Democratizing Global Politics: Discourse Norms, International Regimes, and Political Community. By Rodger A. Payne and Nayef H. Samhat. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 194p. $45.00.

Since the September 11 attacks, depending on the month or even the day, one might or might not reply in the affirmative to the question of whether there is an emerging international or even global political order. President George W. Bush justified the United States March 2003 invasion of Iraq as the preservation and enhancing of that order and of the United Nations itself. A few months later, the UN secretary general suggested that the U.S. invasion was illegal. And even if one grants the emergence of a nascent global political order, its character is uncertain: Is it democratic, consensual, and egalitarian, or hierarchical and undemocratic?

Cities in the International Marketplace. By H. V. Savitch and Paul Kantor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 488p. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The growing popularity of comparative research is one of the most exciting recent developments in the field of urban politics. Comparison allows urbanists to transcend the local and see cities as part of a national or global system. It helps urban scholars identify which factors derive from the workings of democratic capitalist systems, and which grow from particular national practices and policies. But comparative urbanists have a difficult task as they try to disentangle cities from their national contexts. On the one hand, one can hardly understand, say, education policy in Detroit and Düsseldorf without clarifying local and national roles. On the other, an urbanist eager to highlight what is salient about the local does not wish to make national policy analysis central to his or her research. These special theoretical and methodological challenges confronting the comparative urbanist can be daunting.

Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition. By Hendrik Spruyt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 305p. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.

In his latest book, Hendrik Spruyt returns to a long-standing debate among scholars of twentieth-century decolonization: Why did some metropolitan governments withdraw from their empires fairly quickly, while other imperial powers waged a protracted struggle to retain their overseas possessions, sacrificing men and money in the process? Spruyt not only offers a sophisticated theoretical response to a question of historical significance but also applies it to more contemporary cases of dissolution by examining the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.