Creating Competitive Markets: The Politics of Regulatory Reform. Edited by Marc K. Landy, Martin A. Levin, and Martin Shapiro. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007. 368p. $59.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

For the past 30 years, policy innovation in the United States and much of the industrialized world has centered on “liberalizing” markets and allowing competitive forces to unleash human creativity and flexibility. Legislators have relaxed restrictions on competition in telecommunications, banking, airlines, and a variety of other markets, ostensibly to enhance the efficiency of each market and thereby benefit both consumers and producers. This wave of “deregulation” has had a decidedly mixed track record. The easing of U.S. banking restrictions in the 1980s, for example, facilitated a host of financial innovations within the sector, but also contributed to the disastrous savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s. The deregulation of the airline industry in the late 1970s was deemed a success for consumers, but the promotion of competition in electricity markets in the 1990s was less successful.

Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today. By Marc Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 293p. $25.50 cloth, $18.50 paper.

Marc Lynch provides a comprehensive overview of the historical rise of new Arab media and public spheres, in which Arabs attempt to break stereotypes and represent themselves, giving voice to views and ideas that are usually absent in both their state-controlled media and Western media. Building on Jürgen Habermas's (1992) The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, which traces the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe, Lynch examines whether Arab countries are developing liberal public spheres of information, debate, and consensus. Using Habermas, Lynch identifies progressive features of the new Arab public spheres, but also indicates limitations.

Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy. By William C. Martel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 436p. $35.00.

With the United States currently fighting protracted wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the question of what it means to achieve victory in war has never been more important for U.S. foreign policy. While policymakers, scholars, and military strategists have studied for millennia how to achieve victory in armed conflict, Victory in War seeks to provide an answer to a more fundamental question: What precisely is the meaning of victory in war and how do we know when victory is achieved? William C. Martel begins this book with the basic premise that there is currently no theory, framework, or set of organizing principles for understanding victory, yet paradoxically, “the implicit assumption [is] that the unalloyed purpose of [war] strategy is to achieve it” (p. 3). To address this glaring omission, the author sets out to develop a “pretheory” of victory, which entails the organization of principles about victory that can provide an analytic foundation for examining the concept of victory more systematically.

Redrawing the Map to Promote Peace: Territorial Dispute Management via Territorial Changes. By Jaroslav Tir. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2006. 169p. $65.00 cloth, $23.95 paper.

Geography has for too long been jettisoned from international relations, owing in large part to the historical legacy of the Third Reich. But borders, land, ports, and peoples can each be contextualized by their location, which is neither random nor arbitrary. Rather, they result from and impinge upon the everyday ebb and flow of politics and economics. This welcome volume goes against the grain of much quantitative research in international relations and examines some aspects of the role of geography in the conduct of foreign policy and the attendant implications for international politics. It builds beyond a growing tradition in quantitative IR of including some geographical explanations in empirical investigations to actually focusing on a particular aspect of how the relation of states to territory affects their behaviors.

The Pursuit of Peace and the Crisis of Israeli Identity: Defending/Defining the Nation. By Dov Waxman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 264p. $69.95.

Studies of Israel's foreign policy have been dominated by realist perspectives, emphasizing a hostile and anarchic international environment as the key determinant of its policies. Even perceptual and psychological interpretations of its policies—relying principally on the perceptions of decision makers—emphasized how these factors shaped their worldviews and affected policy choices. A growing number of studies, however, offer new interpretations of the factors and processes that shaped Israeli security and foreign policy over time, focusing on the social structure of its society or on the use of a foreign and security siege mentality as an instrument of political control and socialization.