Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and South Africa. By Evan S. Lieberman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 344p. $75.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

Evan Lieberman has produced a first-rate work of comparative political economy. Just as importantly, he has done so by going boldly (and engagingly) where so few have gone before—into the tax state. Given how critical the capacity of a state to tax economic elites is to the provision of public goods, redistribution, and the promotion of development in general, it is indeed shocking to realize just how little attention this question has received from political scientists (there being as always some notable exceptions). Lieberman sets out to correct this gap not only by carefully and meticulously defining and measuring different tax states but also by providing a rich historical and comparative account of the rise and consolidation of the two very different tax states of South Africa and Brazil.

Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba. By Juan J. López. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 272p. $42.50.

When the Berlin wall came down, many Cuban-Americans eagerly anticipated the imminent fall of Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba. “Next Christmas in Havana,” read the bumper stickers in Miami. But most scholars studying Cuba doubted that Castro would be so easily dislodged. They cited manifest differences between Cuban and European communism: Cuba had an authentic revolution that began with broad support, whereas communism arrived in most of Eastern Europe in the rucksack of the Red Army. Cuban nationalism bolstered the legitimacy of a government in conflict with the United States, whereas European nationalism corroded the legitimacy of regimes beholden to Soviet Russia. The standard of living in communist Europe paled in comparison to that of the West, whereas Cuban conditions compared favorably to much of Latin America and the Caribbean. European communist regimes were led by colorless bureaucrats who had long since lost faith in their own ideology, whereas Cuba was still led by the charismatic Fidel Castro and the generation that made the revolution.

The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence. Edited by Pauline Jones Luong. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 352p. $49.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

The closed nature of the Soviet system meant that little was known about the republics on the periphery, particularly those of Central Asia. Most scholars viewed the region as a cotton colony of the Soviet Union dominated by a largely traditional, feudal society impervious to Western understanding. Despite greater access to the region and its peoples in the wake of the collapse of communism, the perception that the region remained under Moscow's shadow continued to suppress interest among nonspecialists. More recently, however, renewed interest in the Muslim world brought on by the war on terror has changed all of that. Specialists in international relations, security studies, and comparative politics, in particular, are intrigued by any number of questions, not the least of which are the persistence of authoritarianism and the inability of radical Islam to gain traction in Central Asia.

European Integration and Political Conflict. Edited by Gary Marks and Marco R. Steenbergen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 294p. $75.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

In the study of European Union politics, it is commonplace to deplore the absence of electoral mobilization across national boundaries. One of the reasons the EU suffers from a democratic deficit, the argument goes, is that elections to the European Parliament serve as a projection screen for fundamentally domestic debates. The purpose of Gary Marks's and Marco Steenbergen's volume is to subject this common assumption to systematic empirical scrutiny. The central question the editors pose concerns what features shape the contestation over European integration. Specifically, can such contestation be captured by a small number of dimensions? And how do these dimensions relate to the domestic left/right cleavage over the role of the state in the economy?

Caught in the Crossfire: Revolutions, Repression, and the Rational Peasant. By T. David Mason. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. 328p. $78.00 cloth, $30.95 paper.

Among citizens and scholars in many parts of the world, concern about political violence has been intense since the United States declared a war on terror after 9/11. In this volume, T. David Mason reminds us that, tragically, insurgency was common in the last half of the twentieth century, and he explores a question that remains fundamental: Why, when rebel victory is uncertain at best and the risks large, do people rebel? He probes this question primarily with respect to peasants in Latin America, but his answers are more broadly relevant as well.

Women's Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe. Edited by Richard E. Matland and Kathleen A. Montgomery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 400p. $85.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

It was something of a truism that within the political institutions of the Soviet bloc states, women and power were found in inverse proportion to each other. While women occupied roughly 30% of the seats within the faux-parliamentary bodies of the communist region, true power was never located in those institutions. Instead, political power was found at the Communist Party's zenith, where women were seen rarely, if at all.

Framing Europe: Attitudes to European Integration in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. By Juan Diez Medrano. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 344p. $39.95.

During the 1990s, a number of scholarly books and articles appeared in both Europe and North America to help explain the preferences and motivations of European mass publics concerning the European integration process. These scholarly efforts were spawned in large part by the vast amount of survey data generated by the Commission of the European Union in its efforts to monitor public opinion on issues pertaining to the European Union.

Defining Russian Federalism. By Elizabeth Pascal. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 224p. $74.95.

The rise of Russia's regions became one of the big stories that followed the collapse of Soviet communism. After decades of submission in a highly centralized and authoritarian system, resurgent regions emerged as autonomous actors, threatening the territorial integrity and political stability of the newly independent Russian state. With the notable exception of Chechnya, Russia's regions eventually were reintegrated with the center, but on the basis of an asymmetrical federal system. Elizabeth Pascal's book examines the process that led to this uneven territorial distribution of power in post-Soviet Russia.

The Strategic Use of Referendums: Power, Legitimacy, and Democracy. By Mark Clarence Walker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 166p. $49.95.

This book portrays the referendum as a consequence of elite bargaining. Mark Walker describes this electoral device as one that arises from an executive–legislative struggle where competing groups attempt to gain political legitimacy from the masses, even in nondemocratic states. Political elites thus use the referendum to settle disputes that appear irresolvable in the traditional chambers of the power, or, as E. E. Schattschneider indicated in The Semi-Sovereign People (1960), to expand the scope of the conflict to enhance one's political advantage. The referendum process is thus subject to manipulation—by the choice of wording, the timing of the vote, the subject matter, and even the interpretation of the results.

Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000. By Charles Tilly. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 320p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

Charles Tilly's study of democracy and contention is itself highly contentious and deservedly so. After reading and writing social and political history for over five decades, its author is well positioned to judge which social scientific understandings of democracy hold up to historical scrutiny and which do not. In his search for the “mechanisms and processes that promote, inhibit or reverse democratization” (p. ix), Tilly identifies a number of false leads. One of his most contentious points is that the quest for democracy's “necessary and sufficient conditions” is futile (p. 39). Democracy, he insists, “does not have a single history … repeated in more or less the same conditions and sequences by each democratizing country” (p. 35). Searching for either uniform conditions or repeated sequences is, thus, a waste of time. In an equally contentious mode, he cautions “culturalists, phenomenologists, behaviorists and methodological individualists” not to “treat individual dispositions as the fundamental causes of social processes.” Democratization and de-democratization cannot be understood through the “reconstruction” and “aggregation” of individual dispositions just before their point of action (p. xi). Nor, he argues, can democratization be understood as a “product of age-old character traits or of short-term constitutional innovations” (p. 9).

From Mao to Market: Rent Seeking, Local Protectionism, and Marketization in China. By Andrew H. Wedeman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 292p. $60.00.

In the debate on postsocialist transitions, China has proved a contentious anomaly for proponents of the “big bang” and “gradualism” to explain. In particular, scholars have contended that China's combination of capitalist markets with socialist purchasing and marketing organs provided opportunities to gain rents by taking advantage of discrepancies between the two price mechanisms. Officials gain from such a pattern of rent seeking, which tends to stall reform efforts. Somewhat paradoxically, Andrew Wedeman argues that economic rents propelled China toward a free market economy, a novel contribution to the debate on postsocialist transitions.

The Size of Nations. By Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 272p. $35.00.

When the Soviet Union fell, why did the region break up into smaller independent states, rather than remain one nation? In contrast, at almost the same time, what caused 15 European nations to band together to create a supranational institution with a common currency, rather than maintain their completely separate sovereignty? Are small countries more viable than large countries? Are dictatorships bigger than democracies? And within countries, why are capital cities usually centrally located?

The Behavioral Origins of War. By D. Scott Bennett and Allan C. Stam. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 300p. $59.50 cloth, $24.95 paper.

An aphorism in the natural sciences states that one should either write the first article on a subject or the last one. The statistical study of war began in the 1930s and 1940s with the work of Lewis Richardson and Quincy Wright, then expanded massively in the 1960s with the Correlates of War project based at the University of Michigan. Those were the first articles. This book is potentially the last important one.

Genes, Trade and Regulation: The Seeds of Conflict in Food Biotechnology. By Thomas Bernauer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 224p. $39.50.

There is more heat than light in the discussion of the differences between the United States and the European Union over the regulation of genetically engineered (GE) crops. Thomas Bernauer's sober, thorough, and accessible book sheds welcome light on a complex issue, while also taking some of the heat out of the discussion.

Terrorism and the UN: Before and After September 11. Edited by Jane Boulden and Thomas G. Weiss. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 248p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

One year after the attacks of 9/11, a workshop was held in New York City to explore two questions: How does the United Nations respond to terrorism, and how has the international environment been changed by terrorism? This well-edited selection of chapters, first presented at the workshop sponsored by CUNY's Ralphe Bunche Institute and the University of Oxford's Centre for International Studies, offers a thorough examination of the UN post-9/11, and provides an inventory of the questions now facing scholars of international conflict and international organization.

Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace. By Timothy W. Crawford. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 304p. $39.95.

Pivotal deterrence highlights the problem of dual deterrence in which one state (pivot) attempts to preserve the status quo and prevent conflict between two revisionist adversaries, while each depends on the pivot's support and/or neutrality for its ultimate success. Timothy Crawford's book is an important and, in several ways, original statement on a topic unduly ignored in past studies. In the first two chapters, the author carefully lays out his theoretical expectations concerning the conditions that make pivotal deterrence 1) possible, 2) probable, and 3) likely to succeed. A set of necessary conditions expected to make pivotal deterrence possible are clearly outlined: The two adversaries must see each other as more threatening than the pivot, whereas the pivot must be at least equal in power to them, prefer the status quo between them, and believe that both adversaries are revisionist and willing to go to war if assured of its support.

Unwanted Company: Foreign Investment in American Industries. By Jonathan Crystal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 256p. $35.00.

Jonathan Crystal's primary theoretical objective in this book is to refine our understanding of “how societal actors translate economic interests into policy preferences” (p. 2). In this respect, he is not concerned with explaining why societal actors achieve their preferences, but instead with why societal actors seek one policy rather than another to further their interests. To do so, the author examines U.S. firms' reactions to the increase in foreign direct investment in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s.

US Hegemony and International Organizations: The United States and Multilateral Institutions. Edited by Rosemary Foot, S. Neil MacFarlane, and Michael Mastanduno. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 312p. $74.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This important and timely work has the potential to disturb those who feel they already understand the conditions, character, and consequences of U.S. hegemony with respect to the way in which this position of power shapes U.S. efforts at establishing, maintaining, transforming, and terminating multilateral institutions. For people who view the United States as a champion or villain in its relations with international organizations, this work is likely to be irritating and upsetting; and for those who are less certain or dogmatic, this collection of studies is an excellent introduction to the subject because the work includes detailed, empirical case studies on a wide range of issues. Regardless of one's alignment or identification with these groups, this finely edited volume is illuminating, and its high quality makes it relevant to scholars, decision makers, and interested members of the public. Support for this recommendation is found in the careful scholarship that runs throughout and in the firsthand experience of many of the authors with the topics and controversies they analyze and present. Given the international audience to which this study is directed, the work's overall credibility is probably enhanced by the fact that many of the authors are not Americans.

What Moves Man: The Realist Theory of International Relations and Its Judgment of Human Nature. By Annette Freyberg-Inan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 266p. $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Human nature is the subject of Annette Freyberg-Inan's sustained attack on political realism. She argues that all realist theory shares a common set of assumptions about human motivations. In short, realists believe that humans are, and always will be, up to little good. We are fearful, self-interested, power-hungry, and “by and large, rational” (p. 94). Realists apply these psychological characteristics to nation-states, modifying them only to the extent that states and their leaders are likely to be more rational—in the sense of being strategic and utility maximizing—than average people. Such understandings of human nature are, however, simplistic and misleading.

Taming the Sovereigns: Institutional Change in International Politics. By K. J. Holsti. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 372p. $70.00 cloth, $25.99 paper.

For those who want to understand how international political institutions have developed and changed over the last 300 years, this is the book for you. K. J. Holsti begins from the premise that we actually know very little about how these institutions have changed and especially about the degree to which they have done so since the Second World War.