Peter J. Spiro's timely and highly accessible book encourages readers to reflect upon the contemporary meaning of citizenship. It could not have come at a better time. As I read it, I watched the collapse of the global financial system, which may really be just an aftershock of even more devastating global climate, food, and energy crises. At the same time, rather than coming together in a shared effort to respond to these multiple crises, Americans were entering the most polarizing phase of the presidential election. Sarah Palin is probably the first vice presidential candidate to suggest publicly that some parts of the country are “un-American,” but her words clearly reflected the sentiments of a significant portion of the U.S. public. Although it stirred some late-night television ridicule, Palin's remarks sparked little outrage or thoughtful and sustained public reflection about the broader implications of her statement. We should hope that the aftermath of the election will afford us a chance for such a dialogue on the nature of our national political community and its relation to the wider, global community. Beyond Citizenship should be required background reading for such a conversation.

This book opens and closes with the puzzle of how Russian rulers can control, distort, and bend the news to their own ends without worrying about how the audience receives it. On its first page, Ellen Mickiewicz asks: “[W]ouldn't these political leaders want anxiously to know what viewers make of the news?” And on its last page (p. 206) we are told that “political leaders and broadcasters persist in imagining an undifferentiated, unsophisticated mass on the other side of the screen.” While there is no direct evidence in the rest of the book to indicate that leaders do not know what to make of their audience, or that they assume it to be an undifferentiated, unsophisticated mass, these assumptions set up an interesting look at what audiences actually make of television news in Russia.

Here are two challenges that the world has had to face in 2008: 1) Construction of the Large Hadron Collider was recently completed. Experiments using this machine will yield new knowledge of a fundamental kind. There is also a theoretical risk, believed to be vanishingly small but not zero, that the machine could create a black hole capable of destroying the Earth. Should the machine be turned on? 2) Fertilizing “desert” regions of the oceans with iron is expected to stimulate phytoplankton growth, sucking carbon dioxide into the oceans and thus helping to mitigate climate change. It might also alter vital ocean ecosystems. To know the full consequences of ocean fertilization, large-scale experiments are needed. Should they be allowed?

W. Lance Bennett is rightly pessimistic about a state with government-run mass media, on the one hand, and unchecked corruption, on the other. The massive and partially acknowledged corruption operates menacingly at all levels of society, a phenomenon mainly of the post-Soviet period. And the situation is bound to worsen as the economic crisis grows. However, it is unlikely that this decade of rampant corruption is the source of most heuristics that Russians use, for the derivation and content of shortcuts to navigate news tend to be drawn from early experiences under Soviet rule.

My thanks to Jackie Smith for her thoughtful observations on Beyond Citizenship. My only point of disagreement goes to the nature of a world that, if not truly postnational, has witnessed the dramatic rise of nonstate forms of association. On the one hand, the ability of individuals to more fully actuate identities not anchored in the state advances autonomy values. On the other hand, these nonstate forms of association should not be romanticized. They, too, will implicate exclusion and conflict.

As in his book, Scott Barrett seizes the reader's interest by describing a dramatic situation of choice. Who cannot be struck by the example of the Large Hadron Collider and the possibility of accidentally annihilating the Earth with it? What does precaution require here?

Amid the steady stream of quantitative and game-theoretical studies of conflict published in recent years, Marc Howard Ross's Cultural Contestation in Ethnic Conflict comes as a welcome reminder of the ineffably human dimensions of conflict and violence around the world. His panoramic account of ethnic conflict goes beyond the establishment of statistical correlations and the modeling of “iterated games” to trace the complex processes by which conflicts emerge, escalate, and unravel, as well as the role of culture and identity in these processes. Making sense of ethnic conflict, Ross shows, requires an understanding of meaning—of how symbols, rituals, places, and events evoke emotions, inspire narratives, and inform identities in diverse settings around the world. The research agenda he pursues and promotes is thus in no small measure ethnographic and interpretivist, focusing on the (inter)subjective (self-)understandings of participants in ethnic conflicts, rather than the ostensibly objective conditions under which conflicts unfold.

The popular slogan NIMBY—Not in My Back Yard—captures a classic dilemma that confronts policymakers: Although society as a whole requires certain basic public goods, such as energy supplies, improved infrastructure, and transportation hubs, individual communities are often unwilling to bear the localized costs and externalities of hosting these installations. In this fresh, insightful, and creative study, Daniel Aldrich explores the ways in which states decide to site controversial facilities and the types of instruments that public agencies employ to respond to societal opposition against these siting decisions.

It takes a vacuum for the American mainstream press to seize an opening to perform its vital role. And it takes a crack in what the authors portray as an edifice of official secrecy, lying, intimidation, and retribution for the mainstream press to do its job—holding public officials to standards of accountability.

John T. Sidel's thoughtful review of my book raises two important, intertwined issues that I focus on here: the nature of group identity and the differences he sees between interpretivist and poststructuralist accounts of ethnic conflict. He offers two views of ethnic groups: One argues that strong identities and a sense of groupness precedes, and forms the basis for, conflict, and the other asserts that identities are necessarily incomplete, inadequate, and accompanied by anxiety, and that conflict is constitutive of ethnic identities. He attributes the former position to me while suggesting that I ignore the latter.

I am grateful to Alexander Cooley for his insightful comments and questions.

Ellen Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and empirical analysis about why the mainstream press proved incapable of independent news framing at critical junctures in the Iraq War. She then raises a series of excellent broader questions: What about the responsibility of government institutions to hold those in power accountable? What about the independent force of public opinion? Were earlier administrations as able to spin the press as successfully as the Bush administration? Each of these questions might well fuel a book. I can only address them briefly in this response.

On September 5, 1995, three United States military personnel abducted and raped a 12-year-old schoolgirl on Okinawa, an island in the Pacific that houses roughly 75% of the U.S. military facilities in Japan. After a month and a half of smaller rallies, more than 85,000 demonstrators gathered in late October that year to protest not only the crime itself but also the presence of the U.S. bases on this string of islands that sit a thousand miles south of mainland Japan. Despite the enormous tragedy of this incident, the widespread international attention it received, and the Okinawan governor's refusal afterwards to renew land to the bases, more than 48,000 U.S. military personnel, their dependents, and civilians remain today on the island, which is roughly the size of Los Angeles. Tragedies at other U.S. bases overseas have similarly not altered the bilateral contracts with the host nation. In 1998, for example, a marine airplane accidentally severed a ski-lift cable for a gondola in Cavalese, Italy, killing all 20 passengers aboard, but this incident did not negatively impact the presence of the U.S. military in that nation.

Indonesia is a country that seems to violate a number of widely held assumptions that comparative political scientists hold. For example, under Suharto's 30-year rule, corruption soared, but so did economic growth. In Riots, Pogroms, Jihad, John Sidel offers another false generalization for consideration, namely, that despite the rise of ethnic and religious violence in the world since 1990, the widespread religious violence experienced in Indonesia since the mid-1990s is not best understood as part of a global trend. Rather, he argues that “such broad-brush accounts offer little to illuminate the specific modalities of religious violence observed in Indonesia or to help examine the discernable but seemingly inexplicable shifts … in the forms, targets, processes of mobilization, and consequences of this violence in successive periods” (p. 11).