Limbert Review of My Book

Book reviews
International Relations theory

The morality of defensive war. By Ccile Fabre and Seth Lazar. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 2014. 260pp. 35.00. isbn 978 0 19968 283 6. Available as e-book.
Among moral and political philosophers writing on the ethics of armed conflict, it is usual
to distinguish between those who defend a traditional theory of the just war and those
who propose a newly reconstructed account based on a revisionist critique of traditional
commitments. This impressive volume offers an important collection of essays from both
key revisionists and a number of important philosophers and political theorists who
approach revisionism from diverse critical angles.
One part of the revisionist onslaught challenges the traditional jus in bello argument by
confronting it with a more rigorous, individualist and, in some versions, self-consciously
cosmopolitan analysis of its moral foundations. As Ccile Fabre and Seth Lazar indicate
in their introduction, this has led to an erosion of confidence in the principles of
non-combatant immunity on one side and equal liability of combatants on the other. It is
a line of argument with potentially far-reaching consequences for our understandingand
potentially the legitimacyof the Law of Armed Conflict.
A second component that revisionism has tackled is the traditional assumption that
national defence is the paradigmatic moral justification of war. The most systematic assault
on this dimension of the theory was David Rodins elegant treatise, War and self-defence
(Oxford, 2002), in which he systematically refuted the available arguments for an unreconstructed version of that idea. But whereas the attack on central pillars of jus in bello has been
followed up in recent work by attempts at positive reconstruction by both revisionists and
their critics, the ad bellum problem had remained somewhat neglected. The principle of
national defence has not been entirely abandoned in the wake of Rodins attack but nor
has a more satisfying alternative been defended and widely accepted. The principal aim of
the volume is to offer some positive reflection on how to think about jus ad bellum and, in
particular, the criterion of just cause in the wake of a negative revisionist critique.
The nine essays offered in this book are divided into three groups. In the first, essays by
Lazar and by Patrick Emerton and Toby Handfield specify more clearly why the commitment to either a general or a particular principle of national defence is in tension with
deeper moral commitments. Emerton and Handfield interrogate the attempts of liberals and
pluralists to ground a national defence privilege and offer an intriguing alternative approach
in the form of prosaic statism while Lazar offers a penetrating critique of analyses of
conditional threats. In the second group, three of the most prominent revisionistsRodin,
Fabre and Jeff McMahanoffer positive accounts of just cause for war based on revisionist
arguments, showing how defensive war in response to some sorts of threat might be justified in ad bellum terms and without conflicting with deeper commitments.
International Affairs 90: 6 (2014) 14531510
2014 The Author(s). International Affairs 2014 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by John Wiley & Sons
Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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Rodins essay defends the value of pursuing his arguments against traditional assumptions, identifying his position as falling between a pacifism that rejects all war and the view
that national defence can always justify war. The central problem according to his analysis
is one of proportionality. As Lazar puts it in his contribution, whereas defensive violence
threatens vital interests by killing and maiming, those rights it secures are widely seen as
non-vital (at least by comparison). It therefore seems like the values at stake in national
defence are such that the lethal violence they sometimes require will be disproportionate.
Fabre and McMahan both offer accounts of jus ad bellum that concede more to the
traditional view while arguing from a purely revisionistin Fabres case, cosmopolitan
footing. But both stop a long way short of reconstituting it on a new foundation. For
Fabre, most cases of political aggression are mixed, containing both threats to political
rights as such and threats of violence. By arguing that armed defence against the lethal
component in a conditional threat is justified, she supports the claim that defensive war
can be permissible against political aggression backed by threat of force. In genuine cases
of purely political aggression, however, she upholds a revisionary stance and argues that
war would be unjust. McMahan concedes more. Like Fabre, he thinks that aggression
commonly presents itself as a mixed threat and in response the use of lethal force may be
legitimate on the basis of a hybrid justification. Soldiers who fight in wars of aggression
may be liable to less than lethal harm for the political rights they threaten; but if greater
harm is necessary to defend against them, the additional harms may be justifiable as a lesser
evil, particularly where very large numbers of people will otherwise suffer wrongful
infringements of political rights.
These constitute important refinements of and elaborations on some of the most influential revisionist arguments in the literature. In the third part of the book, a series of essays
presents views from important theorists who remain open to the significance of sovereignty and collective goods in the analysis of the ethics of war. Yitzhak Benbaji offers an
innovative account of national defence as a general principle justifiable on the basis of social
contract. Margaret Moore and Christopher Kutz both draw on wider moral resources by
reflecting on the value of political community in ways that challenge the individualism
of revisionist arguments. Anna Stilz offers a reflection on the vital question of territory, a
matter that contemporary just war theory has given little, if any, sustained attention to in
commenting on the defensive rights claimed by states.
In a short review, it is impossible to do justice to the great richness of this volume.
It addresses a theme central to contemporary just war theory and the ethics of political
violence and offers a refreshing diversity of philosophical perspectives, even while it
extends the central thrust of the revisionist argument. It will form an indispensable part of
the current literature in the field.
Christopher Finlay, University of Birmingham, UK
Risk and hierarchy in international society: liberal interventionism in the postCold War era. By William Clapton. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2014. 190pp. Index. 58.00.
isbn 978 1 13739 635 5. Available as e-book.
This fine book makes important contributions to understanding International Relations
in the new erafor the academy, at leastof what might be called life after the anarchy
assumption. Now that anarchy has been dethroned as the default structural condition for
all of history (see the work of Ian Clark, David Lake, Jack Donnelly, and others), we are
left to cope instead with understanding hierarchy and varieties of hierarchical formations
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in which state sovereignty, non-intervention and sovereign equality are compromised
and states are routinely in superordinate and subordinate positions: empire, hegemony,
spheres of influence, Great Power status, rankings of major and minor powers, in-groups
and out-groups, etc. This is William Claptons theoretical realm. Substantively, Claptons
book is about how hierarchy is manifested when key major powersthere are three case
chapters on the European Union, Australia and the USengage in liberal interventions in
the surrounds of Europe, the South Pacific and Iraq respectively.
To help us map out how late modern hierarchy operates, Risk and hierarchy brings
together two literatures that might previously have been unaware of each other: the English
School of International Relations (IR) theory and German sociologist Ulrich Becks work
on the notion of a risk society and a world risk society. The latter offers the proposition
that a key impact of globalization is to create new, threatening de-bounded risks that
political leaders feel they must respond to. Additionally, as his topic is liberal interventions
and democracy promotion, Claptons book is also quite relevant to liberal IR theory. A
primary goal is to revise and improve the English Schools take on hierarchy, particularly
correcting the misapprehension that hierarchy is incompatible with the English Schools
master concept, international society. Instead, Claptons improved formulation finds that
both anarchy and hierarchy are useful, and even essential, for understanding international
society after the end of the Cold Warelements of both are present, especially as ascendant liberal norms about democracy and human rights rub shoulders with old Westphalian
norms of sovereign equality and non-intervention.
The combination is fruitful. As Clapton points out, a new awareness of global
de-bounded risk does not tell us how to deal with it. Enter the suppositions of liberal IR
theory, which provide answers to coping with risk: democracies dont fight each other,
they resolve inter-democracy disputes peacefully, they hopefully respect new liberal norms,
so intervening to spread or promote democracy-building will solve potential problems in
dangerous places. In short, the fateful synaptic breakthrough is the idea that states that lack
functional democratic regimes are potentially risky; proceed accordingly (p. 34).
Definitional distinctions are not inconsequential. Hierarchy is not mere brutal dominationand Clapton makes it clear that we can distinguish between the two. Hierarchies are
social relationships based on legitimacy and consent, sustained by accompanying norms and
shared understandings. In short, they have social logics that we need to identify. Life after
the Cold War, under globalization, features new social logics of hierarchy, where world
risk society concerns combine with liberal foreign policy agendas: major liberal powers
responding to threats with externally sponsored and enforced reform programmes. It is
the social logic of risk that underpins this particular sort of hierarchy between democratic
major powers and subject countries.
The three cases are well chosen to illustrate instances of hierarchy properly recognized and accepted by the wider society of states (p. 100). The European Neighbourhood
Programme has partner countries on the geographical periphery of Europe, involved in
stabilizing and liberalizing measures in a variety of policy areas. In the case of Australia,
policies after 9/11 and the October 2002 Bali bombings try to cope with the spreading risk
from possible state failure, in what Australian government discourse terms an arc of instability in the South Pacific. Australias Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands
and a statebuilding package for Papua New Guinea both promote liberal good governance
and rule of law. The US war in Iraq in 2003 illustrates some definitional tensions. Clapton
disagrees with Tim Dunne that the war was an instance of hierarchy, because the US
invasion wasnt legitimate. For Dunne, coercive domination is still hierarchy. For Clapton,
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the Iraq War was not an instance of hierarchy, just coercion; it changed once key Security
Council resolutions after the invasion legitimized the American presence. Additionally,
it is quite laudable of Clapton to go beyond the well-known cases of American adventurism, demonstrating that this is a broader phenomenon, not tied simply to the oddities of
American identity and politics.
Two quibbles might be raised by some readers. Some might worry about how we can
truly ascertain the presence of the risk logic when risk language is rather ubiquitous in
national security documents. But Clapton is convincing on this. The telltale signs are
discourses specifically framed in terms of temporally and spatially de-bounded risks, high
levels of uncertainty and an emphasis on precaution and prevention (p. 114). He provides
plenty of well-chosen textual evidence in each of his cases. Second, for Clapton, hierarchy
means consent and legitimacy, a commonly held definition, but somewhat narrow from
other perspectives. There are other definitions of hierarchy and other (though less complete)
ways of explaining these liberal interventions. One could, for example, consider hegemonic
liberal values and liberal strategic precepts as constituting a new standard of civilization or
dominant moral discourse that in effect produces a hierarchy of good and bad actors and
a recipe for action upon the latter, whether consented to or not. (See the recent work of
Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Ann Towns and Ayse Zarakol.) From such perspectives, not inside
the English School, coercive domination can be the central element in hierarchical relationships. This is an area for further work, though perhaps one in which the inherent differences
in research traditions cannot be overcome.
Such definitional issues do not detract from Claptons fine contribution, however.
Risk and hierarchy is an inventive combination of ideas and literatures, which together
yield improved, significantly more complete explanations of the phenomenon that is in
many ways the hallmark of the post-1990 world: liberal interventionism. We are the richer
for it.
Daniel M. Green, University of Delaware, USA
New constitutionalism and world order. Edited by Stephen Gill and A. Claire
Cutler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. 368pp. Index. 65.00. isbn 978 1
10705 369 4.
This volume aims to explain the reconstitution of power and governance in the emerging
[neo-liberal] world order (p. 1), which is seen to extend the realm of the market and
commodification processes, serve the particular interests of capital and large corporations
and be underpinned by the geopolitical power of the US. While there is nothing new to
this view, the books more specific concern is with new constitutionalism, understood as
a socio-political project aimed at preserving and/or justifying neo-liberal institutions and
practices. The book argues that a wide variety of politicallegalregulatory mechanisms are
creating a de facto constitutional structure that locks in a neo-liberal framework of capital
accumulation. It explicitly adopts a critical perspective aimed not merely at describing
how this is occurring in different domains and on multiple levels, but also at identifying
the potential for the creation of a more just world order through an engagement with the
contradictions, dislocations and inequalities integral to the neo-liberal order.
The book is divided into six parts, each beginning with a useful mini-introduction. The
chapters in the first part are largely conceptual, where Gill emphasizes the role played by
law in constituting the power of capital, the neo-liberal state and society; Cutler links the
emergence of a transnational market civilization to the globalization of the commodity
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form of law; and Christopher May conceptualizes the rule of law as the basic norm for
the new constitutionalism. In the second, more historical, part of the book, Tim De Muzio
brings out the class-based nature of American liberal constitutionalism, while Ran Hirschl
identifies fear of democracy on the part of elites as the driving force behind constitutionalization at both the national and the transnational level. In part three, Saskia Sassen emphasizes how the global corporate order is constituted at the national level with the help of key
segments of the liberal state; Neil Brenner et al. discuss new constitutionalism in relation
to their influential notion of variegated neo-liberalization; and Adam Harmes identifies
multilevel governance in the neo-liberal form of market-preserving federalism as a key
feature of new constitutionalism. While part four consists of three chapters dealing respectively with international investment law (David Schneiderman), trade agreements (Scott
Sinclair) and international taxation (Dries Lesage et al.), most chapters in part five focus
on the relationship between new constitutionalism and social reproduction, with Isabella
Bakker highlighting the latters changing conditions due to governmental and regulatory
efforts to expand markets and introduce greater market discipline; Adrienne Roberts linking
the growing private indebtedness in the US to the (re)privatization of social reproduction,
and stressing the role played by law and the criminal system in facilitating corporate power
and capital accumulation; and Janine Brodie interrogating the complex, uneven and still
unfolding interplay between the new constitutionalism, neo-liberalism and social policy
(p. 248). In the final part, which focuses on the prospects for a just new constitutionalism,
Gavin W. Anderson addresses constitutionalism as critique, and argues that the literature on globalization from below can provide epistemological resources for an alternative
constitutional project. In the last chapter, Richard Falk uses the legality/legitimacy duality
to bring out the geopolitical power and hypocrisy internal to new constitutionalism, and
makes the case for a people-oriented constitutionalism informed by legitimate resistance to
the current legal order.
About 20 years have passed since Gill introduced the term new constitutionalism in the
study of world political economy, and his work constitutes the reference point for most of
the chapters in the book. As many of the contributions do not go much beyond what the
respective authors have published elsewhere, the books main value resides in it providing
a comprehensive overview of work on new constitutionalism in a single volume. That
said, all chapters do not properly address new constitutionalism (e.g. Hilal Elvers chapter
on international environmental law), nor do they all employ the theoretical-conceptual
framework of neo-Gramscian or transnational historical materialism (e.g. Sassens chapter).
This is not all bad, however, as exemplified by Brenner et al.s sympathetic critique of
Gills overemphasis on regulatory practices at the global level. With reference to the editors
guidelines and the books critical perspective, it is also clear that several contributors have
not fully heeded the call to address contestations linked to new patterns of resistance and
insurgent power (p. 5). More generally, in line with much critical work aimed at fostering
progressive change in the real world, a weakness of the book is that it remains all too
academicthis in the dual sense of having limited potential to be read by non-academics
and of being inconsequential in relation to the real world.
Tore Fougner, Bilkent University, Turkey
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International organization, law and ethics*
Peace diplomacy, global justice and international agency: rethinking human
security and ethics in the spirit of Dag Hammarskjld. Edited by Carsten Stahn and
Henning Melber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. 617pp. Index. 85.00.
We the peoples: a UN for the 21st century. By Kofi Annan and edited by Edward
Mortimer. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 2014. 258pp. Index. 15.80. isbn 978 1
61205 558 9.
In the midst of the international crisis du jour, during a break in the Security Council debate,
Secretary General (SG) Dag Hammarskjld was asked by Ambassador Sir Pierson Dixon
to make a statement supporting the British position. When Hammarskjld refused, Sir
Pierson reminded him there is something called political sense. [S]tressing each syllable,
Hammarskjld replied: And there is something called integrity, turned around and
closed the door behind him (p. 265). It is a sign of how far the United Nations has fallen
that such an exchange is unimaginable today. The closest we have come in recent times
was when Kofi Annan gently, but correctly, pointed out that the 2003 Iraq War was illegal
under the UN Charter.
Most UN observers believe Hammarskjld and Annan were its two best SGs. These
two excellent collections will do much to explain why, and consolidate and burnish their
reputations for broadening and stretching the executive authority of the UN, based on
creative interpretations of Charter clauses and the force of their personalities. Great Powers
need organizing principles of foreign policy, Hillary Clinton reminded us recently. In
a matching vein, great SGs need a guiding vision for the exercise of international civil
authority. Hammarskjld and Annan combined pragmatism and humility with a guiding
vision of human progress and solidarity.
A central challenge that both had to contend with, with mixed success, is how to combine
the UNs unique legitimacy and international authority with the global reach and power
of a superpower. Had the Permanent Five members of the Security Council (P5) known in
advance how the two were going to act once in office, it is doubtful either would have been
chosen. As we prepare to select the next SG in 2015, this leads to a sobering conclusion: the
very skills and character traits needed for the worlds top diplomatic office will ensure the
best candidates are vetoed.
Article 99 of the Charter confers on the SG a broad authority and considerable discretion, requiring the exercise of political judgement, tact and integrity. If the Security
Council is divided, the SG cannot be an alternate locus of international diplomacy. If it is
united, he cannot be an alternative focus of international dissent. His exercise of international leadership is subject to the systemic constraints of the prevailing world order whose
bedrock organizing principle is state sovereignty. He must play a political role that respects
the pivotal place of the Security Council, while mindful of the political temper in the
General Assembly, which is the truer barometer of international sentiment. When the
major powers and groups are bitterly divided, the SG must strive to forge a fragile agreement by identifying common elements, reminding member states of the Charter principles, nudging them towards face-saving formulations that can recreate a sense of common
purpose and appealing for calm and unity. The most important requirement for the SG is to
*
See also Ccile Fabre and Seth Lazar, The morality of defensive war, pp. 14534, and David Sloggett, The anarchic
sea: maritime security in the 21st century, pp. 14645.
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exercise the skills of soft leadership: the elusive ability to make others connect emotionally
and intellectually to a larger cause that transcends their immediate self-interest.
The SG is in regular contact with representatives of many governments, CEOs of international organizations, multinational corporations and civil society organizations. This
multi-textured milieu of international relations provides him with many opportunities to
probe and explain, test and tease, persuade and dissuade; to engage in diplomatic parlance
and exercise ideational leadership. Quiet diplomacy within the confidential confines of his
private office can be supplemented or substituted by the occasional public diplomacy of the
UNs bully pulpit.
The StahnMelber volume is a major collection of reflections on Hammarskjlds
intellectual and international political legacy by a cross-disciplinary team of top-flight
reflective practitioners (Annan, Brian Urquhart, Hans Corell) and engaged scholars. The
25 chapters are organized into five parts: reflections on Hammarskjld, his intellectual
legacy and leadership; his efforts in the Congo; the role of the SG; and the influence of
his ideas and praxis on intervention, responsibility and the responsibility to protect (R2P).
The book finishes with Hammarskjlds final report to the General Assembly on the work
of the UN and an address to the staff on 8 September 1961, which would still inspire and
rally the faithful to the cause. Hammarskjld, more than anyone else, translated abstract
Charter principles into an operational code of ethics for UN officials as international civil
servants.
Hammarskjld had to steer the UN through the choppy waters of the Cold War and help
the organization oversee the independence of large numbers of Asian and African countries
from colonial masters. UN peacekeeping emerged as an institutional innovation at the
point where the two intersected. The principles and values that Hammarskjld articulated
and instilled survive to this day, even though the operational forms they take have evolved
and mutated. What comes through strikingly is how deeply committed Hammarskjld
was to the vision and values embodied in the Charter, including equal political rights and
economic opportunities and the crucial importance of the rule of law for regulating the use
of force and levelling the playing field for small and Great Powers. The one element that
distinguishes the strangely innocent (Urquhart, p. 31) Hammarskjld even from Annan is
the spiritual quality to his thinking, speaking and acting, rightly traced in the book to his
Swedish Lutheran background.
The element that unites Hammarskjld and Annan as SGs is their deep humanism.
Another trait they shared was the lasting loyalty, bordering on devotion, they inspired
in the immensely talented group of senior advisers they assembled. We the peoples consists
of 43 speeches delivered by Annan as SG, divided into nine thematic chapters on the UN,
development, peace and security, human rights, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, Africa,
the Middle East, prevention of genocide and R2P, and diversity. The very first speech in
the collection is on Hammarskjlds legacy delivered, in Uppsala on 6 September 2001, days
before 9/11.
The world witnessed many profound changes during Annans ten turbulent years as SG.
He oversaw an explosion in UN peace operations as testament to the numerous demands
and expectations, but many were dogged by charges of ineffectualness, financial corruption
and sexual exploitation. For some, Annans legacy is indelibly stained by the horrors of
Rwanda, Srebrenica and the oil-for-food scandal. For others, the tragedy of Iraq happened
on his watch. Most developing countries remember him as the architect of the Millennium
Development Goals. Annans most treasured legacy will probably be his championing of
human rights and humanitarian protection. The world has made significant progress in
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criminalizing atrocities and enhancing the prospects of holding perpetrators to international account. Development, democracy, good governance and human rights as a shared
global responsibility became the vocabulary of choice in international discourse during,
and partly as a result of, Annans tenure as SG.
Either book by itself will help to illumine the major cross-currents of international
politics, the tension between international idealism and state-based realism, the evolution
of the concept of the international community and the role of global norms in shaping the
terms of engagement between states, international organizations and civil society actors
on the contested terrain of world politics and cosmopolitan solidarity. The two together
will deepen understanding, connect the present to its intellectual past, and show how
much progress has been made but also how much still remains to be achieved, in the unfinished journey to tame power and make it serve humanity. Solidarity, empathy, integrity,
decency, moral compass, intellect: words to define a good and effective SG who speaks as
the conscience of common humanity amidst the hurly-burly of Great Power diplomacy.
Until we see the likes of Hammarskjld and Annan again, the UN is unlikely to recapture
the heights of influence it attained during their years of stewardship.
Ramesh Thakur, Australian National University, Australia
Cyber operations and the use of force in international law. By Marco Roscini.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. 307pp. 67.00. isbn 978 0 19965 501 4.
Cyber operations is uncompromisingly a legal text, although Marco Roscinis summing up at
pp. 28087 is non-technical and convincing. A little counting reveals a lot about its subject
matter. A mere dozen or so entries in the ten pages of the select bibliography predate this
century; many items listed there appeared in the past two or three years. Yet the table
of cases includes many old favourites; no case concerns cyber operations. In the table of
treaties, the 2001 Budapest Convention on Cyber Crime (about domestic, not international,
law) is the sole entry that uses the c-word.
That explains why this book is so welcome. In chapter 18 of his Law of targeting (OUP,
2012; reviewed in International Affairs 89: 4) William Boothby demonstrated that the familiar
principles of international law regulating the conduct of hostilities (jus in bello) can and
should govern cyber operations (roughly, in the present context, using your computer as a
weapon). Boothby could not be expected to develop the point there. Nor was he concerned
with the lawfulness of the resort to force by states (jus ad bellum). Roscini now provides a
systematic treatment of the application of those bodies of law to cyber operations. That is
not a mechanical exercise: their rules must be tailored to fit this newish and fast-moving
realm. And as he says, when and how such rules will apply can be controversial: thus the
Manual on the international law applicable to cyber warfare (The Tallinn manual, 2013) produced by
independent experts for NATO, should not always be taken as gospel. Roscini warns, too,
against supposing that the adoption of a treaty regulating cyber warfare is the solution: any
treaty would potentially be outdated the day after it was opened for signature (p. 287). In
a foreword warmly commending this book, Professor Yaron Dinstein, a leading authority
on the international law of conflict, agreeswhile murmuring that: It is not necessary to
agree with the author on every thesis presented by him (e.g. as regards the controversial
issue of anticipatory self-defence) (p. ix).
Short accounts of the emergence of the cyber threat to international security and
issues of taxonomy and classification introduce Roscinis treatment of the increasingly
significant, and legally tricky, identification and attribution problems in modern conflicts.
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When should a state be held responsible for cyber operations that are carried out by unofficial
actorsthink Ukraine 2014? As Roscini says: One of the[ir] main advantages is exactly
that the author can hide under the invisibility cloak of plausible deniability (pp. 3940).
In the cyber context, he suggests, the attribution question, much exercising international
lawyers, will in practice generally boil down to whether the state exercised effective
control over those actors.
Roscini addresses a range of jus ad bellum issuesnew wine in old bottles. For instance,
will a cyber operation mounted by one state against another contravene the prohibition in
Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter on the use of force in their relations (language
from 60 years ago)? He argues that while force is generally taken to mean armed force,
that should only require weapons to be employed, cyber capabilities can be weapons. Nor
should causing physical damage be required to demonstrate a breach of Article 2(4). Severe
disruption of a nations infrastructure should count, although not causing mere inconvenience. That will leave grey areas, in turn affecting the lawfulness of retaliatory actionor
anticipatory or pre-emptive strikes. (The 70 pages on application of the jus ad bellum are
summarized at pp. 11516.)
Roscinis treatment of jus in bello is on similar lines. For jus in bello to apply, there must
be an armed conflict (a term requiring separate consideration from the use of force).
Its rules can differ as between international (IAC) and non-international armed conflict
(NIAC), although there is steadily growing assimilation. Can stand alone cyber operations, preceding the use of kinetic force or even rendering it unnecessary, amount to
armed conflict? Yes, he unsurprisingly says. And how does the IAC/NIAC distinction
apply to cyber operations? Roscini analyses the case law and writings on these fundamental
but highly technical issues, summarizing his conclusions at pp. 1613. He then applies the
familiar principles of jus in bellodistinguish between military and civilian targets, minimize
collateral damage, proportionalityto the way cyberspace is organized and the harm that
cyber attacks can cause. There is an extensive treatment of neutrality, necessitated by the
borderless nature of cyberspace.
One may ask, does it matter to the victims whether the next time a dam has to be
breached Barnes Walliss bouncing bombs or a computer keyboard is employed by those
carrying out the operation? What does matter, as Roscini shows, is that in both cases the
same questions regarding its lawfulness must be asked. Cyber operations will be a valuable
resource in answering them.
One slip: Professor Harold Koh was not the US State Department Legal Advisor: the
State Department deliberately follows the way the title of his British opposite number is
spelled. While those worried by the prospect of under-age cyber warriors (perhaps they
already exist) can find them in Boothbys book.
David Bentley
NATOs balancing act. By David S. Yost. Washington DC: United States Institute of
Peace Press. 2014. 404pp. Index. 25.95. isbn 9 781 60127 202 7.
David Yosts new book on NATO has a number of merits. It is thorough, even encyclopaedic in coverage; it is written with clarity and conviction; and it is the product of tireless
scholarship (a concluding chapter of 147 endnotes suggests someone who has thought long
and hard about a closing argument). This book will tell you almost everything you may
wish to know of NATOs multifaceted missions, partnerships and defence postureas well
as a good deal of the politics and debates which lie behind the evolution of these policies.
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In this sense, it is a welcome successor to Yosts earlier volume on the alliance (the highly
regarded NATO transformed published in 1998). Given the absence of an authoritative postCold War history of NATO (publishers please note) and NATOs decision to cease public
dissemination of its own Handbook (my copy is dated 2001), NATOs balancing act serves as
the most reliable guide to the complexity and challenges of NATOs development over the
last 20 years. As a work of reference, therefore, it deserves a place on the shelf of anyone
interested in NATOs affairs.
Yost demonstrates very ably how the alliance has got to its current point. Where he
succeeds much less well, however, is in showing why. In his earlier work, Yost argued that
NATOs core challenge was to balance a longstanding and foundational commitment to
collective defence with an increasingly important and urgent orientation towards collective security, and, in parallel, the need to maintain a cooperative relationship with postSoviet Russia. Pulling off that challenging task was an act of political will seen through
in the difficult, even harrowing, circumstances of Balkan conflict. NATO, Yost demonstrated, did not end up in such a position willy-nilly; its post-Cold War reorientation was
heavily conditioned by a conceptual and historical understanding of collective security as
an approach to international order. That understanding was perhaps passive in the minds
of European and American politicians, but it clearly conditioned how they thought about
enlargement, relations with Russia and the grand scheme of Europes security architecture.
It also influenced greatly how Yost himself conceptualized the shifting sands of NATOs
evolution in the 1990s.
NATOs balancing act takes up this story through an examination of the three essential
core tasks of the alliance, as articulated in the 2010 Strategic Concept. An attention to collective defence, crisis management and cooperative security is a useful means of cataloguing
NATOs functions, describing the efficiency trade-offs that arise through task duplication and pinpointing the cause of debate among allies (east Europeans, for understandable reasons, favour the first task, the US and the UK are keen on all of them and the
southern Europeans hold few strong opinions other than minimizing their exposure to
commitment). What the book lacks, however, is any conceptual apparatus (akin to collective security) to hold all of this together. There is plenty of empirical detail to suggest that
NATO is resilient as an organization, that American leadership matters and that the alliance
retains a normative commitment to the principles of the North Atlantic Treaty. All three
positions hold conceptual promise, but how they drive NATO forward is never clarified
all seem to matter in some way and all, it is implied, will ensure that NATO is sustained.
Thus, for conceptual oversight is substituted empirical heft. Through sheer force of
example, Yost demonstrates that NATO (despite its naysayers) is capable of adaptation
and of managing its ever-changing security environment. Having surveyed NATOs
ongoing difficulties (a recalcitrant Russia, engaging in intractable conflict management)
and its internal weaknesses (the ever-deepening burden-sharing problem), and having
urged NATO to demonstrate vision and muster determination, Yosts final word is that the
alliance remains, for all its problems, indispensable to the defence of the values and security
of all Allies, including the United States. Although written before the Ukraine crisis and
before NATOs seeming shift back to collective defence at the 2014 Wales summit, this is a
verdict that few in sympathy with NATO would disagree with. But the absence of alternatives is not the most ringing of endorsements and it somewhat sidesteps the question of
why NATO is as much value to a US fixed on China as a Poland or Latvia worried about
Russia. But the old sawthat if NATO did not exist then we would have to invent itstill
applies. One wonders, however, if NATO were created from scratch tomorrow, would it
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resemble the NATO that Europe and North America have inherited? Or would it, rather,
look very different?
Mark Webber, University of Birmingham, UK

The rise and fall of intelligence: an international security history. By Michael
Warner. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. 2014. 406pp. Index. Pb.: 22.33.
isbn 978 1 62616 103 0.
Michael Warner has done the impossible. In this excellent and concise volume, he has
captured the rise of professional and organized espionage by states, while also explaining its
integration with the ideological and technical revolutions of the last hundred years. This is
not an easy task since the secret world is a complex and labyrinthine one, yet he has done it
with remarkable lucidity. More importantly, he has then moved on to explain the collision
of the familiar business of state espionage with the wider world of globalized information
and big data in the twenty-first century. The emerging consequences of this, he insists,
are astounding. The skills to do intelligence have diffused around the world and across
societies: they can literally be purchased online. States, businesses, insurgent groups, even
individual citizens are now engaged in a frenzy of spying. Intelligence is now everywhere.
He explains the role of technology in developing what has beenfor more than a
centurypredominantly a system of defence intelligence. When Clausewitz wrote his
magisterial text On war, intelligence was dismissed as unimportant. Military forces were
incapable of rapid movement and warfare was slow and defensive. The arrival of the train,
the telegraph and tinned food overturned this state of affairs. A century later, we had the
possibility of surprise attack, the most severe challenge for the Westphalian state. The rise
of intelligence as warning in an increasingly unpredictable international system found its
ultimate expression in the alert systems that underpinned strategic nuclear arsenals during
the Cold War.
Intelligence was also driven by ideology. In the West we have a particular idea of intelligence that is focused on strategic analysis of foreign threats. This is an eccentric aberration.
The majority of countries in the world are focused on regime protection and covert action.
Intelligence elsewhere means secret services as the vicious action arm of the president or the
ruling political party rather than government. Secret states have also formed the vanguard
of censorship and artistic policingindeed in Moscow the KGB even ran its own theatre.
Bizarrely, because these secret policing activities are intended as a deterrent to dissent, the
secret state has to be partly visible and so is often celebrated publicly in such countries.
Cultural representation looms large. Few Americans would know what the interior of
the Treasury Building looks like, but everyone feels they have been inside the FBI building
because they spent the 1990s watching The X-Files. Few people in Britain know what the
inside of the Home Office looks like, but the BBC series Spooks ensures that we are all
familiar with the central operations room in MI5s Thames House. Even obscure bureaucratic elements, such as the UK Intelligence and Secret Committee, are referenced in recent
Bond films, albeit unfavourably. Warner underlines the way in which film and fiction have
shaped the public understanding of intelligence and the efforts of the agencies to engage
with this.
Representation is part of an increasingly vexed reputation struggle. Oversight and
audit are no longer restricted to the committees of national assemblies, but are increasingly
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Book reviews
a matter for international lawyers, journalists, NGOs and global governance. Warner is
clearly anxious about this band of self-appointed watchmen. Nevertheless, the big debate,
he asserts, is clearly about ethics. Now that intelligence is ubiquitous, he asks, can it be a
force for good as well as ill? Intelligence is a form of power, akin to economic power or
military power. It can be used to support arms control treaties and enforce ceasefires on
behalf of the United Nations. Equally it can be used to erase privacy and suppress legitimate
dissent. Intelligence, he asserts, is neither good nor bad: instead it is what we make of it.
Richard J. Aldrich, University of Warwick, UK
The anarchic sea: maritime security in the 21st century. By David Sloggett. London:
Hurst. 2013. 402pp. Index. 39.99. isbn 978 1 84904 100 3.
International maritime security law. By James Kraska and Raul Pedrozo. Leiden:
Brill. 2013. 939pp. Index. 203.00. isbn 978 9 00423 356 0.
The concept of maritime security is one of the most recent additions to the vocabulary of
international security. If security at sea used to be discussed in the frame of concepts such as
seapower or maritime safety, maritime security offers a new umbrella term, which to some
degree replaces or subordinates the older terms and discussions. The salience of maritime
security is related to the significant challenges that issues such as maritime terrorism, illicit
trafficking and, perhaps most prominently, maritime piracy pose. Indeed, piracy off the
coast of Somalia was one of the main concerns that gave maritime security the prominence
that it currently has on the agendas of the major security organizations, including NATO,
the European Union, and also the African Union or the Southern African Development
Community. Maritime security aims to grasp the complex thicket of actors and policies that
deal with the maritime, stretching from navies and coast guards to transport and shipping
to fishing and tourism. Maritime security raises awareness that the sea is a space that sees
high degrees of violence, has the potential for conflict escalationas reflected in the border
disputes in the South China Seaand is host to various insecurities.
The rise of the concept of maritime security and the increasing importance that security
actors grant to the oceans has so far been barely reflected in the academic literature on the
subject. Piracy in Somalia, West Africa and East Asia, illegal trafficking by sea, the rise
of new naval powers such as China or maritime disputes are problems that have received
substantial treatment in the literature. Yet research is only slowly catching up with the
empirical developments and the broader challenges of maritime security. This centrally
concerns studies investigating maritime security strategies, the links between the threats
and challenges, and the cooperation between the myriad of actors that aim at addressing
them. Compared to the attention security on land receives, the maritime domain remains
the blind spot of Security Studies, International Relations and International Law.
Both books set out to correct this situation and are major contributions to filling these
gaps. They not only make a convincing case for why maritime security requires more
scrutiny, but also offer insightful analyses of the vast challenges and the intricate character
of security at sea. Together they also show us the different directions that maritime security
research can take.
James Kraska and Raul Pedrozo study the norms and rules that govern maritime security.
They define maritime security as stable order of the sea and suggest that maritime security
operations lie at the nexus between law enforcement and naval warfare. In their view,
maritime security law is a distinct field of law which combines the laws of naval warfare,
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maritime safety regulations, conventions on international crime, terrorism and nonproliferation, Security Council resolutions and customary law. The 900-page volume sets
out to introduce the core legal provisions and important cases. Discussing these in impressive detail, the authors offer an encyclopaedia of the laws relevant in maritime security.
The book is a major reference work not only for lawyers, but for anyone with an interest in
maritime security. Without doubt, this will be a main resource for the discussion of all legal
aspects of maritime security for years to come. In exploring illegal migration, trafficking
of narcotics, non-proliferation, piracy, irregular warfare or environmental regulations they
come to the optimistic conclusions that over the past two decades maritime security law
has evolved from a set of rules to avoid naval warfare into a global framework designed to
facilitate maritime cooperation.
The main limit of the volume is that it is obviously written from an American perspective. This does not only imply that concepts and discussions from US maritime strategy are
premiered and there are separate chapters on US law enforcement and control measures,
but also that the cases discussed reflect US interests. Kraska and Pedrozo leave us with the
impression that the oceans are well governed. From a legal perspective the oceans look
tight in print. That the realities of the sea look much different comes to the fore in David
Sloggetts narrative account of maritime security.
Sloggett provides a grand narrative of the evolution and development of maritime
security with a focus on practical challenges. In the book he draws on an even broader
understanding of maritime security than Kraska and Pedrozo by including aspects such as
illegal fishing, disasters and humanitarian relief operations in the discussion. As he stresses
throughout the book, he is interested in developing a holistic account of maritime security
that centres on the elaboration of the linkages and connections of different maritime threats
and challenges in distinct regions and countries. Sloggett develops quite a different picture
of the oceansfor him the sea remains weakly governed and more efforts and better strategies will be required to enhance maritime security. This is forcefully highlighted in the 33
short case-studies with which Sloggett ends his book. The exploration of country cases,
stretching from Canada to Indonesia to Eritrea, and issue areas such as energy security or
illegal migration document how vast the governance and implementation challenges of
global maritime security are.
Maritime security is a complex problem, in terms of the interconnected issues as well as
the myriad of civil and military agencies involved. Both books will become major reference
points in the debate on how this complexity can be managed. In 2014 the United Kingdom,
the European Union and the African Union launched ambitious maritime security strategies. How these can be implemented and the oceans better governed will require significant
academic attention to the subject of Maritime Security Studies in the near future.
Christian Bueger, Cardiff University, Wales, UK
Gender, war and conflict. By Laura Sjoberg. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2014. 195pp.
Index. Pb.: 14.00. isbn 978 0 74566 002 9. Available as e-book.
Laura Sjoberg is one of the most important scholars in the field of feminist security studies
or, put another way, Laura Sjoberg is one of the most important feminist scholars in
the field of security studies. Either way, what is indisputable is that she has made, and
continues to make, an important contribution to the field by asking us to go beyond the
question Where are the women? and to ask questions about womens roles in defining and
being affected by conflict, their contributions to it, and how understanding womens roles
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Book reviews
improves our understanding of war and conflict, which continue to dominate international
realities. Importantly, she asks us also to think about the men. Her recent book, Gender,
war and conflict, in many ways serves as a primer or introduction to this broad yet important
topic, including basic principles and definitions, and is an excellent introductory work for
undergraduates who are just learning about the topic, as well as a review for those who are
more conversant with it. In this concise book, Sjoberg explains why adding gender (and
not just women) is important to our understanding of security. For that element alone,
and for her discussion of masculinities and war, this book is worth reading.
I found her discussion in chapter 3 on where are the men to be particularly important
because it serves as a reminder that when we study issues pertaining to conflict and war
we need to think about the impact not only on women, but also on men and to do so in
a variety of ways beyond just the stereotype of man-as-soldier. She integrates anecdotes
and examples from recent conflicts, which grounds her ideas in a real-world setting.
Her extensive discussion about women and the Arab Spring helps situate that event as
it continues to unfold. This book was published in 2014 with events in the Middle East
remaining unsettled. Although she speculates about womens roles in the events that collectively have become known as the Arab Spring, it is also clear that it is far too soon to understand what the long-term implications of those uprisings will be for the region in general
and women in particular. But I admire her for including events that are so current that the
outcome remains undetermined. In other words, although we do not have all the answers,
it should not stop us from asking important questions.
Anyone who has read any of Sjobergs publications will not be surprised by the approach
she takes here. Her inclusion in chapter 4 of an extensive discussion of gender and specifically the link between gender order and (perceived) security (p. 87) is something not often
found in the basic International Relations literature, or even in books that are explicitly
feminist in orientation. While the discussion might be a bit off-putting for some undergraduates, she makes an important point that to truly understand security issues, we need to
broaden our focus and think in terms that are larger than simply men and women. That
approach is a distinguishing feature of this book.
The annotated suggestions for further reading and the use of other tools, such as
questions to consider at the end of each chapter, should make this book especially accessible
for undergraduates. They also offer useful ideas for faculty who are teaching aspects of the
topic, or even interested lay-persons who want to know where to turn for more information. On the other hand, while her inclusion of the relevant literature is important, it is also
somewhat limited and dated. There are a number of relatively recent pieces, both books and
articles, which also address some of these topics but are not included here, an omission that
I hope will be addressed in a future edition.
I found this work to be disappointing in other ways, perhaps because of the type of
innovative thinking I am used to from Sjoberg. Beyond the chapter that goes into gender
and some queer theory, there is nothing that is particularly groundbreaking or distinctive,
but that does seem to be her intent here. Rather, what she has produced is a solid synthetic
work that draws on and pulls together a broad array of literature already extant on the topic
adding the reminder that there are a lot of questions that we should ask if we want to get a
complete set of answers about gender, war and conflict.
Joyce P. Kaufman, Whittier College, USA
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Democratic participation in armed conflict: military involvement in Kosovo,
Afghanistan and Iraq. By Patrick A. Mello. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2014. 259pp. Index.
65.00. isbn 978 1 13738 650 2. Available as e-book.
Under what conditions do states participate in collective military operations? After the
number of multilateral operations increased exponentially in the beginning of the 1990s,
this question became the subject of intense academic debate. Building on case-studies of
the Persian Gulf War, Operation Allied Force in Kosovo, Operation Enduring Freedom in
Afghanistan and the 2003 war in Iraq, scholars generally conclude that a states contribution to a multilateral operation is the result of a complex interaction between domestic
and international-level variables. Although Patrick Mello arrives at similar conclusions, his
innovative theoretical framework, rich empirical data and, especially, his rigorous methodological approach set this book apart from comparable studies on the subject.
Mello situates his research in the democratic peace debate. However, instead of focusing
on why democracies rarely wage war against each other, he examines under which conditions democracies participate in multilateral operations. The book sets off with a comprehensive review of explanations for democratic conflict involvement from which five
explanatory conditions are derived. In line with nearly every empirical work on military
burden-sharing, states with greater military capabilities are expected to make a disproportionately large contribution. Other prevailing explanations, like public opinion and parliamentary veto power, are also incorporated in the theoretical framework. However, Mello
introduces two important causal conditions that, so far, have been largely overlooked in
the academic literature. First, the author draws attention to the substantial variation in
constitutional restrictions on the type of military operations democracies are permitted to
participate in. Second, the study links involvement in multilateral operations to partisan
politics by hypothesizing that right-leaning executives are less reluctant to engage in
military operations.
This combination of original and prevailing explanations results in one of the most
comprehensive theoretical frameworks for participation in multilateral operations. A
particular strength of the framework is that it formulates hypotheses on how the level
of military participation is determined by the complex interaction of the aforementioned
causal conditions. For example, parliamentary veto power is not expected to be sufficient
for non-participation by itself, but only in combination with public opposition to military
engagement.
The empirical test of the theoretical framework builds on fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, a method particularly suited to the purpose of the study. Not only is it capable
of capturing the complex interactions that are expected to explain military participation,
this method also allows for a structured comparison of a large number of cases. The study
examines the level of participation in three armed conflicts: Operation Allied Force in
Kosovo, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and the 2003 Iraq War. This results
in a total of 83 cases of democratic participation and non-participation in armed conflict,
by far exceeding the number of observations generally incorporated in comparable studies
on the subject.
The book primarily focuses on comparing democratic participation within each conflict.
The variables are operationalized for every case separately, which substantially increases
the validity of their measurement. For example, in every operation, the coding of military
participation is dependent on whether the countries contributed combat forces. However,
in the context of the intervention in Kosovo, participation in the strike missions was sufficient for the highest score. In contrast, a similar coding for Operation Enduring Freedom
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Book reviews
also required sending ground forces, whereas participating from the very beginning of the
invasion was necessary for receiving the highest coding in the Iraq War case-study. With
these differences, the author takes into account the specific denotation of military participation in the historic circumstances of each operation.
Although the specific conditions that lead to military participation diverge across operations, several findings are consistent across all cases. The analysis revealed that militarily
powerful states were indeed more inclined to participate, but only under specific conditions. For the interventions in Afghanistan and Kosovo, the analysis yielded evidence in
support of the importance of public backing. However, popular support turned out to be
far less important for the Iraq War. In contrast, theoretical expectations regarding partisan
politics were only confirmed for this more controversial operation, which constituted the
only case where right-leaning governments were indeed more likely to participate. Results
more consistently confirmed the detrimental importance of the other innovative causal
factor of Mellos framework: the absence of constitutional restrictions is a necessary condition for participation in all operations.
In general, the books conclusions add substantially to the rich academic debate on
democratic peace theory and state participation in multilateral operations. This theoretically innovative and methodologically rigorous work can be highly recommended to
anyone interested in the subject.
Tim Haesebrouck, Ghent University, Belgium
Governance, civil society and cultural politics*

Do Muslim women need saving? By Lila Abu-Lughod. Cambridge, MA, and London:
Harvard University Press. 2013. 336pp. 21.99. isbn 978 0 67472 516 4. Available as e-book.
Abu-Lughod has written a polemical work which challenges the very category of Muslim
women which appears in the title. More an extended essay than an academic book, it draws
on the authors past ethnographic research and, more importantly, her anthropological
formation and experience in the Middle East to make its important and timely arguments.
The target of Abu-Lughod is the common sense about Islam which emerged in the
United States post-9/11 and underpinned the Bush administrations war on terror. In
answer to the rhetorical question which constitutes the books title, the author shouts out:
Of course they dont! Leave them alone and sort yourselves out. In six absorbing and lively
chapters, Abu-Lughod marshals evidence from the life stories of a number of women (who
happen to be Muslim, among other things), mostly in rural Egypt, to make a serious dent in
the stereotype of the Muslim woman and to question the very existence of such a uniform
being. She shows that the images of disempowerment associated with that stereotype often
do not hold and that, if anything, disempowerment is shared by both men and women in the
Middle East and caused by material forces of domination which are local and global, political
and economic. The needs, concerns and aspirations of Muslim women, moreover, are not
quite what we in the West imagine. Abu-Lughod argues persuasively that Islam cannot be
isolated from other aspects of womens lives and that depicting it as the source of injustices
and inequalities, as is the tendency in recent debates, is untenable. Islam as such does not
exist; in the authors own words, IslamLand is not a real place inhabited by real people.
*
Stephen J. C. Andes, The Vatican and Catholic activism in Mexico and Chile: the politics of transnational Catholicism,
19201940, pp. 1508510.
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The author wants to make a contribution to public debate and is not writing for a narrow
academic audience. But will her argument be widely heard? The book risks being picked
up and read only by the converted. This is because Abu-Lughod deliberately conflates
extreme with mainstream views. Surely, even in the polarized US context, mainstream
opinion on Islam and the Muslim woman is not represented by the likes of Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
the virulent anti-Islam campaigner, and Laura Bush, wife of the US president with such
responsibility for the catastrophic obsession with Islam gripping the world? The author
makes no distinction between neo-conservative and liberal opinion and often treats them
as if they are equally responsible for western imperialism. This may have been so in recent
US history but her argument ignores the powerful non-interventionist liberal strand which
treats the coercive imposition of values as a contradiction in terms.
Abu-Lughod underlines the distinction between respecting difference and cultural
relativism. But despite numerous examples, it is hard to pin down exactly what she means
by it: the space between the two positions is narrow to the point of vanishing and, as the
book progresses, the claim that she supports universal values becomes increasingly unconvincing. She is silent over hard issues such as the (principle of ) polygamy and genital mutilation. Her discussion of honour crimes in chapter 4 is confusing: it contains an enlightening
and even moving exposition of the broader meaning of honour but I, at least, dont grasp
her moral stance towards the crimes associated with it (though she is right that the term
honour crime must be dropped and the acts treated as simple crimes). To emphasize
the Wests holier than thou approach to Islam, the author points out that the position
of women there is still unequal, but she does not acknowledge that the ills that bedevil
womensuch as domestic violence and inequities of all kindsare outlawed in the West,
whereas they are legal in some settings informed by particular versions of Islamic law. Yes,
what Muslim women wear or do not wear is not our business and the reductive interpretation of veiling as the quintessential sign of womens unfreedom (p. 40) is at the heart of
essentializing Islam and all the problems that derive from doing so. However, that even the
burka can sometimes be liberating and can be variously understood in different contexts,
does not detract from the fact that it is a symbol of male domination and coercion.
Katerina Dalacoura, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
The Russian Orthodox Church and human rights. By Kristina Stoeckl. London and
New York: Routledge. 2014. 158pp. Index. 90.00. isbn 978 0 41565 871 3. Available as
e-book.
In recent years, scholars have been paying increasing attention to the statements made by
Orthodox churches on human rights, human dignity and other closely related topics. The
Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has played a prominent role in this and has published
several documents on this subject, including a passage in its Basic Social Concept in 2000,
the Human Rights Declaration, which was authored in cooperation with the All-World
Russian Peoples Council in 2006 and the Human Rights Doctrine of 2008. Its clerics have
also spoken or written about this topic on other occasions, including in speeches given to
the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the United Nations Human
Rights Council in Geneva.
Kristina Stoeckls book draws on all of these sources, but focuses on the three documents
which were published in the name of the Church and the Peoples Council (which is an
NGO affiliated to the Moscow Patriarchate). It takes a chronological approach and thus
traces the evolution of the ROCs understanding of human rights as they are codified in the
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relevant international treaties and institutions. Stoeckl demonstrates that the Churchs take
on this matter started with an outright rejection of human rights in 2000, a view that was
subsequently reinforced and expanded to include anti-western and anti-liberal elements
and a confrontational approach, but which was moderated in important ways in 2008. She
points out that while the Human Rights Declaration of 2006 relativizes human dignity, the
Human Rights Doctrine of 2008 explicitly rejects this view and thus brings the Churchs
discourse more in line with western, secular approaches to this topic. The latter document
also indicates an openness to discussion, whereas the earlier statements were more confrontational in nature.
Drawing on previous research which has identified a liberal, a traditionalist and a nationalist or fundamentalist wing inside the ROC, Stoeckl persuasively argues that the differences in the ROCs statements on human rights reflect the values held by the different wings
and their relative power within the Church. She also finds that, in fact, the ROC produces
two human rights discourses: one which is very patriotic, traditionalist and anti-western
and another which uses the language of secular human rights in order to claim a place for
itself and other religious organizations in the formulation and implementation of human
rights. While the first discourse is aimed at a domestic Russian public, the second one is
usually resorted to when the audience is an international one. Stoeckl concludes, quite
originally, that the Moscow Patriarchate did not formulate its position on human rights
in order to back up the politics of the Putin government, but because for a religion in the
twenty-first century this was a logical thing to do (p. 128).
This monograph adds to the growing literature on the ROC, its relationship with the
Russian state and its involvement in international politics. It shows that the Church, or
rather the members of its Department for External Church Relations, who are the most
prominently involved in the human rights debate, have thought about this topic in considerable detail and that they have found common ground with conservative religious institutions in the West. This is an important finding, as it systematically challenges the idea
that the ROCs criticism of secular human rights was based on superficial assessments and
misunderstandings, fuelled by anti-western sentiments. Apart from this, the book makes a
contribution to the scholarship on the Basic Social Concept, the 1997 Law on Freedom of
Conscience, the Pussy Riot trial and the significance of tradition for the ROC. Especially
this latter aspect is worth researching, as tradition has become a buzzword within the
Church and wider Russian society, and has so far received insufficient scholarly attention.
Stoeckls book is of a high academic standard and her writing style is fresh and engaging.
Her work would, however, have been even better if the copy-editors had paid closer attention to detail and ironed out some obvious mistakes. For example, we read that Igumen
Filip (Ryabykh) was a collaborator (p. 50) rather than an employee or member of the
Department for External Church Relations and that Russian foreign politics [rather than
policy or policies] was the main reason for the Churchs engagement in the human rights
debate (p. 106). This kind of inattentive editing seems quite widespread and is by no means
unique to Routledge, but it is nevertheless unfortunate. Especially in times when publications in English are written and read by many non-native speakers everybody would benefit
from careful editing and a good standard of English in academic publications and elsewhere.
Katja Richters, University of Erfurt, Germany
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Political economy, economics and development

Capital in the twenty-first century. By Thomas Piketty. Cambridge, MA, and London:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2014. 696pp. Index. 29.95. isbn 978 0
67443 000 6. Available as e-book.
It is nearly always a disadvantage to read a book when you have already heard a lot about it
and think therefore that you know what it says and how you are likely to assess it. Yet, for
anyone who did not alight on Thomas Pikettys enormous volume in the first week of its
publication and have the time to consume it immediately, such a fate has been unavoidable.
We have all had to encounter Piketty variously as dangerous controversialist, as academic
rock-star, as inspiration for a new left, before actually getting to the text itself. As such, a
review cannot really be anything other than a series of reactions to the huge expectations
set in train by the whole Piketty phenomenon.
My discovery, probably unsurprisingly therefore, has been that the book is not at all
what it has been made out to be by admirers and critics alike. This is not for a moment
to suggest that it is not a very important, indeed remarkable, piece of work. Piketty says
in his introduction that his aim was to put the distributional question back at the heart of
economic analysis and there can be no doubt that he has already succeeded. Discussion of
inequality is now ubiquitous, with the debate presently shaped by Pikettys core assertion
that a fundamental force for divergence has come to dominate wealth distribution in the
early twenty-first century, wherein the average rate of return on capital, written by him
as r, is now significantly above, and likely to remain above, the average rate of growth of
advanced industrial economies, written by him as g. In slowly growing economies, Piketty
suggests, past wealth naturally takes on disproportionate importance, because it takes only
a small flow of new savings to increase the stock of wealth steadily and substantially (p. 25).
It should be made clear, too, that in the book this central claim is extensively elaborated,
that all the key concepts are carefully defined and that persuasive evidence for his argument
is piled up page after page, from a hugely impressive array of historical and contemporary
sources.
There is, in short, no question but that this book is a genuine magnum opus. Yet, as
suggested earlier, this does not mean that Capital in the twenty-first century is all that it has
been proclaimed to be. The first problem is actually that title. At one point Piketty disarmingly begs the readers indulgence for his use of it, admitting his total inability to predict
what form capital will take in 2063 or 2113 and observing that the book should, logically
speaking, have been entitled Capital at the dawn of the twenty-first century (p. 35). Fair
enough, except that nobodycertainly no radical economist or ambitious publisher
could have been unaware of the allusion being made by the use of the word capital in the
title. Indeed, at the outset of the book Piketty goes out of his way to applaud the insight
contained in what he describes as Marxs principle of infinite accumulation, albeit he then
quickly notes that his own key r > g hypothesis is likely to generate an equilibrium less apocalyptic than that predicted by Marx, even if the prospect is still disturbing and conceivably
destabilizing (p. 10). The point here is that Piketty is not the new Marx and, to be fair to
him, he never claims to be. His intellectual target is in fact Simon Kuznets, an American
economist (although born in the Ukraine), who proposed in a 1955 article that has hardly
been countered in the years since, that income inequality would automatically decrease in
advanced phases of capitalist development, before eventually stabilizing at an acceptable
level. If he is the new anybody, Piketty is more accurately described as the new Kuznets.
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Book reviews
A second problem with the grander claims made for Pikettys tome is that the focus is
much more on the history and contemporary position of France than one might realize
from the media discussion. Piketty is French, works in Paris and has devoted most of his
previous research to the study of capital in France. So, again, fair enough, at least up to a
point, especially since he justifies this emphasis by noting that, thanks to its revolution,
French estate records are the richest in the world, and arguing that French demographic
growth (its population has roughly doubled since the Revolution) makes it more typical in
this respect than, say, the United States, and thus more pertinent to future understanding of
wider global trends. However, what this generates is a consistent pattern in the book across
a number of issues whereby France is analysed with great thoroughness; the United States is
treated with much the same intensity; some thoughtful comparative points are made about
the United Kingdom, Sweden and other western European countries; and then finally
passing observations are thrown in about the rest of the world. Clearly, the research task
involved in undertaking across the globe the kind of analysis in which Piketty is interested
is well beyond a single scholar, maybe even a team of scholars. That is accepted. But the
consequence, nevertheless, is that the position of capital across the world at the beginning
of the twenty-first century has been studied very unevenly by Piketty.
A third problem with the book concerns its final part, which consists of Pikettys
proposals for the better regulation of capital in the future. These essentially involve
rethinking progressive income tax, bringing in a global tax on capital and moving towards
various other (modest and moderate) measures to defend the social state. Again, this is
worthily done in the spirit of social democracy, but it is where Piketty most reveals himself
as an economic historian, rather than a political economist. It is true that he is not the
conventional neo-classical economist of our times and he does, as many commentators have
highlighted, draw on the literature of Jane Austen and Honor de Balzac for information
about property prices and the average rate of return on land in the periods in which their
novels were set. This assuredly makes him different, but it does not of itself give Piketty the
subtlety of understanding of political, as well as economic and social, processes to make him
a genuine and insightful political economist. Indeed, from such a perspective the concluding
policy-oriented chapters of this otherwise outstanding book are frankly somewhat disappointing.
Anthony Payne, University of Sheffield, UK
The system worked: how the world stopped another Great Depression. By Daniel
W. Drezner. New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. 262pp. Index. 19.99. isbn 978 0
In The system worked, Daniel Drezner convincingly argues that the system of global economic
governance played an important role in preventing the 2008 financial crisis from turning
into a depression. Throughout the book, he highlights the many instances in which global
governance institutions have improved economic outcomes over the past five years. Yet,
while Drezners judgement that the system worked at first appears to challenge the more
negative assessments of most observers of the global economy, it is based on a very narrow
conception of what the system can and should achieve.
If global economic governance does not disrupt the functioning of the global economy
during boom times, and cushions the worst effect of busts, Drezner writes, then it has
worked (p. 74). This is a very low standard of success. Drezners survey of the events of
the past five years shows that there were many ways in which the system did indeed improve
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outcomes, but also reveals many areas in which important reforms are both feasible and
desirable.
Drezner argues that institutions of global governance have become more representative of the distribution of global economic power since the financial crisis. He writes, for
example, that prior to 2007, the allotment of quotas in the IMF bore little resemblance to
the distribution of world economic power. This has changed (p. 50). Yet the most significant of the quota reform agreements, reached in 2010, is still being blocked by the US
Congress, leaving China with 4 per cent of the votes despite accounting for 13 per cent
of global output. Anger at the stalled reforms is behind Chinas initiative, with Brazil,
Russia, India and South Africa, to create a new Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA)
to challenge the IMFs crisis-lending role. The CRA is too small for this role, but allegiance
to the new structure will weaken future BRICS financial and political support for the IMF
in crises beyond their borders.
Drezner highlights the enactment of fiscal stimulus in Germany in 2009 and 2010 as an
example of the capacity of the system to persuade actors to pursue policies beneficial to the
global economy despite their being inconsistent with their initial preferences. Yet whereas
Germany ran budget deficits in 2009 and 2010, it actually ran budget surpluses in 2012 and
2013, despite the fact that the eurozone economy was contracting and unemployment was
climbing to new highs. This contributed to a crisis of confidence in the euro itself, which
threatened to break up the currency union and drag down the global economy, suggesting
that the system still falls far short of what is needed to ensure that major trading nations do
not take actions that worsen crises by generating damaging spillovers.
Drezner praises the robustness of the neo-liberal consensus during the financial crisis
and contrasts it with the breakdown in support for free trade during the Great Depression.
He asserts that the persistence of economic openness during the recent crisis was critical in
preventing a repeat of the Great Depression. Yet whereas trade did not fall nearly as much this
time around, non-tariff barriers to trade, such as anti-dumping measures, did increase, and
trade volumes fell nearly 11 per cent in 2009. This suggests that more can and should be done
at the multilateral level to keep such barriers from rising during future economic downturns.
In sum, Drezner offers a comprehensive overview of the actions taken by global governance institutions since the start of the financial crisis, but his argument that the performance of these institutions has been good enough is unpersuasive. That we did not
experience another Great Depression was indeed due in part to the norms they enshrined
and the cooperation they enabled, although more enlightened unilateral action by the US
Federal Reserve to support global demand probably mattered far more. As the weight of
the US economy and currency in the global economy declines over time, however, reform
of global institutions to reflect this change will become more important in preventing
financial crises from developing and spreading.
Dinah P. Walker, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, USA
The great escape: health, wealth, and the origins of inequality. By Angus Deaton.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2013. 360pp. 19.95. isbn 978 0 69115 354 4.
Available as e-book.
The greatest escape in human history is the escape from poverty and death (p. 23) is how
Angus Deaton begins chapter one. The remainder of the book is consumed with intense
detail on how this escape has been achieved for some and remains elusive for others, and what
can be done to ensure everyone equal opportunity to live longer, healthier and wealthier.
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Book reviews
This book has been written by a microeconomist, which makes for an interesting study
on the intricacies of how we measure the relationship between individual wealth and the
global study of health and poverty. There are great details within this book, such as the
evolution of the knowledge that informs the poverty line index in the United States, to
demonstrate our precarious knowledge base of wealth and equality (an attempt by Deaton
to introduce the analytical rigour of arguments built on statistics and regression analysis).
These discussions serve to shed important light on the central point of this book: economic
growth alone will not lift nations out of poverty. Deaton appears to want to bring the
argument back to governments and governance. He is a strong advocate for the role of
democratic governance in achieving equality, but not in a starry-eyed way. He is particularly
clear in his view that the distribution of aid since the Second World War has not always been
a democratic processwith few democratic ambitions for the receiving populationsin
spite of the majority of donations originating from democratic political regimes. The aim
of this book is to ask: what has worked to lift societies out of poverty? Deaton makes the
case that this is not as easy to identify and explain as the quantitative scholarship in political
science and economics would like us to believe. Deaton argues that clear health improvements have occurred in the last century. This growth is globalthere remain regions such
as Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia with poor performance in their growth trajectory
but every region has had improved reductions in mortality across all age groups and sexes.
What has worked to achieve this is the unanswered questions for Deaton.
In chapter one, we are reminded of how far we have come in collective health advancements since John Snow mapped cholera outbreaks to the water pumps in Soho in 1854.
The advancement of health science was the moment, Deaton argues, that enabled financial
progress. Why these health science advances have not been distributed across the globe (the
focus of chapters three and four), and why inequality is growing within some developed
countries that had made such dramatic earlier progress (i.e. United States), is explored in
the remainder of the book.
In chapter five, we see the beginnings of Deatons thesis emergegood science and even
economic growth cannot overcome political ideology and institutions that do not ensure
equitable access to these goods. Deaton often turns to Americas wealthy but extremely
unequal society: We should not be concerned over others good fortune if it brings no
harm to us. The mistake is to apply the principle to only one dimension of wellbeing
moneyand to ignore other dimensions, such as the ability to participate in a democratic
society, to be well educated, to be healthy, and not be the victims of others search for
enrichment (p. 214).
In chapters six and seven, Deaton shows that the US model has become a useful example
of the global inequality that divides the healthy and wealthy from the sick and poor.
However, where I slightly depart from Deaton is his assertion that foreign aid plays a central
role in accounting for present global inequality. I agree with Deaton that the distribution of
foreign aid has been motivated too often by geopolitical calculations and relationships with
corrupt governments and multinational corporationsparticularly in the pastcreating
devastating harm to this day. I am just not sure that this means foreign aid is the problem;
rather, it is the practices associated with foreign aid. Deaton argues that the negative forces
of aid are always present; even in good environments, aid compromises institutions, it
contaminates local politics, and it undermines democracy (p. 305). However, some of the
poor practices associated with aid distribution and the aid dependencies it creates may not be
the product of too much aid, but a history of too little aid, distributed without being tied to
local institutions and politicswhich leads to the type of poor political decisions identified.
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The book asserts that the stability achieved in this modern age is not a story that can be
solely attributed to economic progress. This book is a timely reminder that the conditions
that facilitated this progress were created not only through the progress of health science,
but through a political effort to ensure that science benefited all.
Sara Davies, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
The great convergence: Asia, the West, and the logic of one world. By Kishore
Mahbubani. New York: PublicAffairs. 2013. 328pp. 15.29. isbn 978 1 61039 033 0. Available as e-book.
The world, according to Kishore Mahbubani, a former Singaporean diplomat and one of
Asias most visible international affairs specialists, is becoming a safer, richer, more equal
and overall better place. In addition, a consensual cluster of norms has been sweeping
the globe and has been accepted by policymaking elites around the world. The reader
is bombarded with a string of seemingly never-ending good news: Policy makers in all
corners have essentially developed the same set of perspectives on how to improve and
develop their societies. His overall point is that despite a sense of crisis in the West, the
remaining 88 per cent of the world is very optimistic about the future. Five hundred million
Asians have recently emerged from poverty, and that number will rise to 1.75 billion by the
end of the decade.
The remaining problems, Mahbubani writes, could be solved through stronger and
reformed international institutions: People no longer live in more than one hundred
separate boats. Instead they all live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat. But this boat
has a problem. It has 193 captains and crews, each claiming exclusive responsibility for one
cabin. However, it has no captain or crew to take care of the boat as a whole.
Mahbubani is an impatient, somewhat rancorous, big-picture writer, using many analogies and aphorisms, so he dedicates very little time to explaining how exactly the changes
he proposes should take place. Few would disagree that the UN needs reforms, but how
can we overcome the many obstacles to get there? He proposes making Brazil, India and
Nigeria permanent Security Council members and replacing the UK and France with a
joint EU seatan excellent proposalyet are there any historic examples of Great Powers
giving up institutional privilege without losing a war? Rather than spend time discussing
such details, The great convergence seeks to serve more as a visionary manifesto than as a
how-to guide.
In many ways, The great convergence sounds eerily like Norman Angells The great illusion,
which argued that economic interdependence had made war all but impossible. Soon after
its publication, however, the First World War broke out in a profoundly interconnected
Europe. Why exactly should things be different this time around? Why is the author so sure
that a conflict between China and Japan is unthinkable?
His answer shows a worrying degree of elitism and unworldliness. Mahbubani simply
reports how, during his debates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, global elites
increasingly think alike: It helps enormously when leaders of different countries have been
trained at Harvard or Yale, Columbia or Stanford, he writes.
Yet one might contend that such an argument misses the point in four important ways.
First, governing elites in the majority of countries have not studied at American Ivy League
universities. Second, the proposition that the worlds elites should all learn the same ideas is
problematic; it is precisely the Cambridge, Massachusetts-centric world-view of many international institutions that has kept them from understanding diverging local perspectives.
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Book reviews
Third, even Yale-educated leaders will have to consider the immediate interests of domestic
constituencies that empower them, which are usually not aligned with those of the
champagne-sipping elites of Davos that have the capacity to look at global challenges from
a long-term perspective.
Finally, Mahbubani himself is a perfect example of how a non-western elite trained in
the US may very well disagree with many western values. He (rightly) criticizes the United
States for its lack of enlightened leadership, yet fails to mention the many shortcomings
of Chinas policies. The author has been one of the most forceful proponents of Asian
values (emphasizing order, stability and authoritarianism), arguing that the West places
too much value on freedom, democracy and individualism. While he no longer explicitly
supports these ideas, he continues to speak of Asia as if it were a single, cohesive unit. Yet
how exactly do the values that India cherishes align with those of Chinas society? Many
thinkers in Asia would disagree with the notion of a unified set of Asian values.
Few of the ideas presented in The great convergence are truly original and the book is filled
with truisms and sound bites that, on closer inspection, make little sense (We will increasingly realize that our village is a world and not that our world is a village).
And yet, given the scarcity of books on global order written outside Europe and the
United States, it is likely to gain a considerable readership around the world, and rightly so.
Despite its flaws, The great convergence may help western scholars get a glimpse of non-western
perspectives, which continue to be greatly underrepresented in the international debate.
Oliver Stuenkel, Fundao Getulio Vargas, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Energy, environment and global health

Global resources: conflict and cooperation. Edited by Roland Dannreuther and
Wojciech Ostrowski. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013. 296pp. 60.00. isbn 978 0 23036
050 1. Available as e-book.
For long on the margins of the study of international politics, natural resources have made
a comeback over the last decade, in tandem with the rise of prices and the politicization of
global markets. Pulling together some of the leading experts in this vast field, this collection of essays stands out for its thoroughness, critical acumen and comprehensive review
of the relevant scholarly literature. Many contributions in this regard tend to treat mining
and oiland increasingly, natural gasas essentially unrelated. Global resources provides
a comparative analysis of the three. While not papering over their substantial differences,
the book instead underlines their shared trajectories to great effect, bringing to the surface
dynamics which can be lost in a more narrowly defined study (p. 233).
The book also eschews the two extremes of resource-related debates, the realist focus on
conflict and the liberal belief in ultimate cooperation as the underpinning of international
resource markets. Instead, the editors highlight a complex relationship between conflict
and cooperation across the long span of the last century. This historical approach is key
to the success of this volume, emphasizing the colonial roots of the extractive industries
without knowledge of which the behaviours of resource-rich states in the developing
world would remain obscure. The five historical and theoretical chapters explicitly address
this frequently unknown or misunderstood record, in terms of both successive commodity
regimes and the intellectual paradigms that accompanied them. This historical approach
is matched by a strong interdisciplinary commitment that brings together insights from
geography, economics, geology and International Relations, among others.
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Energy, environment and global health

Perhaps the most rewarding dimension of the book lies in its focus on the phenomenon of state capitalism and its rise over the past decade. The increased centrality of stateowned corporations in resource-rich states and emerging importer states alike has been
highlighted by the media and in best-selling works such as Ian Bremmers The end of the free
market (Viking, 2010). Yet it hasnt been sufficiently addressed by the mainstream resource
literature, which often falls back into the liberal paradigm of previous decades. Most of the
authors in this collection, however, unequivocally portray evolving firmstate relations that
amount to a sea change from the private sector-friendly atmosphere of the 1990s and early
2000s, and discuss the importance of national oil companies and mercantilist paradigms that
emphasize national energy security. The focus on state capitalism reveals one of the most
fruitful avenues for the comparative study of oil, gas and mining, which, the authors argue,
in their different ways share a trend towards greater interventionism and state involvement.
Investors in all three segments will likely face legal, regulatory, fiscal and, in some cases,
security challenges in their interactions with resource-rich states in coming years. While
the reference to Russias rationality in dealing with its natural gas clients may seem overoptimistic from the vantage point of 2014, the overall reading of the volume points to a
fraught, unpredictable and politicized future for global resources.
One of the upshots of this post-liberal understanding of the immediate future is that
normative efforts at improving the governance of global resource markets, such as the
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, while reviewed, are given short shrift. Indeed,
it becomes obvious throughout the volume that some of the major resource producers, as
well as rising importers in Asia, are only peripherally, if at all, concerned with issues of
governance and revenue management. Even African resource-rich states, referred to as the
ground zero of the resource curse (p. 111) are quickly diverging from this focus, as they
seek to maximize revenues and diversify their pool of investors.
One could point out themes that are dealt with only in passing or are entirely absent
from Global resources. But this would be unfair, in view of the fact that this fine collection
already covers a considerable amount of ground, and does so successfully. One hopes that
the book will find a sizeable readership and that it will be available soon in paperback.
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, University of Oxford, UK
Nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi: social, political and environmental issues.
Edited by Richard Hindmarsh. London: Routledge. 2013. 222pp. Index. Pb.: 26.00.
Three great nuclear disasters have brought the world to the edge of catastrophe: Three Mile
Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The latter may end up having the greatest long-term
impact, not only in terms of the actual radiological contamination of surrounding land and
the Pacific Ocean, but in its psychological and political effects on the Japanese people, and
in the serious damage it has done to the nuclear power industry worldwide. Not enough has
been written about this multifaceted calamity, part of the greater 11 March incident called
3.11 in Japan. Richard Hindmarsh and his colleagues should be commended for taking on
the difficult social and political aspects of the Fukushima disaster within Japan, and for
shining an objective spotlight on the various official failings that magnified the crisis. It
ought to be read by anyone concerned about the current state of the nuclear industry, the
politics of disaster management and the nature of science and public opinion.
Most of the chapters authors employ the framework of science, technology and society
studies (STS), which seeks to better understand and rethink the relationship among those
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Book reviews
three (p. 12). This might be considered a weakness by some readers, as it excludes more
technical, political or general policy approaches. These authors nonetheless use multidisciplinary approaches that encompass various analytical elements. Hindmarsh, for instance,
notes that the Fukushima events brought together a chronic technological disaster,
resulting from a series of poor decisions, with a natural disaster that overwhelmed the
technical defences put in place to prevent the worst events (p. 2). I might add that the crisis
highlighted several of the worst features of Japanese political culture: weak central political
leadership, overly bureaucratized handling of emergencies, lack of flexibility and insufficient planning in responding to unexpected events, undue deference to private sector actors
and the timidity and herd mentality of major news media organizations.
The books greatest strength is that it draws on the work of several Japanese researchers
in the field of science and public policy. Takuji Hara discusses how the Fukushima incident
has shaped the nature of public safety in Japan. From the mid-1960s to mid-1990s, government actively promoted nuclear power as safe and reliable. Plants were located in rural areas
that needed the government subsidies associated with nuclear facilities, the mass media
accepted government assurances and the public remained generally quiescent. In the years
before 2011, more Japanese began to question government and power company claims,
especially about siting and potential earthquakes. After the disaster, the Genshi-ryoku Mura
(nuclear power support network) lost much of its legitimacy. Atsuro Morita and colleagues
provide the most interesting case, examining the spontaneous development of a civic
radiation monitoring map in the weeks after the 11 March events. Ordinary citizens grew
suspicious of government announcements and news media acceptance of Tokyo Electrical
Power Companys assurances, and began to take their own measurements and post them on
a website that began operating days after the quake. Hundreds of monitoring sites began
operating all over Japan. As more professional monitoring came online, for example at
universities, citizen monitors gradually shut down their amateur units.
Five articles on the way forward after Fukushima are also of interest. Catherine Butler
et al. present a comprehensive overview of the areas of public discourse that have been
affected by the disaster, especially the bounds of political acceptability, safety and justice,
and framing of nuclear issues by the news media. Instead of prompting new approaches
to media coverage, the accident acted as a peg for preexisting interpretive packages for
nuclear and energy issues (p. 145). Jim Falk compares Fukushima to the Titanic maritime
disaster, suggesting that both were informed by multiple system failures. He insists that
social and political factors, principally trust in the industry, will shape the future of energy
production. Andrew Blowers suggests that ethical decisions for future events need to be
based on past reactions to nuclear crises. Arguments of nuclear proponents are often disingenuous or ignore the realities of a nuclear world; for example, damage from nuclear
incidents has been limited, nuclear threats are nothing compared to the threat of climate
change and abandoning nuclear power will lead to unilateral disarmament in the West. In
order to overcome the flaws in confronting nuclear catastrophes, Sonja Schmid advocates
creation of an international nuclear emergency response team (p. 194). This is the books
most realistic proposal, and should be seriously considered by policy-makers.
If there is anything to criticize, it is the bloodless nature of the volume. It could use
quite a bit more discussion of the general 11 March event, which was actually three disasters in one: one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded, one of the most destructive
tsunamis that took the lives of 16,000 people, and the Fukushima Daiichi incident. The
event is having incalculable knock-on effects in Japanese politics and society, and was a
gut-wrenching human drama that unfolded before a world television audience. The
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International history
authors need to place Fukushima more clearly in that context. Also, a deeper assessment
of the implications for Japanese politics and decision-making going forward would add
strength to the study. The obvious weaknesses of decision-making by the Kan government,
the slowness of an emergency response that might have averted the meltdown and the
poor regulation of the nuclear power companies by bureaucracy need further examination.
Finally, has the nuclear power industry been fatally damaged? What are its global prospects
in the post-Fukushima era? One wonders how prepared our current policy-makers are for
the next nuclear incident; reading this book might help them get ready.
Joel Campbell, Troy University, Global Campus, JapanKorea
July crisis: the worlds descent into war, summer 1914. By T. G. Otte. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. 2014. 534pp. 22.50. isbn 978 1 10706 490 4. Available as e-book.
It is obvious from reading his latest book why Thomas Otte chose for his professorial title at
the University of East Anglia Professor of Diplomatic History. For July crisis is unashamedly, boldly and successfully a very diplomatic history of the causes of the First World War,
a subject that has so mesmerized and divided historians for a century. From the outset Otte
nails his colours to the mast: The more I studied the period of the long nineteenth century,
the more it became clear to me that the answer [to the causes question], in so far as there
can be one, is not to be found in les forces profondes, the vast impersonal forces, that some
think shape historical processes, but, rather, that the reasons, in so far as they can ever be
fathomed, may be glimpsed in the doings of men (and they were all men in 1914), their flaws
and failings, their calculations and miscalculations (p. xi). Thus Otte offers the play of free
will and the contingent, set against the grinding determinism of impersonal forces. True
to his word, what follows is a seven-chapter dispatch-by-dispatch account of European
decision-makers diplomacy from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28
June to the outbreak of the Great War on 4 August 1914, in which human agency crowds
out structural causes. But this is no mere what one foreign office clerk wrote to another
as diplomatic history used to be pejoratively caricatured. Ottes account is refreshing, captivating and compelling in its description of the twists and turns of the crisis and, above
all, humane in its analysis of the ambiguities and frailties of its protagonists. It dispels so
successfully the usual teleological march to war, that this reviewer repeatedly found himself
believing that an outcome other than the tragic one we all know would ensue.
What is the secret of the success of July crisis? In one word: documents, and a close reading
of them too, to reconstruct the tension generated by the multidimensional chess game in
play. Structural historians have forsaken not only the individual in history, but also too
often the sources. Otte rectifies this with diligence and gusto. The array of archival material
consulted, public and private, and from so many countries and in so many languages, is
breathtaking, not to mention the old journals and volumes long neglected by even the best
historians. Nor is he wary of contesting and contradicting other historians when he believes
the documents warrant it.
What are the conclusions, other than that individual decision-makers are key? First, that
the Germans could have restrained the Austrians, and chose not to do so. But certainly
they did not frog march a reluctant Habsburg Empire to war (p. 85). Both lacked strategic
forethought. That Frances leader Raymond Poincar did little to bring about war
(p. 134) even if he did encourage Russia (although not to the extent of a blank cheque and
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Book reviews
not as much as his ambassador in Saint Petersburg, Maurice Palologue) and that he was
insufficiently flexible with Germany. That a confused and uncoordinated Russian government did not deliberately escalate the crisis by beginning pre-mobilization measures. The
only principal decision-maker to emerge untaintednay glorifiedfrom the July crisis
is Britains foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, hereby rescued from his critics charge
of incompetence or having stuck obstinately to the policy of the ententes with France
and Russia. Otte demonstrates most convincingly how Grey retained complete control
of British foreign policy until the prospect of war drew so close that Cabinet approval
for possible intervention was needed from 29 July. Thus, in Ottes view, Greys cool and
calculated art of keeping a free hand by a policy of constructive ambiguity, balancing
cautious diplomatic support for France and subtle warnings to Germany, was worthy of
the expert fly-fisherman he was. To the last, Grey worked tirelessly to find a solution to
the Austro-Serb crisis through international mediation. In the end, for Otte: None of the
decision-makers in 1914 desired a continental war. But individuallywith the exception of
Greyafter a long period of more or less uninterrupted peace, they had lost the sense of
the tragic, as Henry Kissinger once observed. This, combined with a near-general failure
of statecraft unleashed, as diplomat and historian George Kennan remarked, the seminal
catastrophe of the twentieth century. All in all, Thomas Ottes brilliantly researched book
displays throughout the kind of clear and firm judgement that was so lacking in July 1914.
J. F. V. Keiger, University of Cambridge, UK
The Cold War in the Third World. Edited by Robert J. McMahon. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 2013. 229pp. Index. Pb.: 15.66. isbn 978 0 19976 868 4.
Even though the term, the Third World, is still widely used, it refers to a phenomenon that
was short-lived and specifically related to the Cold War. The term referred to the countries
of the global South, a broad designation to cover the countries emerging from colonialism
and of course the countries of Latin America that had emerged from their colonial position
in the early nineteenth century and moved into positions of dependency on the United
States in the twentieth century. The term Third World could be used from roughly the
mid-1950s to the 1970s, after which the diversity among countries of the global South
became too wide to use a collective label. Even though the Cold War remained a cold
standoff in Europe it turned hot in the Third World through many regional conflicts that
frequently saw the superpowers vying for influence, strategic position or resources. The
interests of local actors rarely accorded with the objectives of the superpowers, though they
were adept at leveraging assistance where possible. The Cold War and the Third World were
interrelated phenomena, but too often in the historiography one had been subsumed to the
other, as this edited collection demonstrates. The contributors examine both the impact of
the Third World on the Cold War and, of course, that of the Cold War on the Third World.
The collection gathers a range of outstanding contributors who pursue this twin set
of objectives across six chapters that are regionally focused and five that are thematically
focused. Thus the Middle East, Latin America, South-East and South Asia, China and Africa
are analysed. The themes considered include decolonization, non-alignment, culture, race
and the US war on the peasant. These are broad concepts and broad areas; obviously some
are treated in a more sophisticated manner than others. In some regional studies, we are
treated to a chronological survey that would be familiar to historians of the region, in
others, we are provided with deep insight into the vectors that shaped the relationship and
motivations of both the US and regional actors. In that sense, the book is slightly uneven,
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but by and large most essays provide new insights. The thematic chapters are more engaging
to the reader familiar with the events and issues associated with the regions. They are free
to range more widely, which one might suspect would be a liability, but in this instance
they are able to highlight the interconnections between the Cold War and the Third
World, across disparate regions. The chapters in this sequence are outstanding. The work
on decolonization provides a fine analysis of the literature, with one notable exception, and
demonstrates that this phenomenon was the primary conduit through which the Cold War
reached the Third World. The end of the Columbian era brought about the assertions of
nationalism and self-determination, at once moving against the European colonial powers
and interacting with new influences and pressures from the superpowers. But crucially, the
book situates this phenomenon within the context of dramatic changes in race relations in
the United StatesBrown vs. Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Little
Rockwhich allows the author to bring international history into the domestic realm.
The analysis of US views of Third World leaders and peoples in the chapter on culture
considers race, religion and gender in order to provide a novel explanation for particular
US attitudes, views and ultimately policies. Cullathers work on the war on the peasant
represents the type of chapter that simply forces the reader to think again and to consider
concepts such as development, modernization and the green revolution through a very
different lens. Westads epilogue, similarly, not only encapsulates the literature, but also
sets out potential research agendas in which historians lag behind some other disciplines.
Despite the more generic title, the assembled authors represent some of the most prominent figures in their respective fields, and are also known for their analyses of US foreign
relations and history. It is perhaps due to this that, despite the cover image of Khrushchev
and Castro, most chapters lean more towards an analysis of US influence rather than that
of the Soviet Union.
David Ryan, University College Cork, Ireland
Scars of partition: postcolonial legacies in French and British borderlands. By
William F. S. Miles. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 2014. 365pp. Pb.: 22.73.
Partitions, the multiple divisions of territory that accompanied the end of empire, caused
displacement and suffering in the short term, and fomented regional instability and conflict
in the longer term. Externally imposed, often arbitrary and devised to meet the requirements of departing imperial powers, the partitions characteristic of twentieth-century
decolonization represent the last geopolitical gasp of a European-dominated world order.
So runs the conventional wisdom. The violent displacement of millions of people across
the new frontiers of Indo-Pakistani Punjab and Bengal in 19478, the seeds of conflict sown
by the straight-line partitions of Korea and Vietnam decreed at the Potsdam Summit, the
unending cycles of contestation and conflict in Cyprus, Kashmir and, above all, Israel
Palestine: these examples surely confirm that tragic consequences ensue when powerful
external agents divide communities and lands. William Miles, an American political scientist with a long interdisciplinary reach, accepts the contention that partitions have seismic
local consequences, but he spurns the simplistic tendency to see dividing territory as inevitablyand genericallydisastrous. His argument is predicated on the observation that so
much of the worlds landmass, not to mention its oceanic frontiers, were sketched, upheld
and then redrawn by the rulers of two empires, the British and the French. Framed in
this light, colonial boundary-making, partitions included, have shaped the terms of trade,
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ethno-cultural distinction and social and political interaction for much of the global
population.
Miless book is intriguing on several counts. For one thing, it is less political science
than a heady combination of historical narrative, oral history evidence and cultural anthropology. All are spiced with a vivid prose more redolent of travel writing than dry quantitative analysis. For another thing, Miles comes to his subjects without academic prejudice.
Neither an apologist for empire, nor a fiery critic of colonialism, he applies three simple tests
to the five geographical regions he examines: What were the forms of partition imposed
by erstwhile British and French colonial rulers? Did Franco-British variations in colonial
administrative practice continue to resonate in the borderlands created by partition? And
if partition was invariably so grim, why have so few such colonial divisions been reversed?
These questions are first posed and answered in respect of the NigeriaNiger frontier in
West Africa that divided the regions primarily Hausa-speaking communities and is now the
epicentre of Boko Harams Islamist insurgency. Miles then moves on to the Caribbean. Here,
he focuses less on matters of geopolitics and ethnic division than on memories of cultural
discrimination and social exclusionwhat he describes as imagined partitionamong the
populations of Martinique and Barbados, two former slave colonies whose relationships
with their erstwhile imperial rulers remain markedly different. Clearly at home with the
cultural anthropology of island peoples, Miles pursues two further oceanic comparisons.
His first is between Anglophone and Francophone territories in the South Pacific, the second
with their equivalents in the Indian Ocean. Case-studies of the New Hebridesan oddly
anomalous Anglo-French condominiumand Mauritiuswhose demographic composition was utterly transformed, first by slavery, then by the inward transfer of Indian indentured labouroffer further insights into successive waves of imperial rule and population
change. Finally, the book shifts to the LaosMyanmar borderlands of the Upper Mekong
River. In a region transformed by revolution, insurgency and illicit trading in people and
drugs, Miles offers useful comparisons about the differential treatment of highland populations and ethnic minority groups on either side of a riverine frontier set to be reconfigured
by Chinas massive dam-building projects to the north.
While Scars of partition thus ranges very widely, an obvious criticism is that none of the
most highly contested partition zones established through decolonization fall within its
gaze. A book squarely focused on the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Vietnam or
the Koreas might have generated different conclusions. But that is not the point. Whether
judged on their own terms or in comparison with each other, the borderland communities
that Miles does examine remind us that the scars of partition, whether geographical and
political or cultural and psychological, are necessarily variable and contingent. Partitions
most telling stories, he makes clear, lie among the peoples living on, or traversing across,
these real or imagined borderlands.
Martin Thomas, University of Exeter, UK
Europe
Post-war statebuilding and constitutional reform: beyond Dayton in Bosnia. By
Sofa Sebastin-Aparicio. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. 247pp. Index. isbn 978 1
This study examines ill-fated efforts to revive the constitutional reform process in Bosnia
after 2005. It criticizes existing statebuilding literature that has focused on particular themes
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such as the role of international actors or the 1995 Dayton peace agreement institutions
themselves. Such approaches, Sofa Sebastin-Aparicio argues, fail to grapple with the
challenges encountered in post-conflict societies such as Bosnia.
In her view, statebuilding in riven societies like Bosnia involves a game played at three
different levels, the inter-ethnic, the intra-ethnic, and the supranational. Effective conflict
regulation stems from an understanding of the psychological and social underpinnings of
ethnic relations. External actors, to make a difference, need to take account of the mistrust
and pervasive insecurity that still prevails nearly 20 years after the cessation of conflict. This
involves abandoning the norms and conditioning resulting from functioning in usually
stable democracies with a strong degree of inter-group trust.
This is a subtle and non-polemical study. It shows impressive grasp of the Bosnian
political world, presumably enhanced by the wide-ranging interviews which are the most
distinctive methodological feature of the book. The author also offers a penetrating but
constructive critique of the Dayton peace process which has gone through distinct phases
from 1995. The acquisition of the Bonn powers in 1997 enabled the external guarantors
to act as autocrats rebuilding a polity and creating a state and, nearly a decade later, this
approach was embedded in the EU accession framework.
But as long as the pervasive lack of inter-ethnic trust was overlooked, the journey
towards political normalization proved frustratingly slow. As the author shows, divergent
approaches from external guarantors thwarted top-down normalization efforts. The US
approach stemmed from the need to amend multiple veto points built into the 1995 Dayton
agreement, in order to give the state a long-term chance of survival. By contrast, it often
seemed that the position of the EU, especially that of Germany, was to identify the supervisory Bonn powers as the primary roadblock to change. Better outcomes might result
if local political forces were far less supervised. This approach was tried out in 20062007
when Christian Schwarz-Schilling filled the top position at the Office of High Representative (OHR). But it led to the ineffectual handling of a still fragile peace process. A sense
of local ownership did not diminish insecurity, but instead increased intransigence and
opportunism on the part of local actors with elections to fight and win.
This jarring episode is only dealt with tangentially in the book and the role of OHR and
the different figures who acted as High Representative for Bosnia is understated. The kernel
of the book deals with an aftermath when the OHR (earmarked for abolition) could only
recover a portion of its previous authority. Ongoing international division and incoherence emboldened the Serbs in their semi-autonomous statelet but the author argues that
divisions within the Bosnian and Croatian camps probably hit renewed external attempts
at building local cooperation the hardest. She believes that personnel are not important
(though elsewhere human agency is underscored); it is the approach that really counts. She
declines to be judgemental in comparing Lord Ashdowns highly interventionist approach
in 20022005 and his short-lived successors laissez-faire one. A key purpose of the book is to
offer a fresh perspective on how to obtain improved outcomes in traumatized post-conflict
societies like Bosnia.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book is at its sharpest on what not to do. Lowering the
standards of compliance was naive. It undermined external authority especially in the eyes
of the Serbs, the most cohesive of the ethnic disputants. The lesson from recent years is that
the failure to ground statebuilding in democratic soil renders external initiatives brittle and
ineffective: Usurping the process from local actors has long served to undermine conflict
regulation practice and damaged the process of capacity-building in post-conflict societies
(p. 186). Kosovo and Timor are briefly discussed as examples of a misplaced reliance on
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existing power structures in order to persevere with flimsy statebuilding processes.
In an absorbing conclusion, the author underlines that the role of external factors in
statebuilding should be considered a subsidiary one. A top-down statebuilding agenda is
likely to be resisted, out-manoeuvred or co-opted by local actors who have greater staying
power and are often firmly attuned to their own parochial agendas. Domestic considerations ultimately carry more weight than external factors in determining the fate of postconflict statebuilding. A subtler approach is advocated, involving the scrapping of rigid
timelines, focusing on the local conditions and involving a broad range of local actors in
order to boost dialogue and consensus buildingin other words, an enhanced role for
civil society (p. 191). This painstaking and more broadly focused approach is likely to have
advantages but I am doubtful that it possesses the ingredients for moving a post-conflict
society like Bosnia decisively away from its intractable divisions.
The evidence amassed is often persuasive, but it is largely based around the halting
performance of one external actorthe European Union. Owing perhaps to its invertebrate character, it has displayed shortcomings in a wide range of policy spheres, so I wonder
if relegating the external dimension may not be an overly sweeping assumption. Besides,
in the absence of the kind of economic recovery which is proving elusive across much of
Europe, what chances are there that a greater emphasis on democratic institutions really
increases consensus in fractured societies?
This study fails to offer any alternative way ahead, at least one that the external stakeholders engaged in Bosnia could feel comfortable in implementing. But it goes well beyond
the existing literature in exposing long-term flaws of the international trusteeship. It is
lucidly argued and hopefully will stimulate renewed interest in the most ambitious effort
at post-conflict reconstruction seen in Europe since the Second World War.
Tom Gallagher, University of Bradford, UK
The rise of Turkey: the twenty-first centurys first Muslim power. By Soner
Cagaptay. Sterling, VA: Potomac Books. 2014. 192pp. Index. 15.40. isbn 978 1 61234 650 2.
It is easy to be excited by Turkeys apparent transformation since the AKP (Adelet ve
Kalikinma Partisi) came to power in 2002. Turkeys impressive economic growth rates, its
experiment in marrying Islam to democracy at home, and its assertive, less exclusively
western, more Islamic and regionally focused foreign policy have all put the country firmly
in the spotlight. The turmoil in its neighbourhood constitutes an additional reason to pay
attention to Turkeys journey.
Yet there are reasons to temper this excitement with caution, and Soner Cagaptay, the
Turkish-born US-based director of the Washington Institutes Turkish Research Program,
ably enumerates many of them. On the economic front, he notes the improved but still
relatively unimpressive foreign direct investment, the low level of investment in research
and development and the chronic current account deficit. Politically, he draws attention to
the growing authoritarianism of (now) President Erdogans reign, and the polarized and
intolerant political atmosphere. He is acutely aware of the complexities of the countrys
Kurdish problem. He is insightful, too, about the pitfalls that lie in wait for Turkeys more
regionally focused foreign policy. The circumstances of the Arab world are not comparable
to those of Turkey, and the Turkish model was perhaps never likely to take root there.
Furthermore, Ankaras confident assertiveness can easily slide towards neo-Ottoman
arrogance and Islamically inspired anti-westernism.
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Yet there is a slightly schizophrenic quality to this book. Cagaptay clearly wants Turkey
to emerge as this centurys first Muslim power, and this sometimes encourages uncritical
reportage and over-favourable spin. For example, he asserts that Turkey is well on the way
to becoming a global power (p. 17). This is somewhat hyperbolic. Yes, Turkeys GDP now
ranks sixteenth in the world, and there is a small high-tech sector. But other emerging
economies have done better, and the Turkish economy is still defined by low to middle
technology products. Measured by GDP per head, Turkey is usually placed around 65th
in global rankings. Its economy is roughly the size of that of the Netherlands, which has
little more than one-fifth of Turkeys population. This does not constitute a sound foundation for embryonic global power status. In the political arena, he argues that the Gezi Park
movement that has grown out of the events of summer 2013 points to the rise of Turkey
as a middle-class society with democracy at its core (p. 1). Others see it as proof that many
Turks detect and fear a growing authoritarian and illiberal trendas does the European
Union, a fact Cagaptay attests to.
In short, Cagaptay seems to want to engender optimism about Turkey, but for the most
part offers evidence that supports a more gloomy assessment. More recent developments
in Turkey provide even stronger grounds for pessimism than was the case when Cagaptay
produced his manuscriptsuch is the speed of events in and around the country. Thus,
his numerous positive references to the contribution of Glenist businesses and institutions were made before Erdogan embarked on purging them. He eagerly anticipates the
emergence of a new, civilian and liberal constitution, but efforts to find a cross-party
consensus have long since sputtered to a halt. In the foreign policy arena, Cagaptay could
not foresee the negative consequences to its foreign policy of Ankaras commitment to
Egypts Muslim Brotherhood, to Hamas and to some unsavoury elements in the Syrian
opposition. Turkeys confident and engaged approach to its neighbourhood now looks to
have been over-confident and wrong-headed. Today, Ankara has few friends nearby.
Ultimately, Cagaptay is obliged to resort to exhortationthat Turkey must improve its
legal culture, its social and political inclusiveness, its media freedoms, and bring to completion foreign minister Davutoglus vision of a zero problems foreign policy (p. 151)if it
is to become the Muslim power that he wants it to be. Surely, if Turkey had the necessary
will, desire, know-how and attributes, it presumably would take these steps. But it doesnt,
and Cagaptay offers ample evidence to support that.
If this seems over-critical of both the author and of Turkey, it isnt intended to be. The
Turkish glass is both half full and half empty; things improve and regress simultaneously,
in complex ways and at a dizzying rate. This makes it a hard country to assess definitively.
Cagaptay has produced an informed and perceptive book that is at times a joy, and always
easy, to read. But, as with Turkey itself, the realities he grasps do not always fit comfortably
with the hopes he cherishes. Turkey might well emerge as the worlds first Muslim power,
but credit will be due to the Muslim worlds travails as much as to Turkeys achievements.
Bill Park, Kings College London, UK
Britannia and the bear: the Anglo-Russian intelligence wars 19171929. By Victor
Madeira. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press. 2014. 317pp. 55.00. isbn 978 1 84383 895 1.
This book covers the history of security and intelligence conflicts first between Great
Britain and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and then, after
December 1922, the USSR. It begins with the October Revolution in 1917 and concludes
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in 1929, when the two countries resumed ties after the diplomatic rupture of May 1927,
caused by a police raid on the All-Russian Cooperative Society (ARCOS), which, operating
as the official Soviet importexport agency, was the centre of Soviet subversive activities
in London.
The Soviet global campaign to spread communism began immediately after the October
Revolution, when the ruling Council of Peoples Commissars allocated 2 million gold
roubles to the campaign of subversion and spying abroad. Strangely, the first civilian postrevolutionary Soviet intelligence organ was only set up almost three years after the October
Revolution, in April 1920, and legally established on 20 December 1920. The subversion of
Britain was funded via ARCOS and the Soviet missions in Berlin and The Hague.
Victor Madeiras description of British policies towards the RSFSR/Soviet Union and
the leading British policy-makers is excellent, as is his exploration of Londonsalmost
always badly coordinatedbalancing act between economic interest and security concerns.
He also provides relevant statistics and the costs of various security undertakings on both
sides, with very useful 2011 equivalents.
Madeira is critical of both the conservative and more pragmatic British politicians who
argued the pros and cons of economic and security policies vis--vis the new Soviet state. His
assessment of Soviet foreign policy-makers and executors is equally incisive, although less
charitablerightly so, as their personal grievances and administrative internal warfare were
petty and undermined their strategic plans. Similarly, the descriptions of British traitors,
Soviet collaborators and assorted fellow travellers, most of whom, with some exceptions,
were rented rather than bought or converted is thorough and interesting.
His accounts and analysis of the cryptographic skirmishes between the two countries,
and British Signal Intelligence efforts, are a particularly strong feature of the book.
Bolshevik Russias achievements were mainly the result of systemic vulnerabilities of a
British democracy but also due partly to the budgetary cuts triggered by the illusory peace
dividends after the First World War and partly to the eternal political short-termism of
many British politicians of that period. The vital secrets of the Government and Cipher
School, the predecessor of GCHQ, for example, were compromised seven times between
1919 and 1927 for short-term political gains.
The genuine concernbut in practice only slow appreciation of what the USSR and
its supporters were trying to achievewas sometimes inadvertently encouraged by disillusioned members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who underestimated its
subversive potential. One of them described it even as an organization whose chief claim to
distinction, so far, is that it is composed of drivelling nonentities intoxicated with conceit,
who have borrowed the Bolshevik ideas without borrowing the brains necessary to execute
them (p. 79). Bolshevik supporters were able to penetrate, spy on and subvert many British
institutions including the security community.
The book is mainly about Britannia and much less about the Bear, although the author
has analysed some very interesting Russian-language sources and used them to great effect.
At the same time, Madeira links Soviet subversion campaigns in the 1920s with the present,
and gently mocks the end of history brigade, reminding us, for instance, that in 1992,
MI5 stopped monitoring political subversion. He is also right when he claims that these
days, the average politician or civil servant is worse equipped to cope with or understand
the modern Russia State and therefore less able to protect Britainbut that is also the case
with their understanding of other parts of the world.
He is partly correct that under the PutinMedvedevPutin team todays Russia does
what it did under their communist predecessors, but many of their policies also do not
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differ that much from those of the tsars. The author notes that the communists were
simply far more efficient and unscrupulous than their predecessors. An important difference, however, so often ignored, between the policies of the present Russian leadership and
the communist leaders is the lack of ideology and policy aiming at dominating the whole
world. Present Russian intelligence operations lack this ideological element, as noted in
the mid-1990s by the doyen of the KGB Egyptologists, late General Kirpichenko, who
remarked that nowadays spying is done only for money.
Britannia and the bear is a fascinating and well-written book. It may and should become a
standard text in British libraries, but it will certainly become that in foreign organizations
(friends and foes alike) that are studying the modern history of the UK and its security and
intelligence organizations.
Henry Plater-Zyberk, Prague Security Studies Institute, The Czech Republic
Russia and Eurasia*

Brothers armed: military aspects of the crisis in Ukraine. Edited by Colby Howard
and Ruslan Pukhov. Minneapolis, MN: Eastview Press. 2014. 252pp. Pb.: $89.95. isbn 978
1 87994 422 0.
Brothers armed is the third volume produced by the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and
Technologies (CAST), a Moscow-based company that combines as a think-tank and a
consultancy. CAST produced The tanks of August, in the wake of the Russo-Georgia war in
2009, followed by Russias new army in 2010. Even though Brothers armed is a stand-alone text,
it is best seen in the light of these previous books.
The volume addresses its subject over nine substantive chapters, broken into four sections.
The first part, consisting of chapter one, lays out the history of the constitutional basis of
Crimea, from Russian imperial times to the post-Soviet situation, and the evolving triangle
of relationships between Kyiv, Simferopol and Moscow. Russia, the author concludes, was
prepared to forget about Crimea on the basis of Kyivs broader loyaltybut this was undermined in 2004 and more seriously threatened in 2014, thereby creating the extraordinary
situation in which Moscow acted.
Part two consists of five chapters which explore the longer-term evolution of the armed
forces of Ukraine and Russia since 1991a case of decline and fall for the former, and
decline and partial rise for the latter. Chapters two and three recount the lack of direction,
resources and governmental support for the Ukrainian armed forces not just since 2010,
but over the last two decades. This has led to a degradation unprecedented in speed and
scale, such that by February 2014 the Ukrainian armed forces hardly qualified as cohesive,
let alone able to respond to the crisis: not only were there no brigade-level exercises in
20082012, but force deployments were such that there were no combat units in the east
of the country, and by the time the war broke out, only a tiny fraction of the armed forces
were combat-worthy.
Chapters four and five explore the condition of the Russian armed forcesthe former
assessing the series of reforms carried out until 2008, the latter the period after the RussoGeorgia war and the appointment of a civilian, Anatoliy Serdyukov, as minister of defence.
He was able to drive through reforms of such speed and scale that he achieved more
*
See also Kristina Stoeckl, The Russian Orthodox Church and human rights, pp. 146970, and Victor Madeira,
Britannia and the bear: the Anglo-Russian intelligence wars 19171929, pp. 14857.
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than any minister of defence since Trotskyand was, as a result, hated by the military
establishment like no other since Trotsky. However, the author, Mikhail Barabanov, suggests
that although some reforms have been successfulfor example, Russian special forces were
able to operate effectively in the campaignoverall they are incomplete and significant
problems remain. Chapter six usefully sets out the establishment and emergence of the
Special Operations Force, the little green men who participated in the Crimean operation.
The two chapters in part three focus specifically on the Black Sea and Crimea. Chapter
seven establishes the status of the Black Sea Fleet since the early 1990s, while chapter eight
charts the chronology of the Crimean operation and how the Russians neutralized the
Ukrainian forces in Crimea by using carrots as well as sticks to make them collapse.
Part four attempts to chart a way forward for Kyiv. It frames the immediate situation
facing the Ukrainian governmentincluding the ongoing possibility of full-scale invasion
by Russiaand suggests changes. Given the preceding chapters, the tone is surprisingly
up-beat, but the author, a member of the Ukrainian Help the Army civic group, concludes
by pointing to the need for sustained western support, clarity of direction from Kyiv and
increased availability of resources, if the Ukrainian armed forces are to attain serious combat
readiness. This combination has so far proved elusive.
It is a shame that there is no introduction or conclusion to provide an overarching framework, offer signposts, and weave the arguments together. These might have allowed the
editorseven brieflyto contextualize their specific focus in wider Euro-Atlantic security
and post-annexation developments. It would have been useful to have a clearer framework, not only because of the richness, even density, of detail throughout the volume,
but because some chapter titles may draw the readers eye more readily than others. But to
overlook these others would be to miss important steps in the overall argument, as well as
much interesting material. Without guidance, the reader is effectively plunged, for better
or worse, straight into the body of the work.
Furthermore, some might see the lack of a discussion of the extended crisis in Ukraine
after the Crimean operation to be a drawback, given the title of the volume. But the contributors, all specialists in the specific field of post-Soviet military affairs and deserving of wider
recognition in the West, have taken the Crimean operation as a concrete aspect of the crisis
and examined it in such a way as to illuminate the wider subject from a different angle.
Thus, there is more to this book than meets the eye and it will prove to be a very useful
text for policy-makers and academics alike. The attentive reader will find that it provides
some answers to the questions western observers are asking about Russian intentions and
capabilities, fills important gaps in knowledge, especially about Ukraines armed forces,
and offers an interesting window onto how specific aspects of the crisis are understood in
Moscow. This combination makes it essential reading both for those who wish to learn
more about the crisis specifically and those interested in the broader issues of military and
security affairs in the region.
Andrew Monaghan, Chatham House, UK
US foreign policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: politics, energy and security.
By Christoph Bluth. London: I. B. Tauris. 2013. 248pp. 56.00. isbn 978 1 78076 918 9.
Newly created states must form relationships with established ones, and vice versa. Thus,
when the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991 the United States was faced with the
task of devising policies towards the 15 successor states of its former adversary. Eight of
these lie in the Caucasus and Central Asia, so US policy towards this region (in reality, two
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distinct regions) can serve as a significant case-study in how a new foreign policy is crafted
and honed.
Christoph Bluth explores two sets of factors that have driven policy: the intrinsic
complexity of the region and the broader international context. At least four local features
impose inherent challenges on formulating a coherent policy. First, the geopolitics of this
large area, which lies between Russia to the northwhose integration into the post-Cold
War order was long considered the overarching strategic goalrising China to the east,
and turbulent Iran and Afghanistan to the south. Second, its ethnic diversity and consequent vulnerability to instability and conflictnotably, but not only, the frozen conflicts.
Third, the problematic, sometimes acute, human rights issues in many of these countries.
Fourth, the presence of significant energy resources, offering both opportunities for international oil companies and major technical and transport challenges to the development
and commercialization of reserves. These local factors, in combination, have generated a
shifting mix of US policy drivers in a complex environment, a challenge compounded by
the limited instruments available even to the sole remaining superpower for influencing a
distant region often suspicious of a western values agenda.
But the broader context has mattered too. A recurring theme of Bluths account is the
extent to which US policy towards the region has been derivative of larger evolving prioritieswhether the imperative of denuclearization, the early post-1991 Russia first policy,
the later efforts to bolster local sovereignties against resurgent Russian influence, the determination to limit Iranian involvement in the region, or the sudden post-9/11 demand for
bases and supply routes in Central Asia. Against the background of these wider contextual shifts, distinct, and sometimes contradictory, policy impulsesabove all, geopolitics,
global energy security and human rightshave interacted. Bluth concludes that the US
has struggled ... to define its relations with the Caucasus and Central Asia and to articulate
its interests in the region. He also implies that the greatest successes came relatively early,
notably the cooperative threat reduction which eliminated the most dangerous Cold War
legacies, and the energy diplomacy which brought diversity of export routes and significant new investments to the region. The passing of the unipolar moment suggests that
successes have been more elusive since.
This account focuses on policy outputs more than formulation, and only lightly
addresses the domestic processes and institutions through which diverse priorities have
been resolved into American behaviourerrors creep in when it does: for example, the
elder Bush is named as GWH, not GHW, throughout; Senator Sam Nunn is renamed
George. Despite the promise of theoretical insight through the testing of rival hypotheses (neo-realism, constructivism, bureaucratic politics), this analytical approach is more
sporadic than sustained and the narrative is dominated by the flow of events. A systematic
explanation of US policy towards this eventful region awaits a future work.
Nigel Gould-Davies, Mahidol University International College, Thailand

Israel since the Six-Day War: tears of joy, tears of sorrow. By Leslie Stein. Cambridge:
Polity Press. 2014. 456pp. Index. 22.50. isbn 978 0 74564 726 5. Available as e-book.
This book, in completing the authors trilogy on the history of Israel, deals with the events,
both domestic and foreign, that accompanied the Jewish state from 1967 until the present.
Through the use of well-researched, concise and autonomous chapters, Leslie Stein has
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produced a book that both combines an increasingly infrequent amalgamation of history
and analysis, and succeeds in maintaining the interest of the reader throughout.
Commencing with the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, Stein details action by
the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) that was deemed unacceptable by the Israeli government
and worthy of compensation, and elaborates upon the terminology of United Nations
(UN) resolution 242. Stein correctly emphasizes the fact that resolution 242 calls for, inter
alia, the withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.
The omittance of the definite article before territories, reveals the desire of the British
and the Americans at the time not to recommend IDF withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines.
The Arab bloc at the UN saw the inclusion of the definite article as essential, and Ethiopias
fervent desire to see all inserted before Israel armed forces, reveals the immediate impact
that resolution 242 had diplomatically, and which reverberates until today.
The Yom Kippur War of 1973 is dealt with concisely, revealing the magnitude and consequences of the Egyptian and Syrian surprise attack on Israel, while describing the numerous
warnings of impending war that the government in Jerusalem received, but failed to heed.
Moreover, Stein describes the unbending Israeli adherence to the erroneous belief that Egypt
would go to war only if it acquired Soviet bombers and missiles capable of reaching the
Israeli heartland; the political factors behind Golda Meirs refusal to authorize a pre-emptive
strike and the disbelief within Cairo at the ease of the Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal.
The author reveals how the Lebanon War of 1982 served to destroy the relationship
between then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin and then-Minister of Defence Ariel
Sharon, with Begin initially unaware of both the IDF presence on the outskirts of Beirut
and of the consequences of the Phalangist actions at Sabra and Shatila. This situation was
highlighted when Begin insisted to Philip Habib, Reagans special envoy to the Middle East,
that Habib was wrong in saying that the IDF was closing in on Beirut, but upon checking
with then Israeli chief of staff, Raful Eitan, Begin was told that Habib was correct. Begin
never recovered from the war, and the rest of the chapter deals with issues such as the introduction of the New Israeli Shekel, the political horse-trading of governing coalitions and
the infamous Bus 300 incident.
The following chapters deal with a plethora of issues: Israels peace agreement with
Jordan and Yasser Arafats objections; the lynching of two Israeli reservist soldiers in
Ramallah; and Sharons visit to the Temple Mount, seen by some as the catalyst for the
Al-Aqsa Intifada. The second Lebanon War, Operation Cast Lead, the Mavi Marmara
Affair and the Goldstone Report are all competently presented, as is Ehud Olmerts often
overlooked initiative to consider the right of return for Palestinian refugees for up to five
years, at a maximum of a thousand per year. The immigration of Russian and Ethiopian
Jews is amply depicted, and the sections on Israeli Arabs, Haredi Jews, along with the
impact of the Tal Law, the kibbutz movement and foreign workers in Israel, are enlightening. Particularly informative is the authors analysis of the process of change that the
kibbutz movement continues to experience.
By way of minor criticism, many would take issue with the statement: The official
Israeli response to Arafats breach of faith and to his and other PLO leaders explicit intentions of exploiting the Oslo Accords as a means of destroying Israel is redolent of the failure
of Israeli intelligence on the eve of the Yom Kippur War (p. 230). Moreover, although, as
Stein admits, the book is a broad survey, mention of Israels Circassian community, whose
loyalty to the state is trumped only by its fierce protection of its culture, could have been
made. In addition, I would suggest that the author occasionally uses language that is overtly
pro-Israel, and in so doing rather weakens the work in places. That said, the book is both
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informed and informative, and is clearly the fruit of prolonged and meticulous research.
Most importantly, it helps fill a lacuna in this area of academia, where anti-Israel literature is
plentiful. The book also furnishes both the lay reader and the expert with an added dimension of understanding of a country which continues to both inspire and frustrate.
Howard A. Patten
U.S.Iran misperceptions: a dialogue. Edited by Abbas Maleki and John Tirman.
New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2014. 176pp. Pb.: 19.99. isbn 978 1 62356
936 5. Available as e-book.
The editors of this bookone the American executive director of the Center for International Studies at MIT, the other an Iranian scholar who previously spent nearly a decade
serving as his countrys deputy foreign ministerhave convened a number of leading
experts from Iran and the United States in order to take a fresh look at relations between
Tehran and Washington. Abbas Maleki and John Tirman co-author the opening chapter,
setting out the rationale for the book and explaining the analytical emphasis on misperception. We start arguments that are critical and exploratory, they write, avoiding the
conventional shibboleths of most discussions of Iran and the United States (p. 12). This
introduction is followed in chapter two with an essay by Robert Jervis, author of a classic
study on perceptions and biases in international affairs.
The four chapters that follow are where the dialogue aspect of the books title comes
most clearly into play: Seyed Hossein Mousavian, on the one hand, and Steven E. Miller
and Matthew Bunn, on the other, sketch out the general perceptions of their respective
countries towards the other. Mousavian focuses specifically on the views of Irans Supreme
Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This marriage of writer and subjecta highly experienced former Iranian diplomat analysing the man whose name is, more often than not,
followed by some sort of variation on the phrase Irans ultimate decision makeris likely
to be of particular interest to readers less familiar with the dynamics on the Iranian side of
the relationship. In chapters five and six, Kayhan Barzegar and Tirman provide reflections
on how Tehran and Washington view the others policies specifically within the Middle
East. Hussein Banai, an IranianCanadian scholar based at Occidental College, examines
the prospects for USIran relations in chapter seven before Maleki, writing with Robert
Reardon, offers concluding thoughts and recommends policies for reducing bilateral
misperceptions. Miller and Bunn offer perhaps the most concise characterization of the
books overall judgments, namely that U.S. and Iranian interests do clash in many areas,
and each country has launched both hostile rhetoric and aggressive actions against the interests of the other. But there are also grounds for a more nuanced view in each country and
common interests that the two countries might be able to pursue if they could overcome
the huge gulf of hostility and mistrust that separates them (p. 57).
It is a reflection of the rapid pace of developments in the Middle East that parts of the
work may already invite revision. The election of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran,
the telephone conversation between Rouhani and President Barack Obama in September
2013, the Joint Plan of Action signed between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, United
Kingdom, France, Russia, China and Germany) in November 2013, the workmanlike
attitude being attributed to the parties towards resolving the nuclear issue, and the now
seemingly routine bilateral exchanges between top Iranian and American officials all took
place either in the final stages of manuscript preparation or after it went to press. As a result,
they are addressed only briefly, or not at all. And this is to say nothing of the scale and speed
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with which the Islamic State has come to dominate the international communitys attentions subsequent to its gains across Syria and Iraq, and numerous other events beyond the
immediate bilateral context that, nonetheless, bear on potential USIranian cooperation
and conflict. Yet even if these come to be seen as harbingers for less adversarial relations
between Iran and the United States, the perceptions and misperceptions that the books
contributors identify and examine are unlikely to fade swiftly on either side.
This book should appeal to readers in the policy, think-tank and academic communities,
particularly those with an interest in American and Iranian foreign policy, contemporary
Middle East politics and the role of perception in diplomacy. Tirman and Maleki note at
the outset that theirs is not a work of history, but a bibliography and suggested readings
would have been a welcome addition for those interested in exploring the issues raised in
greater detail. The writing is generally clear and engaging, very occasionally blemished by
typographical errorsof these, perhaps only the reference to Iran as a rouge state rather
than a rogue state will leave the author red-faced.
Naysan Rafati, University of Oxford, UK
Sub-Saharan Africa
Eritrea at a crossroads: a narrative of triumph, betrayal and hope. By Andebrhan
Welde Giorgis. Houston, TX: Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co. 2014. 661pp.
Index. Pb.: 20.50. isbn 978 1 62857 331 2. Available as e-book.
After a 30-year war with Ethiopia and decades-long struggles for self-determination and
international recognition, Eritreas independence in 1993 was met with elation as well as
high expectations for the future. The Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front assumed power,
with most at home and in the diaspora believing that the movement would build on its
revolutionary achievements and create a functional and free state. However, the national
charter and policy frameworks developed after independence were never properly adopted
and have long since been abandoned. As has been the legacy of other post-colonial experiences in Africa, armed resistance instead gave rise to a political culture that is intolerant of
pluralism. Today, most of the decisions taken by government are geared to serve the interests of regime stability over its citizenry.
Eritrea at a crossroads is a comprehensive and readable account of the countrys origins, the
forging of national identity through a peoples struggle for self-determination and the postindependence decline of a country that sacrificed everything for liberation and independence. Andebrhan Welde Giorgis writes from a unique vantage point, having served Eritrea
as a freedom fighter, as president of the University of Asmara, as Central Bank governor
and as ambassador to the European Union.
Now exiled from his homeland, Giorgiss book is a personal contribution to the internal
and external debate about Eritreas future, rather than an overview of the current political, economic and social context in the country. His main thrust throughout is to counter
current state-led control with a vision of governance that promotes the rule of law, civil
liberties and human rights. The author questions the governments record on improving the
quality of Eritrean lives since independence. Several chapters focus on the countrys developmental trajectory since 1991 and the author writes lucidly about the outward-looking
foreign and economic policies a future government should pursue.
Giorgis portrays modern-day Eritrea as a mosaic of peoples and cultures that has been
shaped by successive pre-colonial and colonial confrontations between foreign powers and
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national resistance. He describes the 1943 British Partition Plan for Eritrea as the first in
a long series of international betrayals of Eritrea and its people (p. 59). Interference by
external powers has undoubtedly been a significant driver of destabilization in Eritreaas
elsewhere in the Horn of Africa. But Eritreas geostrategic importance is over-emphasized,
as evidenced by the authors own depiction of the countrys declining regional and international influence over the last 20 years.
The relationship between Eritrea and Ethiopia is unsurprisingly one of the key subjects
permeating the book. It remains arguably the most volatile relationship in East Africa and
continues to serve as a major source of regional instability. Eritreas UN-mandated federation with Ethiopia in 1952 set the stage for one of the bloodiest wars of national liberation in
modern African history. The author skilfully chronicles the shorter, but equally brutal, war
in 19982000 between the former allies, and outlines the missed opportunities for resolution that led to the death and displacement of tens of thousands on both sides. Giorgis also
makes a connection between Eritreas colonial subjugation by Ethiopia and the big powers,
and the international communitys aversion to making Ethiopia abide by the 2002 boundary
ruling that awarded the border district of Badme to Eritrea.
Other pertinent issues are tackled throughout including Eritreas foreign relations, the
indefinite national service that Eritreans are subjected to and the exodus of Eritreas youth
and educated population. The author is at times repetitive, particularly when prescribing an
alternative vision for Eritreas governance and also when repudiating a continued Ethiopian
expansionist narrative. Eritrea at a crossroads would benefit from being more concise in its
scope, as evidenced by the authors over-lengthy analysis of the development of the postcolonial African state in chapter ten.
That said, the authors personal accounts of service to Eritrea give the book depth,
providing the reader with an understanding of the influences on his political beliefs, as well
as insight into the key policy decisions and power struggles within a government that has
become inward-looking and inaccessible. Mr Giorgis does not hold back when it comes to
his dislike of the current regime. President Isaias Afwerki is described as selfish to the core,
fixated on his grudges and vindictive in the extreme (p. 322) and the book is littered with
personal accounts of the authors clashes with Eritreas president while serving in various
senior positions.
Unable to return to his homeland because of his dissenting views, Giorgis does not
provide a complete picture of the current situation in Eritrea, the inner workings of the
Eritrean government, and what future change may mean for the country. However, the
unknown is part of what makes Eritrea fascinating to the external reader. The book is
a valuable contribution for those wishing to understand Eritreas recent history from an
insiders perspective, especially given the multitude of outsiders perspectives available and
the absence of first-hand information and research coming from inside the country.
Ahmed Soliman, Chatham House, UK
Inside South Africas foreign policy: diplomacy in Africa from Smuts to Mbeki. By
John Siko. London: I. B. Tauris. 2014. 288pp. 53.00. isbn 978 1 78076 831 1. Available as
e-book.
John Sikos valuable addition to the study of South Africas international relations examines
the extent to which the electorate and other actors have been able to influence and guide
the countrys foreign policy. The limited number of other works in the field have predominantly focused on either the apartheid state or the post-1994 majority rule government.
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John Siko peels away the layers of various actors impact on policy formation from Jan
Smutss first term in office to Thabo Mbekis presidency, including the parallel foreign
policy of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile. His progressive analysis starts
with the attentive public, who have had limited impact on policy, and then guides the
reader through the role of different interest groups influences, finishing with a portrait of
the individual leaders at the centre of power. The book is derived from the authors doctoral
dissertation. His personal experience as an American diplomat and academic, who gained
a working knowledge of South African foreign policy during two postings in the country,
adds weight to the analysis. At times, the reader senses the academics frustration at the lack
of grassroots impact on international relations.
By looking at different actors over a long period, Siko demonstrates the rarity of the
swell of inclusion on foreign policy formation during the transition period in 19914. The
South African electorates interest in foreign policy has been limited to single instances of
scandal, often involving military interventions that resulted in South African casualties.
Similarly, academia has played a minor role. Where access has been granted, it has been
based on personal ties, trust and race. Sikos depiction of this transitional period is perceptive and nuanced, drawing on primary research to demonstrate how access has been dependent on the presidencys willingness for inclusion, and the excitement of forming a new
foreign policy for a new nation.
In researching the book, Siko conducted over 100 interviews with insiders and
outsiders, producing a remarkably human account of the countrys foreign relations. The
book is filled with anecdotes which bring to life the processes and personalities of policy
formation. The notoriously strained relationship between President P. W. Botha and the
press is exemplified with a recollection of an encounter between the President and Piet
Cilli, Chair of the Board of the National Press, in which Botha told Cilli, Piet, jou moer
[Go to hell], and Cilli responded in kind (p. 76). However, as the narrative closes in on the
centre of power, so the anecdotes and interviews become more serious. The analysis of the
individual presidents includes interviews with former ministers, heads of intelligence and
senior civil servants. Such accounts add colour to the silhouettes of diplomacy, especially
in the books coverage of the destabilization and isolationism of the 1980s.
The research emphasizes agency rather than structural constraints. The individual
characters who have shaped the countrys foreign relations dominate the book, especially
President Thabo Mbeki. The inclusion of ANC foreign relations pre-1994 highlights
the growing foreign policy role of Mbeki prior to his presidency. The author questions
whether Mbekis style was as dictatorial as his reputation suggests, and notes that an, albeit
small, circle of advisers was able to bend the Presidents ear (p. 247). He also emphasizes
the notable exception where civil society did have an influence on Mbekis policy: the
blocking of an arms shipment from China to Zimbabwe in 2008. This did not lead to a
major policy shift on Zimbabwe, but it did have an impact. However, the author argues that
lack of coordination among interested actors has allowed foreign policy to be the preserve
of the elite.
One characteristic of South Africas recent foreign policy, especially within the region,
has been its multifaceted and multilayered nature. On Swaziland for example, there is little
cohesion between the President, the ANC, the tripartite alliance partners, business or the
Department of International Relations and Cooperation. The same has often been true
with regard to Zimbabwe, especially when it comes to the differences between Mbekis
quiet diplomacy and the more vocal opposition of the Congress of South African Trade
Unions, which called for a halt to essential services to Zimbabwe when its members were
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South Asia
invited to leave. Siko alludes to this, but does not discuss the different layers of foreign
policy-making at great depth.
Siko does not scrutinize the structural constraints on policy formation, neither does
he address international pressures that have shaped and moulded South Africas foreign
relations. What he does is present a rich description of the insider policy influences on the
governments that have determined foreign policy for almost a century. The originality of
the interview material and Sikos concise style make this a compelling read, especially for
South Africans wishing to break this elite preserve on foreign policy.
Christopher Vandome, Chatham House, UK
South Asia
Bargaining with a rising India: lessons from the Mahabharata. By Amrita Narlikar
and Aruna Narlikar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. 238pp. 29.00. isbn 978 0
199 69838 7.
Every Indian grows up learning the story of Mahabharata, an epic tale of rivalry between
the just and virtuous Pandava brothers and their cousins the Kauravas, whose greed far
exceeds their sense of righteousness. The five Pandavas, the rightful heirs to the throne of
Hastinapura, are tricked into exile by the Kauravas, who number 100 siblings and are led by
the unscrupulous eldest brother, Duryodhana. After completing their exile, the Pandavas
return to claim the throne, but are rebuffed. War ensues and ends in the total defeat of
the Kauravas. The Mahabharata is a feast of tales about statecraft, diplomacy, conspiracy,
heroism, friendship and betrayal. No ancient epic provides a richer source of insights into
the causes of war, the conduct of negotiations, and the role of honour, justice and morality
in conflict and peace. The epic is deeply embedded in the Indian psyche, told and retold in
village operas, in school textbooks, Bollywood movies and televisions dramas, as well as in
the corridors of wealth in Mumbai and power in Delhi.
In Bargaining with a rising India, Amrita Narlikar and Aruna Narlikar argue that the epic is
a reliable source of insights into modern Indias negotiating behaviour, and especially useful
for understanding why foreign observers find India a difficult, arrogant and uncompromising interlocutor. Drawing on the negotiations literature, the authors outline two types
of negotiating behaviour: distributive and integrative. The first is a zero-sum approach,
marked by exaggerated accounts of ones needs and priorities, refusal to make concessions
and acceptance of only those agreements that are highly favourable to ones own side.
Integrative behaviour is characterized by a positive-sum attitude, a desire to identify shared
interests and seek common ground, willingness to make concessions and compromises and
accept outcomes that result in mutual gain.
Putting their knowledge of Sanskrit to good use, the authors then use episodes from the
Mahabharata to illustrate the two types of behaviour. An example of distributive behaviour
(pp. 435) is Duryodhanas rejection of his teacher Kripacharyas advice to make peace with
the Pandavas in the final stages of the war. Such a move, he is told, might even win him
the throne from the generous Pandavas. Not only is he sceptical that the Pandavas will be
forgiving given all their suffering at the hands of the Kauravas, his sense of honour also
forbids him from accepting such charity: death on the battlefield is preferable to death in
ones bed.
An example (pp. 578) of concessions (integrative behaviour) is seen in the bargains
struck between the mighty warrior Karna, from the Kaurava side, and the god Indra, the
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Book reviews
father of Arjuna, the most skilled warrior among the Pandava brothers. Known for his
legendary giving and out of his deep sense of honour, Karna cannot refuse Indras request
for his protective shield. He asks for Indras spear, a superweapon in return, and is given it
on the condition that it can only be used in the event of extreme danger to himself. The
Pandavas engineer a threat which forces Karna to use the spear against another enemy.
Without it and his own shield, he is slain by Arjuna. The lesson: concession ends in loss.
Overall, the authors find that the Mahabharata yields far more cases of distributive
behaviour. Integrative approaches such as compromises and concessions are not only rarer,
but often come with heavy cost. Their analysis also shows the importance of honour in
shaping negotiating positions. Moving to contemporary policy, the authors show how
these insights help us understand Indias negotiating behaviour in two areas: trade (such as
Indias role in blocking key agreements in the Doha Round) and nuclear non-proliferation
(its refusal to sign non-proliferation agreements). The authors warn that India is not the
sort of power that will be easily socialized (p. 118).
Aside from its valuable insights into Indias negotiating behaviour, this book is also a
major contribution to the study of International Relations, where there is a crying need
for theories and concepts derived from non-western cultures and context. The Mahabharata
may be semi-fictional, and its characters a mix of divine and human, but it carries plenty
of rational, moral and secular positions and arguments to qualify as a source of studying
contemporary strategy and diplomacy. The Greek historian Thucydides, otherwise known
for his scientific approach to history, made good use of epic poetry. Bargaining with a rising
India reminds one of Richard Ned Lebows A cultural theory of international relations (CUP,
2008, reviewed in International Affairs 85: 3) which develops a theory of conflict and cooperation out of the Greek idea of honour.
The book should be of considerable interest to India watchers around the world looking
for clues to how a rising India behaves in global negotiations on trade, climate change and
reform of international institutions. To be sure, understanding Indias negotiating behaviour requires one to take into account its material capabilities and national interest. But
culture and history also matter. Some in the Indian foreign and defence policy community
will take issue with the books portrayal of Indias controversial negotiating behaviour and
claim more successes than this book allows. But if this book starts a debate between alternative narratives and explanations of Indian diplomacy, it will have done a great service to the
countrys diplomats and foreign policy experts alike.
Amitav Acharya, American University, USA
The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a forgotten genocide. By Gary Bass. New
York: Alfred Knopf. 2013. 499pp. Index. Pb.: 12.99. isbn 978 0 30770 020 9.
1971: a global history of the creation of Bangladesh. By Srinath Raghavan.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2013. 358pp. Index. 19.51. isbn 978 0 67472
864 6.
On 10 December 1971, at the height of the war between India and Pakistan that ended with
the creation of Bangladesh, an inflamed President Nixon turned to his national security
adviser, Henry Kissinger, and shouted: I want a public relations program developed to piss
on the Indians. I want to piss on them for their responsibility. I want the Indians blamed for
this We cant let these goddamn sanctimonious Indians get away with this [war against
Pakistan].
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South Asia
This extraordinary outburst is one of many instances cited by Gary Bass in The Blood
telegram to call attention to Nixons use of foul language to make a presidential point (p.
287). But it also serves as a typical display of the visceral dislike of all things Indian, along
with a pathological attachment to Pakistan and its inebriated military dictator, General
Yahya Khan, which led Nixon to condone the massacre of thousands of Bengalis and ignore
one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern times.
Basss coruscating account of the United States complicity in endorsing Pakistans
murderous campaign in the countrys eastern province takes its title from an angry telegram
dispatched by Archer Blood, the US consul-general in Dhaka (now capital of Bangladesh),
just days after the brutal military crackdown. In his missive, Blood lambasted his political
masters in Washington for their moral bankruptcy and their failure to denounce what he
described as a selective genocide of Pakistans Bengali population by the countrys militaryled regime. His searing indictment was contemptuously dismissed by Nixon, who signalled
his emphatic support of Pakistan in the instruction: To all hands. Dont squeeze Yahya at this
time, making sure that the word Dont was underlined three times (pp. 11516).
But Nixons determination to back Yahyaa staunch American allyand to inflict
maximum punishment on the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, whom he disparagingly referred to as the old witch (p. 255), was only half the story. As important to his
calculations were changes in Cold War politics that announced the onset of Sino-Soviet
rivalry. It presented an opportunity that both Nixon and Kissinger were determined to
exploit. Their strategy was to open secret talks with China, in the hope both of gaining
an edge over the Soviet Union and winning Chinas help to end the war in Vietnam. Key
to this was Pakistan, whose close and longstanding relations with China made it an indispensable intermediarya role it clearly savoured. As Kissinger drily observed at the time:
Yahya hasnt had such fun since the last Hindu massacre (p. 177).
Drawing on thousands of hours of secret taped conversations between Nixon and
Kissinger at the White House, as well as eye-witness accounts in the United States, India
and Bangladesh, although not in Pakistan, Bass, a professor of politics at Princeton, brings
alive the ruthless pursuit of Americas Cold War strategy. What emerges is a hate-filled
agenda, directed especially against India, that suffused a policy of so-called realism. Its
destructive consequencesthe incalculable loss of lives and untold sufferinghave left
lasting scars in South Asia. While Bangladesh still struggles to overcome the trauma of its
birth in 1971, Pakistan and India have gone on to sharpen their rivalry: the one consumed
by the desire for revenge, the other bent on neutralizing the threat it had hoped to vanquish.
Today, the danger of a confrontation between these two nuclear-armed countries serves as
a stark reminder of a regional tragedy whose long-term global implications are yet to be
fully understood.
Srinath Raghavans finely grained study, 1971: a global history of the creation of Bangladesh,
takes an impressive first step in that direction. His concern is precisely to focus attention
on the creation of Bangladesh as a geopolitical rather than a regional event. In so doing,
he aims to demonstrate that, contrary to received judgement, there was nothing inevitable
about the breakup of Pakistan. Instead, he argues, Bangladesh was the outcome of a confluence of three contingent eventsdecolonization, the Cold War and globalizationwhich
interacted with one another and intersected with the South Asian crisis in ways that were
far from predictable (p. 265).
Raghavan writes fluently about the influence of these processes in shaping the direction
of the crisis and its final dnouement: Pakistans military defeat by India and the independence of Bangladesh. However, the flow of his narrative also suggests that some processes
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Book reviews
were more crucial than others. As Raghavan amply demonstrates, the dynamics of the Cold
War clearly exercised a decisive impact on the conduct not only of its main protagonists
the United States, the Soviet Union and Chinabut also on those allied, albeit unevenly,
to each of these protagonists. By contrast, his analysis of the effect of the student protests of
1968 on the crisis in South Asia is uneven. While these protests were undoubtedly responsible for raising consciousness of global issues, especially the war in Vietnam, it is less clear
how relevant they were to altering the course of events in Bangladesh, let alone in Pakistan,
where elite choices rather than popular preferences reigned (and still reign) supreme.
Where Raghavan is arguably at his most convincing is in the claim that the creation of
Bangladesh was far from a foregone conclusion. His appeal to eschew a teleological reading
of an immensely complex process is well made. It should be carefully considered in India
and Bangladesh, where the hollowness of Pakistans founding ideologythe two-nation
theoryand the absurd physical configuration of the state of Pakistan, have long been
assumed to spell the inevitable breakup of the country.
In Pakistan, which Raghavan appears not to have visited, the perspective on Bangladesh is more ambivalent. It is also less deterministic than we might be led to suppose. For
while many Pakistanis would accept that the denial of the democratic rights and the severe
economic disadvantages suffered by the Bengali majority over many years was a powerful
driver in favour of independence, there are as many who would insist that there was nothing
inevitable about the outcome. What made it seem so was Indias military intervention,
which closed all possibilities. In short, to continue with Jorge Luis Borgess metaphor of the
garden of forking paths invoked by Raghavan (p. 266), Pakistanis believe that India, having
wilfully destroyed the alternatives, left only one way, to the destruction of their country.
Farzana Shaikh, Chatham House, UK
East Asia and Pacific*

South Koreas rise: economic development, power, and foreign relations. By Uk
Heo and Terence Roehrig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. 18.99. isbn
978 1 10769 053 0. Available as e-book.
South Koreas rise from poverty to developed country status is well documented. Yet what
has been the impact of this economic transition on Seouls international relations? This, in
a nutshell, is the question that Uk Heo and Terence Roehrig set out to answer in this book.
The result is a theoretically informed, empirically rich and ultimately fascinating analysis
of the nexus between economics and foreign policy in this middle power with increasing
global clout.
Following the introduction, the book starts with a simple yet effective theoretical
framework which the authors then apply throughout their work. This framework links
economic development to a reassessment of a states national interests, a shift in bilateral
relations and a greater involvement in international affairs. These links are established
through different channels which are tantamount to political, societal and economic
openness, greater material strength and bigger public expectations. In short, foreign policy
is transformed due to domestic changes. How does this apply to the case of South Korea?
When studying South Korean international relations, most authors focus on interKorean relations, the US and South Koreas neighbours. Accordingly, Heo and Roehrig
*
Richard Hindmarsh, Nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi: social, political and environmental issues, pp. 14779.
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first analyse these three sets of relations. In the chapter on South Koreas foreign policy
towards North Korea, they argue that its economic success compared to its northern neighbour has prompted Seoul to make use of aid and trade as a policy tool to induce behavioural
change from Pyongyang. Successive South Korean presidents dating back to Kim Dae-jung
have seen economic engagement, whether unconditional or conditional, as a means to a
clear enda less threatening Pyongyang.
With regard to the US, economic development has brought a stronger military and a
new mindset towards the bilateral alliance between Seoul and Washington. South Koreas
growing military power has helped to strengthen the alliance, since Seoul has become
a valuable partner for Washington. Concurrently, however, economic development has
brought a desire for a more independent foreign policy among South Koreas population and elites, thus weakening the alliance with the United States. This dichotomy, it
transpires throughout the book, seems to be inherently linked to the disparate interests
pertaining to a more developed country that can afford to pursue goals beyond economic
development.
The analysis in the chapters on Russia and China and on Japan is also underpinned
by this dichotomy. The authors explain how an economically developed South Korea has
become a more valuable partner for its three neighbours. Links have therefore increased in
both number and scope. Nevertheless, Seoul has also become more assertive. In the case of
Russia and China, relations have significantly improved following the end of the Cold War.
Yet successive South Korean governments have been willing to assert their position when
they thought it necessary. With regard to Japan, the bilateral economic relationship has
ceased to be one-sided, thus bolstering Seouls position. Overall, historical and territorial
issues affect South Koreas relations with its neighbours.
A much welcomed contribution of this volume is the authors inclusion of chapters
on South Koreas relations with the EU, India, developing regions across the world and
international institutions. To begin with, Seoul has become an important economic partner
with countries and for institutions which previously gave little thought to South Korea.
Furthermore, the relationship has gone beyond trade and aid, now including areas such
as security or scientific cooperation. In this sense, it is clear that South Koreas economic
development has brought with it ideational and material changes that have fundamentally
shifted Seouls perception of its role in world affairs.
Some might think that the arguments presented by Heo and Roehrig with regard to
South Koreas international relations have been made elsewhere. Others might note that
the argument according to which economic development results in a more vibrant and
complex foreign policy is not new. Yet the authors provide a coherent, structured and wellresearched volume which offers a distinct contribution to these areas of study. The use of a
theoretical framework throughout the book is particularly effective in this regard. As such,
this book is poised to become a major contribution to discussions about South Koreas role
in international relations and as a middle power.
Ramon Pacheco Pardo, Kings College London, UK
Annual report on Chinas national security studies (2014). Edited by Hui Liu. Beijing:
Social Sciences Academic Press. 2014. 450pp. 98.00. isbn 9 787 50975 860 1.
The Annual report on Chinas national security studies (2014) is Chinas first national security
blue book, compiled by the Centre for International Strategy and Security Studies at the
University of International Relations. This collection of essays has six thematic sections and
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28 chapters, written by established Chinese scholars of international security and international relations.
There are many reasons for recommending this collection. The reader can expect wellcontextualized topics, good readability and informative content. Section one provides an
overview of Chinas national security in 2013 and gives an outline of what follows. Chapters
two to seven stress the security challenges facing China, including economic security,
energy security, social consciousness, ideology and counterterrorism. Section three focuses
on Chinas national security regime and law, and in the next section the contributors
analyse the trends of other Great Powers strategic adjustment and the dynamics of Chinas
strategic relations with these powers (especially the US and Japan). Section five updates
the international security environment for China, particularly the most essential regions
(Europe and South-East Asia), countries (Russia, Japan and India) and issue area (terrorism).
Finally, this collection presents an informative appendix, which covers the main academic
activities, events and writings on Chinas national security in 2013.
At least three important lessons can be drawn from this collection of essays: first, the
most fundamental security challenges facing China are traditional onesespecially when
it comes to the territorial and sovereign disputes with Chinas neighbours. The contributors
highlight that other Great Powers also have prioritized traditional security in their strategic
decision-making. In the case of the United States AsiaPacific rebalance, as Yongsheng
Tang and Dongwei Li argue, the most critical threats facing the United States are not
non-traditional security issues (e.g. terrorism), but traditional security risks associated with
rising powers (p. 178).
Second, it is increasingly impossible to ignore the dilemma between traditional security
and non-traditional security. On the one hand, the existing and ongoing areas of security
cooperation between China and other countries fall within the scope of non-traditional
security, as they do not concern power distribution among Great Powers. On the other
hand, there is still a lack of sustainable cooperation in the field of traditional security, which
concerns the core interests of stakeholders and the distribution of power. It is evident that
traditional security issues have consumed huge resources in Chinese diplomacy, made
things difficult for Chinas peaceful development, and are regarded as the most serious
challenges for Chinas maintaining national security (p. 10).
Third, with regard to the China National Security Council (CNSC), the body in charge
of national security decision-making, two critical issues should be urgently settled. In the
opinion of Yanying Bi, there is no consensus on future national security legislation. For
example, should China establish a macro framework of national security legislation, or
legislate on relevant laws one by one? Moreover, as the contributors suggest, the CNSC
should make full use of available resources, including existing executive bodies, and establish an inter-agency permanent institution to integrate them (p. 149).
No single work can cover all the issues, and the book in question is no exception. It
shows little concern for another important factor for Chinas national securitythe rise
of the private security industry. At present, there are hundreds of thousands of private
military and security contractors engaged in conflict-affected areas around the world. Many
of Chinas neighbours (notably Japan, India and Russia) have been gradually growing more
dependent on private military and security companies. The possibility that the private
security industry will become a new concern for Chinese national security should not
be dismissed. Will the China National Security Council be ready for the involvement of
foreign private military and security contractors in security hot spots? What is the current
status of the China-based private military and security companies? If the editors of this
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East Asia and Pacific

collection would take these questions into account, future volumes on Chinas national
security would be more comprehensive.
In short, the Annual report on Chinas national security studies (2014) provides many valuable
insights into Chinas national security environment and strategies, as well as Chinese
scholars thought-provoking views on the tensions and interconnections between China
and other countries. This collection should be of interest to academics, policy-makers and
analysts interested in Chinas security strategies and policies. It will not only appeal to
students and general readers who want to know more about Chinas national security, but
also deserves a place on the shelves of academic libraries around the world.
Kai Chen, Zhejiang University, China
Following the leader: ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. By David
M. Lampton. Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press. 2014. 312pp.
19.00. isbn 9 780 52028 121 9. Available as e-book.
Will China dominate the 21st century? By Jonathan Fenby. Cambridge, UK, and Molden,
MA: Polity Press. 2014. 139pp. Pb.: 9.99. isbn 978 0 74567 927 3. Available as e-book.
Understanding what is going on in China today requires an appreciation of the events of at
least the last few decades. David Lamptons Following the leader provides an excellent account
of a range of issues from Deng Xiaopings emergence as the dominant political leader in
China, which Lampton dates to July 1977, to 2013, shortly after Xi Jinping took the helm
at the top of the Chinese Communist Party.
The particular feature of this book is its strong coverage of the views and thinking of
Chinas leaders and wider policy elites. It is based substantially on Lamptons own interviews and participation in high-level meetings in China over the past 40 years. This gives
the book depth and colour and provides a nice set of pithy quotes, such as this in 2005, from
the director general of a ministry in Beijing: The expectations of the Chinese people are
rising much faster than the capabilities of the nation. This is a big problem we have to pay
attention to (p. 139).
The book is far from simply anecdotal, however. More broadly, the story is one of
progress over 35 years following reforms initiated by Deng, with a growing institutionalization and pluralization of Chinese politics, themes of Lamptons previous work. Chinas
leaders, concludes Lampton, are cautious and mainly concerned with domestic social and
economic issues, with their interest in global issues being primarily to understand what
impact the world has on China. Lampton also argues that leaders have become weaker
during the periodthis certainly resonates with analysis of the differences between Deng
and his two (post-1989) successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, though the early indications
are that Xi Jinpings tenure will challenge this judgement.
Lampton brings two typologies to bear on his analysis of leadership, that of James
MacGregor Burns, which characterizes leadership goals as transformational, transactional
and power wielder; and a Weberian typology of authority as traditional, charismatic and
legalrational. This provides useful material for teaching purposes, and should serve as a
corrective to oft-heard, but lazy, analysis which reduces Chinese leadership motivations to
a desire to stay in power. It also makes clear that Chinese leaders are not grey bureaucrats,
however they might often be portrayed this way to western audiences.
There is also an insightful chapter on Chinese approaches to negotiation, which ought
to be read widely, and good coverage of Chinas foreign and security policy, on which
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Lampton has written extensively. However, given the books focus on leadership, it would
have been good to see more treatment of official corruption as an apparently systemic
feature of elite Chinese politics. In general, readers of Lamptons previous work will find
more that is new in the anecdotes than the arguments, though overall this is a very informative and readable volume.
It is also far from being an account of a rising power on the verge of global hegemony.
Indeed, there are relatively few serious books that see China inevitably ascending to global
dominance. Early on in his essay on whether China will dominate the 21st century, Jonathan
Fenby cites one of the most famous bullish accounts of Chinas rise, Martin Jacquess 2009
book, When China rules the world (Penguin Press, 2009; reviewed in International Affairs 85:
6) (p. 13). Fenbys stance is the opposite: his goal is to highlight the limits to Chinas power,
which he does by marshalling a good range of evidence on the challenges the country
faces in politics, economics, diplomacy and the environment. The chapter on economics is
particularly comprehensive and clear.
The challenge with this sort of essay is to provide enough historical depth to give the
book a reasonable shelf life. Events in China have already moved on in a number of areas,
including the anti-corruption campaign which Fenby refers to briefly, but somewhat
inconclusively, in several chapters. The book would also benefit from citing more sources.
In particular, the accounts of the fall of Politburo member Bo Xilai and other elite political
tussles in 2012 are given as accepted fact (pp. 38ff ), when the reality is that there is little more
to go on than media reports and rumour.
It is also strange to ask How can China be a Communist state and say that it is time
to re-think the regimes political ideology and its application as the PRC [Peoples Republic
of China] moves into the fifth generation of Communist rule (p. 29), several decades after
the Communist Party itself moved its guiding ideological tenets away from anything
vaguely resembling communism. There are minor inaccuracies on a few points of detail
for example the European Union has never had 26 members (p. 112), former Shanghai
Party Secretary Chen Liangyu was removed from his post in 2006 not 2007 (p. 40), and it
was academics from Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, not Chengdu
University, who produced a 2010 estimate that Chinas Gini coefficient for income had
reached 0.61 (p. 49). These niggles aside, this is a very readable and plausible take on why
China will not dominate the twenty-first century.
Tim Summers, Chatham House, UK
North America*
US foreign policy and the Iranian Revolution: the Cold War dynamics of engagement and strategic alliance. By Christian Emery. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013.
267pp. 55.00. isbn 978 1 13732 986 8. Available as e-book.
The British scholar Christian Amery, lecturer at the University of Plymouth, has produced a
dispassionate, scholarly and balanced account of a very difficult episode in American foreign
policy. The events he describes still cast a shadow over US diplomacy. One has only to
follow debates in Washington, where Iran experts grow faster than poison ivy in the summer
humidity, to see, 35 years after the events, how much passion the subject still provokes.
*
See also Christoph Bluth, US foreign policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: politics, energy and security, pp. 14889,
and Abbas Maleki and John Tirman, eds, U.S.Iran misperceptions: a dialogue, pp. 14912.
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North America
The arguments range from Its all our [i.e. Americas] fault to Iran is the embodiment
of all that is evil (or malign in that usage favoured by US Central Command officials).
Emery does a great service by stepping back from the polemics and bringing his consi
derable gifts for clarity and analysis to the question. He shows us that there is plenty of
blame to go around on both sides. His cast of characters includes politicians infected with
short-sightedness, opportunism and obsessions. It also includes people who sought to do
the right thing and struggled to make sense out of events they did not understand.
Emery, better than many analysts, understands the weight of history. In 1978 and 1979,
as Iran rapidly fell into revolutionary chaos, decisions made decades earlier, for better
or worse, constrained Washington policy-makers who could not or would not question
assumptions or inherited conventional wisdom. Two sets of assumptions weighed particularly hard on American policy-makers. According to one, as Emery points out, the
Iranians were an inferior species of human being whose intrinsic personality faults made
them suitable only to be subjects of a dictator. He quotes US Ambassador Julius Holmes,
writing in 1961: The most likely and probably the most suitable form of government for
this country is one where the people are firmly and resolutely guided by a central authority
not subject to the daily whims of representatives of the disunited highly individualistic and
uncooperative people of this nation (p. 20).
The second assumption was that every rational Iranian would see his countrys interests
the same way as American policy-makersthrough economic and Cold War lenses. Particularly in the events of 1978 and 1979, this assumption led officials in Washington to believe
that the revolutionary authorities in Tehran would, sooner or later, abandon their utopian
fantasies and come to see realitywhatever that was. Emery writes: Many policy-makers
hoped Irans ideological and revolutionary zeal would be tempered by geopolitical realities
and its leaders would conform to the version of realism understood by US decisionmakers. It was an approach that implicitly imposed Americas view of Irans needs. When
Irans leaders did not conform to these expectations, they were relegated to residual cognitive categories such as irrational (p. 8).
Emery paints a picture of an American operations floundering both before and after the
revolution. From the point of view of someone who was serving in Tehran in August
October of 1979, however, he understates the incoherence. For example, he notes how a
defence attach decided that visasfor which there was a huge demand from middle-class
Iranianswould be given only to those who provided useful intelligence to US officials
(p. 133).
Things were worse than that. At the same time, the embassys senior consular official
ignored instructions from Washington to use the Beirut formula and ease the standards
for middle-class Iranians who under normal circumstances would be good visa cases.
That officer unilaterally imposed the same strict standards that might operate in Jamaica or
the Dominican Republic. In response, some of us in the embassy political section ignored
both the defence attach and the consular official, andunder the pretext of helping our
overworked consular colleaguesissued as many visas as we could to desperate applicants.
The question remains: given the circumstances, could events have turned out any
different? Perhaps not, given the fury, fratricide and thirst for revenge that prevailed in
Tehran. In the summer of 1979, no one there was in any mood for truth and reconciliation.
Emery gives the question a fair look, but understands well that the chances of the US and
Iran establishing any kind of relationship in 1979 were remote indeed.
There is a missing piece in the story: how did the Iranians see events of the time? Emery
gives us a superb account of the personality clashes, conflicting ambition and misreadings
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Book reviews
that tied Washington in knots. What we now need is an equally perceptive and balanced
account from the Iranian side.
John Limbert, United States Naval Academy, USA
A war that cant be won: binational perspectives on the war on drugs. Edited by
Tony Payan, Kathleen Staudt and Z. Anthony Kruszewski. Tucson, AZ: University of
Arizona Press. 2013. 336pp. Index. Pb.: 23.78. isbn 9 780 81653 034 2. Available as e-book.
Two nations indivisible: Mexico, the United States, and the road ahead. By Shannon
ONeil. New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. 264pp. 16.00. isbn 9 780 19989 833 6.
Why walls wont work: repairing the USMexico divide. By Michael Dear. New York:
Oxford University Press. 2013. 288pp. 18.99. isbn 9 780 19989 798 8. Available as e-book.
USMexico relations are as deep and complex as any bilateral relationship in the world, and
three recent books draw out the nuances and texture of their daily reality in contrasting,
and sometimes surprising, ways. The books also trace the development of recent international narrative about Mexico, from an obsession with drugs, violence and the rule of law
of a few years ago, to the extraordinary sense of hope and expectation that dominates the
conversation today. All three of these very different books are linked by the overwhelming
weight of the interdependence between the United States and Mexico, but it is the particular spotlight that each shines on that interdependence which distinguishes the three.
A war that cant be won, an edited volume assembled by Tony Payan, Kathleen Staudt and
Z. Anthony Kruszewski, focuses on the herculean challenge facing the Mexican government as it attempts to take on organized crime, reduce violence levels and re-establish the
rule of law over large swathes of national territory. The collection of essays written by both
Mexican and US-based authors approaches the problem of organized crime and violence in
Mexico from a multidimensional perspective, seeking to understand not only the domestic
causes and shared responsibility with the US for the violence, how both Mexican and US
responses have exacerbated violence, without getting us significantly closer to a solution.
Chapters by Benitez and Moloeznik both refer to the drug violence as the highest threat
to Mexicos national security and the Calderon administrations strategy is subjected to a
damning, albeit fair, critique. Direct confrontation with organized crime, they argue, at
least using the methods employed by the 20062012 Mexican government, has failed.
Despite the rather pessimistic bias of the books title, it is not without hope. A full third
of the book is devoted to ending the war and, while the chapter by Caulkins and Sevigny
casts doubt on whether decriminalization or legalization of prohibited drugs in the US
would have a major impact on drug trafficking organizations, others address the need to
seek Mexican alternatives to the status quo. The role of civil society in the public security
morass is not ignored here: the chapter by Daniel Sabet addresses the importance of civilian
engagement with the security forces to develop a more effective and holistic response to
crime and violence, while Correa Cabrera and Nava examine the impact of drug-related
violence on the media and the freedom of expression. This latter chapter highlights one of
the multiple ways in which Mexican society has adapted and responded to the threat posed
by organized crime, while lamenting the structural nature of the self-imposed censorship
on media representatives (p. 111).
Shannon ONeils Two nations indivisible does not shy away from the violence that has
plagued Mexico over the past decade, but it is not the main feature of her book on the unique
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Latin America and Caribbean

relationship between the country and its northern neighbour. As the books title suggests,
ONeils take on the bilateral relationship is of an ever closer union, and the clear mixture
of domestic and foreign policies that mark the partnership is made abundantly clear. While
the book has come in for criticism in Mexico for painting too rosy a glow on the countrys
economic trajectory, particularly given its recent disappointing economic growth record,
ONeils strident thesis that the North American Free Trade Agreement partners economic
futures are so inextricably linked as to be best viewed as one, is supported by her careful
treatment of the interdependence of their economic models and the efficiency-driven nature
of integrated production systems that cross the border. This unique feature of the regional
economic space, in which the competitiveness of one country actually lifts that of its neighbour, runs against the grain of contemporary rhetoric against free trade and North American
integration, in which zero-sum conclusions miss the real, more complicated story, and in
particular overlook the benefits of integration with Americas neighbor (p. 115).
One of the central challenges highlighted by ONeil is the inefficiency and structural
weaknesses of the border, a line that still manages to divide the indivisible partners. Long
delays, crumbling infrastructure and antiquated procedures plague the lives and economic
fortunes of those who live there or who cross the border on a regular basis. The need
to fix the border while prioritizing both security and efficiency has become increasingly
apparent in the last two years, and we are finally seeing investment in border crossings and
technology that will hopefully turn the line in the sand into a more seamless, yet secure,
connection between the two nations.
The unique nature of the border is the focus of a third book on the USMexico relationship, Why walls wont work by Michael Dear. This excellent treatment of the third nation
that exists at the intersection of the two countries is an invaluable contribution to our
understanding of the importance, vitality and complexity of the border region. Dears
historical and anthropological approach to the borderlands is crucially important, as he
establishes the entirely false nature of the border itself, a line that divides communities,
economies and ecosystems that have been united for millennia. Fortress USA, as Dear
describes the US attempts to protect itself from a wave of undocumented migration from
the south, has only resulted in the interruption of the economic vitality and daily life of
the border region. In this way, Americas policy-makers have sought to benefit from the
burdens borne and sacrifices made by a sub-set of its inhabitants (p. 125). For this reason
alone, the book should be compulsory reading for any legislator involved in discussions
over border security and infrastructure.
Duncan Wood, Wilson Center, USA

Security in South America: the role of states and regional organizations. By Rodrigo
Tavares. Boulder, CO: First Forum Press. 2014. 292pp. Index. 55.95. isbn 9 781 93504
992 0.
Although often wracked by internal political instability, the relative absence of inter-state
wars in South America since the late nineteenth century has led some writers, notably Arie
M. Kacowicz, to designate the area as a zone of peace, a concept that has gladly found
its way into the public declarations of the regions leaders. Recently, David R. Mares in
Latin America and the illusion of peace (Routledge, 2012), with a broader geographical remit,
challenged this perspective by enumerating the various outstanding territorial conflicts and
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Book reviews
by warning of the inherent dangers of rapid militarization. Rodrigo Tavares tenders an
equally pessimistic reading of the security challenges that have faced and will continue to
confront contemporary South America.
The author first lays out the profound changes in South Americathe end of military
rule; the decline of US regional involvement; the internationalization of the drugs issue;
the new role played by regional organizations; and the re-conceptualization of the meaning
of securitythat frame the post-Cold War landscape, and the factors that exacerbate or
act as deterrents to conflict. In addition to the continued existence of an abundance of
territorial disputes and destabilizing intrastate conflicts, there are a number of enduring
non-traditional human security issues, such as high levels of crime, the proliferation of illicit
drugs, the illegal trade in small arms, environmental threats and even Islamic terrorism,
which now demand attention. Tavares carefully analyses how the leading countries of South
America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela) have in turn tackled these two
types of issues; the exclusion of Peru, a middle-range power, from this grouping seems
somewhat anomalous given that the country has faced two ongoing insurgencies as well
as longstanding border disputes to the north and south. The myriad territorial problems
that have confronted the minor state actors (including a relegated Peru) are amply covered
in these and later chapters, since they were often of concern to their larger neighbours.
The weakness of the state in most countries (Argentina and Chile being the exceptions) is
held to account for the patent inability of governments to ensure personal security. The
analysis then expands to consider the role of specific regional organizations, for instance
the Andean Community, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Union of
South American Nationsthe legal instruments at their disposal in the security field, their
organizational capacity and their operational experience. These bodies are all found to be
wanting for a variety of reasons; their many initiatives have not led to the necessary institutionalization of a common normative framework or to coordinated action (p. 263). The
OAS, the longest-established institution, is unsurprisingly considered to be the most effective body in the field of conflict resolution.
This reviewer felt that the author gives too little credit to the seemingly definitive
resolution in the 1980s and 1990s of a number of historical antagonismsbetween Argentina and Brazil, Argentina and Chile, and Ecuador and Peruwhich represents a considerable achievement on a par with the postwar reconciliation of France and West Germany.
The question of what actually constitutes an armed conflict is also moot: inclusion in this
category of the toppling of the Stroessner regime in Paraguay in 1989, the Caracazo riots
in Venezuela in the same year, and militarypolice operations in Rios favelas in 2010 relies
on an expansive definition of the term; and the short duration of the events concerned fails
to elevate them to the level of the ongoing rural insurgencies in Colombia and Peru or even
the clashes in eastern Bolivia in 2008. A few of the cited issues appear a little overrated: the
1990 coup in Suriname was in fact a coup de tlphone, quite unlike the militarys previous
intervention in 1980; the threat of Islamic terrorism in the Tri-Border area between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay and Iquique in Chile is concerned principally with fundraising for
Hezbollah in Lebanon, the 1992 and 1994 bombings against Jewish targets in Buenos Aires
being the only local acts of terrorism; and the disputes between Argentina and Uruguay
have been comparatively low key. The author makes a couple of misleading statements that
may confuse the non-specialist reader: the 2009 ceremony attended by Cristina Fernndez
de Kirchner did not put an end to the Chaco War (p. 43), but rather it marked an agreement
on frontier delimitation that had been outstanding since the 19325 war; and the claim that
in Argentina no change of government has been achieved by force of arms since 1861
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(p. 58) ignores the spate of military coups since 1930, a coup being defined by the author as a
violent challenge to the state (p. 259). Finally, Tavares tends to downplay the recent trend
towards the resolution of border disputes, the 2009 BoliviaParaguay settlement and the
2014 International Court of Justice ruling on the ChilePeru maritime boundary dispute
being prime examples.
More generally, it has to be said that the work is marred, to the point of distraction,
by a surfeit of typographical errors, including misspelled words, misplaced apostrophes,
erratic use of the requisite accents, and variance in the rendition of proper names and the
dates of specific events. There is some inconsistency in the use of the present and past
tense: the discussion of Lula da Silvas policies, for example, gives the impression that he
is still in office. The reader has to contend, too, with the authors occasionally slightly
flawed English. At just three pages, the index is wholly inadequate; for instance, there are
no entries for either Guyana or Carlos Andrs Prez. The bibliography, while comprehensive, has the book by Waiselfisz placed between Snchez and Sanjun (p. 284) and omits
entirely the oft-quoted 2010 work by Andrs Malamud. These are all areas, needless to say,
where diligent copy-editing would have made the difference; a singular lapse on the part
of this esteemed publisher.
This would have been a better book had the quality of its presentation matched the
overall quality of its analysis. It is wide ranging, well organized, forcefully argued and
commendably up to date.
Philip Chrimes
18 dias: quando Lula e FHC se uniram para conquistar o apoio de Bush. By Matias
Spektor. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva. 2014. 288pp. Pb.: R$36.90. isbn 9 788 53900 581 9. [18
days: when Lula and the FHC teamed up to win the support of Bush]
Matias Spektor is one of the brightest names in the Brazilian International Relations
academe. His last two booksKissinger e o Brasil (Zahar, 2009) and Azeredo da Silveira: Um
depoimento (FGV, 2010)were widely acclaimed by critics as near-perfect combinations of
politics and history in the study of foreign policy and international relations.
Spektors latest book, 18 dias, is built on in-depth interviews with high-level politicians
and diplomats in Braslia and Washington, testimonies from advisers and staff, agendas
and notebooks. His research achieves a high level of detail from the treatment of personal
diaries as fundamental archival sources, allowing the author to understand and map the
ideas and interests of all actors. This empirical richness is complemented by a broad theoretical review of developments in Brazilian foreign policy literature over the last 60 years.
Spektors argument is that an inter-government task force combining the incoming Luiz
Incio Lula da Silvas team and the outgoing Fernando Henrique Cardosos (FHC) team
was formed to work behind the scenes to persuade George W. Bush to support Brazils
presidential transition in 2002. With USBrazil relations seen as being crucial for economic
stability, both presidents collaborated on two fronts. First came the careful management of
frayed ties between the Brazilian Social Democracy Party and the White House. The second
goal was to introduce Lulas emissaries to Washington and create bridges that allowed the
Workers Party (PT) access to centres of influence in the US capital.
The book is particularly important because it sheds considerable light on how Cardoso
and Lula managed the first transfer of power from one directly elected president to another
in Brazil. As Spektor points out, the transition was particularly fraught in the eyes of
US policy-makers who not only instinctively distrusted the leftist PT and Lula, but also
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Book reviews
had doubts as to whether the new government was serious about meeting all the agreements listed in Lulas pre-election manifesto, Carta ao povo Brasileiro (Letter to the Brazilian
people). The mission undertaken by the joint CardosoLula team was to convince officials
in Washington that these concerns were misplaced. Completing this task proved complicated and involved not only managing relations in Washington, but also taming combative
elements in their respective party bases, as well as defusing direct attacks in the Brazilian
and international media.
According to Spektor, the critical goal for Brazil was to gain the confidence of President
George W. Bush and to reverse the cold bilateral relations that had marked the last two
years of Cardosos time in office. Related to this was the need to allay Wall Streets fears of
the new quasi-former socialist Lula government. For his part, Bush was simultaneously
looking to prevent Latin America from becoming a problem in need of management and
also to soothe jittery Wall Street nerves.
White House perceptions of Brazil changed due to the combined efforts of Cardoso and
Lula. Notably, Brazil moved from being viewed within the US National Security Doctrine
as a big peripheral country to being seen as an emerging power that should be listened to
more and more due to its democratic stability and demonstrated market-friendly credentials.
To develop his narrative, Spektor finds commonality in the Cardoso and Lula foreign
policy positions and draws on established Brazilian foreign policy thinking to demonstrate
that Brazilian governments have generally followed an autonomist strategy since at least
the Second Empire. The challenge for the autonomists was how Cardoso and Lula could
create leeway for freedom of action by Brazil, a peripheral country. Embedded within this
argument is the aim of sharing the constituent values and beliefs of a Brazilian civilization
with the rest of the world. Here the argument is linked with the concepts of multiracial miscegenation and religious tolerance that make up a positive multi-ethnic and pacific
country. The remarkable aspect of the literature review in this book is the subtlety with
which Spektor demonstrates that there is no other strategy in Brazilian foreign policy.
Spektors book is a masterful account of what will emerge as a critical inflection point
not only in Brazilian foreign policy, but also in the countrys process of economic and
political stabilization and growth. The book is written with such literary skill that one
might go so far as to describe it as a thrilleras Spektor moves the focus between Braslia,
Washington, embassies and testimonies, it is almost possible to hear Bush talking to Lula
about the future of Brazil.
What is undeniable is that Spektor is a step ahead of his peers in the analysis of Brazilian
foreign policy and is leading the way to a deeper, richer, insightful and accessible scholarship on Brazils rising role in the region and the world.
Fabrcio H. Chagas Bastos, Grande Dourados Federal University/University of So Paulo, Brazil
The Vatican and Catholic activism in Mexico and Chile: the politics of transnational
Catholicism, 19201940. By Stephen J. C. Andes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2014. 272pp. Index. 60.00. isbn 978 0 19968 848 7.
This work is one of the first fruits of the decision by Pope John Paul II in 2002, fully realized
in 2006 under his successor, to open the Vatican archives on the pontificate of Pope Pius
XI (192239). The bulk of the ensuing scholarly output thus far has focused on Europe,
in particular on the relationship between the Holy See and Fascist Italy, which encompassed the resolution of the seemingly perennial Roman Question with the signature of
the Lateran accords in 1929, an issue that had dominated Vatican diplomacy since 1870. The
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06/11/2014 11:38:35

same period witnessed considerable Churchstate tension in Latin America over the role of
the Catholic Church in a modernizing and increasingly secular society. For want of access
to Vatican archives, this has been generally treated by historians of Latin America as a series
of more or less hermetic internal conflicts, as evidenced by the extensive literature on the
19269 Cristero rebellion in post-revolutionary Mexico, in which only the United States
has been considered as a significant external actor. The singular merit of Stephen Andess
study, based closely on his exemplary doctoral dissertation, is that it illuminates the hitherto
obscure relationship between Rome and not just the Church hierarchy but also lay activist
groups in Mexico and Chile, which in some instances obdurately attempted to pursue their
own course to the detriment of the Vaticans broader interests.
The study concentrates on these two countries, not only on account of the obvious
impracticality of one researcher attempting alone to consult a multiplicity of national
archives across a vast region, but also because Catholic militancy in Mexico and political
Catholicism in Chile in the 1920s and 1930s ran directly counter to Vatican policyshaped
by its more immediate experience in Europewhich had come to favour pragmatic compromise with the state through diplomatic means, free from the interference of lay activists,
and the avoidance of Church involvement in domestic politics. In Mexico, the Vatican
therefore discouraged the militant Unin de Catlicos Mexicanos because Rome held high
hopes of an agreement with the government of lvaro Obregn (192024) since the latter
did not strictly enforce the religious articles of the 1917 constitution; and it later disavowed
the Cristeros once it became obvious that armed rebellion would never succeed in toppling
the anti-clerical government of Plutarco Elas Calles (19248) and its successor, in order to
facilitate an albeit fragile compromise in 1929 that narrowly protected Church interests. In
Chile, the Holy See questioned the continuing utility of a longstanding alliance between
the Chilean episcopacy and the Partido Conservador, a bastion of privilege at variance with
the Churchs social teaching and unlikely to garner any support from urban workers. In
contrast to Mexico, the separation of Church and state in 1925 was accomplished by mutual
consent and anti-clericalism was much more muted. The emergence in Chile in the 1930s of
an alternative social Christian political party, which eventuated in the Partido Demcrata
Cristiano, was the ideal solution for the Vatican as it detached Church-controlled organizations from party politics, thus making the interests of the Church less vulnerable to changes
in the political wind. Such Churchparty separation had been obviated earlier in the case of
Mexico by the constitutional ban on confessional parties. More generally, the author shows
how Rome in 1931 produced its own institutional model of Catholic activism in the form of
Catholic Action; then, as now, centralized control was the prescribed norm.
The preceding synopsis does scant justice to the richness of the argument and the
amount of evidence marshalled to support it. Although bounded by the chronological
parameters of Pius XIs pontificate, the author excels in the amount of background information that he provides the reader on the nature of Vatican diplomacy and on the papal
project to promote a Catholic alternative to revolution, articulated in Pope Leo XIIIs 1891
encyclical Rerum novarum and Piuss own Quadragesimo anno (1931). He carefully analyses the
varied activist groups in each country and their often strained relationship with the Church
hierarchy and the specific role played by a host of religious figures, fleshing out the existing
state of knowledge in this area. Andes adds a new dimension to the substantial body of
writing on the Cristiada and his account of Churchstate relations in the 1930s makes an
original contribution to an underdeveloped field. On the critical side, he occasionally
gets bogged down in minor details in his fulsome discussion of Catholic social activism
at the grassroots level. For the benefit of non-country specialists, he might conversely
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06/11/2014 11:38:35
Book reviews
have proffered more detail on the political situation in Mexico and Chile in this published
version of his dissertation.
Stephen Andess highly insightful book draws attention to the influence wielded outside
Europe by an institution that has largely operated under the radar; it is an important
addition to the growing body of archival-based work on the modern papacy.
Philip Chrimes
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