At crucial turning points in the history of U.S. political science, urban politics has moved to the center of the discipline. In the early 1900s, comparative studies of local government and administration contributed to the emergence of professional political science. In the postwar era, studies of community power played a critical role in the behaviorialist revolution. In recent years, the rethinking of national boundaries and institutions has presented new opportunities for studies of politics at the local level to contribute to reformulated approaches to state-society relations in general. This extended theoretical essay, though addressed to “urban studies” rather than to political scientists as such, offers glimpses of how such a reformulation might look.

This well written volume could not have come at a better time. At no time has the issue of political structure and/or restructuring been more contentious in Nigeria's political history. This study is a courageous effort at isolating and discussing the issues that shape Nigerian politics: federalism, revenue sharing or allocation, population, local governance, and state creation. Rotimi Suberu admits that the Nigerian federation is “hypercentralized,” thus negating the basic principles of federalism. He notes quite correctly that this is both a product of Nigeria's historical experiences and the character of postcolonial politics, but more importantly, the legacy of decades of military dictatorship with its commandist style of rule. This political reality, according to the author, is further complicated by several fault lines in Nigerian politics and society: the North-South divide, Christian-Muslim antagonism, ethnic suspicions and conflicts, majority-minority ethnic calculations, oil and nonoil state struggles, and a political elite that has found it rather challenging to build a national project.

The wave of market reforms that swept across the world during the last two decades stunned most observers. It came as a particular surprise that even fragile democracies would implement painful neoliberal programs. Why did presidents enact drastic, risky measures that could easily trigger opposition and protest, thus endangering their political survival? How did the people respond to this bitter medicine? And how did democracy fare? Did its quality suffer because presidents autocratically imposed unpopular reforms? Or did political leaders manage to obtain popular support for their neoliberal programs through democratic mechanisms?

Japan's rapid ascent from economic decimation and military occupation to the world's second largest economy is often described as miraculous. So stupendous was the growth of Japan's economy during the 1960s and 1970s that by the 1980s, numerous books had been published with hubristic titles about Japan's position vis-à-vis the United States in the world political economy, such as Japan as Number One and Japan in the Passing Lane. Japan is lauded for its economic prowess and often touted as a model of development to be emulated by other countries. Its economic position in international affairs, however, is not matched with commensurate political influence. This is due in part to Article 9 in the “MacArthur” Constitution in which Japan declared it would forgo offensive military capabilities. Moreover, an avuncular military relationship with the United States allowed Japan to free ride on American grand strategy during the Cold War. This strategy was a linchpin of the Yoshida doctrine and is still the foundation of Japan's security policy in the post–Cold War era. The dichotomy between Japan's economic position and its political position in international affairs has led to a myriad of catchphrases regarding Japan's foreign policy. It is referred to negatively as engaging in “checkbook diplomacy,” that Japan is a “bank with a flag,” that Japan has “power without purpose,” or that Japan is merely “buying power.”

In recent decades, women's movements have mobilized in a range of contexts in order to press for international and national governmental responses to violence against women. Despite the scope of such activity in the public realm, there has been relatively little scholarly analysis of cross-national variations in governmental responses to the problem of violence against women. Laurel Weldon's study is an important response to this scholarly gap in both the fields of policy studies and of women and politics.

The search for a fuller understanding of how development and democracy interact in Third World countries continues to interest analysts and policymakers alike, especially when applied to the Arab world—the region least predisposed to either development or democracy. Competing political economy and political culture theories have been advanced to explain the pervasive absence of democratic politics in a context of alternative socioeconomic performances ranging from advanced to backward. Tunisia and Morocco, former French-colonized Arab-Muslim states located in northern Africa, serve as middle-income countries whose politics are undemocratic but whose social and economic performance has been moderately successful. Rather than limiting himself to either of these alternative theoretical approaches, Gregory White locates his analysis at the intersection of the external international political economy and the internal domestic economy and society. By elaborating these case studies within the framework of the European Union and its impact on peripheral middle-income actors, he advances both our understanding of state-society relations in transitional polities and the interaction that takes place between such polities and the powerful global forces that configurate and constrain their domestic policy choices.

Ted Gurr's Minorities at Risk Project began in 1986 as the first comparative large-n study of politically active ethnic groups around the globe. Now it is the single most influential scholarly resource on the subject, a fund of data generating volumes of published research, and—in an era when political science is often accused of irrelevance—providing valuable guidance for policymakers. Peoples Versus States, the second comprehensive report of findings from this project, builds on and extends the analysis introduced earlier in Minorities at Risk (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993).

Claiming that great powers determine the character of an international system is unremarkable. The difficult task is to show how great powers have created and maintained an international system that works in their interests. This is the job Alex Roberto Hybel undertakes in Made by the USA. He seeks to show how the United States first responded to the Europedominated state system, and then upon rising to great power status, how it sought to shape the international system to its own benefit. The contemporary relevance of Hybel's effort is for assessing whether the United States can maintain control over the international system into the twenty-first century.

The political economy of the rise, influence, and impact of institutional investors on the development policies of states has been seriously undertheorized in the disciplines of political science and economics. Mary Ann Haley's pathbreaking book, Freedom and Finance joins a range of works in the past decade that have sought to reverse this negligence by investigating the political implications of the ascendancy of portfolio investment in the developing world. Haley provides a useful overview of the political efforts of nation-states, multilateral institutions, investment banks, and money managers to pry open markets in societies otherwise starved for capital. This cooperation between political and private sector elites favored schemes that offered opportunities to investment banks and money managers, based for the most part in the United States, Western Europe and Japan, to expand their purchases of stocks, bonds, and various securities options in the developing world. In this context, she argues that institutional investors, including large-scale corporations such as investment banks and money managers of pension and mutual funds, have consolidated their economic power to the point of exercising political influence over governmental policies in the lessdeveloped world.

A long-standing debate in the field of international relations concerns the relationship between power and conflict. While balance of power (BOP) theorists view parity as a condition preserving peace, power transition (PT) theorists argue that parity (and transitions) between the dominant (global or regional) power and a dissatisfied challenger make war more likely. Kelly Kadera asserts that empirical evidence on whether parity is peaceful or dangerous is quite mixed. She attempts to reconcile these seemingly disparate theories by developing a dynamic model of power and conflict. She argues that the empirical puzzle stemming from the BOP-PT debate can be resolved by “defining three types of power distribution: approximate parity, a decisive advantage, and overwhelming preponderance” (p. 81). She develops a series of dynamic models that apply under each of these conditions. The key variables in each model are a state's power and the conflict it sends and receives from its rival. She assumes that 1) a state's power is generated by a dynamic process (capturing internal growth); 2) a state's power is negatively affected by the conflict a rival directs against it; and 3) more powerful states are able to direct increasing amounts of conflict toward their rivals.

Several years ago during a meeting at the United States Department of Defense on the implications of national missile defense plans, I and a few collaborators asked U.S. officials how they anticipated that India would react. The initial answer was that they had not given it any serious thought, since their main focus was managing Russian concerns about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Ashok Kapur would not be surprised by this anecdote. In Pokhran and Beyond he argues forcefully that key among a number of variables explaining India's nuclear behavior was the sense that countries, particularly the United States and China, “did not take Indian security concerns seriously, and [that] Indian pleas for a strategic dialogue [went] unheeded” (p. 7).

The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the Era of Reform according to the editor David Lampton, endeavors to provide the reader with an in-depth understanding of the decision-making process in China as it relates to formulating China's external and strategic policies. It is the third of three books edited by Lampton that aim at the same goal.

In a globalized world where states are opening up and borders becoming more porous, one may ask what is foreign and what is foreign policy. This question is even more relevant in the case of European states where European policies certainly are not foreign policies. Within the states of the European Union, socalled domestic ministries, the Ministries of Finance or the Ministries of Agriculture, primarily, conduct “foreign policy,” while the influence of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs seems to be dwindling. The outside is inside and Europe is part of us: European policies are devised by networks of various actors at all levels, European and national, governmental and societal. In other words, foreign policy in Europe is indeed a curious beast—which is the reason that a number of authors have in the past years delved into this topic.

Theories of political realism have lost their luster in recent years: Both the classical variant and structural realist adjustments are, it has been argued, deeply flawed. An oversimplified view of what motivates states, an unwillingness to recognize the part domestic political arrangements and ideas play, and an insufficient appreciation of institutional constraints and of networks of economic interdependence undermine, it is said, the theory's foundations. Moreover, many doubts have been raised about its predictive power.

The demise of Cold War bipolarity has led to dramatic changes in the geopolitical position of Germany, as it has gone from being divided between two blocs to a reunified economic powerhouse in the space of only a few years. Germany might therefore be expected to display dramatic changes in its foreign policy behavior, and thus makes an excellent test case for putting scholarly speculations to the test. This volume presents the results of a research project designed to evaluate the explanatory power of three theoretical approaches—neorealism, utilitarian liberalism, and constructivism—as they pertain to the case of German foreign policy after reunification.

Ethics and Foreign Policy had its beginning in a conference in 1998 whose theme was ethics and foreign policy. The organizers seem to have been inspired, or perhaps provoked, by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's promise that Britain under the Labour government would have “an ethical dimension” in its foreign policy. The contributors recall Cook's promise, almost always in disappointed tones, 22 times in the 220 pages that follow.

In an era marked by a worldwide war against terrorism and the recapturing of the language of good and evil in descriptions of one's own war aims and the actions of one's enemy, The Ethics of Destruction arrives at an appropriate time. The intentionally provocative title captures its apparently paradoxical aim of combining the effort to act justly and the effort to destroy. In the course of this exercise in amalgamation, it also illustrates the mixture of self-interest, technological capability, normative expectations, and political shrewdness that takes center stage when international conflict looms.

The study of immigration and immigration policy has become a research growth area for political scientists in recent years. And with good reason. Immigration has traditionally been a focus of other disciplines, such as demography. Thus, research has tended to focus on the demographic profile of immigrant groups, the characteristics of sending and receiving communities, and the nature of transnational social networks that facilitate immigration. Noticeably less attention has been devoted to the politics of immigration and immigration policy. Here, political scientists are helping to fill an obvious and important research niche. Immigration Policy and the Challenge of Globalization is a timely contribution to the growing political science literature in this area.

The rapid development of European environmental policy and Europe's embrace of the environment as an important foreign policy area make this a timely and important book. The European Union represents a unique political experiment in shared, multilevel governance among nation-states. This volume presents one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of both international and comparative dimensions of European environmental governance. It also attempts to make an important theoretical contribution by calling for greater theoretical linking between international and comparative approaches to the study of the European Union.

We do not lack for publications on the topic of humanitarian intervention. Given the nature of international relations after the Cold War, from developments centered on northern Iraq in 1991 to those centered on Kosovo in 1999, we now have a multitude of sources dealing with the use of military force presumably in response to gross violations of human rights. In fact, the number of publications on this topic is in inverse proportion to the actual number of possible humanitarian interventions. Most atrocities do not result in outside intervention, as events in the 1990s in Rwanda and the Democratic Congo and Nigeria should remind us. Perhaps we have so many of these studies because appearances of humanitarian intervention so clearly flout the principle of state sovereignty and noninterference in the domestic affairs of states, which constitute fundamental notions of the Westphalian state system of world order. Among the best of these publications is Nicholas Wheeler's Saving Strangers.