowhere mentioned, one cannot help but notice the recurring themes and patterns of Great Power politics in Louis Sell’s latest book, From Washington to Moscow. Sell, a career foreign service officer, has written this book at a time when the global order is arguably straining from several structural forces—and he shows how similar the last two decades of Cold War were. From Washington to Moscow can be classified as a work of contemporary history. Methodologically rigorous and qualitative, Sell deploys thorough archival research aided by personal observation, which makes the book a fluid and enjoyable, but serious, read. It is also a welcome departure from contemporary political scholarship, which tends to be mostly quantitative in nature and is often devoid of the historical ‘long views’. Sell charts US foreign policy debates about the Soviet Union during those decades, and they are, again, highly similar to the contemporary debates we face. As evident from Sell’s account, Nixon was the most pragmatic of the US presidents, followed by Reagan and Ford. Nixon realized the importance of back channels with the Soviets, and this policy eventually helped the US extricate itself from the costly quagmire of Vietnam—not dissimilar to current US challenges in the Middle East (pp. 42 and 47). Ford’s attempts to forge the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty, later considered a roaring success, were initially met with heavy partisan rhetoric and domestic opposition from both the military and politicians (p. 57)—bringing to mind President Obama’s Iran agreement—and Reagan, often considered a hard-line right-wing ideologue, was in fact wary of pushing the Soviets into a corner (pp. 139 and 185) and took every opportunity to cut a deal. It is hard to imagine nowadays such an amoral and pragmatic move of realpolitik as Nixon’s China gambit, to solidify the Sino-Soviet split, given the spread of social media and the state of heightened polarization within western domestic policy. * See also Tony Brenton, ed., Historically inevitable?, pp. 1543–4. 1520 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. International history Sell also sheds light on the Soviet decision-making process. The irrational fear of a repeat of the Second World War often drove the Soviets to pre-emptive security maximizing (p. 17). The most interesting part of the book describes the lead-up to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. When narrative and ideology cloud practical calculations and threat assessment, they inevitably lead to imperial overreach, something we are thoroughly familiar with post-2003 (pp. 56, 83, 86). The book highlights another significant aspect of the Cold War, one that is sorely lacking from contemporary discourse, amid the ongoing crises in Syria and Ukraine: the common ties that bind Russian and western publics. It is easy to forget during times of geopolitical tension that Yuri Andropov, possibly one of the most ruthless KGB chiefs and a hard-line believer in the historical inevitability of socialism, also loved Sinatra and Shakespeare (p. 119). Sell reminds us that rank-and-file Soviet bureaucrats, soldiers and policy-makers were honest, humorous, patriotic citizens, who just happened to be on the wrong side of the fence (p. 220). From Washington to Moscow is not without its problems. The book jumps between timelines, which might be hard to follow for some readers not acquainted with Cold War chronology. It is also a little too sympathetic to Leonid Brezhnev and Andropov. But notwithstanding those minor flaws, Sell’s work is an important scholarly contribution and should be of interest not just to students of Great Power politics and Russian–western relations, but also to anyone, especially in the West, who is either uninitiated or dismissive of the destructive power of incompetent and inefficient centralized command economy, bloated bureaucracy and dogmatic ideology. Sumantra Maitra, University of Nottingham, UK Beyond the divide: entangled histories of Cold War Europe. Edited by Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. 2015. 336pp. £75.00. isbn 978 1 78238 866 1. Since the mid-2000s, Cold War history and the study of state socialism have experienced a transnational turn. Researchers are increasingly interested in the flows of people, ideas and goods across East–West frontiers, as well as in the networks (institutional and interpersonal) resultant from such movements, underlining the permeability of the Iron Curtain. The edited volume by Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen is a worthy instance of this scholarship that is altering our understanding of postwar European history. While mindful of different time-frames, the contributors do not consider bipolarism paradigmatic, for such a view makes it ‘difficult to investigate exchanges, interactions, and culture’ after 1945 (p. 13). The volume encompasses four sections. The first deals with the interplay between official and unofficial diplomacy. It includes two case-studies on different forms of diplomacy: Giles Scott-Smith’s account of ‘parallel diplomacy’, ‘individual enterprises that fostered official state aims without being commanded by a state’ in the Netherlands (p. 15); and Mathieu Gillabert’s analysis of Swiss cultural diplomacy from peaceful coexistence to detente. Additionally, there are examinations of bilateral entanglements, most importantly the French–Soviet negotiations on cultural circulation for the third basket in the Helsinki process (Nicolas Badalassi). Badalassi shows how, despite opposite country objectives for the conference, premises were created for a significant degree of cultural East–West convergence in Europe that consolidated existing channels of cross-border communication. The second part of the volume examines academic networks and mobility within epistemic establishments. Three chapters tackle the issue from bilateral vantage points, 1521 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews during the 1960s and 1970s: Sampsa Kaataja writes on Estonian–Finnish computing cooperation, Beatrice Scutaru on French–Romanian academic exchanges and Anssi Halmesvirta on Finnish–Hungarian interactions in research and development. The editors insist that East–West interactions ‘should not be perceived as binational phenomena … but as processes that entailed several countries and different layers of society’ (p. 12). Indeed, the bilaterally flavoured essays stay true to this pronouncement, particularly its second part. Authors reveal varying social categories taking advantage of the Iron Curtain’s permeability. The volume, however, does not flesh out enough the continuities of East–West ties from pre-1945 to the postwar period. Though acknowledging this direction of research (for example in the introduction or Halmesvirta’s chapter), the volume overlooks the reactivation, after 1956, of traditions that were shaped in the first half of the twentieth century. The third section dwells on the interaction between non-governmental and semigovernmental institutions. Václav Smidrkal shows how the 1940s and early 1950s did not lead to the insulation of Czechoslovakia from French culture. He stresses that this access was mediated by an instrumentalization which served the politics of cultural demarcation in the two camps. Following Lenin’s theory of two cultures (bourgeois vs proletarian), east European party-states claimed to be saviours of ‘genuine’ western classical heritage. This heavily translated intercultural exchange was the bedrock for later entanglements. Sonja Grossmann’s chapter on the evolution of the relationship between Soviet friendship societies in western Europe and official diplomacy emphasizes this nuance. Her conclusion is edifying: ‘Western governments were never able to replace friendship societies, even if they tried to create alternative bodies, as in Great Britain. Finally, in the 1970s, western governments learned to make use of the friendship societies for their own purposes, especially in the case of West Germany, a sort of private–public partnership that peaked during the Perestroika’ (p. 211). In her turn, Sarah Davies points out how an official propaganda tool, the journal Anglia, could equally alter British self-perception and trigger a dialogue with its Soviet audience. It was created in 1961 to ‘tell a subtle and credible story about Britain’ (p. 225), deliberately contrasting itself with the boastful Amerika. What stands out is that the staff established correspondence, admittedly severely surveyed, with Soviet citizens, to the extent that ‘Savitskii from Stavropol’, a regular correspondent, wrote to express his grief at the death of Wright Miller, the editor-in-chief of Anglia. The last part of Beyond the divide looks at how television (Lars Lundgren), interpersonal ties (Anna Matyska) and the translation of cultural productions in Yugoslav–Italian relations (Francesca Rolandi) undermined separation and encouraged border crossings. Rolandi highlights the shared feeling of inbetweenness that brought together Yugoslavia and Italy. Italian popular culture was thus able to spread in Yugoslavia in a spontaneous way, facilitating the passage to other cultural products from the ‘real West’ (p. 290). Moreover, this connection became a filter for other east European countries. Because of its transnational lens, Beyond the divide brings to the surface spaces, relationships, institutions and networks that have long remained in the shadow of a bifurcated vision of postwar eastern and western Europe, separated by the seemingly unbreachable Iron Curtain. Bogdan C. Iacob, New Europe College, Romania 1522 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Governance, law and ethics Governance, law and ethics* International organizations and military affairs. By Hylke Dijkstra. Abingdon: Routledge. 2016. 258pp. £71.00. isbn 978 1 13819 588 2. Available as e-book. International organizations and military affairs is an interesting and important book. It does what few people have done before, notably look comparatively as well as in a theoretically informed way at how states cooperate in military affairs through international organizations. As in all books, and particularly books as ambitious as this, one could find fault in the details. The theoretical discussion is perhaps not as innovative as Hylke Dijkstra contends. For example, I am certainly not convinced that academics have paid insufficient attention to control mechanisms in the area of international organizations (p. 9). Equally, one might question Dijkstra’s case selection. Why was no non-European regional organization examined? Do states with less well-developed state machineries deal differently with the requisites of institutionalized collaboration in military matters? Yet I don’t want to waste my limited time here on quibbling and carping, better by far to focus on the positives of a book I would recommend to anyone interested in these issues. It is precisely the ambition of the author—which necessarily leads to some of these shortcomings—that I most enjoyed. The book is focused on answering one deceptively simple and admirably clearly stated question: how do the member states of international organizations control international secretariats in the area of military affairs? To address this question, Dijkstra examines three international organizations—the UN, NATO and the EU—along two dimensions: their institutional development over time and the formulation of the mandates of their operations. The author identifies three kinds of control mechanisms used by member states: non-delegation, generic rules and shadow bureaucracies. The former refers to instances of non-delegation or incomplete delegation of either functions or resources. The second, indirect, method consists of the use of generic rules intended to enhance control over agents. Finally, shadow bureaucracies have the capacity to gather, process and verify information autonomously of the agent. The empirical sections of the book explore these theoretical themes in terms of institutional development and the formulation of mandates in each of the three organizations. I found the empirical detail fascinating and have learned much from it. Dijkstra illustrates the ubiquity of control mechanisms and underlines the constraints that member states place on both institutional development and the drafting of military mandates. He concludes that states frequently forfeit the gains of delegation to avoid excessive dependence on international secretariats; control takes precedence over effectiveness. This looks to become even more of a problem as states, for reasons both of limited capacity and the need for legitimation, turn ever more frequently to international organizations as a means of collaborating over military interventions. The increasing importance of the role played by international organizations in military affairs means that this book is valuable not only for its theoretical and empirical insights, but also because of the lessons it offers for those interested in making international military collaborations more effective. The dilemmas involved in reconciling the control national governments crave with the collaboration they increasingly need are crucial to contemporary policy debates, and this book provides fascinating insights into them. Anand Menon, King’s College London, UK * See also Ken Conca, An unfinished foundation, pp. 1538–9. 1523 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews Rise of the machines: a cybernetic history. By Thomas Rid. New York: Norton . 2016. 392pp. Pb.: £14.20. isbn 978 0 39328 600 7. Available as e-book. Thomas Rid’s newest book could not be more timely or relevant. As the United States directs its new Cyber Command to prepare e-attacks on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and when Silicon Valley’s most successful technology firms are building sprawling campuses that could be mistaken for hippie communes, it is understandable to ask how society found its way here. Rise of the machines answers just this question, through an extensively researched history of cybernetics. Be they in London, Lima or Luanda, today’s global citizens are more connected to technology—and to one another—than ever before. In a single lifetime, even the most mundane rituals and routines have been transformed, and almost daily one encounters not only a new gadget or app, but also the concomitant research exploring brain plasticity, learning behaviours, workplace etiquette or technology addiction. Rid investigates the nature of early technologists’ myths to offer a sweeping narrative of humankind’s relationship with the machine. The book’s title, Rise of the machines, implies a direct line from genesis to today. In fact, the book complicates this important narrative, charting an evolving human–machine relationship based on a critical interaction of communication and control. The central theme of the book is the inherent tension between utopian and dystopian world-views, from the Second World War to contemporary questions of security and progress. Its subtitle may strike today’s reader as curious; once a futuristic term, ‘cybernetic’ now ‘sounds oddly old-fashioned and out-of-touch’ when considering today’s Googles, Apples and Nests (p. 354). Nevertheless, it is important to understand the past in order to make informed decisions about the future. What is remarkable about Rid’s contribution is that even those fluent in code or steeped in the debates surrounding today’s technological innovations are unlikely to fully understand the chequered past of cybernetics. On delving into contemporary history, one expects a story laced with nerds and the Beltway establishment, less so a cast of characters including Hollywood celebrities, spooks, feminists and anarchists. This is a complex story that can only be told while considering unlikely cultures and communities. Extensively detailed, The rise of the machine therefore could risk overwhelming the casual reader. In fact, so detailed are Rid’s chapters that, at times, his descriptions of weapons systems or battles are more reminiscent of Erik Larson’s narrative non-fiction than what one might expect from a King’s College London security studies professor. However, by focusing on a discrete story in each chapter and squarely situating it in a distinct decade, Rid is able to create a textured narrative encompassing the period from the 1940s to the present day. One of the strongest sections offers insight into the ‘seductive power of the cybernetic mythos’ (p. 358) in culture, and grandly romps between the Whole Earth Catalog, the Grateful Dead, the Church of Scientology, video games and becoming a better baseball shortstop. While intensely descriptive—at the point of learning the proclivities of an exceedingly drunk Russian general, perhaps too much so—the book steers clear of the normative or prescriptive. Indeed, this ample volume offers a single point of reference for those interested in understanding the origins of all things ‘cyber’, and is to be commended for its comprehensive portrayal of cybernetic history. Rid concludes with the identification of five patterns observed over time. But, as society wrestles with the reality that innovations often advance more rapidly than the laws and 1524 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Conflict, security and defence policies governing them, many readers may be left wondering about the political aspects of increasing human–machine engagement. Perhaps the societal and ethical implications of the argument are beyond the book’s defined scope, or perhaps this will be Rid’s next contribution? Those interested in the nexus of science, technology and society will hope so. Now that the author has plunged deeply into this space, there is a non-zero probability that this is ‘game over’. Terry Babcock-Lumish, Islay Consulting LLC, Honolulu Conflict, security and defence Social science goes to war: the Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan. Edited by Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence. London: Hurst. 2015. 320pp. Pb.: £18.50. isbn 978 1 84904 421 9. Available as e-book. There is nothing new about the involvement of anthropologists and anthropology in western military campaigns. As a young anthropologist, Edmund Leach, who would go on to hold a personal chair in social anthropology at Cambridge, was drafted into the British Army during the Second World War; he worked in Burma, persuading the Kachin tribespeople in the Highlands to fight against the Japanese invaders. Edward Evans-Pritchard, professor of social anthropology at Oxford and fellow of All Souls College, played a similar role in Sudan with the Anuak. Although he did not contribute to the French war effort, Pierre Bourdieu, perhaps the most eminent French sociologist of the late twentieth century, conducted anthropological fieldwork among the Kabyle during the Algerian war. With no colonies, anthropologists in the United States have traditionally had less interaction with the armed forces, though after the Second World War, Ruth Benedict wrote an important study of Japanese culture which influenced US policy towards the defeated power. Consequently, the recent involvement of US anthropologists in the American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan has been both historically noteworthy and highly controversial. The edited volume by Montgomery McFate and Janice Laurence, Social science goes to war, is, therefore, to be welcomed. McFate and Laurence seek to explain how anthropology became involved in the American war effort through the creation of the Human Terrain System (HTS) and its Human Terrain Teams (HTT). According to the authors, the need for detailed ‘cultural knowledge’ became apparent to the US military as a result of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At that time, a number of US Army and Marine units requested cultural expertise to help them in theatre: ‘In the words of Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the then Commanding General of Multi-National-Corps-Iraq: “I asked my Brigade Commanders what was the number one thing they would like to have had more of, and they all said cultural knowledge”’ (p. 2). As a result of these requests, the Department of Defense (DoD) produced a ‘Joint urgent operational needs statement’ (p. 8). The Human Terrain System, with its Human Terrain Teams, emerged out of this ‘Operational needs statement’; its mission was ‘to enable culturally astute decision-making, enhance operational effectiveness, and preserve and share socio-cultural institutional knowledge’ (p. 9). The DoD subsequently contracted willing individuals with apparently appropriate anthropological training to deploy with US units, supporting commanders with academic analysis of local social, political and economic dynamics. The aim of this collection is to fill a gap in the literature by recording ‘the actual lived experience of social scientists who served on HTTs in Iraq and Afghanistan’. According to the editors, ‘this edited volume goes beyond the anecdotes, snippets and blogs to provide 1525 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews a comprehensive, objective and detailed view of HTS’. As a narrative, the book succeeds admirably. It explains the political context in which the HTS emerged and then, through a series of personal memoirs by deployed individuals who worked in HTTs, it describes the working environment of these operatives. McFate and Laurence record a number of successful interventions by HTTs. Since there is currently very little academic literature in the public domain about the Human Terrain System despite its importance, this work is to be welcomed. However, while a significant contribution, it does not represent a comprehensive study of the Human Terrain System. On the contrary, there remain many unexplored areas, especially around the politics of the programme. Here, McFate’s own central role in the creation of the HTS may have been a disadvantage. Understandably, although McFate acknowledges the opposition of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to the use of anthropology for military purposes, she dismisses their concerns perhaps a little too easily: ‘One of the goals of HTS, as established in the 2006 Iraq JUONS [Joint Urgent Operational Needs], was to increase the level of situational understanding and thereby to reduce the need for lethal force’ (p. 79). For McFate, anthropology improved the discretion of the US forces, reducing the level of violence. This seemed to be an unobjectionable goal. Yet McFate’s own interest in the programme seems to have encouraged her to ignore the objections of anthropologists and, indeed, the evident problems of the programme. She reduces the intense and complex politics of the AAA’s opposition to a mere cultural reflex: dedicated to their profession, anthropologists actively embraced a ‘cult of irrelevance’, where any involvement in policy undermined academic integrity. One of the AAA’s strongest arguments against the policy was the inadequate qualifications of the vast majority of those contracted onto Human Terrain Teams as ‘anthropologists’. McFate and Laurence acknowledge this point but significantly underplay it. As a result of their lack of training, the contribution of many HTTs was nugatory and, in some cases, harmful. The AAA’s opposition to the Human Terrain System was not a vote for total policy irrelevance; the AAA was protecting its international professional credibility and the kinds of policy influence which it regarded as appropriate to it. It would certainly be possible to criticize the AAA but this work, unfortunately, oversimplifies the issues. McFate and Laurence’s volume is a useful contribution to an important and underresearched aspect of the recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is by no means the last word on the issue. Written by those involved in the programme, its analysis is insufficiently contextualized and critical. Indeed, any scholar interested in understanding the Human Terrain System and its teams more deeply would benefit from reading this book alongside Christopher Sims’s 2015 King’s College London doctoral dissertation. He proves that, in fact, the roots of the Human Terrain system go back to 2004 and lie in the counter-IED (improvised explosive device) initiative in Iraq, while also offering a more critical assessment of its achievements. Anthony King, University of Warwick, UK The future of extended deterrence: the United States, NATO, and beyond. Edited by Stéfanie von Hlatky and Andreas Wenger. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. 2015. 280pp. £45.60. isbn 978 1 62616 264 8. Available as e-book. Over the last few years deterrence, and more particularly nuclear deterrence, has again become an area for academic and policy discussion. A number of factors have contributed to this, including the continuation or re-emergence of some traditional threats to the West, 1526 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Conflict, security and defence albeit in a somewhat different guise, such as Russia and North Korea; the increasing assertiveness of several nations on the world stage, exemplified by China’s actions in the South China Sea; unsuccessful attempts at deterrence, such as US President Obama’s line in the sand over the use of chemical weapons in Syria; and linked to all three, the demonstration of a lack of understanding of deterrence theory within the political elites in the West, for example former UK prime minister David Cameron’s argument in favour of bombing Syria over the chemical weapons breach in order to deter the Syrian regime. Furthermore, the increasing bloc obsolescence of the West’s nuclear forces and the issue of replacement has once again raised questions about deterrence and extended deterrence, which is the focus of this book. Finally, these questions have been reignited by the 2016 US presidential election and, in particular, some of the comments made by one of the candidates—Donald Trump—who has questioned the US’s ongoing commitment to NATO’s Article 5 and suggested that both South Korea and Japan should consider acquiring their own nuclear weapons. Thus, a volume that examines the future of extended deterrence is both timely and apposite, even though it was written before Donald Trump had even secured the Republican nomination. The future of extended deterrence is edited by academics on both sides of the Atlantic, focusing mainly on extended deterrence in the NATO context. Thus, the first part of its title is a little misleading, given the nuclear guarantee that the US extends to a number of states in Asia. It would have been useful to have seen a greater examination of US use of extended deterrence elsewhere; this would have tied in with NATO’s increasing global role and its formal links to nations outside its traditional region. This is not the only area of omission. The UK’s role as NATO’s second nuclear guarantor is only partially covered, probably because of the limitations of the UK’s nuclear capabilities; its commitment is nevertheless politically important (while France was returned to NATO’s integrated military structure it has excluded its nuclear forces). Although the result of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union was not known at the time of writing, David Cameron’s commitment to holding a referendum was. Thus, the risk of a vote to leave and its knock-on effects should have been considered, particularly as it may trigger a second referendum on Scottish independence, raising doubts over the future of the UK’s nuclear force. The contributors are drawn from the academic and policy communities, which is generally beneficial, although some of those with a policy background retired some time ago, with the result that the individual chapters are of variable quality. The book itself is divided into three main parts comprising seven chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion written by the editors. Part one consists of two chapters and focuses on ‘New thinking on deterrence’. It is the strongest of the three and provides a solid overview of the issues, with Jeff Larsen’s piece being the standout chapter. Part two focuses on ‘NATO’s nuclear weapons policy’ in three chapters. This part provides a good deal of detail on NATO’s evolving (or stagnant) nuclear policy since the end of the Cold War, but at times it gets too wrapped up in the chronology and would have benefited from fewer chapters and a greater degree of reflection. The last part then considers ‘The politics of missile defence’ in two chapters. This area continues to be one contested within NATO and of major concern to Russia and others. Both chapters are satisfactory, although not earth-shattering in their arguments. While the book’s focus on nuclear is understandable in terms of the formal articulation of extended deterrence theory, what is missing is how to deal with ongoing developments in warfare. In this respect, a separate chapter that considers the interplay of Article 1527 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews 5, extended deterrence and the different environments of conflict, including cyber, would have been a refreshing addition. In summary, this volume provides a fairly traditional canter through the issues currently surrounding NATO’s policy of extended deterrence. For readers who have a greater familiarity with the subject, the book provides a useful reminder of some of the issues involved. For those less familiar with it, The future of extended deterrence is one of a number of primers on the topic that could be recommended. Whichever camp readers fit into, the volume needs to be read sooner rather than later, as the issues associated with extended deterrence are moving on at a rate of knots, and the impact of Brexit and the forthcoming US presidential election are yet to be worked out. Andrew M. Dorman, King’s College London, UK War with Russia. By General Sir Richard Shirreff. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 2016. 446pp. £13.60. isbn 978 1 47363 222 6. Available as e-book. Ghost fleet: a novel of the next world war. By P. W. Singer and August Cole. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 2015. 416pp. Index. £17.30. isbn 978 0 54414 284 8. Available as e-book. Is Russia set on a collision course with NATO? Yes, if it seriously aims to recreate the Soviet Union (minus communism), as the USSR included three states that are now members of NATO. The question is whether collision is best avoided by appeasement, in the hope of changing Russia’s course, or by deterrence, which would recognize that enmity exists, and thus makes constructive cooperation extremely difficult. Deterrence would mean holding NATO exercises and planning for the defence of the Baltic States. But today NATO is very different from what it was during the Cold War, despite or because of its enlarged membership. Member states’ governments clearly diverge in their attitude to Russia: since the annexation of Crimea, the Baltic states, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States have pushed for stronger defence measures. Germany, Hungary and Greece, by contrast, are appeasers. Nationalist parties are springing up everywhere, whose leaders, lacking historical memory, admire Putin’s ‘strong man’ image, mainly, one suspects, because they would like to be like him. Today, only regional exercises take place, and in a real operation the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) would have to refer back to the North Atlantic Council, which represents all members, for permission at every step. This is a recipe for inaction and weakness, and what Sir Richard Shirreff, deputy SACEUR until 2014, fears will whet the bear’s appetite. His thriller, War with Russia, tries to imagine a successful Russian attack on the Baltic states—initially taking the form of cyber warfare and the infiltration of special forces that would allow Russia to present NATO with a fait accompli, while NATO members still debate whether this is an Article 5 case. He himself sat through war games (including the BBC’s World War III: inside the war room of February 2016) where western powers hesitated to use nuclear weapons; the scenario here remains non-nuclear. Yet nuclear weapons play a large role in the plot, given that Russia has adopted NATO’s old doctrine: it would use nuclear weapons to force an armistice—to ‘de-escalate the conflict’ in Russian terminology, to ‘restore intra-war deterrence’ in NATO parlance. Under Gorbachev, Russia had stepped back from nuclear planning. However, already in the 1990s, tactical nuclear use crept back into Russian doctrine, to offset insurgencies or conventional war. NATO’s dilemma is how to react—to plan for this contingency or somehow to negate it, given its own professed 1528 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Conflict, security and defence belief that nuclear scenarios have become ‘ever more remote’. Since 2014, this claim does not ring true. Shirreff ’s novel, set in spring and summer 2017, spells out what the coming months could bring if Russia moves further to recreate the ‘Union’. The outcome depends much on whether the appeasing governments want to continue to avoid confrontation, at any cost to others. But the alternative, all-out confrontation, is frightening. The novel’s happy ending depends all too much on a magic wand finally being waved—cyberwarfare— in the bold belief that we could be as good at it as the Russians (and Chinese). But are we? Ghost fleet, too, explores the impact of new technology on warfare while emphasizing its vulnerabilities. Not that we shall be able to get away from it, or stop it from transforming our world—and that will apply particularly to warfare. Like Shirreff ’s novel, Ghost fleet is crammed with insider information, including valuable references in the endnotes. The two authors, with backgrounds in defence research and journalism, explain that all new technology referred to in their book is already in the pipeline for adoption by the military. The fictional part is how it might be applied in war. The scenario: a superpower war between China, backed by Russia, and the United States, with the limited war aim of excluding US military power from the Pacific and the wider aim of making China ‘top nation’ globally and the renminbi the global currency of reference. The longstanding consensus among International Relations scholars that nuclear weapons have banished superpower war, or else would inevitably turn it into a global apocalypse, is negated by P. W. Singer and August Cole: protracted major war—minus nuclear weapons—is again thinkable. Is this merely to excuse planning—and procuring—for it, just as ‘broken-backed war’ (war after a massive all-out nuclear exchange) was a scenario to which the Royal Navy clung in the 1950s so as to retain a purpose (and its big slice of the defence budget)? Apart from this big assumption, the scenario itself is remarkably unimaginative. Ghost fleet begins with China bombing the US’s fleet in the harbours of Hawaii, turning the islands into a Chinese colony and engaging in Doolittle-style raids to destroy US bases in Japan which will be persuaded to become neutral. (We later have a battle of Midway rerun as well.) US reliance on interconnectedness, GPS and computers, equipped with dirty chips imported from China and rigged to allow the Chinese government to manipulate them inside US military appliances, make the surprise attack possible. What remains of the US Navy—especially its nuclear-powered surface vessels and submarines—becomes traceable through monitoring of Cherenkov radiation. Therefore a ‘ghost fleet’ of discarded older vessels must be rustled up and retrofitted for a campaign to liberate Hawaii. The political and strategic configuration of the scenario—placed sometime between 2020 and 2030—is extrapolated from present trends. The world will have weathered, with heavy losses, one or more financial crises worse than that of 2008, resulting in major tectonic shifts in the world economy and currency markets. NATO has ceased to exist and only the United Kingdom, and, secretly, Poland, remain America’s allies. The other Europeans are fickle and undependable, but also irrelevant. Even the UK is seen as useless: its only aircraft carrier cannot come to America’s assistance as it is jointly owned by France (which refuses to release it to help the US). Poland’s support is bought with ten US nuclear weapons. The protagonists fight with all forms of new inventions. Drones flying in coordinated, communicating swarms survey or attack carefully targeted enemies or, indiscriminately, children in a playground. Comprehensive integrated data analysis allows commanders to take stock of evolving situations from windowless control rooms. As in Shirreff ’s novel, America is eventually saved by a magic wand, here a wonder-weapon (the rail-gun), calling to mind the one promised by Hitler at the end of the Second World War. 1529 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews I. F. Clarke’s Voices prophesying war (Oxford University Press, 1966), a survey of science fiction and other literature, showed that imagining future war often made for self-fulfilling prophecies. This is the concern both books raise. Will they help deter war between nuclear powers or make it more thinkable, and thereby contribute to making it happen? Beatrice Heuser, University of Reading, UK Holidays in the danger zone: entanglements of war and tourism. By Debbie Lisle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2016. 392pp. £79.30. isbn 978 0 81669 856 1. Available as e-book. Holidays in the danger zone speaks to the reader in a way that few other academic books have done in the past few years. If it was not for some more heavy, theoretical considerations peppered through the introduction and conclusion, making it less suited to the general public than one could have hoped, Debbie Lisle’s book could justifiably be placed in airport bookstores around the world. And what an apt read it would make there, on our way to leisure locations and exotic conference facilities. The book offers an engaging view into the ‘entanglements’ between conflict, global power dynamics and the realms of leisure and vacationing. Yet Holidays in the danger zone provides a lucid and challenging discussion that is about more than holidays: it is a reminder of the critical importance of connecting international political matters, as much as global power dynamics, to the often sidelined mundanity of everyday issues—like tourism—that are all too often talked about apolitically. The near 400 pages of the book are rich in historical accounts and case-studies, rounded off by a well thought-through introduction and conclusion that, in fact, leave readers asking for more (theory, discussion, broadening). Lisle’s starting-point are the entanglements between war and tourism. She tries to debunk the dichotomy between war and leisure, or what she calls the dominant ‘tourism–peace model’, and sets out from the start the visual and material angle of her account. This approach is echoed in a series of casestudies organized in a ‘loosely chronological arc’ from the late nineteenth century to the present day, which offer a narrative of how serious political events translate to and reverberate throughout the tourism industry. The five central chapters of the book are rich in accounts of the militarization and demilitarization of leisure, and are conveniently supported by visual and anthropological assessments. In a prose that is often catchy, despite the odd theoretical divagation that might not appeal to all readers, Lisle offers a very serious effort that is well beyond the cover theme of the book. Holidays in the danger zone unpacks the ‘architectures of enmity’ and the construction of foreign experiences. Importantly, Lisle extends her investigation to the sites of war tourism and conflict vacationing, where leisure meets accounts of war. Readers are taken, then, to Hiroshima’s commemorative sites and the places of ‘dark tourism’ in postwar states like Sierra Leone and Rwanda, but also across history, for example to Thomas Cook’s excursions. In doing that, Lisle refers to a wide variety of experiences to account for and deconstruct dominant narratives about peace, leisure and even commemoration. In her words, this is primarily an effort in making the war–tourism connection ‘un-surprising’ against the production of foreignness, asymmetrical logics and exploitation. Perhaps too humbly, Lisle calls Holidays in the danger zone a ‘modest endeavour’ to start a conversation on the interplay between international politics and everyday affairs, but the book does much more than that. For any scholar of international affairs, it speaks to the value of not taking the everyday for granted. Where, perhaps, Holidays in the danger zone could have done more, is in its professed attempt to challenge dominant descriptions of international affairs, against what is often 1530 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Conflict, security and defence seen as legitimate knowledge about world politics—an agenda for the rediscovery of the everyday in international relations has incredible potential. Yet Lisle relegates these considerations to the concluding two chapters (one of which looks at the tourism–terrorism dynamic), and one is left to wonder whether a more explicit foregrounding of this mission would have made Holidays in the danger zone an unmissable text in International Relations (IR) theory, akin to Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, beaches and bases (University of California Press, 1992). Here, then, I find myself hoping for a second version of the book, one for the general public, which can educate even the distracted business traveller as to the importance of seeing the entanglements between their destinations and the asymmetrical power imbalances of world politics—or perhaps a new version of the 2003 eponymous BBC Four TV series on leisure locations in dangerous places, now starring Lisle instead of Simon Reeve. Hence Lisle’s book is a work of critical social theory, even almost an anthropological effort, and begs in many instances for a more explicit engagement with those ‘grand questions’ of IR—about power, sovereignty, global transitions and more—that might appear antiquated but can, on the contrary, offer a unique perspective on the dynamics of geopolitics. Equally, as Lisle herself flags in the conclusion, the book is possibly offering only a preliminary view into the tourism–war nexus, remaining rich in western-centric cases, and lacking a southern, subaltern and alternative perspective, as well as considerations of other realities. This, however, invites engagement: we can hope that many scholars out there, not just in the niche of tourism studies, will take up Lisle’s challenge and present a view of the mundanity of international power politics from other views and other (leisure) spaces. Michele Acuto, University College London, UK Shaper nations: strategies for a changing world. Edited by William I. Hitchcock, Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2016. 224pp. Index. £25.95. isbn 978 0 674660 21 2. Available as e-book. This anthology examines eight countries that have significant influence in their geopolitical neighbourhoods. Exploring strategic thinking and policy-making in each nation, the book surveys Brazil, China, Germany, India, Israel, Russia, Turkey and the United States. The authors of each chapter were selected not only because of their respective expertise on the country, but because of the perspective they have through living and working there. William Hitchcock’s introduction explains that strategic choices ‘are usually framed by a number of powerful forces that direct or restrict strategic behavior’, and common factors, such as domestic politics and national identity, guide strategic thinking (p. 5). Though some of the countries have more global and regional influence than others, general patterns also emerge despite diverse cultures, history and threats. Hitchcock concludes ‘that strategymaking is very difficult when, as is the case for most of these shaper nations, it is hobbled by institutional weaknesses, internal political divisions, and ideological modes of thinking’ (p. 15). More pointedly, he writes that Turkey and Russia have pursued ‘risky’ strategies that appear ‘unlikely to succeed’ in the long term. The book is organized in alphabetical order of the countries, with the first half surveying Brazil, China, Germany and India. Matias Spektor describes what Brazil ‘wants’ and how domestic politics, ideology and the intersection of politics and economics inform its strategy. Writing that Brazil wants improved economic conditions and a regional order, he argues ‘there is no clear-cut grand strategy’, but pressure from a rapidly changing domestic civil society and international influences is ‘likely’ to sharpen this vision (p. 35). Turning 1531 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews to China, Men Honghua writes that defence and realism have been China’s core strategies since the country embraced globalization following 1978. Chinese officials believe military power is required for national defence, but ‘what constitutes their vision of realism’ is ‘a strategy that postulates [that] they can enhance their security and interests while reassuring prospective antagonists that they intend to do no harm to others’ (p. 52). In contrast, Constanze Stelzenmüller describes Germany’s role in the European Union as a leader by ‘default’, but one with a coherent strategy. Following economic problems in the eurozone and reluctance to use hard power, Germany faces challenges in the future, such as debates about European integration, Russian aggression and whether to engage more with the world. Exploring an emerging power, Srinath Raghavan looks at India’s strategy to obtain a stable setting for economic and social development that will give the country a larger international role. With a history of threats from neighbouring countries and efforts to balance competing international influences, Raghavan finds that India wants ‘to ensure an enabling global context for its continued internal growth and to play an international role commensurate with its increasing economic and strategic heft’ (p. 87). The remaining half of the book explores Israel, Russia, Turkey and the United States. For Israel, Ariel Levite writes that the political leadership cannot form consensus and lacks a strategy to overcome dilemmas, such as a fractious public, regional conflicts and issues about national identity. He concludes that Israel will face challenges because of its inability to develop a clear strategy. However, Russia, as Fyodor Lukyanov describes, is seeking to recover its world standing and influential sphere, but has an unclear ideology to support the mission. He concludes that ‘ethnic pride and national identity may clash with Russia’s own security interests if prudence does not prevail’ (p. 121). Similarly, Yaprak Gürsoy examines how Turkey is seeking regional power beyond its immediate neighbours, but President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has increasingly relied on Sunni populist politics as his soft power declines. However, Gürsoy argues that populism only adds to the ‘troubled relationship’ with the West and Turkey’s neighbours. In the last analysis, James Steinberg describes the United States’ strategy ‘imperatives’ as consisting of avoiding the emergence of adversaries and maximizing international cooperation. The American strategy must address regional powers, adapting to other countries’ strategies, and ‘this very diversity offers the opportunity for the United States to craft an imaginative and flexible approach that offers a much more hopeful prospect than the perilous strategic challenges we faced during the Cold War’ (p. 154). Jeffrey Legro concludes the anthology by explaining how shaper countries’ national strategies contribute to uncertainty, which results from weakening identity and authority, shifting power, national policy ambiguity and the erosion of institutions and coalitions. He argues that the ‘shapers’ are ‘a new trend in the international arena—most will not define world politics, but they will affect their individual regions, and regional dynamics could reshape global politics’ (p. 175). Shaper nations uses a comparative lens to shed light on eight nations that influence their geopolitical neighbours. The authors provide good summaries on the difficulty of defining and describing national strategies, but also of explaining the selection of Brazil, China, Germany, India, Israel, Russia, Turkey and the United States. This approach is one of the book’s strengths, allowing the authors to probe similar issues in diverse national contexts with different strategies. Indeed, the chapters nicely incorporate not just the political and economic influences that inform national strategy, but also discuss elements of culture and identity. However, in the last 20 years, technology has transformed the world and connected millions of individuals living in different time zones through a variety of activities in real time. How this form of globalization influences populations and national strat- 1532 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Political economy, economics and development egies is not explored by the contributors. For example, would internet communication between populations enhance the impact a shaper nation has on a smaller neighbour or would it give a smaller nation more influence on larger neighbours than in earlier eras? As for future projections, several chapters discuss the role specific country leaders had in shaping national strategy, but little analysis is provided about how the countries’ strategies could shift with a new leader. Nonetheless, scholars and policy-makers will find this book a solid summary of the influences and goals of the eight countries’ national strategies. Ryan Shaffer, United States Department of State, USA The ideas expressed are solely the author’s opinions and do not represent the United States Department of State or any other agency. Political economy, economics and development Connectography: mapping the global network revolution. By Parag Khanna. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2016. 466pp. £16.60. isbn 971 1 47460 423 9. Available as e-book. Parag Khanna begins Connectography by telling readers of the lifelong obsession with maps that underpinned his interest in international politics. In this new book, Khanna seeks to become a cartographer himself; and it is a surprisingly uncharted world that he seeks to map: the world of global infrastructures. For Khanna, the old political maps he loved when he was young have begun to fade; their charting of territorial borders is increasingly problematic when trying to understand the contemporary landscape of global politics. The old maps offer nothing but ‘cartographic illusions’ of a settled and permanent international system, and hide from view the dynamic processes and transnational material infrastructures connecting the world in new and unexpected ways. Khanna shows that the advent of new computational tools provides the techniques to represent patterns of material development in dynamic ways that reflect the pulsating rhythms of demography, economics, ecology and engineering that are transforming the international system. Combining demographic data, climatology, seismic patterns and infrastructural maps, Khanna’s cartography reveals new patterns of settlement, connection and flow that have the power to melt the simple political lines of older times. Khanna identifies a number of megatrends. First, humanity is fast becoming a dense, urban coastal civilization. Mapping global city networks and regions reveals new functional economic geographies and connectivities that bring into question traditional state-centric notions of global politics. Such urban concentrations may even generate new forms of political authority, as coastal megacities become the ‘key units of human organization’. Second, and relatedly, large technical systems—the human-built engineering projects connecting our world—are inscribing increasingly complex and adaptive patterns into the new dynamic cartography, generating the ‘arteries and veins, capillaries and cells, of a planetary economy underpinned by an infrastructural network that can eventually become as efficient as the human body’ (p. xxiii), via an emerging global sensor network—the so-called ‘internet of everything’. Khanna draws from these observations a number of arguments on the trajectory of the international system. Centrally, connectivity and aggregation are replacing division as the new paradigm for global organization, as the continents become integrated megaregions. Functional infrastructure is more reflective of contemporary political realities than the political border. At the same time, devolution—from empires to states, from states to 1533 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews cities, from capitals to provinces—is a powerful political trend of our time. Khanna sees the paradox of connectivity and devolution in dialectical terms: the old pieces of the political map are being reconstituted as a connected commonwealth of shared resources. A global networked civilization is emerging. The result is that geopolitical competition has shifted from conflict over territory to conflict over connectivity. Struggles today are over supply chains, energy markets, industrial production, financial flows, human capital and technological innovation. In this tug of war, new entities have evolved to capture such flows. ‘Special Economic Zones’ proliferate as new entry points to global flows of value and new cities, such as Songdo in South Korea, are ‘built to fight trade wars’ (p. 291). For Khanna, the power to become a critical node in global networks trumps military power—competition over connectivity is the arms race of the twenty-first century. The emerging international system is increasingly complex and multi-scalar. Great Power competition, global interdependence, powerful private networks: these are not competing paradigms, but exist uneasily in tandem. Their contradictions are being worked out before our eyes. Like all good map-makers, Khanna is a traveller, and his book is a hybrid: part travelogue, part meta-geography, part political theory. Like any undertaking so large—and at times the scope of Connectography is head-spinning, as it covers every nook and cranny of the globe—the book contains a number of weaknesses. Despite his protestations about the state-centrism of much existing political theory, Khanna himself displays a surprising reliance on states and state strategies as the organizing structure for the book. This feature of his work points at a deeper truth: that, for all the veracity of the analysis, states remain key players in global infrastructure provision. China has taken centre stage here in recent decades, building a twenty-first-century transnational infrastructure that has come to be viewed as a ‘new silk road’, designed to reposition the country as a central node in the emerging global networks of connectivity. Khanna’s stronger arguments about connectivity and devolution underestimate the residual power of the state as a way of organizing international political life. The author’s preference is for the eye-catching phrase or slogan, but deeper analysis of the power of the state is needed sometimes—its unravelling will take more than new transnational material connections. Although political and territorial borders are clearly being challenged, there is much resistance and attachment to the old forms, as indicated today by the continuing rise of the political far right. Indeed, there is often a teleological bent to Khanna’s writing that is hard to accept. The non-linear complex system he is describing has many possible futures. We cannot know that ‘the arc of history … bends towards connectivity’. Despite some weaknesses, what Connectography does offer is a grand vision. Khanna’s intuition that we are missing a large part of what is important in international affairs if we pay too little heed to the material infrastructures underpinning globalization is surely correct. Indeed, in this, he is adding to emerging debates in international relations on ‘new materialisms’, even if he does not make this point explicitly himself. Khanna points readers towards the uncharted territories. It will fall to others to complete the task. Simon Curtis, University of East Anglia, UK, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, US 1534 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Political economy, economics and development The politics of innovation: why some countries are better than others at science and technology. By Mark Zachary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. 444pp. Index. £64.00. isbn 978 0 19046 412 7. Available as e-book. For societies that aspire to wealth and high quality of life based on manufacturing rather than natural resources or services, few, if any, topics are more significant than their technologybased innovation capacity. Such capacity is also widely seen as the key to military strength, so it represents a truly weighty item on some national security agendas: 2016 saw the introduction of the Third Offset Strategy in the US and, in its wake, the UK Defence Innovation Initiative. The politics of innovation should be recognized as a landmark publication. It begins by offering readers a bounded definition of innovation (technology-based) and metrics for evaluating performance, after which it moves on to survey the multitude of ideas that scholars have offered to explain why some countries, at different times, perform much better than others. Mark Zachary Taylor’s starting-point is ‘Cardwell’s Law’, which states that nations are not equal in creativity and that individual states tend not to hold a dominant position for very long in historical terms. Taylor’s purpose is to explore the validity of these arguments and to highlight the keys to technology and innovation leadership. His overall conclusion is that states must assemble the right mix of the initial ‘five pillars’ of innovation (property rights, research and development subsidies, education spending, research universities and trade policy) and locate them within a capitalist system supportive of either innovation or consistent product improvement, while also building extensive national and international networks. While all this is essential, external security and economic pressures on the state must also generate a condition of ‘creative insecurity’. To quote from the first chapter, ‘the bottom line is that countries for which external threats are relatively greater than domestic tensions should have higher national innovation than countries for which domestic tensions outweigh external threats’ (p. 13). This proposition is developed and explored through 400 pages of closely argued text, statistics and case-studies. The figures bring out clearly that most innovation has come from a small number of countries, a club of which neither Russia nor China has yet achieved membership. The author’s picture of China is still of a country that assembles, copies and perhaps improves the innovations of others, and he ranks it only 28th in his table of innovative nations (p. 52). Looking forward, he sees the country as slightly more likely to be a ‘disappointment’ than a ‘surprise’ (p. 282). Emerging from the book are important messages for politicians and their advisers: ‘silver bullet’ policies targeting only one dimension of innovation are unlikely to be effective, since a system to deliver innovation requires a mix of ingredients prepared and cooked in just the right way. Innovation is always a risky effort and, therefore, there has to be a readiness to tolerate failure, although preferably, as others have argued, on a small scale. Given that the author underlines the existence of external dangers of a military or economic nature, as drivers of innovation, the book can be seen as falling into a wider school of thought that stresses the role of competition as a factor favouring continuous improvement. The politics of innovation offers analysis at the national and societal level and has a narrow, technology-based view of innovation, and thus policies that introduce radical change in the managerial and service sectors are not covered. Nor does the book recognize the special qualities of the successful innovator, stressed by Marco Iansiti (which involve a capacity to link technology and manufacturing with a product that the market will appreciate). But Taylor is concerned with the ‘why’, rather than the ‘how’, of innovation and the scale of 1535 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews his effort, the clarity of his writing, and his capacity to manage and integrate a wide range of arguments and evidence is highly impressive. Finally, while the book’s main argument is well summarized in the first chapter, even those who are only interested in an overview of the topic should take time to read a later chapter on the pressures and techniques of resisting innovation (chapter seven). Such resistance, as Taylor makes tersely clear, is often to be found in the military. Trevor Taylor, Royal United Services Institute and Cranfield University, UK Energy, environment and global health* Reason in a dark time: why the struggle against climate change failed—and what it means for our future. By Dale Jamieson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. 260pp. Index. £20.00. isbn 978 0 19933 766 8. Available as e-book. Though the subject-matter tends to be rather bleak, climate ethics is at least fortunate in that the leading scholars who have marked out the contours of the field still contribute to its steadily evolving literature. Dale Jamieson most definitely should be considered in these terms, as should this seminal contribution to the debate. That said, Reason in a dark time is not only, or even primarily, a book about climate ethics—of the seven chapters, only two would be considered ethics proper. Nor is it a book ‘to save the earth’ (p. 1). Jamieson’s point of departure is the hard-headed acknowledgement that we have failed in our ambitions to prevent anthropogenic warming. In 1992 in Rio, the optimistic launchpad of climate diplomacy, the aim ‘was that states, motivated ... in part by a sense of justice, would make binding commitments to limit emissions and transfer resources’ (p. 227). This has not happened. Instead we have entered an era of ‘“small ball” climate politics’ (p. 228), where the voluntary pledge and review system has replaced the dream of a coordinated climate regime. What matters now—and this is the main aim of the book—is understanding how and why this has happened, in order that we might do better in the future. Failures, as the author notes, ‘can be greater or lesser’ (p. 11); if we are to avoid this failure becoming a catastrophic one, we should pay attention to his richly detailed diagnosis. The book’s first substantive chapter aims at developing a better understanding of what has happened so far. This is not the most novel part of the work, but it will be of great help to readers seeking a timeline of key events in climate diplomacy. The outstanding section follows, with chapters three to five moving on to explain our failure in more detail. Connecting them is the struggle of our ways of reasoning in the face of the many problems posed by climate change. Chapter three presents a wide-ranging survey of the general obstacles to action. While Jamieson acknowledges and spells out the substantial difficulties posed by the interaction between science and politics, climate denial and our unwieldy political institutions, among other things, what he takes to be ‘the hardest problem’ is the crippling toll that climate change exerts on our psychology (pp. 102–104). The physical process of climate change operates on spatial and temporal dimensions that are just incomprehensible to us: the effects will unfold over millennia and will be scattered variably across the planet. Evolution did not build us to respond to the ‘slow buildup of insensible gases in the atmosphere’, and while we can surely think harder and better about climate change, in Jamieson’s view it would pay to be mindful of this unpleasant reality. Underneath our * See also Guy Edwards and J. Timmons Roberts, A fragmented continent, pp. 1558–9; and David Buchan and Malcolm Keay, Europe’s long energy journey, pp. 1542–3. 1536 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Energy, environment and global health reactions to climate change, he tells us, ‘are some deep truths about our animal nature’ (p. 103). With this daunting prognosis in hand, Jamieson turns to consider the fate of two traditional ‘sets of concerns’ that we might have thought useful in instigating the necessary behavioural changes. One way to motivate a response to a problem is to turn to economics in order to see whether potential solutions can be aligned with our self-interest; another is to look to ethics in the hope that we might make progress by giving our moral convictions due weight. Neither has proved effective. Our ability to make rational economic decisions is blighted by complexity and uncertainty. More fundamentally, though, economics has to answer questions about the valuing of human lives and aspects of the natural world that it does not appear all that equipped to do. On this topic, Jamieson’s mapping of the debate between the two foremost climate economists, William Nordhaus and Nicolas Stern, stands out—it is perhaps the highlight of the book. As for ethics, the chief problem, as Jamieson sees it, can be found in our inability to link our seemingly innocuous everyday actions to the eventual harms imposed by climate change. An individual act may have an imperceptible effect in itself but, in combination with many others, might contribute to a massive harm sometime in the distant future, in some remote part of the world. Jamieson’s core argument is that climate change puts pressure on every aspect of our paradigmatic account of responsibility, to the extent that it is not at all clear that it can be accommodated without serious revisions to moral theory. Where these revisions are to come from and what they would look like is at this stage obscure. In the final two chapters, Jamieson brings his analysis together in an attempt to provide some general guidance for ‘the road ahead’. There are two questions in play. First, how should we, as individuals, structure and give meaning to our lives in the face of climate change? In response, Jamieson revives an established theme in his work: given the scale of the challenge to our ways of acting effectively—that challenge he has spent the preceding pages conveying with such force—the appropriate response is to shift the focus inwards and towards ourselves as characters. By cultivating virtues that are sensitive to the obvious deficiencies in our current relationship with the environment, we might be able to take the sting out of some of the informational problems and do so, moreover, in a way that enriches us in the process. The second question concerns what we should expect and press for in policy terms. Here, more than anywhere, Jamieson’s realism is in full view. The message for readers to take home is that ‘it is time to stop letting the perfect … be the enemy of the good’ (p. 236). Rather than stick doggedly to one approach, we should let policies compete with one another as part of a flexible climate politics; and given our clearly limited stores of ‘respect and reciprocity’ (p. 217), we should perhaps focus on actionable priorities, like reducing the use of coal, rather than overarching moral projects. Overall this book is a remarkable achievement. As impressive as its span is the clarity with which Jamieson communicates his ideas. Everything about Reason in a dark time, from the story of our failure to the suggestions for a better future, bears the mark of deep and rigorous reflection, and it will prove incredibly useful, not to mention inspiring, for anyone interested in the topics covered. Alex McLaughlin, University of Reading, UK 1537 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews An unfinished foundation: the United Nations and global environmental governance. By Ken Conca. New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. 301pp. £64.00. isbn 978 0 19023 286 3. Available as e-book. An unfinished foundation is a rare book, combining scholarship with optimism and proposals for a set of reforms designed to make the United Nations a ‘stronger foundation for global environmental governance’. This book is also unusual in its focus on that ‘most formal and conventional of international institutions’ (p. x), when its author, Ken Conca, is well known as an engaged scholar of environmental politics who has been, as he admits, generally sceptical of formal political processes, concentrating instead on transnational green activism in the search for a more sustainable world. Rather than simply criticizing the manifest failures of the UN in this regard, he explores its potential as a framework within which a more effective movement for global change can thrive: ‘The UN itself will not be the source for such a movement. However, mobilizing the powerful ideals embedded in its mandate—strengthening people’s human rights in, around and through nature, and securing for them a more peaceful and less vulnerable footing in the human and natural worlds—can surely help to build it’ (p. 216). Conca’s argument starts from the observation that, from its foundation, the UN has possessed four essential mandates: the provision of peace and security, the upholding of human rights, economic development and the elaboration of international law. What occurred was an ‘uneven articulation of the environmental issue across the four mandate domains’ (p. 54). A rights-based approach had emerged, but it was states’ rights to enjoy their own natural resources, rather than human rights, that prevailed. This continued with the conceptual shift towards sustainable development that provided the ‘intellectual glue’ for UN environmental action from the 1980s, and served to advance the interests of G77 members in the wake of the failure of the campaign for a New International Economic Order. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit was, Conca argues, the high water mark of this ‘law and development’ trend, reflected in the establishment of a raft of environmental treaties and conventions under UN auspices. As Conca demonstrates in chapter three, 1992 also marked the limit of this approach in terms of meeting expectations of effective international action (p. 84). Sustainable development has not occurred and is not achievable under present arrangements, as is made evident in the book by two very different case-studies on Sierra Leone and California. In the light of the ‘revealed failings’ of the law and development approach, Conca proceeds to advance the central argument of the book, to bring ‘the UN’s mandate domains of peace and human rights squarely into a renewed strategy for global environmental governance’ (p. 106). The case for incorporating the UN’s well-developed human rights apparatus into the environmental realm is made from an activist perspective. It would enable more effective claims to be made against governments, help to defend environmental activists, keep environmental protection efforts ‘honest’ and link distant nodes in transnational supply chains. The latter aspect may be particularly important, because of the failure of existing environmental law to cover the ‘unreachable spaces’ opened up by globalization, in which the denial of human rights frequently accompanies severe environmental degradation in unregulated production. Thus the lack of a proper connection between the human rights and environmental agendas puts both at risk. The case for integrating environmental and peace and security agendas is also made, but is perhaps less convincing. Although environmental degradation and conflict are often inextricably related, the ‘securitization’ of environmental issues has been a controversial topic since the 1990s and there are good reasons, which the author does not really address, for maintaining some separation in policy responses to them. 1538 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Energy, environment and global health Chapters four and five get down to the detail of what has actually occurred within the UN system in terms of the strengthening of environmental human rights and ‘greening’ responses to conflict. Readers will find here a painstaking account of the achingly slow but demonstrable progress that has been made in both areas. There has been some change of emphasis from the negotiation of treaties to the ‘implementation of rights sensitive programs’ (p. 128), but on many issues such as water management and climate change, opportunities to install a human rights approach have not been taken. The integration of environmental concerns into the UN’s security mandate has, if anything, proved to be even more difficult, as evidenced at a high level by the Security Council debates of 2007 and 2011 on climate change. On these occasions, many developing countries read the motives of the developed world sponsors as an attempt to distract attention from their lack of commitment to the proper forum for climate change discussions—the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Here as elsewhere ‘the weak construction of the environment as a matter of peace and security is part and parcel of its strong construction as a matter of sustainable development’ (p. 197). Despite these problems, the overall impression conveyed by Conca is of gradual conceptual and institutional movement towards the recognition of environmental concerns beyond the ‘law and development caravan of global governance’. His conclusion on the possibility of change, stating that the UN ‘has a greater potential to disseminate and legitimize new thinking than any other international organization’, provides the basis for recommendations contained at the end of the book. Conca’s recommendations call for normative renewal and progressive incrementalism to link human rights and peace and security with environmental protection in mutually reinforcing ways. Most of the proposals are not in the form of airy generalizations but have specific targets based on deep knowledge of the UN system. Normative renewal would include the extension of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ concept to environmental disaster relief and the sustenance of small island developing states faced with the depredations of climate change. Organizational renewal would need to tackle the nagging issue of systemwide coherence, encouraging member states to work across the UN rather than ‘hide in compartmentalized segments’ (p. 200). Movement on a broader role for the Security Council, especially in relation to climate change, is likely to be dependent on the vexed question of council reform. The section on ‘programmatic renewal’ sketches out the most convincing route to immediate progress, with proposals relating to specific peacebuilding activities involving the inclusion of environmental action at the local level. The extension of existing treaty regimes will also provide opportunities, for example in a wider application of the Aarhus Convention approach to procedural rights. There is also a proposal for a more comprehensive approach to drafting the new Sustainable Development Goals to redress the neglect of ecological context in the old Millennium Development Goals. This book is an important and practical contribution to discussions of UN reform, based on a thorough critical study of the development and limitations of the organization’s environmental role. It emphasizes the possibilities for change, but it also appreciates the political forces that led to the dominance of the ‘law and development’ approach. The unresolved question concerns the possibility of an equivalent political incentive to transcend the gap between the UN’s mandates. Both the human rights and security mandates are fraught with dissension, and it is not at all clear how mutual reinforcement between them and the ‘law and development’ approach is to be achieved. The localized and incremental activities discussed in this book may provide one answer. John Vogler, Keele University, UK 1539 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews Europe The European External Action Service and national foreign ministries: convergence or divergence? Edited by Rosa Balfour, Caterina Carta and Kristi Raik. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. 2015. 258pp. £70.00. isbn 978 1 47244 243 7. Available as e-book. EU foreign policy through the lens of discourse analysis: making sense of diversity. Edited by Caterina Carta and Jean-Frédéric Morin. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. 2014. 272pp. £95.00. isbn 978 1 40946 375 7. Available as e-book. The diplomatic system of the European Union: evolution, change and challenges. Edited by Michael Smith, Stephan Keukeleire and Sophie Vanhoonacker. Abingdon: Routledge. 2015. 282pp. £90.00. isbn 978 0 41573 228 4. Available as e-book. The European External Action Service: European diplomacy post-Westphalia. Edited by David Spence and Jozef Bátora. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 427pp. £64.50. isbn 978 1 13738 302 0. Available as e-book. The community of scholars—and policy-makers—interested in EU foreign policy, and the institutions and instruments available for its implementation, is a highly active and tightly knit group. This is more than amply reflected in the four volumes reviewed here: edited collections comprising 62 chapters in total, with much cross-pollination both in terms of ideas and authors (some of whom contribute to more than one of these volumes). If there is a unifying theme to these four books, it is that the study of EU foreign policy remains vibrant and relevant. This relevance is even more pertinent if we take into account significant institutional developments arising from the Lisbon Treaty (especially the creation of the European External Action Service, the EEAS), and the perceived need to constantly define, if not redefine, the nature of the EU’s international role—its ‘actorness’. Essentially, what is at stake is the kind of actor the EU is in foreign policy terms and the changes that have occurred in its institutional structure to enable it to perform its international role. The persisting conundrum for studies of these two variables is that despite institutional change and innovation, the EU as an international actor is always perceived to be at the mercy of the specific interests of individual member states and to fall foul of an international system which it has long wished to help shape but is forever reacting to. What these four books do, each in its own way, is posit that there is a European system of diplomacy that has emerged over time and is the culmination of over four decades of evolution, and that this system is also reflective of the change in the EU’s international role which should be defined increasingly in ‘strategic’ if not ‘global terms’. This is a loose, lowest common denominator similarity; each places emphasis on different, theoretical, empirical or institutional aspects of this evolutionary process and its form and structure. The books by David Spence and Jozef Bátora; Michael Smith, Stephan Keukeleire and Sophie Vanhoonacker; and Rosa Balfour, Caterina Carta and Kristi Raik are the more closely linked of the four. What are some of the characteristics they share? First is the acknowledgement that the decision-making processes of EU foreign policy, and their organizational structure, are hybrids. The implicit comparison here is to the nation-state and how it ‘does’ foreign policy. Consequently, if the EU is a hybrid system of governance mixing supranational and inter-governmental processes, then its foreign policy arm is the par excellence example of this. Second is the idea, mentioned above, that what is being examined is a specific type of ‘diplomatic system’, a European form of diplomacy that has undergone trial and error since the 1970s (when it first emerged in the form of European 1540 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Europe Political Cooperation) and has resulted in a unique method of formulating and conducting foreign policy. Third, there is strong support across all three books for the proposition that institutions matter and that they are central to the development of this unique ‘diplomatic system’. Fourth, the authors agree that the establishment of the EEAS has been the key institutional change and the main question is whether, as Spence and Bátora state, it is ‘paving the way for innovative, even revolutionary, forms of diplomatic organization’ far removed from the traditional, ‘Westphalian’, state-centric models which have dominated the study (and practice) of foreign policy. Smith et al. and Balfour et al. are slightly more circumspect about the centrality of institutions and the role of the EEAS. Smith et al., while acknowledging that institutions do matter, question how far they matter and imply that the youth of the EEAS does not provide us with enough evidence yet to be able to formulate such grand assertions (and certainly the evidence, in my opinion, is indeed very mixed). Balfour et al. stress that we cannot ignore the importance of national foreign policies in this European diplomatic system, they still carry a lot of weight and are an intrinsic element of the ‘hybrid’ characterization. However, all three books grapple with the issue of ‘what kind of actor is the EU’: what foreign policy goals is it that this hybrid diplomatic system is trying to achieve and how does this help define Europe’s international role? What emerges from across all three offerings is that in a rapidly evolving and fragmented international system, there is a desire to develop the idea of the EU as a strategic, global actor. This is reinforced in the recent ‘Global Strategy’, the latest European security strategy review launched by Federica Mogherini, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. In the review, the definition of the EU in strategic terms is a constant refrain, it is seen as having strategic interests which must be met pragmatically and there is an implicit questioning of its global remit in terms of hard action rather than advocacy or activism. It is interesting to note that, after 40 years of development as a foreign policy actor, much of which has been dominated by the ‘civilian’ if not ‘normative’ dimensions of the EU’s actorness, we are back to thinking about the EU in more strategic terms, forging strategic partnerships with like-minded states and rivals alike, and acting on the basis of interests as well as values. Lastly, what links these three books is the emphasis placed on institutions and policy—the empirical side of EU foreign policy. As can be seen from the range of contributions and the titles of the individual chapters, these are edited volumes primarily dedicated to examining what has happened in practice, while providing some theoretical frameworks and insights, be they to do with ‘hybrid systems’, ‘epistemic communities’, ‘structural diplomacy’ or the age-old distinction between ‘supranational’ and ‘inter-governmental processes’, but they are not theory-driven. The fourth volume reviewed here, and I do not mean to diminish its importance by dealing with it last, is ‘theory heavy’. Central to this book is the idea that discourses matter in understanding the course of European integration, and more specifically for our purposes, EU foreign policy. Four broad approaches are tackled by a wide range of eminent scholars in this field: post-structuralism, constructivism, critical discourse analysis and discursive institutionalism. This book may not be to the liking of those of a more practical, policymaking mindset, but it offers an insight into ‘alternative’ understandings of the roots, formulation, representation and expression of the EU’s international relations. This book suggests that it is celebrating a diversity of theoretical approaches, ‘a polyphony’ of ‘less traditional approaches’, a ‘pluralistic choir’. Whether it is polyphony or a cacophony is up to each individual reader to decide. But what is true is that this is not only a theoretical puzzle, it is also a policy-relevant one, as reflected in all four books here. The EU foreign policy 1541 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews system is diverse, it is a hybrid, it blends together distinct actors, processes and institutions: what these books are helping us do is decide whether this is to be celebrated or if it results in ineffective policy formulation and disjointed action. In its own way, each of these four books makes a valuable contribution to the literature on European foreign policy. It would be foolish to attempt to do justice to each individual contributor in these volumes in such a short review. Suffice it to say that despite the broad variation in subject-matter and emphasis to be found across the volumes presented here, it is possible to discern unifying themes which set out the framework for understanding what matters in terms of explaining EU foreign policy—and with the current threats and challenges faced by the EU (both abroad and at home) this is a very important and useful field to be toiling in. Spyros Economides, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Europe’s long energy journey: towards an energy union? By David Buchan and Malcolm Keay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. 224pp. £25.00. isbn 978 0 19875 330 8. The European Commission’s ‘Framework strategy for a resilient energy union with a forward-looking climate change policy’, published on 25 February 2015, is mainly designed to achieve three related goals: first, a fundamental transformation of Europe’s energy system into an integrated, continent-wide system where energy flows freely across borders, based on competition and the best possible use of resources; second, a low-carbon and climatefriendly economy; and third, improved energy security. David Buchan and Malcom Keay, experienced specialists in EU energy policy at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, have set out to assess whether the ‘energy union’ proposals are sufficient to achieve these ambitious goals. Their conclusion is that without wider-reaching changes, it will be impossible for the energy union to deliver its intended results. The authors diagnose two main problems. First, they stress the tension between the goal of energy market liberalization and the interventions of the member states in their home markets in order to support renewable technology or to guarantee security of supply. Second, they highlight the reluctance of the member states to further harmonize competences for energy policy at the EU level. The authors’ argument for further Europeanization stems, in particular, from the risk that if energy policy does not progress towards more integration, it will move towards renationalization. Consequently, they call for a new overarching institutional arrangement under which member states consent to surrender some competences. Regarding the policies, the authors argue that four key challenges have to be addressed to realize the potential of the energy union. The first is further and more radical reform of Europe’s dysfunctional electricity market. In particular, they highlight the uncertainty over investment in new conventional plants due to lower wholesale prices, caused by the increase in subsidies for renewable energy. These plants play a key role as reserve power sources in times of low output from renewable energy due to weather conditions. In order to avoid the further establishment of national capacity payment schemes for conventional electricity companies, the authors call for a debate on an EU-wide market for long-term contracts with generating companies. However, they acknowledge the difficulties in persuading member states to accept such a far-reaching measure. Their second suggestion is an integrated strategy for the demand side instead of the current narrow focus on energy efficiency. Such an approach would comprise wide-ranging issues—from demand 1542 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Russia and Eurasia management to pricing and taxation—and also require closer coordination at the European level. A third proposal concerns transferring low-carbon incentives away from technologyspecific support to new market-friendly approaches, such as carbon taxes or carbon intensity targets. Their final argument is that, in future, EU energy security should be primarily achieved by improving its internal ability to absorb sudden cut-off in supply, rather than its external energy diplomacy. This entails accelerating the building of cross-border gas and electricity infrastructure, the development of gas storage capacity and research into large-scale electricity storage. The merit of this book lies in its concise analysis of the problems facing the proposed energy union, combined with concrete proposals. After taking stock of the EU’s energy policy developments in the opening chapters, it continues with an analysis of the respective performance of interventionist and market-based instruments. Despite the complexity of the issues discussed, the book is extremely readable and its 200 pages provide an excellent overview of the main themes and conflicts of the energy union. However, this lean format inevitably leads to omissions, and there are two minor shortcomings. First, while solutions for more active demand management or the idea of tradeable carbon intensity targets are discussed in two annexes, the other proposed solutions are often mentioned only very briefly. A fuller discussion and illustration of these would be useful, including how such proposals are received by the expert community. Second, some further aspects, such as the transport sector or increasing regional cooperation between the member states to implement the internal electricity market, would have deserved more attention. In sum, the book is intelligently written and should be read by all scholars, advanced students, stakeholders and policy-makers working on the energy union. Alexander Bürgin, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey Russia and Eurasia* Historically inevitable? Turning points of the Russian Revolution. Edited by Tony Brenton. London: Profile. 2016. 364pp. Index. £25.00. isbn 978 1 78125 021 1. In recognition of its approaching centenary, this book considers the question of the inevitability of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its outcome in mature Leninism. As the editor, Tony Brenton, argues in the introduction, the Russian Revolution was one of a very small number of pivotal events in the evolution of twentieth- (and arguably twenty-first-) century history. The volume focuses on key turning-points where the outcome might have been altered significantly by historical contingency. This focus draws the authors and the readers into counterfactual history, and a number of questions arise about such endeavours: Why bother? How should one study things that did not happen? What use is there in speculating about them? The contributors are sensitive to these questions, one of them (Martin Sixsmith, p. 196) noting that: ‘counterfactual history is a thankless task; it leaves too much to the imagination’. Leaving aside the question of why one might think that exercising the imagination is thankless, consideration of counterfactuals helps us to weigh the relative significance of multiple causal factors, in the attempt to understand complex social and historical phenomena. The editor makes a convincing case for the effort to analyse ‘forks in the road’ (p. 9), when underlying social and political forces produce moments in which one or another * See also Louis Sell, From Washington to Moscow, pp. 1520–1. 1543 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews course could have been travelled. Understanding what did happen invites exploration of what did not. In a larger sense, consideration of historical contingency encourages a healthy scepticism of grand theories concerning the determining impact of social forces or the ‘lessons’ of history. The volume pursues these themes through the analysis of a wide range of contingent events that—had they come out differently—might have affected the outcome of the Russian Revolution, and, by implication, altered the future of Russia and of the international system. The contributors include both academic and popular historians. Some contributions are carefully sourced, balanced and argued; some just tell a story. Some take on the editor’s injunction to address the counterfactual question; some do not. In general, the analyses are complemented by a careful, grounded narrative of events that populate the footnotes of more general accounts of the Russian Revolution. Highlights include Stolypin’s assassination in 1911, the delayed election to and abortive meeting of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the attempt on Lenin’s life in August 1918, Bolshevik reformism in 1922, and the issue of pluralism in the Bolshevik party more generally. Some contributors conclude that specific contingent events were crucial to the future trajectory of Russian history (see Sean McMeekin on the return of Lenin in April 1917, or Orlando Figes’s analysis of the failure to apprehend Lenin in October 1917). Others (such as Simon Dixon’s account of the Stolypin assassination, or Erik Landis’s chapter on the razverstka) conclude the opposite. For the most part, the authors provide judicious analysis of what the consequences might have been if specific events had turned out differently, weighing the significance of contingency against deeper social and political structural processes. In general, readers will come away from the book agreeing with its premise. There clearly were profound factors pushing Russian society and polity towards a substantial social and political transformation. Systemic social inequality and deprivation, economic crisis, the political awakening of the population in both rural and urban areas, the demonstrated incapacity of the regime to adapt to changing conditions and the stresses of a disastrous war made the survival of the status quo highly unlikely. But the form and content of change were not determined. The outcome was strongly affected by contingent and unpredictable events. Most students of modern Russian history will have wondered about the ‘what if ’ questions regarding the collapse of the Russian empire into Leninism. They will appreciate this book. More generally, the volume provides a welcome reminder of the importance of individual agency and of accident in the course of history. S. N. MacFarlane, University of Oxford, UK The last days of Stalin. By Joshua Rubenstein. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2016. 271pp. £20.00. isbn 978 0 30019 222 3. Available as e-book. On 5 March 1953 an era of absolute fear came to an end. As historian Robert C. Tucker memorably put it, de-Stalinization started effectively and irrevocably with the generalissimo’s demise. Joshua Rubenstein is unquestionably one of the foremost experts on Soviet history, politics and culture. He is the author of a fascinating biography of that consummate survivor, the journalist, novelist, propagandist and, finally, witness, Ilya Ehrenburg (Tangled loyalties, London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), and also co-edited, together with Russian historian Vladimir P. Naumov, a volume on the secret trial of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in 1952, a major and tragic consequence of Stalin’s delusional anti-Semitism (Stalin’s secret 1544 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Russia and Eurasia pogrom, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). In his most recent book, Rubenstein sheds new light—based on archival material, memoirs, newspaper collections, and other open sources—on the dictator’s unexpected demise in early March 1953; the solemn choreography of his funeral with all the Byzantine intrigues involving his heirs, primarily Lavrenti Beria, Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev; the post-Stalin thaw; and the West’s, primarily the Eisenhower administration’s, failure to grasp, early and consequently enough, the meanings of the seismic changes taking place in the Bolshevik empire. What becomes clear in Rubenstein’s gripping narrative is that as long as Stalin was alive, the system was completely and unquestionably paralysed. His terrified lieutenants were aware of the abysmal state of the economy and the widespread public discontent with terror and fear, but none of them would dare to challenge him. They were a group of ideologically driven thugs, and their esprit de corps hinged on their readiness to fulfil whatever the master ordered. Nothing was more important for ‘Stalin’s team’ (to use Sheila Fitzpatrick’s term) than pleasing the increasingly erratic despot. As long as he was alive, this was their only reason to exist. Rubenstein discusses at great length Stalin’s last major public appearance at the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1952. The main political report was delivered by the heir-apparent, the unflinching bureaucrat Malenkov. Stalin watched carefully his ostensible protégé but showed no indication that he was preparing a transfer of power. What he was planning, instead, was a new, mass-scale purge that would result in the elimination from the top leadership (and, most likely, from physical existence) of such Bolshevik veterans as Anastas Mikoyan, Vyacheslav Molotov and even the eternally loyal Lazar Kaganovich. Stalin’s ten-minute speech was grandiloquently self-assured and revealed a still resolute political personality. Stalin’s cult had reached an astronomical climax and the vozhd (supreme leader, guide) continued to be acclaimed as the most inspired and inspiring genius in the history of Marxism-Leninism. At the first Central Committee plenum in the aftermath of the Congress, Stalin changed the leadership’s structure. The select Politburo turned into a much larger body called the Praesidium and included newcomers such as the party economists Mikhail Pervukhin and Maxim Saburov. Unlike Lenin, Stalin never bequeathed a ‘Testament’, but in those final remarks (he spoke without notes for one hour), he singled out the political marshal Nikolai Bulganin as a trustworthy potential leader. Bulganin was to play an important role in the years to come, succeeding Malenkov as prime minister in 1955; he was demoted by Khrushchev in 1958. Rubenstein captures with great acumen the psychological undercurrents that explain the ever-shifting alliances among Stalin’s former underlings. All this coincided with the tyrant’s paranoid obsession with a Jewish (‘Zionist’, ‘bourgeois nationalist’) conspiracy meant to destroy the homeland of socialism. One of the most famous victims was the celebrated actor Solomon Mikhoels, murdered in Minsk on Stalin’s order in early 1949. Later, in January 1953, Mikhoels’s son-in-law, the composer Mieczysław Weinberg, was arrested in connection with the lunatic ‘doctors’ plot’. His close friend Dmitry Shostakovich personally appealed to Beria and vouched for Weinberg’s honesty. Mercifully, Stalin died, the investigation was stopped, and a few weeks later Weinberg returned home. Others, however, died in prison, subjected to monstrous tortures. The last months of Stalin’s life exposed the Soviet Union’s Jewish population to terrible hardships and unbearable threats. For Stalin and the secret police officers assigned the task of unmasking the Jewish ‘fifth column’, there was no doubt that the survival of the USSR required such exclusionary policies. As Rubenstein emphasizes, the Rudolf Slánský trial in Prague in October 1952 further radicalized Stalin’s already pathological anti-Semitism. 1545 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews With the supreme leader gone, changes occurred almost overnight, including the release of Gulag prisoners and diplomatic openings to the West—culturally timid, but real relaxation. The main promoter of this ‘New Course’ was Lavrenti Beria, the man responsible not only for appalling years of terror, but also the chief administrator of the USSR’s atomic research programme. In fact, Beria’s intriguing personality is a main topic in Rubenstein’s excellent account. He was neither a closet reformer nor a secret heretic, but, unlike his peers, Beria realized the magnitude of the social disaster caused by Stalinism. Arrested in June 1953, Beria was executed in December under the most preposterous charges (espionage, treason, etc.). Ironically, much of his anti-Stalin agenda resurfaced as Nikita Khrushchev’s strategy during the following years. Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland, College Park, USA Middle East and North Africa Syria. By Samer N. Abboud. Cambridge: Polity. 2016. 272pp. £55.00. isbn 978 0 74569 797 0. Available as e-book. Syria, a country that had been under the academic radar due to its opaque decision-making apparatus and secretive leadership, is now firmly back on the agenda. Samer Abboud’s Syria has joined a growing list of works aimed at explaining the roots and development of the conflict that began in 2011. Like so many studies on the region’s politics, the book starts with a brief overview of Ottoman history, to trace the roots of the fighting and setting the scene via the emergence of landed elites and more defined class structures, to create a context for the rise of the Ba’ath Party. Abboud’s central thesis is that overly simplistic narratives have been used to describe a conflict whose events are defined by a complicated and multidimensional plurality of actors and relationships. The book attempts to introduce, although not in an overly detailed manner, the main parties to the conflict, while setting out a narrative of its trajectory to date. This trajectory is narrated through an interesting and important look at the underpinnings of the conflict. Abboud explains how Hafez Assad ruled through ‘four pillars of power’: the party, corporatism, state bureaucracy and the army and security apparatus. Of particular interest is how the regime maintained a ‘rural minoritarian character’ and focused efforts on the ‘ruralization of the security services and state bureaucracy’ (p. 27). The balance of power was significantly altered when Bashar Assad enacted a reorientation of the Ba’athist model of development which could be described as neo-liberal with an authoritarian bent. This would see fundamental changes to the socio-economics of the country, but the ‘combination of corporatism and repression’ meant there was little outlet for dissent (p. 46). The removal of state subsidies, and what Abboud describes as ‘rural and agricultural neglect’ (p. 37), led to huge rates of urbanization, combined with a deterioration of living standards during the 2000s. By the late 2000s, 20 per cent of the Syrian population lived in ‘slum’ villages and 40 per cent of total housing in urban peripheries was informal. Abboud gets stuck into the uprising as early as chapter two, the central premise there being that the authoritarian nature of the regime allowed for no institutions that could express the grievances linked to the changing economic and political circumstances of the 2000s. The opposition was decentralized and uncoordinated. Initially this was a strength, as it meant they were leaderless and hard to repress, but later that disorganization would 1546 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Middle East and North Africa prove a weakness, as a lack of coherence made it hard to present an alternative vision for the country. The regime pursued a policy of repression that would force many political actors out of the country, thereby losing their legitimacy and ability to influence events. Abboud makes the important point that there was a parallel rise of violent and non-violent actors, as opposed to a simple militarization of the conflict. He focuses, in particular, on the importance and emergence of ‘local coordination committees’, whose goals have progressed from activism, to relief, to governance. Indeed, civil society in Syria emerged from a standing start in awful conditions, to play a central but underreported role. Abboud argues that ‘the rise of a robust, committed and active Syrian civil society has been one of the few foreseeable long-term positive impacts of the uprising’ (p. 213). These committed activists stand in stark contrast to the pre-uprising proliferation of ‘Government Non-Governmental Organizations’. The author makes the powerful argument that civil society in Syria should be understood to be in a ‘perpetual revolution’ (p. 72) against both the regime and armed groups. In terms of the armed groups themselves, Abboud deploys the framework ‘new wars’ theory, arguing that the ‘civilianization’ of the conflict has resulted in devastating consequences. Meanwhile, the huge range of opposition actors and their changing names and alliances are evidence of fluid networks of violence. There is also a multiplicity of actors within the regime, which has adopted a policy of ‘militiafication’ to allow groups, most famously the shabiha, to be given responsibility for violence and security in parts of the country. Abboud demystifies the shabiha, arguing that they ‘should be understood as a genuine expression of regime support from different segments of Syrian society’ (p. 109). Looking at the wider role of international actors, the book argues that they are ‘perhaps the largest factor explaining the continuity of the conflict’ (p. 120). Iran, in particular, is briefly singled out: ‘[the] regime is financially and militarily dependent on Iran for its survival’ (p. 130). Other aspects of the regional powers’ involvement are touched upon, but not fully investigated. The section on Turkey doesn’t really get to grips with the Kurdish issue and the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is only lightly explored, with simplistic sentences, such as ‘territorial expansion is the raison d’être of ISIS’ (p. 107), not doing justice to the nuance Abboud is otherwise striving to provide. Indeed, while a more serious investigation than most media reporting, the book is for a generalist rather than specialist audience, as it looks under the bonnet of the Syrian conflict but doesn’t get into the nuts and bolts. Abboud has a slightly annoying tendency to explain repeatedly what a chapter is attempting to show, rather than just doing it, and, unsurprisingly, parts of his argument have been overtaken by rapidly moving events. Looking forward, Abboud makes the important argument that holistic solutions need to go beyond the state and that more creative definitions of operative sovereignty—whether federalism or decentralization—are perhaps where we will eventually get to, once parties see a political rather than military route out of the conflict. Sadly this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. James Denselow, Centre for Syrian Studies, University of St Andrews, UK Saudi Arabian foreign policy: conflict and cooperation. Edited by Neil Partrick. London: I. B. Tauris. 2016. 395pp. £69.00. isbn 978 1 78076 914 1. Available as e-book. The Arab uprisings of 2011 and their messy aftermath have prompted a major shift in foreign policy-making in Saudi Arabia, and officials in the kingdom have become far more assertive in regional affairs. During the same post-2011 period, the gradual decline in the 1547 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews health of the nonagenarian monarch, King Abdullah, meant that the conduct of day-to-day policy-making increasingly passed to Crown Prince Salman and his ambitious young son, Mohammed bin Salman. Salman became king of Saudi Arabia in January 2015, following Abdullah’s death, and two months later, Mohammed bin Salman, by now the Minister of Defence and Deputy Crown Prince, put together a Saudi-led coalition that intervened militarily in Yemen, setting in motion a conflict that has generated untold humanitarian suffering in what already was the poorest state in the Arab world. In Saudi Arabian foreign policy: conflict and cooperation, Neil Partrick, a seasoned analyst of political and economic trends in contemporary Gulf states, has delivered a useful primer on Saudi foreign policy which provides contextual detail to recent developments. The underlying premise of the volume is that ‘Saudi Arabia seeks foreign relations commensurate with a national security imperative’ in order to ‘ensure that other regional states do not overly threaten its internal cohesion or external security’ (p. 374). At a time when Saudi regional policies vis-à-vis Iran, Yemen and Syria are under global scrutiny, analysts will find much to take away from this examination of the multiple factors that feed into the frequently opaque ‘black box’ of decision-making (p. 374). The book is somewhat lopsided, as it begins with a section of three chapters that examine different aspects of the internal dimension of foreign policy-making, and then moves on to 18 country-specific analyses; moreover, Partrick has himself written twelve of the 21 chapters. The three chapters in the opening section cover the domestic factors that go into foreign policy considerations and contain two good overviews of the role of Islam and identity and on the variegated politics of oil; the latter chapter, by Neil Quilliam, will be an important resource for policy practitioners seeking an insight into Saudi energy policies, even though it appears to have been written prior to the start of the sustained oil price collapse that began in June 2014. All books have long timelags between their initial conception and final publication and are, to an extent, hostage to events, especially in such a fast-moving regional landscape as the Middle East after the Arab Spring. The book’s publication in early 2016 has meant that there is little in the volume on the Yemen war or, indeed, the new decision-making structure in Riyadh under King Salman and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed. Nor is there any anticipation of the more interventionist tone that Mohammed bin Salman would inject into Saudi oil policies which came close to being utilized as a foreign policy tool for the first time since the Arab oil embargo of 1973. Perhaps more surprisingly, there is no real mention or analysis of the Saudi-led economic packages of assistance to regional monarchies afflicted by the 2011 upheaval, with the notable exception of Mohammed El-Katiri’s excellent chapter on Saudi–Maghreb relations, which includes an invaluable section on Saudi development aid (pp. 197–200). In addition to El-Katiri’s offering, the chapter by Mark Katz, on Saudi–Russian ties, will also prove highly relevant to political analysts seeking a better understanding of how Riyadh and Moscow might work together (or apart) in any Syrian endgame. Being overtaken by events is beyond the control of any author or editor, but there are a surprisingly large number of elementary factual inaccuracies in the volume that will sap the confidence of observant readers. Mohammed Morsi was removed from the Egyptian presidency in July 2013, not July 2014 (p. 61); Egypt conducted unauthorized air strikes in Libya in July 2014, not February 2015 (p. 69); Mohammed Khatami’s tenure as president of Iran ended in 2005, not 2004 (p. 115); Colonel Gaddafi was ousted and killed in 2011, not 2012 (p. 187); Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in Egypt in 2011, not 2010 (p. 231); South Korea won a nuclear power contract in the United Arab Emirates in 2009, not 2013 (p. 270); the 1548 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Middle East and North Africa United States stations its Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, not its Sixth Fleet (p. 334); and Iraq under Saddam Hussein was never ‘a former if discreet US ally’ (p. 260). In addition, the chapter on Saudi relations with Indonesia includes the startling, and incorrect, claim that ‘Mohammed bin Abdul-Wahhab supported Abdulaziz (Ibn Saud) in consolidating territorial gain that ultimately led to the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932’ (p. 280). The above issues grate, but do not detract from what is a useful overview of the issues and perceptions that collectively feed into the construction and conduct of foreign policymaking in Riyadh. Although the speed of regional events has overtaken a number of chapters, the greater muscularity and unpredictability of recent decision-making makes it vitally important that Saudi foreign policy be subjected to rigorous analysis by scholars and practitioners alike. As such, the volume succeeds in providing a snapshot of the regional and international landscape that faced Saudi officials at the time of the transition from King Abdullah to King Salman in 2015. Furthermore, while the absence of any Saudi contributors is a matter of regret, the incorporation of Saudi voices into the text does give greater clarity on Saudi perspectives on key aspects of foreign affairs, which is welcome. Kristian Coates-Ulrichsen, Rice University, USA Israel and Palestine: alternative perspectives on statehood. Edited by John Ehrenberg and Yoav Peled. London: Rowman and Littlefield. 2016. 396pp. Index. £55.00. isbn 978 1 44224 507 5. Available as e-book. This work is a collection of papers, varying in quality and originality—as well as ‘alternativeness’—which discuss and debate future logistical and political permutations for the land mass(es) currently inhabited by Israelis and Palestinians, religious and secular, majority and minority. Therein lies what many readers may consider a problem: that in the desire to propose potential solutions to the Arab–Israeli conflict, some contributors may fall prey to utopian thinking, unrealistic assumptions and biased critique. There is little doubt that all the contributions add something to current debates over Israeli and Palestinian statecraft, but those outside academia may be confused over the relevance and practicality of some of the ideas promoted in this anthology. Others may question how alternative many of the contributions are, given that a substantial part of this book is concerned with the continuing clash of histories within the traditional and revisionist narratives—arguably comprising the mainstream in academia, both in Israel and in the West in general. For those readers who set store by neutrality, some of the language used may cause frustration. The terms ‘occupation’, ‘expulsion’, ‘dispossession’ and ‘colonization’ are used liberally in many of the chapters when referring to Israel, with no explanation, context or justification offered. This can give the impression that Israel bears sole responsibility for the deadlock in the Arab–Israeli peace process and that the Palestinian side has no case to answer. The use of terror against Israel goes largely unmentioned and the Israeli perspective is not adequately represented, save for a minority of the contributions. Moreover, the use of Wikipedia as a source, and the confusing of James Brady with James Baker, may surprise. A dominant theme throughout the book is that the two-state solution has failed, and that the consequence of this, almost inevitably, has to be a one-state solution. However, at the UN, as well as in the US, British and Israeli administrations, the two-state solution is the only game in town, so rash statements about its demise are puzzling. Furthermore, as readers make their way through the book, there appears precious little explanation as to how and why Israel would dismantle itself, in some form or another, in order for said ‘one 1549 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews state’ to exist—a state presumably incorporating among its ranks those working towards the destruction of the Jewish state. The same holds true for the genuine concern on all sides that radical elements will take over this single entity and hijack its future, to the detriment of all concerned. These issues are eventually addressed, but not until their absence has become somewhat of a leitmotiv throughout this work. That said, there is much in this book that deserves praise and may serve to inspire optimism. Indeed, there are a number of nuanced chapters that focus on such issues as the root causes of the Arab–Israeli conflict; the essential nature of human rights; reconciliation; and planning spatial relations between Israelis and Palestinians. These, along with others concerning, inter alia, the idea of sharing sovereignty and reflections on a shared future in Israel–Palestine, contribute to give this book a certain value-added, especially when dealing with a subject-matter that may have become moribund in the view of many due to its intractable nature. However, some of the language used and the glaring partiality of certain chapters may do little other than reinforce the biases that this book was, presumably, designed to challenge. Overall, this volume will contribute to the existing literature on the topic of Israel– Palestine and their future, and will add to readers’ knowledge of the subject-matter, but perhaps serves more to emphasize the problems of the conflict, rather than facilitating their solution. Howard A. Patten South Asia The army of Afghanistan: a political history of a fragile institution. By Antonio Giustozzi. London: Hurst. 2015. 309pp. £35.00. isbn 978 1 84904 481 3. In the autumn of 2005, when Britain was considering its deployment to Helmand, I asked a group of military officers if they had studied the Soviet experience in Afghanistan (1979–89) and whether there were lessons to be learnt. Some had indeed read Russian texts, but the consensus around the table was that any comparisons were otiose. The Soviets had been occupiers, whereas the West was there with the consent of the population. The main difference, however, was that we now lived in an age of network-centric warfare. The Soviet experience was from a distant analogue era, whereas we were now digital warriors, with capabilities such as real-time fused intelligence, armed drones and laser-guided missiles. A decade later we now know that cleverly implemented analogue warfare with some access to basic digital capability can defeat network-centric warfare. In this context, Antonio Giustozzi’s fascinating book makes for sobering reading. We find that the Soviets made many of the same mistakes and had most of the same debates as the coalition. Like NATO, they allowed a dependency culture to develop, by which the Afghans left the big decisions to Soviet commanders and advisers. They also made the Afghan Army unsustainably large, aiming for 220,000 (p. 33), whereas NATO eventually opted for 195,000 (p. 147). The paucity of literate officers and non-commissioned officers made both figures unattainable. Corruption, desertion, drug-taking, ethnic tensions, poor administration, nepotism, occasional collusion with the enemy, impunity—these were all factors which the Soviets and NATO both encountered. Indeed, Giustozzi’s analysis is so relentlessly downbeat that one wonders how the Afghans won their reputation for military prowess. Did they not beat the British in 1842 and again at Maiwand in 1880? British officers have told me that well-trained Afghan 1550 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. South Asia units are up there with the very best troops in the developing world. The British-trained ‘Force 333’ has, in particular, gained a fine reputation for special operations which has been replicated in other special forces units. The Taliban have out-thought—and occasionally out-fought—western forces in the period since their resurgence in 2006. Here, then, is the key. As Giustozzi says (p. 8), ‘the real strength of Afghanistan is the armed population not the regular forces’. Afghanistan’s traditional expertise has always been asymmetric warfare. This raises the interesting question of whether NATO would have done better if it had created a large, reliable and localized police force to protect communities from the (in 2006 still hated) Taliban. A well-trained and resourced police force (which the Afghan National Police never became) could have been supplemented by a much smaller and professional Afghan army, including several units of air-transportable special forces which could match the Taliban in irregular warfare. But back in 2006 such ideas were frowned upon. In the first flush of hubris following the victory in 2001–2002, the West was planning for Afghanistan to become a modern state with western-style laws and institutions. Such a utopian nationstate should not be equipped with anything which could be mistaken for the militias of old; instead, Afghanistan needed a formal standing army with all the associated paraphernalia, modern equipment, pay scales, ‘just in time’ logistics, medevac and so forth. In charting the efforts of the Soviets and Americans to create and sustain an Afghan Army, Giustozzi provides much fascinating detail, based on a vast array of interviews conducted over a number of years. His knowledge of modern Afghanistan is unsurpassed, although in places his text reads like a business report, with too many subtitles which interrupt the analytical flow. It is also slightly uneven in its treatment of the four periods in the history of the Afghan Army it looks at: monarchical (1879–1973), Soviet (1978–89), mujahideen and Taliban (1992–2001) and western-backed (2001–14). The chapter on the Soviet era is masterly and comprehensive at 84 pages. The NATO period is perhaps excessively long at 104 pages, but the royal army prior to 1973 gets scant attention with only 13 pages. This is a pity because this was the only period when the army fulfilled its real role of defending the homeland from external enemies. In all the other periods it was in a counter-insurgency role, fighting other Afghans. I recall General Abdul Wali (the late King Zahir Shah’s military adviser and close relative) telling me that the Afghan Army had progressed best under Turkish military advice and training. However, in that period, Afghanistan also received limited assistance from the United States, Britain and Russia. Much of the story is about rivalries within the army. The vicious infighting between the two leftist parties, the Khalqis and Parchemis, lasted from 1973 until as late as 1990. This was replaced by the antagonism between Soviet-era officers and ex-mujahideen integrees. Then, after 9/11, the former Northern Alliance forces were given disproportionate importance, partly due to the role they had played in removing the Taliban from power. Tajiks and Hazaras still have disproportionate influence in the army. It is a truism that the Afghan Army will only be effective once the feuding parties make peace. It will perform at its best when fighting an external enemy on behalf of a home government which is unified and less prone to the corruption which has blighted good governance in recent years and disillusioned much of the population. Tim Willasey-Wilsey, King’s College London and formerly of the FCO, UK 1551 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews China, India and the future of the international society. Edited by Jamie Gaskarth. London: Rowman & Littlefield. 2015. 184pp. Index. £80.00. isbn 978 1 78348 259 7. Available as e-book. China, and to a lesser extent India, have grown at phenomenal rates in the last three decades. The possibility that China is going to surpass the United States in economic terms in the next decade dominates the headlines. Some scholars contend that China’s and India’s rise is signalling a shift in power from the West to the East. While most writers of this genre emphasize the realist paradigms of hard power (understood as economic, political and military power), some scholars rely on soft power and normative power narratives to conclude that the twenty-first century will be an Asian century. The edited volume by Jamie Gaskarth critically analyses this assertion. The contributors argue that although China’s and India’s hard power, and especially their economic potential, will increase in the future (although this is debatable with respect to China), they will not be able to surpass the US and the twenty-first century will not be an ‘Asian century’. Ian Hall (chapter five), David Kerr (chapter six) and Chris Brown (chapter seven) contend that neither China nor India is a normative power and it is highly unlikely that either will become one in the medium to long term (especially China with its authoritarian political system and the unwillingness of the Chinese Communist Party to undertake political reform). This is due to the historical origin of their norms—the great civilization ethos which they are proud of and treasure, the experience of colonization by western imperial powers (and in China’s case also by Japan) and mistrust of international institutions among others—which has had a profound impact on their foreign policy. Consequently, China, and to a lesser extent India, do not agree with western norms. Most importantly, both countries espouse a rigid doctrine of sovereignty in accordance with ‘the Westphalian order’, but not with ‘Westphalian society’ (p. 142). Both India and China follow a policy of non-intervention in the sovereign territory of a country, in accordance with Article 2(7) of the United Nations Charter. This is one of the key tenets of the foreign policy of the two countries, drawing on the 1954 Panchsheel Treaty or the five principles of peaceful coexistence, the foundation of relations between the PRC and India, which later formed the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement. Following Stephen Krasner and others, Brown posits that intervention was allowed for in the Westphalian treaties under a number of circumstances. Happymon Jacob, in chapter one, notes that India intervened in East Pakistan in 1971 and in Sri Lanka in 1987. Similarly, China has compromised on non-intervention in Libya, when it abstained on UN Resolution 1973 on 17 March 2011, which used the principle of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to establish a no-fly zone over Libya. Jacob and Chen Yudan, respectively, illustrate that India and China have compromised on territorial sovereignty and redrawn borders— India with respect to Jammu and Kashmir and China with respect to Russia among other countries—for ideological reasons or to achieve peace. Thus the willingness to negotiate on sovereignty issues is more a matter of symbolism and national prestige. Although both states have become more concerned about sovereignty issues and the two countries’ understanding and practice of the concept has evolved, they have not been able to make up their minds on norms and institutions such as R2P and the International Criminal Court, nor have they been able to come up with normative innovations for international society. For instance, Beijing has categorically stated, on several occasions, that it does not propagate its development model—the ‘Beijing Consensus’—and has asked countries not to emulate it. 1552 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. East Asia and Pacific As with edited volumes, especially those originating from a conference or a workshop, this book has some minor flaws. First, there is much repetition in some of the chapters and across chapters. Also, in chapter four, David Armstrong discusses various scenarios for the future world order. He states that one of the possibilities is the coexistence of distinct regional orders in which ‘the EU might retain its incipient federalist features, China its modern version of the tribute system, the Americas a balance between states in close partnership with the United States and others resisting US power and Africa, with its own emergent structure’ (p. 87). But Armstrong omits to mention the regional order in South Asia. India and South Asia were never a part of the tributary system in East Asia. India, with enough material and soft power capabilities, also does not fall in the category of ‘others resisting US power’. India’s centrality in south Asia—based on its historical past, material capabilities and social and cultural influence—is unquestionable. Despite some shortcomings, China, India and the future of the international society is a mustread for policy-makers and government officials, not only in China, India and the United States, but across the globe. Students at all levels and scholars in social sciences and the general public must read the book to get a good grasp of India’s and China’s foreign policies, and the true state of the emerging world order. Raj Verma, Jilin University, China East Asia and Pacific Rethinking the triangle: Washington–Beijing–Taipei. Edited by Brantly Womack and Yufan Hao. Singapore: World Scientific and University of Macau. 2016. 236pp. Index. £65.60. isbn 978 9 81471 312 2. Available as e-book. The starting-point for this book is a challenge to the idea that Taiwan is, or should be, a ‘problem’ in US–China relations. Rethinking the triangle between Washington, Beijing and Taipei could, it is argued, see the relationship become an ‘inclusive, opportunity-driven one’ (p. vi), overcoming the entrenched suspicion which has existed since the early years of the Cold War. As Brantly Womack demonstrates in his chapter offering ‘an American perspective’ on the triangle, this is actually going with the grain of recent developments in cross-Strait relations, which have been characterized by growing economic interdependence (including in production networks for goods for the US market) and improved political relations. That better cross-Strait relations are the first step for a more inclusive triangle would appear to be supported by the PRC (People’s Republic of China) perspective provided by Ren Xiao. Taiwan’s transition in 2008 from independence-leaning president Chen Shuibian (Democratic Progressive Party, DPP) to Ma Ying-jeou (Nationalist Party, KMT) was a key step to improved ties across the Taiwan Strait, but Ren also highlights a longer process of gradual softening and increased pragmatism in Beijing’s policy, from changes in language in the 1970s (as US diplomatic recognition shifted from Taipei to Beijing) to the adoption of the ‘1992 consensus’ which allowed both sides space for different interpretations of ‘one China’ (pp. 53–5). He sees policy developments under Hu Jintao (2002–2012) as continuing this trend, with cautious optimism about prospects if the DPP were to regain power in 2016—as it has since done. Indeed, from the Taiwanese perspective, as described by Tse-Kang Leng, domestic politics is a key driver of cross-Strait dynamics. It follows that improving the relationship is not that simple. Leng suggests that Beijing may have been over-optimistic in thinking that 1553 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews Ma could ‘reverse’ pro-independence sentiment in Taiwan (p. 90), and argues that the 1992 consensus lacks legitimacy in a now fully democratic Taiwan (p. 100), which also plays into the US domestic debate on how to deal with ‘authoritarian China’ and ‘democratic Taiwan’. There are strategic challenges too. Yufan Hao sees instability and uncertainty in the security triangle since 2008 (p. 119), and an ‘increasing trust gap between the United States and China’ (p. 117). Furthermore, economic independence has enhanced political problems in Taiwan, rather than delivering the sense of shared destiny envisaged by Beijing’s strategy (pp. 121, 124). And as several authors comment, there are no easy solutions to the thorny issue of Taiwan’s external status. Looking from Japan, Takashi Sekiyama reveals further strategic issues for a more ‘inclusive’ triangle. Japan feels vulnerable to changes in cross-Strait dynamics and US policy (a legacy, partly, of the US diplomatic switch of the 1970s). He indicates that Japan wants some tension between the PRC and Taiwan, and is particularly concerned about the prospect of a joint diplomatic ‘attack’ from Beijing and Taiwan, perhaps over maritime disputes (pp. 149–51). More broadly, an improved triangle might leave Japan as the new ‘major obstacle’ to the development of US–China relations (p. 142). This takes readers back to a fundamental question which the book needs to address: what the US might actually want. Taiwan, as Hao puts it in realist terms, provides Washington with ‘leverage’ in dealing with Beijing (p. 134), and in the introduction, the editors comment that the US is ‘not eager to see the problem solved’ (p. xvi). In the current context of US– China tensions in east Asia, shifting Washington’s mindset may be the greatest challenge to ‘rethinking the triangle’. Tim Summers, Chatham House, Hong Kong Non-traditional security challenges in Asia: approaches and responses. Edited by Shebonti Ray Dadwal and Uttam Kumar Sinha. New Delhi: Routledge. 2015. 428pp. £95.00. isbn 978 1 13819 119 8. Think tanks and non-traditional security: governance entrepreneurs in Asia. By Erin Zimmerman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. 228pp. £68.00. isbn 978 1 34957 892 4. Available as e-book. During the past decades, Asia has been severely affected by non-traditional security challenges. Countries in the region have added them to their policy agendas and have been calling for greater cooperation. In response to a growing need for analysis, the books under review offer valuable qualitative studies which promote the non-traditional security agenda. Despite the many publications on non-traditional security in Asia already available to readers, Non-traditional security challenges in Asia, edited by Shebonti Ray Dadwal and Uttam Kumar Sinha, is a volume that matters. The editors and contributors succeed in exploring the practical and conceptual problems imposed by non-traditional security challenges on the region. This comprehensive work scours primary sources from literature reviews, policy assessments and interviews. It has an introduction (by Shebonti Ray Dadwal and Uttam Kumar Sinha) and 17 chapters written by scholars from multiple disciplines, which successively explore the most significant non-traditional security challenges in Asia, including vulnerability produced by environmental change and climate change, water and food security, energy security, transnational organized crime and terrorism. What do these challenges mean for the future of security governance in Asia? As the editors and contributors suggest, the increasingly transboundary nature of non-traditional security 1554 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. North America challenges has made increased cooperation a necessity and therefore counter-measures need to be promoted at the national, regional and global levels. However, state-centred solutions alone cannot deal with all these challenges, largely due to the diverging interests of stakeholders. In such cases, public–private partnerships are a second-best solution. From a perspective of discursive institutionalism, Erin Zimmerman’s Think tanks and non-traditional security stresses the importance of Asian think-tanks and their networks in the security governance of countries in the region. The author argues that think-tanks can help with ‘constructing, maintaining and developing discourses’ to advance non-traditional security agendas (p. 16). In chapters one to three, Zimmerman reviews the existing literature and presents the theoretical foundation and methodological framework that underpins the rest of the book. Asian think-tanks, as the author explains, adopt three strategies to gain political influence: ‘problem framing, agenda setting and networking’ (p. 30). Based on detailed case-studies, chapters four to seven examine two types of think-tanks in Asia, that is, governmentally affiliated think-tanks and non-governmental ones. The two examples of the former are the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Institute of Strategic and International Studies, affiliated with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, affiliated with the ASEAN Regional Forum. To a large degree, their relationship with governments could be described as a public–private partnership, in which governmentally affiliated think-tanks and their networks can get access to political structures, transmit ideas and influence security governance in Asia. The think-tanks working inside public–private partnerships ‘often enjoy close relationships with their domestic governments’ (p. 94). Non-governmental think-tanks, such as the International Institute for Strategic Studies Shangri-La Dialogue and the Atlantic Council’s Asia Security Initiative, are also embedded in the regional security governance of Asia, even though they operate outside the umbrella of Asian governments. As the author argues, these think-tanks ‘have constructed a multilayered network’ and their ideas are accepted by decision-makers (p. 173). In the final chapter, Zimmerman highlights that Asian think-tanks and their networks could be ‘a catalyst for institutional change and played a valuable role in defining the future of security governance in Asia’ (p. 188). In the end, the two volumes are worth including in any serious discussion about non-traditional security studies in Asia. This reviewer learned a great deal from both and highly recommends them to readers interested in security governance and think-tanks in Asia. More generally, their theoretical and empirical contribution to the study of nontraditional security will be felt in the future. Kai Chen, Xiamen University, China North America* Blind spot: America’s response to radicalism in the Middle East. Edited by Nicholas Burns and Jonathon Price. Washington DC: The Aspen Group. 2015. 217pp. Pb.: £13.10. isbn 978 0 89843 629 7. It is hard to imagine a subject-matter more timely and important than that of Blind spot: how should the United States respond to the threat posed by the rise of radical Islam in the * See also Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence, eds, Social science goes to war, pp. 1525–6. 1555 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews Middle East and its spillover effects across the globe? Blind spot is the product of the Aspen Strategy Group’s 2015 conference in Colorado, in which experts and scholars came together to discuss and reflect on the causes and consequences of the rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and what this means for the western world. The result is a collection of contributions, edited by Nicholas Burns and Jonathon Price, in which the many facets of the last decade of Middle Eastern affairs are explored, intertwining the story of the rise of ISIS with that of the Arab Spring, and complementing the analysis with more or less sharable policy prescriptions and ‘tools’ to face the threat at home and abroad. Divided into four thematic parts, the book offers, in effect, a 360-degree analysis of the ISIS problem, ranging from the roots of radicalism in the Middle East and the issues of sectarianism and regional balance, all the way to online radical propaganda and US military and diplomatic efforts in the region. More importantly, and certainly commendably, the contributors set themselves the daunting task of elaborating short- and long-term solutions to contain and eventually defeat ISIS, providing a good overall level of analysis and reasoned arguments in the process. Of particular interest are Frances Townsend’s argument on the need for cooperation between governments, civil society and the private sector to contain ISIS’s online campaigns (p. 120) and David Ignatius’s call for deeper intelligence cooperation among antiISIS factions (p. 92). Other suggestions, such as Vali Nasr’s idea of a framework of cooperation between Iran, Saudi Arabia and the GCC, appear more idealistic (p. 67), yet they still provide a valuable exercise in geopolitical analysis. Beyond such specific prescriptions, there is an underlying agreement among the Aspen Strategy Group that small-scale military intervention is doomed to pay small dividends, while a more holistic strategy that combines military, financial, diplomatic and statebuilding approaches constitutes the best way to remove threat, while simultaneously achieving US national security objectives. In this regard, all authors appear unforgiving of Obama’s handling of the withdrawal from Iraq and his policies in the wake of the Arab Spring in Syria and ISIS’s early successes. Ryan Crocker, for example, talks of ‘missteps, half-steps and nonsteps’, and he blames the latest events in Syria and Iraq on the ‘absence of US leadership’ (p. 75), a position echoed by Michèle Flournoy and Richard Fontaine, who contend that ‘the president’s rhetoric has not been translated into effective programs and actions’ (p. 179). While such accusations are understandable—not many will be forgiving of Obama’s U-turn on his ‘red line’—the almost complete lack of detailed background on US engagement with the region since 2001 deprives the reader of a more comprehensive account of the historical context needed to understand what has happened in the Middle East since 9/11. As often happens in edited volumes, some contributions stand out more than others. Peter D. Feaver’s chapter is one of the most noteworthy, as he offers an insightful and detailed analysis of possible strategies to defeat ISIS, concluding that the United States ‘must do more, including committing a significant US ground presence’ (p. 169), a prescription incidentally largely shared among the contributors. However, to those who look back at the previous decade of US interventionism in the region in search for an answer, the author’s response is dismissive: ‘The first pitfall is having a strategy that is only backward looking—one so focused on the mistakes of the past that it misses the opportunities of the future’ (p. 170). Once again, the ‘don’t look back in anger’ attitude of the book leads the authors to omit a pivotal portion of history which could provide useful lessons for both readers and policy-makers. In sum, given the scope of this book, the newest work of the Aspen Strategy Group should be commended for addressing a complex and timely issue, and for challenging itself 1556 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. North America and the public with the unenviable task of addressing one of the most urgent threats of our time. However, while the general consensus is that the United States needs to implement new and more comprehensive strategies, the book lacks clarity and detail on how a policy of putting more ‘boots on the ground’ would work or how it would be any different from 2003. Antonio Perra, Birkbeck, University of London, UK Mission failure: America and the world in the post-Cold War era. By Michael Mandelbaum. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. 504pp. £20.00. isbn 978 0 19046 947 4. Available as e-book. In a 1996 Foreign Affairs article entitled ‘Foreign policy as social work’ (75: 1, January/ February), Michael Mandelbaum offered a scathing judgement of the United States’ interventions in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti, which the author, like other realists, deemed inessential for US interests. This became one of the defining critiques of Bill Clinton’s foreign policy, and for some it served just as well for the broader agenda of humanitarian interventionism that came to the fore in the 1990s. Twenty years on, with Mission failure, Mandelbaum has expanded this critique to cover the whole span of post-Cold War US foreign policy; he finds no more to applaud under Clinton’s two successors. Mandelbaum sets out well how the United States embarked on unprecedented missions to transform other societies, because its military superiority and the absence of a rival equal power gave it an unparalleled freedom of action after the end of the Cold War. For the first time, these benign conditions allowed it to indulge the historical missionary strand in its foreign policy thinking, something otherwise held in check by the geopolitical necessity to focus on urgent security interests instead. (This is undeniable, even if the author overestimates the extent to which the missionary impulse really dominated US foreign policy in those years.) In short, and to Mandelbaum’s dismay, the United States chose to spend its vast reserves of power on geopolitical ‘luxury items’ (p. 7) instead of policies that would have made better use of this exceptionally favourable moment. After reviewing in considerable detail examples from Bosnia and Russia to the Middle East and Afghanistan, Mission failure argues that by 2014, US policy had failed in all of them, mostly because of the absence of social conditions that would make the desired transformations possible, or else because powerful governments in China and Russia were able to resist the changes demanded of them. Mandelbaum therefore stresses the paradox that, in those years, the United States had a surplus of power but also less success in its foreign policy, or at least in these missions of transformation. What is more, these were not just failures but mistakes that American leaders should have known to avoid. The end of that unusual era in US foreign policy-making was marked when President Barack Obama effectively decided that the pursuit of Afghanistan’s social and political transformation was either impossible or too costly to continue. Mandelbaum convincingly makes the important distinction that, while the US did not intervene militarily in countries with the deliberate intention of imposing protracted political change and nationbuilding, it embraced this goal willingly once the success of interventions seemed to call for transforming these countries. This point is still too often overlooked. Iraq, which Mandelbaum argues was the most sustained and intensive case of US post-intervention nationbuilding, especially when the country was under the control of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is a perfect example of what could be a called a ‘transformation trap’. Overall, the book’s analysis of why different US missions of transformation failed is convincing, although the author also argues that they were not very seriously attempted 1557 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews in some cases, which should have brought some nuance to his wholesale dismissal of such enterprises. It might also be fairer to say that the transformation efforts underperformed in some cases, or that they should not be judged by the rhetoric that often accompanied them or the unreasonably high standards of Japanese and German reconstruction. Some examples also feel somewhat shoehorned into Mandelbaum’s overall scheme. The limited and shortlived attempt by the Clinton administration to pursue a human rights agenda with China hardly qualifies as a mission of transformation to be considered alongside Russia or Iraq. Similarly, including the Middle East Peace Process in the book’s framework feels forced. Mission failure’s emphasis on the shortcomings of Arab or other political cultures can also be disconcerting. There is no doubt that deeply entrenched socio-historical features were repeatedly underestimated by US policy-makers and made political transformation hard to achieve in the short or medium term. Similarly, the disappointments of the Arab Spring have certainly severely dampened US optimism about the inevitability of democratization everywhere. Yet the analysis sometimes veers towards suggesting that some cultures are incapable of political change except in the very long term. Mandelbaum concludes that the return of power politics in Asia, Europe and the Middle East means that missions of transformation are a luxury that the United States can no longer afford. Ultimately, regardless of any disagreement one can have with particular points or case-studies in Mission failure, this is a strong argument. There is no denying that the international conditions that allowed the United States to pursue the transformation of other societies have been severely eroded by developments such as the financial crisis, the Iraq War, the rise of China and the renewed assertiveness of Russia—they are not likely to return. Nicolas Bouchet, German Marshall Fund of the United States, USA Latin America and Caribbean A fragmented continent: Latin America and the global politics of climate change. By Guy Edwards and J. Timmons Roberts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2015. 304pp. £26.60. isbn 978 0 26202 980 3. This engaging and informative book has two primary aims: first, to show how Latin American countries have participated in global climate change politics and, second, to argue that the continent’s participation is substantively important for global climate negotiations and outcomes. It succeeds at both of those aims, but also leaves some gaps where future research can deepen and extend the work begun here. As the title suggests, Latin American countries have approached global climate politics in a number of ways rather than forming a coherent bloc. Guy Edwards and J. Timmons Roberts find order in the multiplicity of national approaches by focusing on three major regional strategies. Probably the best known is the strategy of the ALBA countries, the group of leftist ‘Bolivarian’ states led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez until his death in 2013. The ALBA countries have taken a hard line in the global climate negotiations, insisting that developed countries take substantial action first and trying to block agreements they regard as not demanding enough. The book also dives into these countries’ contradictory position as major oil and gas producers, and notes the diverse, but usually underwhelming, efforts they have made to control emissions at home. The second Latin American group described—Mexico and the smaller countries in AILAC (Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean)—has made quieter, but in some ways more important efforts to blur the North–South line etched 1558 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Latin America and Caribbean into global climate negotiations. Mexico’s and Peru’s skilled leadership in annual negotiation sessions was paired with trend-setting promises from individual AILAC member states that attempted to catalyse more ambitious commitments across the globe. The book takes a detailed look at these countries and their initiatives—and the frequently disappointing actual implementation of their commitments—and traces an important side of Latin American diplomatic strategies that has hardly even gained newspaper coverage, much less sustained academic research. Finally, the third strategy covered is that of the region’s largest country, Brazil. While an undeniable regional power, Brazil has not been a regional leader in climate negotiations. Since 2009, it has prepared for climate negotiations with its emerging power allies in the BASIC alliance (Brazil, China, India, South Africa), but it has not garnered followers in its own region. Like the other countries of Latin America, its national climate policies also show occasional high ambitions for climate action—and even achievement, as in the dramatic drop in deforestation rates from 2005 to 2014—but a much more chequered pattern of actual implementation. The descriptive contributions of this book alone are substantial. There are strikingly few works on comparative environmental politics in the Latin American region and those that exist tend to cover only a couple of countries and/or are a decade or more old. The focus on climate politics demands a far-ranging review of policies from deforestation to energy, and this book helps to fill the gap. There are even fewer works on Latin American participation in global environmental negotiations or on Latin American diplomacy outside a narrow range of trade and security issues. Edwards and Roberts offer readers a treasure trove of well-researched information about critical topics as they relate to a major developing area. Both authors have a deep knowledge of climate politics and the Latin American region, and they have forged important ties with leading regional players that give them additional insight into Latin American strategies. The flip side of the breadth of the coverage here is that every topic deserves more study and more depth. Key cases like Mexico and Venezuela receive only a couple of pages, and the substantial contradictions between the dependence of many of the region’s countries on fossil fuel extraction and their climate action ambitions get only a few more. Thus Edwards and Roberts have sketched out an agenda for others to follow in more depth. The second of the book’s aims—to persuade readers that the region’s climate action has been decisive for the global outcome—is a harder argument to make, given that much of the world’s climate emissions and its weightiest diplomatic actors originate elsewhere. As the authors admit, the US, the EU and China still dominate as both the causes of global climate change and the actors who shape collective solutions, such as they are. Yet the authors are persuasive when arguing that successful global action on climate also requires actors like the Latin American countries, who may have more scope for experimentation and innovation and who are leading the way in the painstaking process of finding a balance between environment and development imperatives. Countries like them will also be the big emitters of the future if these issues are not resolved, so the Latin Americans are crucial trail blazers for long-term global success in addressing global warming. We need similarly substantial research on other developing country regions as well. Kathryn Hochstetler, London School of Economics and Political Science, London 1559 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Book reviews Nicaragua: navigating the politics of democracy. By David Close. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 2016. 215pp. Index. £62.50. isbn 978 1 62637 435 5. This is a book, as Canadian political scientist David Close succinctly puts it, about ‘Nicaragua’s transition to, through, and from democracy’ (p. 155), in the period between the triumph of the Sandinista revolution over the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979 and 2015, when Daniel Ortega, one of the leaders of that revolution, was firmly entrenched in power. Close seeks to explain the reasons why the political elite has failed to find, during this period, a governing formula acceptable to most Nicaraguans, resulting in political polarization and the eventual return of one-man rule, conforming to certain historical features embedded in the country’s political culture. In contrast to most observers who see the 1990 elections—in which the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) unexpectedly lost power to a broad opposition coalition—as bifurcating the post-1979 period, marking the point of political transition to electoral democracy after a decade of revolutionary ferment, Close discerns no less than four political transitions: in 1979, 1984, 2000 and 2011. These transformations were not, in the last three cases, the result of changes of administration, as the sitting governments actually initiated them, but rather ‘full-scale makeovers of the political system: the entire logic, function, and purpose of the state’ (p. 4); they were sufficiently distinct to constitute different political regimes. The first two regimes, Close contends in a reprise of the argument set forth in his 1999 work, Nicaragua: the Chamorro years (Lynne Rienner; reviewed in International Affairs 75: 3), left Nicaragua more pluralistic and democratic, the last two moved the country away from democracy, so that by 2015 Nicaragua was neither a democracy nor an authoritarian state but a hybrid system, exhibiting a ‘balance of democratic and non-democratic traits’ (p. 157). The author devotes a chapter to an analysis of the complexion of each of these distinct political regimes: the reasons why they arose and how they gave way to their successor. The years 1979 to 1984, he asserts, were characterized by ‘Leninist vanguardism’, yet the FSLN uniquely offered a modicum of political space to its civic opponents that moved the country in the direction of pluralism, while the decision to move to representative democracy was ‘the method chosen to preserve the Sandinista government’ (p. 25), leaving open the option of further reform, but at a slower pace. From 1984 to 2000, Close avers, were the years when Nicaragua was a genuine liberal democracy, the year 1990 signifying a change of management rather than a change of regime and the ‘rough-and-ready’ (p. 129) Chamorro presidency (1990–96) showing democracy’s ‘resilience and adaptability’ in the face of a high level of contention (p. 95). The turning-point away from democracy was the notorious 2000 pact between sitting president Arnoldo Alemán and Daniel Ortega—‘run for the benefit of two caudillo-style political bosses’ (p. 129)—that established a political duopoly which degraded the quality of the country’s democracy; it was, moreover, an arrangement in which the correlation of power soon shifted away from the ruling Liberals in favour of the FSLN. The author’s critical attitude towards this ‘pact’ was reflected in a more recent co-edited work, The Sandinistas and Nicaragua since 1979 (Lynne Rienner, 2012; reviewed in International Affairs 88: 4). Lastly, the elections of 2011 signify for Close the beginning of the current political regime in Nicaragua, as they marked the final establishment of a ‘dominant power system based on personal rule’ (p. 3)—in the making since Ortega was returned to office in 2006—characterized by electoral manipulation, the reappearance of violence as a political tool and, above all, the concentration of political power in the hands of the president and his family. Under Ortega, in short, the political system has become ‘verticalist, hyperpresidential, personalist … and increasingly hegemonic’ (p. 138). 1560 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Latin America and Caribbean This book has a number of formidable strengths. The author ably sets out the legacy of Nicaragua’s past without which certain aspects of the contemporary political scene would be incomprehensible. He also offers a useful comparative perspective, both with the wider Latin American experience and with other contemporary polities (Hungary, Russia and Venezuela) that have also recently trodden a path away from electoral democracy to more hybrid political forms. As a political scientist, Close of course embeds his analysis in the literature of the field, yet he does so in a refreshing, highly accessible style, eschewing the jargon that sadly too often envelops his craft. Indeed, the early parts of the work in particular read like a political science textbook; the analysis is often dense and fast-paced, bringing out the complexity of the situation, yet there is room for further elaboration in some places. Finally, David Close is, above all, an objective observer; this bodes well when dealing with a country whose recent history has occasioned a high degree of political partisanship, especially in the 1980s and early 1990s. Nicaragua is an impressive work of political analysis. Its appearance on the eve of the November 2016 elections makes it an indispensable tool for scholars and commentators alike seeking to understand their predictable outcome. Philip Chrimes 1561 International Affairs 92: 6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.