To whom should political scientists address themselves? Should we be content to pursue more or less purely intra-disciplinary concerns, whether those be driven by some specialist “literature” or by one or another preferred method of inquiry? Is it intellectually responsible to do so? Do we have the tools or capacity to do otherwise? Given the fallible character of even our most confidently held research findings, what are the ethical or intellectual consequences of addressing ourselves to audiences in the world of law or policy or politics? And given that any potential interlocutors in those extra-disciplinary, non-academic domains quite legitimately have interests and agendas of their own, how should we anticipate the knowledge claims we advance might fare on various terrains of contest and power? These questions and others are central to the mission of this journal.

An anonymous late eighteenth century British painting at the Ackland Museum in Chapel Hill portrays “Satan Leaving the Court of Chaos,” a reference to Book II of John Milton's Paradise Lost. In an assertion of demotic power, Satan, “the adversary of God and man,” travels “full fraught with mischievous revenge” from Chaos, where he is most at home, to God's created world in order to corrupt Adam and Eve and induce original sin.Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University (iik1@columbia.edu). This text is a slightly revised version of the presidential address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 31, 2006. The program's theme, “Power Reconsidered,” animated the choice of subject. He is particularly grateful to the Program Chairs, Judith Goldstein and Richard Valelly, for their intellectual and instrumental leadership.

We examine judge bias in Olympic figure skating as an exploratory analysis of a leading constructivist approach to identity using quantitative methods more closely associated with non-constructivist social science. While constructivism is a major theoretical orientation in international relations, large-n quantitative studies of the approach are uncommon in large measure due to the principal argument of constructivists: that interests should be treated endogenously. If interests and identities are mutually constituted, then it would seem to be impossible to distinguish their effects, creating a problem of observational equivalence. Some constructivist theorists nevertheless suggest that under certain conditions material interests can be thought of as causes of collective identity, meaning that it is in principle possible to isolate the influence of identity. We build on this “bounded” version of constructivism by identifying an arena of international relations in which the observable effect of the identities constituted by interactions among states can be analyzed independent of those states' national security concerns. We study whether collective identities constituted by the international system during the Cold War systematically influenced judge bias in Olympic figure skating, examining whether judges' evaluations of skaters systematically vary according to whether their respective states viewed one another as “friends,” “rivals,” or “enemies.”Brian R. Sala is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at University of California, Davis (brsala@ucdavis.edu). John T. Scott is professor in the Department of Political Science at University of California, Davis (jtscott@ucdavis.edu). James F. Spriggs II is Professor of Political Science at Washington University at Saint Louis (jspriggs@artsci.wustl.edu). Previous versions of this paper were given in the Department of Political Science at University of California, Davis, and at the 2004 Western Political Science Association meeting, for which we owe thanks to Kris Kanthak.We would like to thank the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Karen Cover at the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame and Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado for providing the data for this study. We would also like to acknowledge the generous research funding provided by the University of California, Davis, and the tireless work Dan Brunstetter did in entering the data and consulting his mother on the finer points of figure skating. A number of friends and colleagues offered valuable advice: Dan Brunstetter, James Fowler, Scott Gartner, Bob Huckfeldt, Cindy Kam, Yuch Kono, Zeev Maoz, Jennifer Ramos, Randy Siverson, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, Walt Stone, Mike Thies, and Chris Zorn. Finally, for his immense statistical expertise and especially for inspiring us to publish this paper we owe special thanks to Jeff Gill.

Samuel Huntington argues that the sheer number, concentration, linguistic homogeneity, and other characteristic of Hispanic immigrants will erode the dominance of English as a nationally unifying language, weaken the country's dominant cultural values, and promote ethnic allegiances over a primary identification as an American. Testing these hypotheses with data from the U.S. Census and national and Los Angeles opinion surveys, we show that Hispanics acquire English and lose Spanish rapidly beginning with the second generation, and appear to be no more or less religious or committed to the work ethic than native-born whites. Moreover, a clear majority of Hispanics reject a purely ethnic identification and patriotism grows from one generation to the next. At present, a traditional pattern of political assimilation appears to prevail.Jack Citrin is Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley (gojack@berkeley.edu). Amy Lerman is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at University of California, Berkeley (alerman@berkeley.edu). Michael Murakami is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at University of California, Berkeley (mmurakam@berkeley.edu) and Kathryn Pearson is Assistant Professor Political Science at University of Minnesota (kpearson@umn.edu).

Is it acceptable (or perhaps even imperative) that the United States works to spread democratic liberty, even when nation building requires warfare on behalf of the oppressed? I argue that Mark Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a useful aid for reflection regarding this question. What Twain accomplishes, thanks in great part to his humor, is an honest exposure of the partial truths and considerable falsehoods contained in each common opinion regarding benevolent intervention. To highlight the complexity of Twain's thoughts on nation building, I discuss three possible interpretations of Connecticut Yankee. The first conceives of Hank Morgan as a well-intentioned democratic reformer, laying the proper foundation for a peaceful democratic transition after King Arthur dies. The second reads the book as ironically criticizing Hank for his overzealous promotion of democracy amidst a traditional culture. The third portrays Hank as an all-out revolutionary, justified in using any means to rid Camelot of slavery and oppression. Each of these interpretations represents, I believe, one aspect of Twain's outlook on the world. Brought together in the minds of thoughtful readers, these three themes prompt deeper reflection on the moral status of benevolent imperialism. Joel Johnson is Assistant Professor of Government and International Affairs at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota (joel_johnson@augie.edu). He is the author of Beyond Practical Virtue (University of Missouri Press, forthcoming). Special thanks to John Nelson, Lilly Goren, Peter Schotten, Brent Lerseth, Joe Dondelinger, three anonymous reviewers, and the participants in the Augustana Faculty Research Colloquium for helpful comments on preliminary drafts. This article was written with the help of a grant from the Augustana Research and Artist Fund (ARAF).

In the past twenty years, intersectionality has emerged as a compelling response to arguments on behalf of identity-based politics across the discipline. It has done so by drawing attention to the simultaneous and interacting effects of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and national origin as categories of difference. Intersectional arguments and research findings have had varying levels of impact in feminist theory, social movements, international human rights, public policy, and electoral behavior research within political science and across the disciplines of sociology, critical legal studies, and history. Yet consideration of intersectionality as a research paradigm has yet to gain a wide foothold in political science. This article closely reads research on race and gender across subfields of political science to present a coherent set of empirical research standards for intersectionality.Ange-Marie Hancock is Assistant Professor of Political Science & African American Studies at Yale University (ange-marie.hancock@yale.edu). She is the author of The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the “Welfare Queen.” The author thanks Christian Davenport, Gary Goertz, Errol Henderson, Gerald Jaynes, Eric Juenke, Alondra Nelson, Valerie Purdie-Vaughn, Mark Sawyer, James Scott, Evelyn Simien, Lester Spence, Dara Strolovitch, and the anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics for their comments on previous versions of this paper, which substantially improved the manuscript. She is currently a visiting faculty fellow at the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.

The watershed Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education affected activist politics on issues that extend well beyond African-American civil rights or education. The apparent success of the Court decision in spurring social change encouraged activists in other social movements to emulate the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's litigation strategy, and to adapt organizational structures, political strategies, and rhetoric borrowed from the civil rights movement. We examine how a Supreme Court decision and its subsequent interpretation influenced the development of other social movements. Borrowing from work on social movements, we contend that the Court decision signaled judicial openness to stand up for minority points of view on questions of fundamental rights, and that the civil rights movement spilled over to affect other movements. Activists continued to respond to that signal decades after Brown, even when that signal of judicial responsiveness and openness did not reflect the real prospects for achieving influence through a litigation-based strategy.David S. Meyer is Professor of Sociology and Political Science (dmeyer@uci.edu) and Steven A. Boutcher is Doctoral Candidate (sboutche@uci.edu) in Sociology, University of California, Irvine. We are grateful for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper from Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Stephanie DiAlto, Sharon Lean, Sharon Oselin, and Su Yang.

It has always been true that foreign policy debates tend to proceed on a weak evidentiary base, with clever quips or stirring oratory regularly trumping sound analysis. According to Thucydides, for example, the Athenian assembly that endorsed the Sicilian expedition during the second Peloponnesian War had only the haziest conception of the adversaries' capabilities. Contemporary politics is distinctive not in the sloganeering quality of political discourse, but in the divergence between the quality of information available to society as a whole and the quality of information used in making decisions. For example, it was clear to any open-minded observer by the time of the Congressional vote in 2002 that implications of collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda lacked any basis in reliable evidence. By the time the Bush Administration initiated war in 2003, claims about Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons capabilities were also partially debunked and increasingly dubious. Still, the war went forward, and many Americans continued to believe the Bush Administration's false claims even after the Administration itself had abandoned them.Patrick Thaddeus Jackson is Associate Professor of International Relations in the School of International Service at the American University in Washington, DC (ptjack@ american.edu). Stuart J. Kaufman is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware (skaufman@udel.edu). For helpful comments and feedback on this article, we would like to thank Monica Duffy Toft, Neta Crawford, Daniel Nexon, and three anonymous reviewers.

Where does one locate the subfield of international political economy (IPE) with its study of North-South relations and developing countries? Attempts to map the field usually work on at least two levels. In the first instance, an intra-political science conceptualization conventionally invokes the fields of international relations and comparative politics and then uses words like “intersection,” “inform,” and “complement.” Indeed, if comparative politics is traditionally viewed as the study of politics within countries (often with attention to a specific region of the globe) and international relations is preoccupied with the relationships between countries in the international arena, efforts to understand the politics of developing countries obliges IPE scholars to engage both fields. How can one understand the development experience of a country (or region) without situating it in a broader international context? Undeniably, a country's experience with its colonial legacy, the evolution of state institutions, economic growth, poverty, corruption, globalization, and natural resource exploitation can only be understood in the dynamic context of the international arena.Gregory White is Associate Professor of Government at Smith College, Northampton, MA (gwhite@email.smith.edu). He is the author of On the Outside of Europe Looking In: A Political Economy of Tunisia and Morocco (2001) and articles and book chapters on Moroccan politics and labor migration.

With this issue, we are pleased to initiate the practice of a Review Editor Introduction. As I noted in my initial Editorial Statement a few issues ago, the job of review editor is a weighty one, involving some complex judgments. The choices regarding review assignments, pairings, and such that I make—with the advice of my terrific team of assistants—impact individual authors and the profession as a whole. Given our desire to use the review section to create interesting dialogues and new conversations, we have decided that an editor's introduction could be useful, in identifying certain inter and intra subfield connections and in introducing special features or symposia.

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. By Robert Pape. New York: Random House, 2005. 352p. $25.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

Making Sense of Suicide Missions. Edited by Diego Gambetta. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 392p. $45.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror. By Mia Bloom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 280p. $24.95.

How many causal paths lead to suicide terrorism? Unfortunately, too many to produce precise predictions about when and where suicide terrorism is likely to occur. Nonetheless, Mia Bloom's, Diego Gambetta's, and Robert Pape's books do an excellent job of addressing this phenomenon with sophisticated theories and empirical findings. While Pape presents a coherent, single theoretical framework for explaining suicide terrorism, Bloom and the contributors in Gambetta's book focus on a range of loosely interconnected causal explanations across individual, organizational, and societal levels. These works also have a rich historical and comparative focus across time and cases. Even so, the fundamental question is how they advance our knowledge about suicide terrorism.Karen Rasler is professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington.

The three books under review reflect a radically altered agenda in social science, affected by the attacks of September 11, 2001, in which international terrorism in general and suicide missions in particular are “hot” topics. But because (sadly) new cases are recorded daily, the analyses in these books must be considered exploratory.Eli Berman is professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego. David D. Laitin is James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty member of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 released a barrage of public rhetoric characterizing the 19 Muslim hijackers as evil fanatics “in love with death” and animated by a “hatred of freedom.” A spate of scholarship, op-ed articles, and policy papers devoted to anatomizing the “problems with Islam”—a propensity for violence and authoritarianism, an archaic conflation of religious and political domains, the pent-up rage of Muslims “left behind” by modernity—soon flooded airwaves, newspapers, and bookstores, in many cases recycling arguments several decades and even centuries old. Counterclaims about the inherently peaceful and tolerant essence of Islam quickly followed, and a very peculiar American public debate about Islamic authenticity was born.Roxanne L. Euben is the Jane Bishop '51 Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. The author is grateful to Lawrie Balfour, Michael Munger, and Keith Topper for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

The books under review reveal considerable agreement about suicide bombers. Yet there is a significant gap between the scholarly consensus they embody and widespread perceptions about the subject. We learn, for example, that suicide missions are as old as the hills. We learn that there is no particular link between the propensity to engage in suicide attacks or other forms of extreme terrorism and religious belief—let alone belief in Islamic fundamentalism. We learn that Sri Lanka's secular Marxist Tamil Tigers have been responsible for more suicide attacks than any other group in recent decades. We learn that even within Islamist groups like Hezbollah, the majority of suicide attackers have not been religious at all, and that some of the religious ones have been Christian rather than Islamist. And we learn that suicide attackers are of both sexes and of various ages, incomes, and education levels.Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University and Henry R. Luce Director of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies.

Completed in 2005, Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism is based on extensive research conducted by the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. This book belongs to what one might call the quantitative school of terrorism studies, as it relies mainly on data gathered on suicide attacks and their perpetrators over the last two decades. Its author takes issue with the conclusions of those who stress the importance of the doctrine of Islam in the shaping of the suicide terror phenomenon. Such a debate is part and parcel of a wider dispute within U.S. academia, boosted by 9/11 and its Iraqi aftermath, though it was already rooted in the “Orientalism” battle back in the 1980s. However, it also touches on an ongoing conflict between scholarship and partisanship: Should academics take sides and advocate specific policies, at the risk of submitting their scholarly credentials to the political goals they champion, or should they shun away from politics, at the risk of remaining clad in their ivory tower while social debates rage, uninfluenced by their expertise? The issue of terrorism is crucial to that matter.Gilles Kepel is professor and chair of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies, Sciences Po, Paris.

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. By Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 312p. $60.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

Michel Foucault is the man who gave us trenchant critiques of modernity in books such as Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. His arguments about the body, power, and knowledge have influenced a number of interdisciplinary studies and created a generation of “Foucauldians.” However, one set of his writings has been decidedly uninfluential: the set pertaining to the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79. Those journalistic essays—written for the Italian and French press (Corriere della serra and Nouvel Observateur)—are the subject of this fascinating and comprehensive volume by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson.

Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century. By Lisa Anderson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 176p. $29.00.

The large question looming over this series of lectures by Lisa Anderson is the perennial problem of the relationship between social inquiry and political practice. Her engagement with this issue takes the explicit form of parsing the political—and specifically the public policy—aspirations, achievements, and failures of American academic social science from its founding in the late nineteenth century to the present. None of this is new territory, and Anderson's debt to the historical and analytical work of many (for her, mostly contemporary) scholars is both obvious and readily acknowledged (p. x). However, it is not really Anderson's intent to make a contribution to the historical or philosophical literature; rather, this is an argument with a definitively presentist goal, namely, understanding the conditions that define (as the title of her book intimates) what it means to be committed to a public role for scholarship and scholars today.

The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition. By Roger Berkowitz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 234p. $49.95.

Roger Berkowitz's The Gift of Science is about the genesis and development of legal codification from its birth in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's work to the German Civil Code of 1900. Leibniz's legal writings have been long neglected and this study is to be commended for bringing these writings back to our attention. Berkowitz charts the development of Leibniz's legal thought from his early to mature writings, illuminating Leibniz's surprisingly helpful reflections on the nature of law.

On Justification: Economies of Worth. By Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. Translated by Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 400p. $85.00 cloth, $39.50 paper.

Those interested in any of a variety of fields—reasoning about justice, the foundations and mechanics of social interaction, rational action, value formation, norm change, or conflict—will find rich potential in this ambitious and challenging book by sociologist Luc Boltanski and economist/statistician Laurent Thévenot, which does not fit into any single research paradigm. Published in France more than 15 years ago, the book is available in this English translation and ought to have a significant impact on social theory generally.