International Relations theory

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Book reviews

International Relations theory The social in the global: social theory, governmentality and global politics. By Jonathan Joseph. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. 302pp. Index. £99.00. isbn 978 1 10702 290 4. Available as e-book. This book offers a strong critique of contemporary constructions of ‘globalization’ and ‘global governance’ by harnessing together into one consistent thesis Foucault’s work on governmentality, Gramsci’s work on hegemony and a Marxist reading of neo-liberalism. In this respect the book is an important, if not invaluable, contribution to critical understandings of both global politics and the theorization of global politics. Clear, well written and with careful ‘case-studies’ on the modes of governance of the European Union and the World Bank, the book is also a very good read (which is a strong virtue in this particular field of IR theorizing). Jonathan Joseph’s thesis comes, for this reviewer, in two complementary parts. On the one hand, the book aims to place the Foucaultian concept of ‘governmentality’ in the social and historical context of the emergence of ‘neo-liberalism’. The concept—overextended for the author in general analyses of ‘modernity’—is thereby limited to a specific social form of rationality (the neo-liberal era of global capitalism) and understood in terms of the socio-economic conditions that make it possible (the breakdown of the postwar settlement). From this perspective, governmentality is specifically considered a set of national, regional and international rules and procedures by which states, led by the United States, promote markets, individual responsibility and the ‘freedom of the governed’ (p. 25). On the other hand, the book aims to show how recent concepts of social theory—starting with the notion of ‘globalization’ itself and including interrelated concepts like ‘global governance’, ‘network society’, ‘risk’, ‘reflexivity’, ‘social capital’ and ‘global civil society’—can only be critically understood within the historical and social terms of the end of the postwar settlement. Untied from this context, they reify social process and ‘legitimate’ the very governmentality, together with its socio-economic conditions, that they wish to analyse (pp. 56−7). One of the strongest claims of the book’s particular harnessing of Foucault and historical materialism is that this lack of analysis has produced ‘ideologies of the surface’ not only in post-modernism but in theories of the global in general. In this context Joseph is particularly critical of the social theories of Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, David Held, Scott Lash and Jan Aart Scholte. These two complementary parts of the book come together in a persistent set of arguments that structure the book’s polemical intellectual trajectory. Globalization is not an ‘irreversible’ given (pp. 68−9); nor are there no alternatives to its imperatives (state self-limitation, individual choice and de-politicization). Since recent social theory has not kept together its analyses of the political, the social and the economic, it has been unable to show the socio-economic limits of contemporary forms of g­ overnmentality. For the International Affairs 89: 4 (2013) 1019–1084 © 2013 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2013 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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Book reviews author, it is these limits that offer the conditions of re-theorizing and re-practising ‘social transformation’ in both developed and developing countries (p. 268). The last section of the book offers a careful exposition of these ideas in the context of the European Union and the World Bank (post-Washington Consensus). Given his theoretical framework, Joseph can argue persuasively that, whereas the European Union has been able to practise governmentality due to the settling of liberal socio-economic conditions throughout the Union, the World Bank’s imposition of liberal techniques of governmentality on non-western countries promotes local elitism for lack of liberal civil society. The post-Washington Consensus re-inflection of these techniques in terms of ‘ownership’ does not shift, therefore, the neo-liberal purpose of open markets and capital accumulation. This book expounds a strong critical position on globalization and global governance theories, bringing into the field of International Relations an important reflection on the empty relations pertaining between the ‘social’ and the ‘global’. Despite its methodological sophistication, the book does nevertheless risk replacing the technological determinism of recent social theory (globalization as a technical fact) by economic determinism. The regulation of state behaviour (from within and from without) is always geared to market growth, less the welfare of a state’s population. This is indeed a major argument of the book, distinguishing it from Foucaultian-inspired biopolitical studies. The economic inflection is well taken. It is at the risk, however, of its own reductionism, and at the evident cost of any normative reflection on practices of state accountability. Richard Beardsworth, Aberystwyth University, UK Power, Realism and constructivism. By Stefano Guzzini. London: Routledge. 2013. 360pp. Index. £85.00. isbn 978 0 41564 046 6. This book is a compilation of Stefano Guzzini’s work on power, Realism and constructivism over the past two decades. It is framed by a new introduction written for the volume, but the rest of the material is reprinted. It provides both a good overview and a good survey of Guzzini’s work on these topics. It is in part a greatest hits volume, and his hits are in fact great. But it also includes some lesser-known works, including conference papers that have not appeared in journals, so there is material in the volume even for Guzzini fans who are already familiar with the greatest hits. The central focus of Guzzini’s work over the course of his career has been the study of power in international relations in all its complexity. He began, both temporally and analytically, with political Realism, but found that it did not give us adequate conceptual tools for the task. Constructivism can give us many of these conceptual tools, but only if it is done reflexively, taking into account the power effects of given conceptualizations of power. Power has many meanings and many facets, and he argues that mere categorizations of forms of power are analytically inadequate. Rather, we need to think in terms of their interactions, even though these are necessarily more contingent than categorizations or positivist power analyses. The book is structured around the three themes of power, Realism and constructivism, even though the themes are intertwined within individual chapters. Each theme has five chapters devoted to it, led by his best-known publications on the topic. Three of the chapters on each theme are topical, and two are devoted to studies of the work of individual scholars. These range from social theorists such as Niklas Luhmann and Pierre Bourdieu, to disciplinary International Relations scholars, Robert Gilpin and Susan Strange in the Realist camp and Alexander Wendt and Fritz Kratochwil in the constructivist.

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International organization, law and ethics Bookending these parallel sections on power, Realism and constructivism are an introduction that provides both some autobiographical framing and an overview of Guzzini’s thinking on power, and a concluding chapter that makes the case for teaching theory to International Relations students, even at the introductory level (the former is new for this volume, the latter is not). The concluding chapter is an outlier in the volume, but one that I found to be useful in organizing my own thoughts about how and why I teach theory. In creating a volume such as this, the author/editor needs to make a set of decisions about how to organize and present the material. The decisions to organize the material topically, to include both better- and lesser-known writings, and to keep individual chapters in their original form rather than editing and adding to them for the volume have both pros and cons. The inclusion of a range of materials, including lesser-known writings and the six chapters analysing the thoughts of other individuals, shows us the breadth of Guzzini’s thinking, and the ways in which the various themes interconnect. This organization makes it easy to follow themes, but harder to follow the temporal progression of Guzzini’s thought. The decision to leave the individual chapters in their original forms introduces some redundancy, not necessarily a bad thing considering the complexity of his arguments. It can also be a little frustrating—it left me wondering what he thinks about all of these arguments now. The introductory chapter attempts to answer this question somewhat, but not in much depth. The chapters on individual thinkers are particularly thought-provoking. Guzzini argues that these chapters are useful in the context of his analysis of power because specific arguments are made in the context of ‘certain cognitive interests’, and ‘focusing on the research agendas of individual scholars is a good way to get at [those interests]’ (p. 12). These chapters do not really cumulate, nor contribute to a broader theory of power (nor does he claim that they do). They are, however, excellent examples of the close reading of theoretical texts in the context of International Relations theory, and are therefore not only interesting and informative, but also pedagogically useful. In a way, this volume is a missed opportunity for Guzzini to revisit his thoughts on the subjects of power, Realism and constructivism, as much as two decades after they were originally put on paper. Yet the thoughts themselves stand the test of time well. The volume is a great overview of his thinking, and necessary reading for anyone interested in any of the three themes, let alone their intersection. Samuel Barkin, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

International organization, law and ethics* The law of targeting. By William H. Boothby. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. 582pp. Index. £95.00. isbn 978 0 19969 661 1. This valuable textbook, the latest product of a former British air force lawyer, sets out the international law regulating the conduct of hostilities—international humanitarian law (IHL)—as it applies to ‘targeting’. The author explains that it has been ‘deliberately written to be of interest and of relevance to universities, armed forces, Ministries of Defence, Foreign Ministries, military training and staff colleges, doctrine centres, think tanks, the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross], NGOs, and the specialist media’ (p. xiii). Even those without a primary interest in the law, in particular the media (specialist or not), should benefit from spending a little time with this careful study before pronouncing * See also Alex J. Bellamy, Massacres and morality: mass atrocities in an age of civilian immunity, pp. 1029–30.

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Book reviews on the rights and wrongs of, for instance, drone (UAV) warfare. No prior knowledge of the law is assumed (for instance of the law of treaties, or the nature of customary international law, ‘that mysterious phenomenon’ as it has been called). The book’s structure is clear and logical; each chapter ends with a valuable summary; there is a good index. Boothby quotes an official American definition of targeting (his own is fuller and more elegant): ‘The process to detect, select, and prioritize targets; match the appropriate action; and assess the appropriate effects based on the commander’s objective, guidance, and intent’ (p. 4). Two features of this definition should be noted. First, it emphasizes process, from the origins to the consequences of the action in question; and second, it brings out Boothby’s claim: ‘It will … generally be in the strategic interests of a State whose armed forces are involved in a conflict that its use of force is seen to be legally and more generally appropriate’ (p. 4). Although ever more ingenious ways of killing people (retail or wholesale) are constantly appearing or in prospect, the basic principle behind IHL can be seen in Article 22 of the Hague Regulations of 1899 (itself drawing on earlier formulations): ‘the right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.’ The law of targeting sets the appropriate limits to military action through the elaboration of two aspects of proportionality: ‘distinction’ and ‘discrimination’. Distinction defines lawful objects of attack, essentially military as opposed to ‘civilian’ objects; discrimination addresses the duty to avoid so far as possible collateral damage. Though at first sight an objective set of tests, Boothby explains that in the real world in applying these concepts there must be an element of subjectivity (chapter 9.5). This is perhaps the most important passage in the book. The ignorant, the cynical and the dubiously motivated will always deny the possibility of any meaningful regulation of the use of force. But a good example of what Boothby is driving at, although he does not refer to it, was the debate in December 1998 within the so-called Small Group of counterterrorism officers (created by the US National Security Advisor to deal with Bin Laden) about a possible cruise missile strike on the governor’s compound in Kandahar, where intelligence indicated that Bin Laden would be spending the night. The intelligence was judged to be too uncertain, the risk of collateral damage to innocent civilians and to a nearby mosque (and so also to the reputation of the United States) too high, and the strike did not proceed. The next day the CIA Station Chief, Islamabad, recorded, ‘We should have done it last night. We may well come to regret the decision not to go ahead.’ In fact the bird had probably already flown (‘The 9/11 Commission Report’, pp. 120 and 131, available at http://www.9-11commission.gov). There is a short discussion of the controversial involvement of civilians—for which read ‘the CIA’—in UAV operations. Civilians, Boothby points out, are not brought up to respect IHL. Distinction and discrimination are required by Additional Protocols I and II to the Geneva Conventions 1949, as well as by customary IHL, which binds states not parties to the Protocols. In explaining the law, Boothby draws on the official military manuals of the United Kingdom and other states, and the important studies by the ICRC. Where the ICRC’s formulations appear to be more stringent than the manuals and the battlefield practice of law-abiding states, however, he repeats his warning against imposing unrealistic demands on the military: ‘Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines will respect law that makes sense’ (p. 566). He is understandably perturbed by the view of the European Court of Human Rights that the specialized rules of IHL must yield to the generalities of human rights law where they may be in conflict. It is no disrespect to the careful judgments of the majority of the court last month in Smith and others vs. Ministry of Defence (www.­supremecourt.gov.uk/ decided-cases/docs/UKSC_2012_0249_Judgment.pdf ) nevertheless to regret what appears to be a further step down that path.

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International organization, law and ethics Boothby believes that the law of targeting remains fit for purpose, notwithstanding exciting predictions on the future nature of warfare. A good start has been made with the publication earlier this year of the unofficial NATO Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare (see http://www.ejiltalk.org/the-tallinn-manual-onthe-international-law-applicable-to-cyber-warfare). David Bentley, International Law, Chatham House Just business: multinational corporations and human rights. By John Ruggie. New York: W. W. Norton. 2013. 223pp. Index. £14.99. isbn 978 0 39306 288 5. Available as e-book. Human rights and business seem ill matched. Most attempts at expanding the international human rights regime in a way that would encompass multinational corporations have resulted in stalemate. Governments have been unable to agree about imposing binding regulations on companies in international law. More business-friendly initiatives, such as voluntary best-practice measures of the kind exemplified by the United Nations Global Compact, are condemned as whitewashing by human rights activists. Neither approach seems to offer a basis for generally acceptable regulation. The unanimous endorsement of the ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ by government representatives at the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2011 came as a considerable surprise. Applauded by human rights NGOs and major corporations alike, the Principles appear to have broken the mandatory-versus-voluntary stalemate and promise to provide an authoritative focus for a new regulatory dynamic in which public and private efforts play mutually reinforcing roles. In his new book, Just business: multinational corporations and human rights, John Ruggie reflects on his six years as UN Special Representative on Human Rights and Business. He gives an insider’s account of the political process leading up to the creation of the ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework’. This clarifies the responsibilities of states and businesses in safeguarding human rights and specifies rights of redress where these are violated. It eventually led, in 2011, to the establishment of the Guiding Principles as ‘the authoritative UN standard for business and human rights’ (p. 159). Ruggie’s book describes how convergence was achieved by getting the protagonists to move beyond their comfort zone and this alone makes it instructive reading for political practitioners, activists and business people alike. But Just business is of no less interest to an academic readership. Drawing on his combined skills as an accomplished political practitioner and distinguished scholar, Ruggie constantly cross-links the theoretical and the practical. He sees business and human rights as ‘a microcosm of a larger crisis in contemporary governance’ (p. xxiii) and, using his own particular story, seeks to draw general conclusions about how gaps in global governance might be closed. His practical goal of ‘[mobilizing] all of the rationales and organizational means that can affect corporate conduct’ (p. xlii) represents a direct transfer to corporate behaviour of findings from the academic study of norms, which assumes a complementary rather than a mutually exclusive relationship between ‘profit and loss’-based and norm-based conduct. The attribution of normative sensitivity to multinational corporations reflects the complex environment with which such corporations now have to cope. Peopling that environment are not only competitors and official regulatory bodies from the national and international political spheres, but also a multiplicity of stakeholders from the societal sphere—civil society activists, shareholders and consumers, for example. The growing diversity of economic, political and normative demands necessitates a complex, mixed-motive market

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Book reviews rationalism on the part of companies. Even if one disagrees with Ruggie’s view that firms ‘internalize new social expectations as responsibilities’ (p. 34), calculations about reputational cost do inevitably come to haunt corporations once they have assumed human rights responsibilities of the kind embodied in the corporate social responsibility agenda. States are not always willing or able to devise (and act upon) legal directives for business. Nor are human rights responsibilities the only challenges the business sector has to face. Gaps in governance result from the limited nature of the contributions that can be expected from the two sides. Ruggie’s conclusion, in political terms, is that private- and publicsector contributions should be combined in such a way as to compensate for each other’s weaknesses: ‘best-practice’ private self-regulation should be coupled with ‘some authoritative way of determining what constitutes “best” as well as some means of dealing with those who act otherwise’ (p. xxiii). This seems a well-conceived design for a corporate human rights regime. Yet implementation of the Guiding Principles is still in its early stages. Those Principles make recommendations as to ‘how existing commitments must, should, or can be met’ (p. 83). It remains to be seen whether this ‘common global normative platform’ and the ‘authoritative policy guidance’ expected of it (p. 81) will succeed in mobilizing both legal and social compliance mechanisms to bridge the gap between corporate commitment and corporate compliance in the field of human rights. We are indeed only ‘at the end of the beginning’ (p. 166). Klaus Dieter Wolf, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany Unimaginable atrocities: justice, politics, and rights at the war crimes tribunal. By William Schabas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. 232pp. Index. £34.99. isbn 978 0 19965 307 2. Available as e-book. Michael McKean, portraying a member of the fictional band Spinal Tap, once extolled the virtues of hard rock pioneer Yngwie Malmsteen: ‘He’s really incredible. I really—I bought his album the other day and I just, I threw my guitar out. I said why bother? Why bother, you know? Use it as a coffee table, you know, because I can’t play the thing like that.’ This is the precise sentiment shared by honest academics and prospective authors upon reading William Schabas’s latest offering. In Unimaginable atrocities, Schabas has produced perhaps his greatest work in a prodigious collection of extraordinary contributions to the field. It is insightfully titled, with language lifted from the Rome Statute, germane to the eight essays which make up the text. The oft overlooked dedication is equally revealing— ‘To Ben Ferencz, who was there when it all began.’ Notably, Ferencz was a prosecutor at Nuremberg and has since dedicated his life to the development of international criminal law, attending countless conferences, advocating to officials and diplomats, interacting with students, and informing the public. Ferencz once said: ‘Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task … if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race.’ Schabas has long contributed to the development of effective world law. He has taken on the task and made it his own, standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Cherif Bassiouni, Antonio Cassese, Hans Corell, Michael Scharf and David Scheffer. His text is plainly intended to appeal to and inform, not only academics, but also those with less direct expertise in the field. This is not to suggest that it is somehow written at an introductory level, or that it can be passed over by those more familiar with the issues addressed in the book. Rather, it seeks to expand the audience, educating those interested in creating a safer

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International organization, law and ethics and more tolerant world on key components within the field of international criminal law, while providing substantive arguments for discussion among academic circles. The eight topical essays include: the identification of international crimes; the principle of legality; the selection of targets for prosecution; the definition of genocide; the required intent, act and role of the state; the creation of a historic record through international justice; the problems with amnesty; and the ‘right to peace’. Schabas does not purport to cover every major issue in international criminal law. Rather, these selections are made to deal with fundamental subjects and pressing concerns, while educating those who might otherwise remain uninformed. While it is impossible to address each essay within the confines of a brief review, a more detailed examination of a few exemplars provides some flavour of the nuanced but concise and understandable treatment afforded to these topics. Schabas first discusses the definition of an international crime. While initially concentrating on practical enforcement concerns—piracy, for example—more recent international crimes ostensibly turn on the ‘degree of evil’. That concept, however, is insufficient. The focus is better placed on the involvement of the state as an essential actor in the commission of the crime. Schabas recognizes that this alone cannot account for all international crimes, yet state involvement, as much as any other distinguishing factor, may help define the inclusion of additional crimes in the international criminal law lexicon. In the light of its real world consequences, amnesty is perhaps the most controversial issue looked at by Schabas. Many proponents of international criminal law, and particularly those dealing with victims’ rights, have seemingly rejected the concept of amnesty, with some case law to support such a position. Meanwhile, governments, weary of war, have often found amnesty to be the best option for resolving conflicts. Schabas takes the pragmatic approach, finding danger in any absolute. ‘While both peace and justice are to be sought,’ he writes, ‘sometimes peace will only be attainable if justice is sacrificed’ (p. 198). Given the dedication to Ferencz, who concentrates much of his efforts on the inclusion of the crime of aggression in international criminal law, it is only fitting that the book closes with a discussion of the ‘right to peace’. After providing historical context, Schabas argues that three key bodies of international law—humanitarian, human rights and criminal— have failed to fully recognize and advance this right to peace, despite the fact that the right to peace is, and should be, the unifying principle for these three areas of law. Schabas has truly outdone himself in his latest offering. Rather than throwing out the laptop (with the guitar), Schabas’s work should encourage others to pick up the pen, the phone or the tablet and work to fulfil Ferencz’s goals—a world of tolerance through, at least in part, international criminal law—just as Schabas continues to do. Matthew Kane No one’s world: the West, the rising rest and the coming global turn. By Charles A. Kupchan. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. 272pp. Index. £16.99. isbn 978 0 19973 939 4. Available as e-book. What will replace the western world order once the United States is no longer capable of exercising global leadership? Will China’s rise be ‘unpeaceful’ and prove to be disruptive, as John Mearsheimer argues, or will rising powers support today’s system that is ‘easy to join and hard to overturn’, as G. John Ikenberry predicts? Who will rule the world once the United States’ reign ends, and what will such a world look like? Is it a ‘post-American world’, a ‘Chinese world’, or simply a western world order under non-western leadership?

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Book reviews Rejecting such predictions, Charles Kupchan predicts that tomorrow’s world will ‘belong to no one’. Before elaborating on this claim, the author briskly moves through centuries of history to explain why the West was quickly able to develop economically and leave other, traditionally successful, regions behind, thus initiating western global dominance. While the world had historically been compartmentalized, with each region operating according to culturally particular and exclusive principles, the author argues that Europe’s rise helped create one single global system: as European powers conquered the world, ‘they also exported European conceptions of sovereignty, administration, law, diplomacy, and commerce’ (p. 65)—thus creating what we now call the ‘western world order’. Kupchan writes that ‘remaking the world in its own image was perhaps the ultimate exercise of Western power’ (p. 66). The West’s capacity to define modernity caused generations of non-western thinkers to argue about whether there was a difference between modernization and westernization. Kupchan shows that in a few decades, at least three BRIC countries will be among the world’s five leading economies, and he predicts that there will be multiple versions of modernity. Not only do the characteristics of Brazil’s, India’s and China’s rise differ markedly from Europe’s, but their cultural DNA is different, too, he argues. This is hardly news; the author fails to explain how internal peculiarities affect countries’ strategy vis-àvis the global system. His assertion that ‘much of Latin America has been captivated by left-wing populism’ and that this represents ‘an alternative to the West’s brand of liberal democracy’ is controversial (p. 90). What exactly are the characteristics of the ‘West’s brand of liberal democracy’? Is Brazil’s democratic system fundamentally different from, say, Portugal’s? The author speaks of the ‘West’ as if it were a cohesive bloc, a somewhat misleading idea to begin with. For example, he writes that Brazil’s then President Lula’s decision in 2010 to meet Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to negotiate Iran’s nuclear programme serves as proof that Brazil will not accept the western global order. Turkey’s quarrels with Israel are supposedly evidence of Turkey’s drift away from the West. Yet such views find little support among policy-makers and analysts in Brazil and Turkey. Equally controversially, Kupchan argues that India’s voting behaviour in the UN shows that ‘its interests and status as an emerging power are more important determinants of its foreign policy than its democratic institutions’ (p. 143), thus implying that the United States’ democratic institutions are somehow more important to US policy-makers than the national interest. Yet the history of US foreign policy is littered with instances when strong partnerships with non-democratic regimes were established to promote US national interest—not at least in the Middle East where Saudi Arabia remains an important US ally. This highly US-centric argument paradoxically shows how difficult it will be for policymakers in Washington to adapt to a truly multipolar world in which the United States will be one among several large actors. Kupchan thus interprets emerging countries’ independent foreign policy strategies as evidence that they will undermine today’s global order, all the while overlooking the fact that despite their growing strength, there is little evidence that countries such as China seriously challenge the norms and rules that undergird today’s system. In the final chapter, Kupchan lays out a series of interesting ideas about how the new world order could appear. He argues that ‘the West will have to embrace political diversity rather than insist that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government’. He rightly observes that ‘even as the West does business with autocracies … it also delegitimizes them in word and action’ (p. 187). Kupchan argues that while such a pro-democracy stance

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Conflict, security and defence may be morally compelling, it was simply not pragmatic and made unnecessary enemies in the emerging world. He declines, however, to specify at which degree of a dictator’s nastiness the West should switch from cooperation to condemnation. No one’s world is sprinkled with interesting insights, yet the ground Kupchan covers is vast, forcing him often to remain superficial and to rely on sound bites when commenting on other countries’ domestic affairs. ‘The world’, he writes, ‘is headed toward a global dissensus’ (p. 145). The prediction that we will live in a world with competing narratives (rather than a convergence towards a western narrative) is an important starting point. Yet Kupchan could offer a more rigorous analysis of what these competing narratives might look like. Oliver Stuenkel, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil

Conflict, security and defence The Cambridge history of war, volume IV: war in the modern world. Edited by Roger Chickering, Dennis Showalter and Hans van de Ven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. 656pp. £100.00. isbn 978 0 52187 577 6. This final volume of The Cambridge history of war poses perhaps a greater challenge to its editors than any of its predecessors, but they have met it with total success. The years it covers, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, have seen the greatest transformation in society in the history of mankind, and war has been transformed with it. An account of that transformation cannot simply trace the development of military operations, from Gettysburg to Helmand via the Somme and Hiroshima: it has to explain how it was that warfare developed from conflicts between professional armies and navies to ones between entire peoples, and how it is now becoming an ugly combination of primitive tribal conflicts fought with twenty-first-century weapons, and lethal contests between experts in communication technology often operating within societies that are, to all intents and purposes, living entirely at peace. Indeed, ‘military operations’ of a traditional kind, when they occur at all, are like the tips of icebergs whose incidence and structure can only be understood by studying the massive formations—social, cultural, technological, political—that underlie them. All this the editors have well understood, and they have assembled an expert team to cover this ambitious project. They have not made the mistake of constructing their volume round a skeleton of ‘wars’ interposed with narratives of the ‘peace’ that interrupted them; and they very wisely avoid the western bias that sees ‘war’ as having reached a terrible climax with the Second World War, since when the world has enjoyed an uneasy peace. ‘The situation’, as Rana Mitter reminds us in his chapter on ‘War and memory since 1945’, ‘looks very different to millions of people who lived in Vietnam, Nigeria, East Pakistan or Korea’. Indeed, one-third of the book is devoted to ‘Post-total warfare’ since 1945; mainly the struggles of post-colonial societies to assert their identities, first against their former imperial rulers, and then among themselves. But excellent contributions on China and Japan remind us that this quarter of the world has bred plenty of problems of its own. The ‘totality’ of the wars between 1914 and 1945 that occupy a third of the book is well demonstrated, not only by accounts of the two World Wars themselves (which deal expertly both with their military dimensions and with the transformation they effected on the societies that fought them) but by chapters on ‘military captivity’, which in many cases meant mass starvation, and military occupation, which often meant genocide. Further

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Book reviews chapters cover both ‘elitist’ attempts to ‘outlaw’ war and the populist movements that made it impossible to do anything of the kind. It would be invidious to single out individual chapters for commendation. All are by well-chosen experts, though one or two authors struggle to cover ground that extends rather beyond their expertise. But the real credit must go to the editors who planned the book, selected a team so uniquely well qualified to write it and provided an excellent bibliography. Michael Howard, University of Oxford Invisible armies: an epic history of guerrilla warfare from ancient times to the present. By Max Boot. New York: W. W. Norton. 2012. 784pp. Index. £16.00. isbn 978 0 87140 688 0. Available as e-book. More a book of colourful biographies than a traditional in-depth history, Invisible armies engages and entertains the reader throughout its 64 chapters and almost 800 pages. In an age where heroes can seem vapid (or entirely absent), Max Boot’s series of rollicking rakes is entertaining, refreshing, informative and even fun. The book opens with the author’s 2007 experience accompanying a platoon of US paratroopers patrolling the Kadhimiya neighbourhood of north-western Baghdad during the surge. Arguing that the American soldiers’ experience in Iraq differs little from counterinsurgency operations in the days of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, Boot lays out his central proposition: ‘Since World War II, insurgency and terrorism have become the dominant forms of conflict—a trend likely to continue into the foreseeable future’ (p. xx). And the key to winning these conflicts against ‘invisible armies’ is to understand and implement effective counter-insurgency tactics such as those gathered and explained in the analysis that follows. The purpose here is to present a unified account of the evolution of guerrilla warfare and terrorism over the ages, beginning with the Jewish uprising against the Romans in ad 66 and ending with current-day conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. It draws on a vast array of secondary sources, along with the author’s personal experiences and an interesting original database of conflicts appended at the end. The narrative ends in 2011, with the US Marines patrolling in the Marjah district of Helmand Province in Afghanistan. From all of these cases the author then distils a unified set of lessons for the benefit of soldiers today and tomorrow. While the book is never boring, how the author determines which cases to embrace or exclude across such a vast sweep of history is a mystery. A prerequisite seems to be a strong and eccentric warrior in the lead. Readers will savour Boot’s facility with language and sense of humour as he describes his protagonists. At the tragic battle of Dien Bien Phu, French Major Marcel Bigeard is ‘the peacocky personification of paratrooper panache’ (p. 350). Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi is ‘stocky, bearded, and long-haired, with a serene expression and “eyes [that] were steadfast and piercing”, wearing a red tunic, black felt hat’ (p. 113). British General Sir Gerald Templar ‘dressed in a debonair tropical suit, a large handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket … bore more than a passing resemblance to the actor David Niven’ (p. 380). Regarding China’s Mao Zedong: ‘it was really in the sexual arena that Mao came into his own: his exploits made other womanizing guerrilla chieftains … seem chaste by comparison’ (p. 342). This is a Great Man view of history and, as Captain Orde Wingate said of T. E. Lawrence, some of them may be embellished with ‘a great deal of romantic dust’ (p. 298).

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Conflict, security and defence The final section includes a thought-provoking set of twelve articles (fashioned after Lawrence’s ‘Twenty-seven articles’), summarizing the lessons of this book. Notable among them are number four: ‘Insurgencies have been getting more successful since 1945 but still lose most of the time’; and number five: ‘The most important development in guerrilla warfare in the last two hundred years has been the rise of public opinion.’ While apt and interesting, these observations are not tabula rasa. Acknowledging the extensive research done recently on these topics by others—for example, on the lifespan of insurgencies and terrorist groups, the degree to which they succeed or fail, and the role of public opinion in warfare—would give the book additional depth and advance the reader’s knowledge still more effectively. Nonetheless, the book is a well-written, wide-ranging synopsis of many centuries’ experience with guerrilla warfare, neatly summarizing the lessons for today’s armies. It will appeal to general readers. Audrey Kurth Cronin, George Mason University, USA Massacres and morality: mass atrocities in an age of civilian immunity. By Alex J. Bellamy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. 450pp. Index. £55.00. isbn 978 0 19928 842 7. How far have moral restraints inhibited states from carrying out atrocities? To answer this important question Alex Bellamy provides a detailed compendium of massacres over the last 200 years. He starts with state terror in Republican France and colonial wars in the United States and Africa, proceeding through the totalitarian genocides of the twentieth century, terror bombing in the Second World War, atrocities by both sides in the Cold War and its aftermath, and ending with the mass killing of civilians by Al-Qaeda, provoking in response the US-led ‘war on terror’. It is a gloomy tale of murder and mayhem. Perpetrators have excused their behaviour on grounds of necessity (for example, to quell civil disturbances) or selective extermination, identifying groups, such as Jews or kulaks, deemed outside the protection of morality. Such excuses are, in Bellamy’s view, never justified but perpetrators have too often got away with massacres because of what he labels ‘contextual factors’. These may range from ignorance of what is happening (for example in the closed society of Maoist China) to strategic priorities which accounted for the failure of the West to stop Pol Pot’s murder of 1.5 million civilians in Cambodia, a state judged a useful counterweight to the Soviet satellite of Vietnam. There is, however, a thin glimmer of light amidst all the gloom. Bellamy argues that since the end of the Second World War and even more since the end of the Cold War, it has become progressively more difficult for states to commit atrocities, with the improvement in global communications, easing of Cold War rivalries and the gradual embodiment of the norm of civilian immunity in international law through the Geneva protocols and, most importantly, the UN adoption of the Responsibility to Protect in 2005. Atrocities can, however, still happen and can even perversely come about through moral guilt, as in the failure of the international community to prevent the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) forces murdering refugees in Zaire because of the RPF’s acclaimed role in ending the 1994 genocide. The central message of the book is that, while moral progress has been achieved, it is fragile and needs constant protection. How is this protection to be secured? Bellamy suggests strengthening global communications and persuading international society to protect its shared norms, in particular through implementation of the Responsibility to

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Book reviews Protect; valuable prescriptions, which would have been more helpful if Bellamy had spelt them out in more detail in his all too brief concluding chapter. Overall, this is a masterly, judicious and painstakingly researched survey of massacres over the last two centuries. It will provide an invaluable quarry for anyone interested in the ethics, legality or politics of war. The book’s central message on the reality but fragility of moral progress is an important one for which it deserves to be widely read. While entitled Massacres and morality, the book has more to say about massacres than morality. Massacres are treated as of equal moral dubiety, varying only in the numbers of civilians killed (with on this score Mao, Stalin and Hitler way ahead). In so far as massacres breach the principle of non-combatant immunity, they are all morally blameworthy. But it would have been interesting if Bellamy had explored the nuances further. Was the Allied bombing of German cities in the Second World War as blameworthy as Hitler’s extermination of 6 million Jews? The RAF pilots thought their actions would shorten the war and save civilian lives. That belief may have been mistaken but was sincerely held. Hitler and his henchmen had no such good intentions to mitigate their genocidal activities. Similarly, not all failures to intervene are equally culpable. Safe havens were established after the First Gulf War to protect Saddam’s persecuted citizens in north but not south Iraq, not just because of different strategic considerations. A key factor was that this was judged practical in the north but not in the south. Such practical judgements do not oppose but form part of moral reasoning, prudence being an important virtue. The rediscovery of the just war tradition in the 1960s and 1970s increased the salience of the principle of non-combatant immunity. It is interesting to reflect that, if only the tradition had not been lost to sight from the eighteenth century, some of the atrocities recounted by Bellamy might have been avoided. The US and European colonial warriors in the nineteenth century, arguing that moral constraints did not extend to ‘savages’, would certainly have met with short shrift from Vitoria. In his book, On the American Indians, published in 1532, Vitoria roundly condemned the Spanish conquistadors for treating the Indians as savages rather than neighbours deserving protection. The Responsibility to Protect was not discovered in 2005, as Bellamy suggests, but rather rediscovered, a reminder of the fragility—and even reversibility—of moral progress. David Fisher, King’s College London, UK After war ends: a philosophical perspective. By Larry May. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. 248pp. Index. Pb.: £17.99. isbn 978 1 10760 362 2. How wars end is a subject to which the political and military leaders who initiate wars have too often paid too little attention, as the calamitous unfurling of events following the 2003 invasion of Iraq amply testifies. Larry May provides a timely and important reminder of the need for ethical guidance to govern practices after wars end, just as much as before and during conflict; and hence of the importance of jus post bellum, as well as that of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Drawing on the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, May develops a set of normative principles to help guide the establishment of a just and lasting peace. These are based on the obligations, shared by both victors and vanquished, to rebuild the society’s infrastructure, provide retribution for the most egregious individual wrongdoers, repair relationships, restore lost property and ultimately achieve reconciliation. All of this is to be accomplished in a manner that is proportionate, not imposing more harm than is alleviated by the application of the ­principles.

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Conflict, security and defence Each of these principles is important, but particular focus is directed to reconciliation, which, in May’s view, needs to be taken much more seriously than it normally is. The aim of achieving reconciliation may moderate the application of other principles since there is little chance of securing a lasting peace if the sides to the war are unreconciled. War crime trials, as required by the principle of retribution, may still be needed but will often better be held during rather than at the end of the war to help moderate behaviour during the conflict. In addition, rebuilding, restitution and reparation efforts need to be shared and aimed at allowing the defeated state to recover the rule of law and the mutual respect that is its grounding as quickly as possible. The moral equality of soldiers—a central doctrine of the just war tradition that accords equal rights and obligations to combatants on both sides—has been disputed in recent years by some philosophers who have argued that such rights only accrue to those fighting a just war and that all combatants fighting for an unjust cause should be treated as unjust warriors. This recent heresy is rightly rejected by May both because of the unfairness of holding all combatants, however remote from the decision-making, as morally responsible for the injustice of a war but also because of the importance of achieving reconciliation after a conflict ends. Condemning all combatants on one side as unjust warriors will make their subsequent reintegration into society much more difficult and impede the process of reconciliation. The caution May counsels political and military leaders to adopt as they contemplate military action is salutary, while his detailed prescriptions for securing a lasting and just peace are both carefully argued and imbued with practical wisdom. But May counsels more than caution: ‘Contemplating how wars should end’, he says, ‘leads me to think that all wars should end’ (p. 25). The fog and fury of war, with nationalist sentiments colouring and distorting our perceptions, are so intense that wars are likely to end badly. Accordingly, ‘contingent pacifism is the best response for soldiers who are contemplating participating in wars’ (p. 232). Such a response would make it more difficult for political and military leaders to engage in unjust wars, which would be a clear moral gain. But it would also make it more difficult, if not impossible, to wage a just war. That is a moral disadvantage which May downplays. Contingent pacifism was the understandable response of many to the carnage of the First World War. This included the Oxford undergraduates who voted that they would in no circumstances fight for king and country in the 1933 Oxford Union debate. Had such pacifist sentiment persisted and prevailed, Britain would have been unable to offer any effective resistance to Hitler’s aggression. Churchill would have had no choice in the protracted War Cabinet meeting on 25−28 May 1940 but to accede to the proposals of Halifax and Chamberlain that Britain should seek such terms as it could for surrender, leaving Hitler unopposed to complete his conquest of Europe and final extermination of the Jews. May suggests that wars such as that fought against Hitler are unlikely to recur. But even if political leaders could safely make that assumption, contingent pacifism would not merely preclude such resistance to major aggression. It would also render difficult any effective military response by the international community to prevent mass atrocities in line with the newly defined international Responsibility to Protect. The moral gain achieved by the adoption of that principle at the 2005 UN Summit would thus have proved very short-lived. David Fisher, King’s College London, UK

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Book reviews Ballistic missile defence and US national security policy: normalisation and acceptance after the Cold War. By Andrew Futter. London: Routledge. 2013. 230pp. Index. £80.00. isbn 978 0 41581 732 5. The US pursuit of an effective missile defence capability has been a long one, fraught with international, technological and domestic barriers. Andrew Futter documents the journey from the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, when missile defences were wishful thinking, to the recent travails of the Obama administration and its attempts to deploy a working missile defence system on both land and sea in various parts of the globe. Missile defences have not always enjoyed universal support. Failures of technology, the perceived lack of requirement and the vast amounts of resources expended all worked against the creation of a working—and effective—ballistic missile defence (BMD) system. They are now a normal, and seemingly indispensable, part of US national security. They have come from pie-in-the-sky, Reagan-era conceptions of invulnerability to the pursuit of something much more modest and attainable. In this book, Andrew Futter has charted the evolution of US BMD and the various debates surrounding its role in broader US national security, producing an excellent account of both the triumphs and the failures of missile defences from the research and development programme under the George H. W. Bush administration to the policies of the Obama administration’s first term. This is no mean feat. What Futter has convincingly shown is that, while international and technological pressures clearly matter, the role of domestic political forces in the making of policy is, to a large extent, the defining factor. Recent US domestic politics, especially the partisan rift between the Legislative and Executive branches (on the issues of federal spending and gun control), would appear to bear witness to the power of domestic political opposition to legislative programmes and agendas. Global events, as well as partisan positions, have often guided policy. The Gulf War in the early 1990s, where an anti-aircraft missile, the Patriot, was effectively co-opted by the US military, and its perceived successes against Iraq Scuds, were seized upon by missile defence advocates to demonstrate conclusively that missile defences ‘worked’. Almost a decade later, North Korea’s 1998 rocket launch, as well as more general ‘missile threat’ from various quarters, appeared to underline the growing need for an effective missile defence system. While missile defences languished during Clinton’s time in office, domestic political expediencies prompted a volte face in 1999, when Clinton signed the 1999 Missile Defense Act, which called for the deployment of missile defences at the earliest possible date. Clinton, who showed no real support for BMD, subsequently balked and the cause was taken up by George W. Bush, who withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002. The Bush administration aggressively pursued missile defences to the extent that parts of the system it deployed had not been adequately tested, and seemingly did so for domestic rather than strategic reasons. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, after all, were perpetrated using passenger planes—not ballistic missiles. Obama, widely expected to rein in missile defences, instead vigorously pursued both national and theatre missile defences, but has placed greater emphasis on cost-­effectiveness and quality control. Obama’s European Phased Adaptive Approach was designed to be deployed in four phases, the fourth of which was cancelled in March 2013 owing to technological and economic issues. Traditionally a pet project of Republicans, missile defences were largely seen by Democrats to be a waste of resources and strategically destabilizing. They now enjoy bipartisan acceptance, although quibbles remain regarding scope and costs. Missile defences have yet to be put to the test in thwarting a real missile aimed at real targets, threatening the lives of real people.

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Conflict, security and defence Until (or if ) that day comes, there will likely be a degree of scepticism surrounding their efficacy; thus far, testing has produced far from convincing results. As technologies mature, however, US missile defences, will become a powerful strategic tool and will profoundly affect the perceptions and calculations (even more so than today) of America’s strategic competitors. One of the opening pages of the book suggests that the evolution of missile defence policy has been ‘complex, complicated and punctuated’. While this is something of an understatement, Futter succeeds in making sense of the miasma of names, dates and technologies as well as the changing policy debates on the issue. The breadth of the book is extensive, covering US policy from 1989 to 2012. Despite its detail, it is eminently readable. Written in a very engaging style, this book would be of great interest to both specialists and non-specialists alike and should be the first port of call for anyone wishing to understand the evolution of US missile defence policy after the Cold War. It seems unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future, that this book will be superseded as one of the best accounts of US BMD policy in the post-Cold War period. Jason Douglas, University College Cork, Ireland Privatizing war: private military and security companies under public international law. By Lindsey Cameron and Vincent Chetail. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. 720pp. £90.00. isbn 978 1 10703 240 8. Although the involvement of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in armed conflict is not a new phenomenon, it has come to present new characteristics, especially its expansion of size, scope and employers. In Privatizing war, Lindsey Cameron and Vincent Chetail, two senior scholars in international law, closely examine the specific legal issues raised by PMSCs; analyse the most critical legal issues related to states hiring PMSCs; discuss international law and PMSCs; and advance applicable justifications for an international law framework governing the activities of PMSCs. First of all, this timely work explains the implicit and explicit limitations of public international law on contracting PMSCs. In the opinion of Cameron and Chetail, the existing prohibitions in international law are largely ambiguous, and bad faith (e.g. avoiding legislative approvals) would probably lead to negative consequences. From a perspective of international humanitarian law, Cameron and Chetail explore the legal status and obligations of PMSCs and their personnel, through explaining the articles on states’ responsibility by the International Law Commission. Specifically, the authors analyse the imputabilities of PMSCs under the circumstances of being state organs, entities exercising delegated governmental authority or groups acting under the direction and control of a state. As they conclude, in most cases, PMSCs may be considered state organs, though ‘the international legal obligations of states do not apply to them as organs of a state’ (pp. 286−7). Next the authors discuss to what extent international humanitarian law could restrict PMSCs and their personnel, through the approaches of corporate responsibility and individual responsibility. As they argue, when PMSCs are considered as the sum of individual responsibility, PMSCs’ personnel could be bound by international humanitarian law directly; if PMSCs are regarded as non-state actors, the situation would become more complex, especially in cases where they are contracted by other non-state actors. The authors write that the legal status of PMSCs’ personnel in international humanitarian law is especially sensitive in three specific circumstances: direct participation in armed conflicts, use of force in self-defence, and law enforcement operations. As they suggest, most PMSCs’ personnel are civilians, and should therefore be extremely wary of direct

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Book reviews participation in armed conflicts and the restrictions on self-defence. Concerning the PMSCs’ personnel engaging in law enforcement, Cameron and Chetail advance several legal rules drawn from international law (e.g. interactional humanitarian law and human rights law) but not from domestic law. Moreover, for ‘enabling maximum respect for international humanitarian law’ (p. 675), they point out that some rules of international humanitarian law are insufficient for governing certain aspects of the PMSCs and their personnel, such as PMSCs’ involvement in humanitarian aid and lack of prisoner of war status. With regard to the violations of international law by PMSCs, the authors discuss different approaches to using interactional humanitarian law, international criminal law and civil law to fulfil responsibilities of PMSCs. It is worth noting that the Montreux Document should be regarded as a useful guide for evaluating PMSCs’ activities in armed conflicts, though it is non-binding. In the words of Cameron and Chetail, states have three options for dealing with PMSCs: banning PMSCs or certain types of their operations, regulating PMSCs’ operations, or maintaining the status quo of contracting PMSCs. Privatizing war not merely contributes to the existing literature on PMSCs, but could even play a role in regulating PMSCs around the world. This well-researched work will appeal to academics, students, scholars, humanitarian and human rights activists in various disciplines, including international security, public international law, humanitarian and human rights studies. Kai Chen, Zhejiang University, China

Governance, civil society and cultural politics Federal dynamics: continuity, change, and the varieties of federalism. Edited by Arthur Benz and Jörg Broschek. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 416pp. Index. £60.00. isbn 978 0 19965 299 0. This volume edited by Arthur Benz and Jörg Broschek starts by noting that the study of the variety of forms taken by federal arrangements requires a systematic comparative approach, which in turn requires a conceptually unifying intellectual framework. The absence of this instrument explains at least in part the difficulties of putting together a more coherent research agenda to explore the variety of institutions and processes related to federalism. The book is an attempt to offer a solution. Its distinguishing feature (and the reason why it deserves to be considered a pioneering enterprise) comes from the fact that it is built around a methodical and programmatic attempt to treat federalist studies as an area of comparative politics, i.e. conceptually to anchor federalism research in the thematic and intellectual culture of that field. In a sense, it wants to do for ‘federalism’ what the ‘varieties of capitalism’ programme has done for ‘capitalism’. While the success achieved in comparative politics by the ‘varieties of capitalism’ literature is taken as a reference point, the editors and contributors are fully aware that the carrying capacity of the analogy between the objectives of their project and the ‘varieties of capitalism’ model is rather limited. A tempting trap is thus avoided. The volume does not aim to provide a new theory of federalism, or to advance a particular theoretical conjecture regarding institutional performance linking it to empirical evidence. Instead, its goal is to create a much needed conceptual and interpretative infrastructure for the integration of a vast domain dominated by the heterogeneity of phenomena, perspectives and themes of interest. With this end in view, the volume advances two key encompassing concepts: ‘varieties of federalism’ and ‘federal dynamics’. The first is meant to capture the structural and

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Governance, civil society and cultural politics functional variety of the arrangements associated with the idea of federalism as well as their multidimensional nature. The second concentrates on change and process. It is about historical trajectories, time-dependent developments, and the internal and external factors determining the ongoing change of federal systems. These two pillars framing the approach are seen in instrumental and pragmatic terms: ‘analytically meaningful concepts that enable us to identify different patterns of continuity and change and ultimately to compare diverging trajectories systematically’ (p. 4), ‘well suited for overcoming the highly fragmented research agenda in the field’ and able to ‘stimulate the debate about how to explore different aspects of federalism in a systematic fashion’ (p. 3). In brief, they are systematization and heuristic devices for putting some working order into an otherwise complex and heterogeneous conceptual space. The 15 chapters of the volume are organized into four sections. The first section presents different models of federalism, looks at possible taxonomies of existing democratic federal regimes and at possible ways to chart conceptually their multidimensionality. This is the static side of the project, the conceptual systematization that prepares the room for the dynamic analysis that follows in the next three sections. The second section discusses the continuity and change aspect in a (mostly) historical institutionalist key: path dependency, resilience, process tracing are the keywords. The third section explores the political factors operating as drivers of change in the environment of the federal systems. The keywords are: parties, party systems, regional, cultural and socio-economic cleavages. The fourth section turns to endogenous forces including constitutional change, policy initiatives, inter- and intra-governmental relations, opening a new angle on the structure and change theme. The conclusions chapter links the different perspectives and arguments into an approach labelled ‘dynamic institutionalism’. This is the point when one gets the final confirmation that the ‘dynamics’ theme has taken the upper hand over the taxonomy of ‘varieties’ theme and has become officially the main star of the show. The volume is an excellent starting point for a broader effort of integrating the comparative study of federalism around a ‘structure and change’ framework while anchoring it in the field of comparative politics. On the downside, one may note the surprising lack of any reference to one of the potentially most effective ways of approaching that task: the conceptual tools created by the federalism scholar Vincent Ostrom and the Nobel Prize in Economics recipient Elinor Ostrom—polycentrism (the theory of governance with multiple overlapping jurisdictions and centres of power); and the institutional analysis and development framework (a methodological instrument meant to capture the multilevel, multifaceted dimensions of institutional and governance systems). But such lacunae are admissible in pioneering initiatives and it is inevitable that sooner or later the Ostroms’ insights will be incorporated into this research agenda. Overall, the volume has achieved its objective of having the conversation revitalized under a coherent and flexible conceptual framework and, as such, is a notable contribution to both federalism studies and comparative politics. Paul Dragos Aligica, George Mason University, USA Of virgins and martyrs: women and sexuality in global conflict. By David Jacobson. Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2013. 254pp. Index. Pb.: £13.00. isbn 978 1 42140 754 8. Available as e-book. The stated aim of this book is to analyse the ways women’s bodies and their sexuality have become a global battlefield. Using what he calls the ‘tribal patriarchy index’, the author

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Book reviews aims to illustrate the ways in which ‘women’s sexuality, dress and image compel militant Muslim outrage and sometimes violent action’ (back cover). To do this, the author conducts four explorations: honour societies (especially in the Middle East and North Africa); sixteenth-century western Europe (notably the Netherlands); globalization (specifically the ways this has advantaged women); and finally, an exploration of the ways immigrants have ‘expanded their footprint into the West’ (p. 6), especially in Europe with emphasis on Muslim immigrant communities and particularly the sub-sections which are Islamist and fundamentalist. The book—subsequently proceeding in four sections (ten chapters plus a conclusion)—ranges over a vast historical, political and cultural landscape, speeding across centuries and time zones from Ghana to Barbie Doll, from Cuba to the Slut Walks, from Britain to France, from the political theory of John Locke to the intellectual roots of Islam; this list nowhere near exhausts the terrain covered in this book. This breadth can be dazzling, yet this book is both troubling and puzzling. Of course, being troubled is not necessarily negative; disturbing conventional concepts or practices is the hallmark of good scholarly work, particularly in the area of women and sexuality, which is what this book is about. But this is where the puzzlement emerges as I am not clear whether this book is about women and their sexuality at all. At least the book does not offer any particularly constructive insights into the theoretical and empirical intricacies of women and sexuality in global conflict and certainly not in the light of the vast feminist and other critical literatures available on this precise topic. Instead, it veers more towards adding to the plethora of conventional and popular constructions of women as ‘other’, once again defined by sexuality, and as only a useful site of analysis in relation to a ‘larger’ political, cultural or social issue. And clearly the ‘larger’ issue here is the spectre of ‘militant Muslims’ and ‘radical Islam’. This emerges as the main concern and indeed fear of this book. I am also perplexed by the methodological construction and the function of the ‘tribal patriarchy index’. Not introduced until page 113, it appears in a chapter entitled ‘Loathing the feminine mystique’, consolidating the overall mood of the book of reaffirming women as marked by a Freudian sense of confusion and ‘exoticized allure’: the front cover and indeed main title Of virgins and martyrs bespeak this perfectly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the core concern of the book, the ‘greater Middle East’ emerges at the ‘high end of tribal patriarchy scores’ (p. 119). To be sure, readers may learn something from many of the nuggets of historical detail and be inspired by the globe-trotting experiences of the author from ‘sensual Ghana’ to Titian’s ‘sumptuous’ painting Venus of Urbino in the Uffizi in Florence, to the heady aromas of a Parisian café. Indeed, one learns much about the author in this book. Ultimately, I remain very troubled by its popular attractiveness perhaps guaranteed by the scientistic overtones of a global index, despite it being marked by methodological mystery alongside a deeply problematic use of the idea of ‘tribes’, together with an unreflective use of the concept of patriarchy, which is a very blunt instrument to describe the intricacies of gendered practices in all their intersectional forms. But I do not think the book is written with feminist or other critical scholars in mind; or indeed women locally or globally. The ‘we’ of the book is a very specific segment of a ‘western we’, one which presumably excludes Muslims, given that the author sets up a dichotomy between ‘the West’ and ‘the Islamic world’ (p. 3), and a ‘we’ that is being exposed to injury if we do not ‘delve into the role of women’s status and sexuality in global conflict’ (p. 3); not a ‘we’ that many in the West would identify with. This is a worrying book for all the wrong reasons. Marysia Zalewski, University of Aberdeen, UK

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Political economy, economics and development Political economy, economics and development New spirits of capitalism? Crises, justifications, and dynamics. Edited by Paul du Gay and Glenn Morgan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 352pp. Index. £55.00. isbn 978 0 19959 534 1. We need to talk about capitalism. So much is clear. Indeed, one of the central questions to arise from the global financial crisis of 2008 and beyond surrounds issues of ‘why has very little changed?’ Why, the editors ask in the opening chapter, is it that a certain hazy pre-crisis rationality, something akin to the primacy of markets as an organizing principle, is still relatively intact when many are confident it was that very rationality that caused the bust? This book offers no takeaway thesis for why this might be the case. Instead it provides something less tangible: a series of concepts and ways of thinking that will provide ammunition for academics seeking alternative frameworks for understanding capitalism. As such, this book is best read as a call for (academic) arms, as opposed to a substantive contribution to our understanding of capitalism. But this should not diminish its contribution. It is the first major attempt at filtering the increasingly in-vogue ideas of French sociologist Luc Boltanski and his collaborators (The new spirit of capitalism, Verso, 2005; On justification, Princeton University Press, 2006; On critique, Polity, 2011) into Anglo political economy scholarship. Consequently, it will be mostly of interest to those who are keen to engage with Boltanski et al., but who understandably require some assistance from already engaged Anglosphere scholars as an entry point into the jargon-riddled world of French pragmatic sociology. Following a broad-ranging and accessible introductory chapter about capitalism, crisis and the work of Boltanski et al., the book is divided into two further sections: ‘Developments and critique’ and ‘Applications’. The first section starts with chapters by Boltanski and his collaborator Eve Chiapello, which provide both background and elaboration on their intellectual projects. Also included is a refreshingly honest and open rebuttal of the practical use of their work from Hugh Wilmott, and a reminder of the importance of Albert Hirschman’s genealogy of self-interest from Paul du Gay. Highlights from the second section include chapters on the post-crisis politics of alter-globalization group Attac and the Nordic welfare model. Kathia Serrano-Velarde’s chapter on the reframing of higher education is the most faithful application—and is thus the most informative about the plausibility of the framework. It is, however, the first three chapters, in which the general foundations of the Boltanski approach are outlined, that provide the added value to this volume. From the book, it seems that engaging with this scholarship has two potential general benefits for political economy scholars. First, it gives the means for reclaiming capitalism as a category of analysis. Increasingly, within the social sciences, to talk about ‘capitalism’ is implicitly to sign up to a series of political and normative standpoints that many feel uncomfortable identifying with. By conjuring the spirit of Weber and his intellectual predecessors, this volume, and Boltanski et al., highlight another way that instead explores how the capitalist imperative for accumulation is justified in a myriad of moral manners. Second, and related, it highlights how scholarship can be critical without making assumptions, again potentially uncomfortable, about ‘ideological pacification of social actors through immutable structures of domination’ (p. 22). By foregrounding the justificatory practices of actors, critique can thus be based on respecting the moral views of social actors themselves as something real. This can lead to little nuggets of wisdom: particular ‘spirits of capitalism’ become ‘embedded in rules of conduct, in practices, and in institutions as well as in certain forms

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Book reviews of legitimatory discourses that explain, normalize, and motivate actors’ (p. 14). Merely to critique, let alone overthrow, this spirit becomes a very difficult task, and helps shed light on the question originally posed above. The result is the potential for more pragmatic critique: one that accepts the inevitably ‘socially constructed’ nature of our contemporary ‘spirit’, but equally accepts that to impose critical terms which are outside that very institutionalized spirit is—frankly—not practical, or indeed ‘realistic’ (p. 22). In short, New spirits of capitalism? is an interesting and timely introduction to the currently under-explored work of French pragmatism in the context of the global financial crisis. In particular, it provides the potential for scholars to engage critically with capitalism from a fresh perspective, and provides assurances that delving into the world of Boltanski and friends is an endeavour that is surely worth the trouble. Liam Stanley, University of Birmingham, UK Masters of the universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the birth of neoliberal politics. By Daniel Stedman Jones. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2012. 418pp. Index. £24.95. isbn 978 0 69115 157 1. The recent death of Margaret Thatcher was perhaps the most noted passing of any western leader since her political soulmate, Ronald Reagan, died in 2004. We saw scattered celebrations in the coal towns that shut down during her tenure, but the Financial Times spoke for many when it called Thatcher ‘Britain’s most important peacetime prime minister since the late 19th century. She transformed British politics by overturning assumptions about the relationship between the state and the market’ (Martin Wolf, ‘Thatcher: the great transformer’, 9 April 2013). The backstory to the Thatcher−Reagan triumph of the 1980s was the appropriation of neo-liberal economic thought in service of conservative ideology on both sides of the Atlantic. Daniel Stedman Jones has sketched a masterful, clearly drawn historical portrait of the evolution of neo-liberal economics, from its relatively moderate and academic origins in the Great Depression and the Second World War to its thorough politicization by the 1980s. Jones gives us the best kind of intellectual history, showing the interplay of ideas, ideology and nascent political movements. The book should be lauded for illustrating that the history of ideas is not straightforward, and a big idea can be bent towards something that its originators might not have imagined. One could paraphrase a constructivist aphorism to insist that economics is what we make of it. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and other economists started it all when they consciously separated their academic and polemical writings, creating two neo-liberal movements that would thereafter be joined at the hip. Jones suggests three stages in the rise of neo-liberalism. The first, from the 1920s to roughly 1950, centred primarily on academics and columnists who sought to achieve, in Walter Lippmann’s term, a ‘good society’ that would temper the nascent welfare state while creating economic structures to avoid a repeat of the calamitous depression (p. 6). Both the New Deal and the British welfare state were based on a positive view of the state if it was ‘in the hands of an enlightened and expert policy elite’ (p. 27). The second phase, from 1950 until the elections of Thatcher and Reagan (1979−80) saw British and American conservative movements based on neo-liberal ideas reach maturity and put forth clear ideas. The Chicago School led by Milton Friedman came to prominence during this time, focusing more on free markets than their European counterparts. Jones lays out the thickening trans-Atlantic contacts by way of think-tanks that disseminated these new ideas. The new American conservatism blended three strands: ‘new conservatives’ shocked by totalitarianism abroad

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Political economy, economics and development and secularism and permissive values at home; anti-communists committed to the ‘titanic struggle’ (p. 141) to save the world; and the neo-liberals and various libertarians. William F. Buckley emerged as a leading American conservative thinker who reconnected with traditional values while seeking a ‘fusion’ of disparate right-wingers (p. 163). A third phase, since 1980, has seen the success of neo-liberalism in both domestic and, especially, international trade and development policy. Reform of public housing became a leading 1980s issue in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The ‘third way’ of Democrat Bill Clinton and New Labourite Tony Blair sought to blend neo-liberal ideas with a social conscience. The book’s strongest chapters present the intellectual evolution of neo-liberalism. Hayek was the greatest of three early thinkers and his story has been well covered in recent years, but Jones’s detailed analysis of Friedman’s thought is a revelation. While clearly more radical than Hayek, Friedman’s polemical thought evolved and was more nuanced than commonly believed. Primarily a proponent of economic freedom, he would allow government a role in regulating competition, and was famous for his libertarian values. Jones feels that the 1970s were the critical decade in the rise of neo-liberalism as a political force. Neo-liberal notions about handling the macro-economy and regulation of business took hold during the Wilson and Callaghan governments in Britain, along with the Carter administration in the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, governments came to see monetary tightening and business liberalization as the best ways to confront stagflation and economic decline. The embrace of neo-liberal policy prescriptions across the political spectrum came rapidly, and set the stage for their fullest acceptance under Thatcher and Reagan. The book gives short shrift to areas that could have enriched the narrative. There is very little on modern continental European conservatism, especially the conservative revivals in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands from the 1970s onwards. Surely, they relied at least partly on neo-liberal ideas, as did conservatives in Japan and the ‘tiger’ economies of East Asia. We could use more discussion of neo-liberalism in parties of the left during the heyday of Keynesianism and the welfare state, not just during the waning of the left in the 1970s. We crave better understanding of the neo-liberal takeover of multilateral foreign economic policy (the ‘Washington Consensus’), and the recent collapse of neo-liberal economic policy in the financial crisis. Perhaps the greatest need is more discussion of the transformation of the Republican Party into an angry hard-right club promoting a toxic brew of tax cut fundamentalism, anti-gay and anti-immigration demagoguery, and hyperactive neo-conservative foreign policy. Many of the GOP’s more reactionary ideas come not via neo-liberalism, but from supply-side economics of Arthur Laffer, objectivist-libertarianism of Ayn Rand, talk radio of Rush Limbaugh and televised evangelical Christianity of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. There is something troubling about an economic ideology that promotes selfishness and hyper-individualism as if they were cherished values. Economic freedom and relatively unfettered markets are good things, but so are communitarianism, effective governance and regulation of economic abuses. Neo-liberalism has become a kind of quasi-religion, with adherents evangelizing for the one true economic faith. At their best, Thatcher and Reagan were avatars for national renewal, striving to restore national pride and determination. While they often spoke of government as the problem, not the solution, they sought to make institutions work better, not to destroy them. Neither leader was a dogmatist, but both were pragmatic, ever bending with the political winds. Both would probably advise us to be careful about rigid embrace of any ideology. Joel Campbell, Troy University, Global Campus, Japan−Korea

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Book reviews Governing guns, preventing plunder: international cooperation against illicit trade. By Asif Efrat. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. 357pp. Index. £32.50. isbn 978 0 19976 030 5. In April 2013 the United Nations General Assembly approved a treaty that regulates the global trade in small arms. The treaty, however, has proved controversial; it is far from being implemented and does not contain a specific enforcement mechanism. This is despite 13 years having lapsed since Kofi Annan warned that ‘in terms of the carnage they cause, small arms … could well be described as “weapons of mass destruction”’ (p. 59). As Asif Efrat notes, this damage not just entails the conflict deaths that result from the use of small arms, but a huge multitude of other devastating ‘negative externalities’, ranging from the ­facilitation of crimes like rape and robbery to the impediment of foreign investment (pp.  62−3). When the purpose of international cooperation against illicit trade is to reduce such consequences (p. 226), what, asks Efrat, inhibits it, and how can these barriers be overcome? Existing analyses of the persistence and intractability of illicit trade tend to concentrate on the role of criminals. An example of this approach can be found in Moisés Naím’s Illicit: how smugglers, traffickers, and copycats are hijacking the global economy (Doubleday, 2005). The title of Asif Efrat’s new book—Governing guns, preventing plunder—seems to suggest that he too will focus on bandits, pirates and other similarly swashbuckling characters. Efrat, however, while not ignoring the significance of criminal activity, scrutinizes the role of a supposedly more innocuous cast that includes British art gallery owners, American bankers and Israeli employers. According to Efrat, it is ‘legal actors who have often sought to hinder, delay, or obstruct attempts to curb illicit trade’ (p. 4). He argues that legal actors frequently have little to gain and much to lose from international restrictions on illicit trade, even if that trade is human trafficking (p. 177). Legal actors exert political pressure on governments, affecting their cost−benefit calculations ‘and hence … their preferences on international regulation’ (p. 57). At an intergovernmental level, these preferences often do not align; this absence of shared interest leads Efrat to depart from much of the neo-liberal institutionalist literature that takes a shared interest to cooperate as given. Underlying his successful attempt to build a ‘systematic, unified account of the international regulation aimed at curbing illicit trade’ (p. 273) is a theoretical framework that has both liberal and realist elements: government preferences and the distribution of power are the key to the ‘varying robustness of international regulation’ of illicit trade (p. 12). The framework takes governments to be unitary actors, although Efrat acknowledges in his analysis of the shifting and conflicted British response to the illicit trade of looted antiquities that the assumption does not always hold (p. 173). The illicit trade in antiquities is one of three main case-studies, the others being small arms and human trafficking (drugs, money laundering and counterfeit goods are discussed in much briefer studies). The depth of Efrat’s three main cases does, however, come at the expense of breadth; they comprise over half the book, and yet all three essentially concentrate on the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. This is not a significant flaw, as it does not negate the validity of Efrat’s theoretical framework, but it would be interesting to have seen Efrat’s prodigious capacity for research applied further afield. The book contains an odd reference to Britain’s ‘Foreign Service’ (p. 156), but is otherwise authoritative, lucid and peppered with interesting episodes, such as Efrat’s account of the unlikely marriage of religious groups and feminist organizations in America that pushed for their government to act against human trafficking in the 1990s (p. 183). Efrat is

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Energy, environment and global health to be commended for his concluding discussion of policy implications (pp. 294−7), which ensures policy-makers will find this book as valuable as academics will. Matthew Wright

Energy, environment and global health China’s environmental challenges. By Judith Shapiro. Cambridge: Polity. 2012. 200pp. Index. Pb.: £14.99. isbn 978 0 74566 091 2. Available as e-book. Green innovation in China: China’s wind power industry and the global transition to a low-carbon economy. By Joanna I. Lewis. New York: Columbia University Press. 2013. 224pp. Index. £27.50. isbn 978 0 23115 330 0. The governance of energy in China: transition to a low-carbon economy. By Philip Andrews-Speed. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2012. 280pp. Index. £57.50. isbn 978 0 23028 224 7. Available as e-book. The fate of the global environment has often been linked to the future of China. China is the world’s largest CO2 emitter in absolute terms and it is also the world’s largest coal consumer. At the same time, the country has the world’s largest wind energy market and it is heavily investing in renewable energy. Nevertheless, the share of renewable energy in total energy consumption is decreasing, instead of increasing, because of the rapid growth of China’s fossil fuel capacity (Feng Wang, Haitao Yin and Shoude Li, ‘China’s renewable energy policy: commitments and challenges’, Energy Policy 38: 4). Climate change and fossil fuel resource depletion are only two of China’s environmental challenges. Scarce domestic natural resources such as water, land, minerals and energy as well as air quality are under pressure from the world’s largest population, high GDP growth, progressing industrialization, rapid urbanization and a growing middle class with an increasingly affluent lifestyle. The study of how China will react to its environmental challenges is very timely and important. Judith Shapiro’s China’s environmental challenges is a well-written book with an astonishingly captivating authorial voice. The monograph aims to link China’s impact on the environment on a global scale with China’s domestic political pressures, struggles, history and culture. Shapiro searches for the domestic roots of its transnational impact on the environment. The book draws upon Shapiro’s long experience of China’s environmental problems and brims with expertise. For example, it discusses critically the challenge of the central government to implement its progressive environmental policies and energy policies on a national level. Another interesting discussion is on the links between global consumerism and China’s rising demand for natural resources. The book shares some characteristics with Jonathan Watts’s When a billion Chinese jump (Faber and Faber, 2010). Both are written in a fascinating style, which is entertaining, a bit polemical and sometimes even sweeping in its arguments. The use of theories and concepts is occasionally overshadowed by a broad picture approach that sometimes lacks focus. Key environmental challenges such as climate change and sustainability are discussed very briefly and then taken for granted, but they are never theorized or conceptualized in more detail. The same goes for the five ‘analytical core concepts’ of globalization, governance, national identity, civil society and environmental justice, which are not fleshed out in a detailed way. The book issues criticisms towards Stalinism and capitalism but fails to provide analysis of their systemic flaws in relationship to the environment.

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Book reviews Nevertheless, the occasional lack of theoretical and conceptual frameworks does not diminish the value of the book as it remains a fascinating, thoughtful and topical introduction for anyone interested in China’s environmental issues. Its strength and weakness is its ability to paint a broad picture of China’s environmental crisis, covering large theoretical and thematic grounds which are accessible to a wide audience. Joanna Lewis’s Green innovation in China provides an excellent overview of the Chinese wind power industry and the country’s efforts to become a global forerunner in the low-carbon economy. The Chinese wind energy industry has experienced rapid growth in recent years and today it is a global leader in terms of investments, production and installed capacity. It is rivalling many of the more established wind energy industries in Europe and the United States (Frauke Urban, Johan Nordensvärd and Yuan Zhou, ‘Key actors and their motives for wind energy innovation in China’, Innovation and Development 2: 1, 2012). Against this backdrop, the monograph offers a detailed account of China’s domestic wind energy policy regime, its history and the global positioning of its growing industry. Lewis’s book is based on a decade of primary research in the fields of China’s renewable energy, climate and innovation policies. The book is written in a detailed and knowledgeable style. It elaborates on interesting case-studies of transfer of wind energy technology from Denmark, Germany and the United States to China, thereby explaining the roots of China’s booming wind energy industry. Lewis further provides fascinating in-depth analysis of competition and cooperation in the wind energy industry between China as an emerging player and the established global players in Europe and the United States. While Lewis discusses the issue of technology transfer in various forms in much detail, the issue of ‘indigenous innovation’ is under-represented in the book. Many wind energy firms operating in China acquired their technology, expertise, knowledge and networks from overseas wind firms in Europe and the United States, most importantly from Germany, for example through mergers, acquisitions, licensing and joint ventures. The issue of Chinese indigenous innovation in the wind energy sector is highly debated in academic and industry circles. It is questionable how much original innovation is coming from China in the wind energy industry as innovation is often based on either adaptation of existing technologies or so-called ‘imitative innovation’ (Y. Dai, Y. Zhou, D. Xia, M. Ding and L. Xue, ‘Technology trajectory of Chinese wind power industry’, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 2013). This issue could have been discussed more critically in Lewis’s book. In addition, the concept of innovation could have been defined more clearly. Yet the monograph is essential reading for everyone interested in the Chinese wind energy industry, providing a compelling and well-researched overview, including the industry’s history and prospects for its future. Philip Andrews-Speed’s The governance of energy in China, well written and timely, addresses key issues of China’s energy governance from a theoretical and conceptual perspective. Andrews-Speed uses the conceptual frameworks of transition management, new institutional economics and historical institutionalism to elaborate China’s energy policies and its transition to a low-carbon economy. The approach of the book is embedded in the discussion on socio-technical regimes, regime transition and technological change. The book provides a competent and knowledgeable discussion of these topics; however, its structure could have been more intuitive. The conceptual framework and definitions for governance and other key terms are elaborated for the first time only in chapter five. The overall structure of the book could have been explained better and the flow of ideas between the chapters could be clearer. The work could have profited from some illustrative empirical case-studies to elaborate how the concepts of transition management, new

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Energy, environment and global health institutional economics and historical institutionalism can be applied to energy governance. Instead, it relies mainly on secondary literature. Nevertheless, the monograph is an important addition to the literature on China’s transition to a low-carbon economy. The book makes the point that the adaptive capacity of institutions of energy governance needs to be increased to enable a transition to a low-carbon economy in China. All three books are valuable additions to the growing body of literature on China’s environmental challenges, with specific reference to its energy and climate dilemmas. Shapiro’s book is entertaining, Lewis’s monograph is research-intensive and Andrews-Speed’s publication is largely conceptual. By using different approaches, each of these publications attempts to provide answers to how China is responding to its pressing environmental challenges, most notably the dilemmas of climate change and fossil fuel depletion, and how a transition from its polluting high-carbon economy to a green low-carbon economy can be possible. These books argue that the future of our global environment—and particularly our global climate—is in the hands of China; the authors nevertheless seem hopeful that China should be able to tackle its environmental challenges and move towards a greener, more environmentally friendly economy. Johan Nordensvärd, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and Frauke Urban, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK Global health and International Relations. By Colin McInnes and Kelley Lee. Cambridge: Polity. 2012. 205pp. Index. Pb.: £16.99. isbn 978 0 74564 946 7. Available as e-book. Global health has become a regular topic on the agenda of gatherings of powerful actors such as the G8 and World Economic Forum. It has also increasingly been a focus for philanthropy and an area of interest for medical research and teaching. Since the late twentieth century, in a world characterized by increasing interconnectedness, there have been changes to both the distribution and spread of diseases and the institutions governing health across borders. It is in this context that the term ‘global health’ has emerged. A striking feature of the politics of global health is that related key concepts—such as global health diplomacy and global health governance—have often remained ill-defined. This is a lacuna which has been addressed by Colin McInnes and Kelley Lee’s exploration of the intersections between International Relations and health. Both are multidisciplinary fields which have often met because of their shared areas of interest in global health and because of their indeterminate and common discursive boundaries. In their book, they adopt a social constructivist approach which emphasizes states’ identities, the roles of non-state actors and norms in the international system. Existing accounts of the trend of this growing terrain shared by health and International Relations have tended to concentrate on the role of ‘real world’ developments in global health. McInnes and Lee offer a different explanation for the links between these two disciplines on global health, namely, that they are socially constructed in a manner which mirrors different individuals’ and communities’ thinking, interests and relative power. In this sense, they make the case for the connections between the two being political, rather than based on an assessment of objectively observable facts. If global health governance is seen as ‘a series of rules, norms and principles’ accepted by key policy actors (p. 101), the authors reason, it must also be shaped by their ideas and interests. In order to ‘de-politicize health’ (p. 115), biomedical, quantitative and economic forms of evidence have been prioritized in decision-making on resource allocation.

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Book reviews One of the key issues they point to is the proliferation of discrete global health coordinating institutions. A common ‘real world’ explanation for this preponderance of initiatives consists of a critique of the World Health Organization as bureaucratic, nepotistic, underfunded and strategically unfocused. An allied, and dominant, criticism of global health governance is that it lacks a centralized authority. This is not owing to insufficient effort: a particularly useful table in the book summarizes twelve different global efforts to produce better coordination between global health entities since the 1980s (pp. 123−4). Instead, the authors contend, the inherently contested and political nature of global health governance means that it will not yield to a simple administrative, technical or scientific fix. Another critique of global health governance—that it lacks democracy and transparency—emanates from civil society. The People’s Health Assembly, a civil society coalition formed in 2000, has called for a ‘democratization’ of global health and has criticized what it views as the excessive influence of donor countries, multinational pharmaceutical companies and Bretton Woods institutions. As the authors point out, while such civil society groups have perceived charitable foundations to lack accountability, they themselves can be vulnerable to such negative charges. It would have been useful for the text to have drawn further on an emerging literature on global health activism to offer a more descriptive mapping of the diverse civil society actors in this terrain and to describe further their sources of political influence, or lack thereof (Raymond A. Smith and Patricia D. Siplon, Drugs into bodies: global AIDS treatment activism, Praeger, 2006; Jonathan Wolff, ‘The human right to health’, in Solomon Benatar and Gillian Brock, eds, Global health and global health ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2011; Mandisa Mbali, South African AIDS activism and global health politics, Palgrave, 2013). The value of their social constructivist approach is particularly evident in their chapter dealing with health security. Noting that efforts to ‘securitize’ health began in the early 2000s, they frame the motivation for this discourse as a ‘pragmatic or strategic act to gain increased policy attention’ for health issues (p. 132). They also discuss the diverse ways in which the concept of health security has been framed. In particular, they outline three dominant broad meanings of ‘health security’, namely: global health security, human security and national security (p. 133). Each meaning, they argue, has served different interests and agendas. Despite the fact that there has never been a case of state failure caused by a health crisis, health issues have been placed on some states’ national security agendas in certain instances—this points to the relevance of social realities in international relations. The book also contains chapters dealing with international political economy and foreign policy as they relate to global health. It is an important addition to a growing literature on the politics of global health. This book deserves a wide readership among scholars of global health and International Relations, particularly as it could foster greater inter-disciplinary collaboration between researchers in these fields. Mandisa Mbali, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa

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International history International history The sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914. By Christopher Clark. London: Allen Lane. 2012. 736pp. Index. £30.00. isbn 978 0 06114 665 7. Available as e-book. Christopher Clark, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, has written a great book. It is hard to see how it will be bettered for its analysis of how the Great War happened, making full use not only of the British, French and German archives—which have tended to dominate past historiography—but also of Russian and Serbian archives. Rather than looking at the July crisis of 1914 alone, Clark goes further back, spending two-thirds of the book on the domestic and international politics of the key European countries in the years before 1914, when mental models, motivations and assumptions were set. The expression tour de force was designed for this book. It is a weighty tome. How could it be otherwise? As Clark points out, the number of articles and books written on the outbreak of war numbers in the tens of thousands. Historians have fought over the war and its origins for decades. If the Great War is the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century—as many argue that it was—it justifies such a body of scholarship. Clark wades, therefore, into a historiographical minefield. Some readers will be displeased by the absence of a single discernible cause of war or of a single figure at which one can point an accusatory finger. Some have criticized Clark, a German specialist who has previously written a much-praised history of Prussia (Iron kingdom: the rise and downfall of Prussia 1600−1947, Allen Lane, 2006) and a biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II (A life in power, Pearson, 2000), for being too soft on Germany (and too harsh on France). But Clark has no time for the blame game. The search for the moral certainty of an evil perpetrator and a shining defender of noble values is an understandable one—and was particularly understandable in the wake of a war which killed so many, shattered European order and left a generation mutilated by the horrors of the trenches. But it gets us no further to true understanding; it is too easy. There is evil in the world, and there is good, but these alone do not explain the conflagration of 1914. ‘The outbreak of war’, Clark writes, ‘is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol’ (p. 561). Such bons mots and acerbic asides are sprinkled through the book, turning what would otherwise be an impressively massive work of scholarship into what is more, a good, indeed a gripping, read. Clark gets under the skin of the societies and individuals he describes: men such as Nikolai Hartwig, the Russian diplomatic representative in Serbia who encouraged Belgrade with his pan-Slavism (and who died of heart failure on the carpet of the Austrian minister’s residence in July 1914). There is psychological and political acuity to this masterful portrait of policy-making. States are not like billiard balls, totally predictable in their action and reaction to external influences. Fateful decisions are not always made in conditions of calm, well-informed rationality. Individual fears, mental models, the sense of a loss of agency, position vis-àvis bureaucratic rivals, cultural insecurity as well as ideas about morality—all these factors play some explanatory role in something as complex as the outbreak of war. And all these factors give The sleepwalkers contemporary relevance to the study of international affairs, at a time when China is rising, North Korea is unstable, the Middle East is in turmoil, classic military alliances are in flux, and familiar tropes around liberal internationalism, Realism and the rise and fall of Great Powers are being brushed off once more. There are other reminders of startling modernity in Clark’s book. One chapter sub-heading reads ‘Air strikes on Libya’, describing the Italian campaign to take over what

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Book reviews had previously been an outpost of the Ottoman Empire. The assassins of Franz Ferdinand were, in effect, suicide bombers (everyone remembers Gavrilo Princip, but forgets the other members of this desperate death squad). And there are powerful reflections on the possibility of other paths. Hindsight hardens the lines of historical causality. As Clark writes of the quest for causes of the war in its aftermath, ‘causes [are] trawled from the length and breadth of Europe’s pre-war decades [and] are piled like weights on the scale until it tilts from probability to inevitability’ (p. 362). But looked at from the perspective of 1913, or even the summer of 1914, war was not a foregone conclusion—and certainly not the war which occurred. The sleepwalkers has the makings of a classic. Clark has stolen a march on other histories of the war itself which will come out at the end of 2013. This book will not end a historical debate. But it should serve to inform not only historians, but enlightened policy-planners and politicians as to how Europe—and therefore the world—found itself at war in 1914, 99 years ago. Charles Emmerson, Energy, Environment and Resources, Chatham House Lenin’s terror: the ideological origins of early Soviet state violence. By James Ryan. London: Routledge. 2012. 249pp. £95.00. isbn 978 0 41567 396 9. Available as e-book. No other political personality embodied more fatefully than Vladimir Lenin the absolutist revolutionary dreams of the twentieth century. Trained as a lawyer, he had nothing but scorn for the rule of law. Pretending to fulfil Marxist humanism, he established the first totalitarian dictatorship in history. An intellectual himself, he disparaged the intelligentsia as a class of moral morons and political cowards. He was a consummate ideologue, the founder of an unprecedented political institution, the vanguard party. An heir to the Russian revolutionary tradition, he valued secrecy, conspiracy and violence. Less cruel by nature than his successor Joseph Stalin, Lenin was nevertheless ready to condone and to order mass murder if he felt that this could serve revolutionary expediency. Erudite, nuanced and truly original, James Ryan’s study is an outstanding contribution to understanding the nature of Bolshevism as a radical movement, its main goals, techniques, fixations and consequences. Ryan correctly links Lenin’s approach to violence to the ideological tenets of Marxism. He uses a famous statement by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag archipelago as the epigraph to the book’s introduction: ‘The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short of a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology’. Lenin conceived of himself, and indeed he was, a faithful student of Karl Marx’s doctrine. By the standards of the Second International, he was one of the best informed and most prolific writers. Uncompromising in terms of ultimate principles and yet able to step back under unpropitious circumstances, Lenin was a genuine Machiavellian. He believed profoundly in the final revolutionary goal—the advent of a classless utopia—and had no reservations or scruples on the use of violence in order to advance his cataclysmic agenda. Ryan accurately points out that, in addition to the Marxist tenets, Lenin was profoundly marked by the avalanche of boundless violence unleashed by the First World War. Like other socialist prophets, among them Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, he saw himself caught in a cosmic battle between the forces of progress and those of reaction, between socialism and barbarism. By the end of his life, he may have vaguely realized that the new society he and the Bolsheviks had imposed on Russia was quite different from the promised human emancipation. Lenin’s last two years were full of disappointments, frustrations and even despair.

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International history Lenin abhorred the iniquities of tsarist Russia and despised any reformist temptation. The old order had to perish in its entirety, definitively and irrevocably. Furthermore, he was an enemy of gradualism within the socialist movement itself. Inspired by allegedly selfless motivations, the Bolsheviks created a political and social cosmos in which human beings were treated as mere cogs in the wheel. Human dignity was trampled in the name of the noble hopes and man became, as Arthur Koestler put it, a ‘grammatical fiction’. Ryan’s main question, to which he provides impressively rich and persuasive answers, is: ‘How and why did Lenin and his Party, committed to a vision of a “beautiful future” of peaceful prosperity for humanity as a whole, visit a violent dictatorship upon the Russian people?’ (p. 1). He also looks at the connection between the original Leninist theory (or faith) and Stalin’s own revolutionary thought. It is clear that Stalin was Lenin’s most successful disciple, but the question remains whether he was also the most faithful to the prophet’s behests. Ryan’s thoughtfully crafted study is a remarkably well-documented exercise in intellectual history, a state-of-the-art exploration of the main themes in the Leninist theoretical body, and an attempt to come to terms with the moral implications of the catastrophic Soviet experiment. Whatever the 0riginal Bolshevik promises, the historical record is inescapably conducive to this conclusion: ‘The extent of Bolshevik violence and dictatorship was, paradoxically, both effective and ultimately counter-productive, for the price of survival was a bloody dictatorship that distorted the lofty ideals that animated the Bolsheviks to take power in the first place’ (pp. 191−2). My only reservation here concerns the term ‘lofty’. I would prefer ‘reckless’ or even ‘delusional’. Can one somehow exonerate the original intentions from the disastrous effects? Can one separate the morality of intentions from the morality of effects? Ryan himself offers enough evidence that other leftist intellectuals and militants realized that Bolshevism was bound to culminate in purges, camps and mass executions. Even before the Bolsheviks’ coming to power, it was clear that Lenin was a fanatical propagandist, a utopian ideologue fixated on social purity and purification, an heir to Robespierre and Saint-Just, but no philosopher. Philosophy implies doubt and Lenin was the man without doubts. Lenin was the practitioner of a simplistic, partisan and exclusivist philosophy. He rejected emphatically any possibility for a middle path, of a tertium datur between what he called ‘bourgeois ideology’ and the ‘proletarian’ one. Lenin’s Manichaeism was inexorable. For Lenin and his followers, ideas were (are) always the manifestation of class interests. This was the meaning of a notion essential for the Leninist conception about ideas, ideologies and philosophical consciousness: partiinost—partisanship, class position, militant commitment, total and abject subordination to the party line. As Ryan demonstrates, for Lenin the dictatorship of the proletariat, a concept he defended with a crusader’s zeal, represented the only way to save the revolution. Violence, in this revolutionary eschatology, had redemptive, cathartic and miraculous functions. Those who refused to follow the party’s revealed truth were ‘enemies of the people’ and they deserved to be exterminated as despicable vermin (Ryan quotes extensively Lenin’s hateful published and secret texts). Ryan’s important book offers an excellent account of Leninism as a revolutionary doctrine that sanctifies political violence and condemns entire social categories to stateengineered extinction. Masquerading as an ideology of the oppressed, it was a secular teleology of exclusion rooted in the visceral contempt for the rule of law, liberty, property and the universality of human rights. Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland (College Park), USA

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Book reviews Hitler’s philosophers. By Yvonne Sherratt. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. 2013. 301pp. £25.00. isbn 978 0 30015 193 0. Available as e-book. Totalitarian leaders fancied themselves as intellectuals. Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao—they all wanted to be seen and acclaimed as philosophers. Convinced that they had a mission to purify humanity of the ‘enemies of the people’ and create an earthly paradise (defined either as a classless society or as a perfectly homogenous racial community), they tried to construct ideological justifications for mass murder. Unlike traditional dictators, they pursued utopian goals and strove to transform not only the political order, but also the human mind. A self-taught individual, devoid of any systematic intellectual background, Adolf Hitler absorbed his main ideas from like-minded individuals, resentful vulgarizers and distorters of the German philosophical tradition. Vividly written, often absorbing, though much too anecdotal, this book is a significant contribution to understanding both Hitler’s hateful world-view and the main sources that inspired his attempt to become the ‘philosopher-Führer’. There is no certainty that Hitler ever thoroughly studied the metaphysical works of such thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Fichte or Nietzsche. Most likely he borrowed his views on these highly influential philosophers from second-hand sources. He may have read Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitic diatribes or the strangely incoherent ruminations of Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He used the time he spent in prison, after the failed coup of 1923, to muse on their ideas, but there is no trace in his literary output of any direct, unequivocal influence. Yvonne Sherratt highlights anti-Semitic themes in the German philosophical tradition, but again, these were quite frequent in the European cultural and political landscape of the nineteenth century. In fact, even Karl Marx (whom Hitler abhorred but claimed to have read) displayed a high amount of anti-Jewish venom in his early writings. In fact, as Brigitte Hamann showed in her path-breaking book on Hitler’s Vienna (Hitler’s Vienna: a dictator’s apprenticeship, OUP, 1999), young Hitler internalized most of the ideas that were to become his life-long fixations from the relatively peripheral racist literature circulating in Austria-Hungary’s capital when he was a rootless and despondent individual. In other words, he did not need the sophisticated contributions of Kant and Fichte in order to start hating the Jews as the embodiment of all the things he execrated. Sherratt organized her book in two parts: the first deals with Hitler himself, his ‘philosophical’ lieutenant Alfred Rosenberg, a mystical lunatic and a rabid racist, and some of the main figures of Nazi or pro-Nazi philosophers. It is the best part of the book and should have stayed alone. Whereas philosophy professors Alfred Baeumler and Ernst Krieck were vainglorious mediocrities attracted to National Socialism because of their own racist convictions, others were prominent figures who moved in that direction most likely for opportunistic rather than fanatical reasons. Two main cases have been widely discussed throughout the last two decades: political philosopher Carl Schmitt, who became the main constitutional theorist of the Third Reich, and Martin Heidegger, arguably Germany’s most admired and influential philosopher since Hegel. The question Sherratt asks only cursorily is related to the deep causes of Schmitt’s and Heidegger’s conversion to Nazism and the enduring impact of their ideological transmogrification of their own work. Furthermore, whatever one thinks of Heidegger’s refusal to come to terms with the moral implications of his romance with National Socialism, it is unfair to portray him as ‘Hitler’s Superman’. To be sure, he behaved despicably towards his former mentor and close friend Edmund Husserl, cutting off all relations with him as soon as the Nazis expelled Jewish professors from the academia. He delivered a scandalously abject rectoral address

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International history in Freiburg in 1933. In an article published in 1934, Heidegger indulged in a mindboggling dithyramb that definitely sullied his reputation as a humanist thinker: ‘The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law.’ Sherratt insists on Heidegger’s ambivalent relations with his Jewish students, many of whom would later be shocked by their philosophical idol’s genuflections to the criminal ideology of Nazism. Some, like Herbert Marcuse, would never be able to go beyond their moral revulsion; others, like Hannah Arendt, would move from considering Heidegger a moral monster, immediately after the war, to forgiving him and even promoting his writings in the AngloSaxon world. It would have been useful for Sherratt to compare Heidegger’s relatively brief worshipping of National Socialism with similar attitudes at the other end of the ideological spectrum, for instance Georg Lukacs’s Stalinist passion and his unrepentant commitment to Bolshevism as a philosophy of freedom. No less fascinating is the fate of Schmitt’s ideas on legitimacy and violence: once associated with the Nazi revolution against liberal values and institutions, Schmitt’s theses have been embraced in recent years by exponents of the post-Marxist far left. Habent sua fata libelli… The second part of the book is more problematic: first, because the authors discussed could be described as victims of Hitler, not as Hitler’s philosophers. Sherratt acknowledges this, but the title of her book remains misleading. Second, we get a lot of biographical information (not necessarily new) on Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt, but much less analysis and interpretation of their works. I am not sure that the idyll between young Hannah Arendt and Heidegger is so important in such a work of intellectual archaeology. Was Arendt a Heideggerian? I doubt it. Did she admire his work? No doubt. Much has been written about that topic and not always in good faith. Arendt did not engage in exculpating Heidegger, but rather tried to understand his moral blindness (thoughtlessness) as part of what she once called the ideological storms of the twentieth century. Sherratt mentions but fails to engage in a profound discussion of Arendt’s and Adorno’s main writings on totalitarianism. We learn a lot about Adorno’s socializing with Thomas Mann’s family during the Californian exile, but almost nothing about the fascinating insights into the tragedy of modernity in Adorno’s writings. In her conclusion, Sherratt deplores the fact that ‘Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno, in spite of their enormous accomplishments, have never been admitted into the philosophy canon in the English-speaking world’ (pp. 262−3). Assuming this is the case (which I doubt), I am afraid that this book, especially its second part, will not do much to change the situation. Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland (College Park), USA Empire of secrets: British intelligence, the Cold War and the twilight of empire. By Calder Walton. London: HarperCollins. 2013. 411pp. Index. £25.00. isbn 978 0 00745 796 0. Available as e-book. In Empire of secrets Calder Walton has written a long overdue book on the role of the intelligence services in Britain’s retreat from empire. Walton was a member of Christopher Andrew’s research team on the authorized history of MI5 and is therefore more than competent in handling intelligence records and interpreting them effectively. This is clearly evident in Walton’s confident and very readable prose. He is comfortable in analysing MI5’s role (his main focus) in the passing of power to newly independent nation-states against a Cold War backdrop and constant anxiety over Soviet-sponsored subversion in Britain’s

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Book reviews remaining colonial possessions. Apart from mining open Security Service papers and newly declassified material on the Mau Mau in Kenya that came to light in 2011 from the Foreign Office archive at Hanslope Park, Walton has striven hard to look at what he calls the ‘unprecedented volume of records that have been crashing into the archives in recent years’ (p. xxii). Rather disappointingly, however, he informs us that most historians of Britain’s end of empire continue to ignore the role of the intelligence services, which has essentially become the ‘missing dimension’ of British postwar imperial history. Walton spends the first 70 pages of his book surveying the history of Britain’s intelligence services (principally MI5 and SIS) from 1909, which would be rather familiar to most historians of intelligence, but given the commercial market that the book is trying to attract this is perhaps necessary for the lay reader. The story starts in earnest when Walton examines what MI5 deemed to be the foremost priority in the immediate postwar years— not the emerging Soviet threat, but Jewish (or Zionist) terrorist groups operating in the British Mandate of Palestine. Although these groups committed violence in Palestine, MI5 also had to keep track of their activities in the United Kingdom, which included a bomb being planted at the Colonial Office in April 1947 that fortunately failed to detonate. Some of these cells also linked up with the IRA while others had connections with communism and the Soviet Union. The book then moves on to the transfer of power in India in 1947 and Walton highlights an important deal that MI5 brokered with the new authorities to maintain a Security Liaison Officer (SLO) in New Delhi, setting a significant precedent. In every other major British colony or dependency, the continued presence of an MI5 SLO became a vital, though undisclosed, part of Britain’s transfer of power. They provided crucial intelligence for colonial administrations and a secret channel of communication between London and newly independent national governments. While these SLOs sometimes shared ‘clean’ intelligence with new governments-in-waiting, they would also continue to monitor the activities of some democratically elected ministers until the last possible moment before independence and in some cases, such as in the Gold Coast, even beyond. Walton nevertheless argues persuasively that British intelligence services helped to smooth the end of empire by providing key background information on anti-colonial leaders. Assessments that MI5 made of leaders like Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya were, according to Walton, ‘sober and non-alarmist, dispelling fears of their communist beliefs, rather than heightening them’ (p. 335). Perhaps the main theme to emerge from Walton’s book was the continual failure of colonial administrations to pay attention to intelligence matters until it was too late and then to ignore lessons identified from previous emergencies. This was particularly the case in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden. MI5’s experience of the Second World War was that the use of torture during interrogations could never produce reliable intelligence, but Walton argues that the Security Service often failed to instil this view among colonial special branches and those on the front line who had to deal with the various postwar insurgencies. Although more secret colonial-era records are soon to be released, which leads the author to speculate on what else we might learn in the future, for now we have at least Walton’s pioneering book on a very complex, and at times uncomfortable, aspect of Britain’s postwar history. Christopher Baxter, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

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International history Nasser’s gamble: how intervention in Yemen caused the Six-Day War and the decline of Egyptian power. By Jesse Ferris. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2013. 342pp. Index. £30.95. isbn 978 0 69115 514 2. Available as e-book. The impact of Egypt’s costly embroilment in Yemen during the 1960s is often noted within the context of the 1967 Six-Day War. Rarely, however, is it the object of substantial scholarly attention in its own right. Amid this context comes a well-written and thoroughly researched study of the intervention. Nasser’s gamble draws on an impressive selection of Russian, US and British diplomatic archives, as well as the Arabic-language memoirs of politicians and senior military officials and contemporary press coverage. The book provides a precise and deeply researched analysis of the conflict, but unfortunately stops short of providing a history of it outside the Egyptian involvement, which the author is well qualified to give. Even for Middle East specialists, familiarity with the details of ‘Egypt’s Vietnam’ may be superficial: what began as a regional projection of power at the height of Arab nationalism’s prestige descended into a costly quagmire that saw 70,000 Egyptian troops deployed and little achieved. Numerous histories of the conflict exist, though many are dated. In this regard, the value of Nasser’s gamble lies in providing an informed and well-written account of Egypt’s involvement that draws on a masterful array of source material unavailable to previous historians. ‘Nasserism as a foreign policy’, the author notes, ‘was first and foremost an Egyptian ambition for regional hegemony’, but also ‘tended to push Egypt into uncompromising positions of principle and fanciful overextension’ (pp. 4, 12). The Egyptian invasion took place following the humiliating setback of Egypt’s September 1961 severance from its merger with Syria, which had resulted in the expulsion (according to some accounts, wearing only his undergarments) of Nasser’s ‘governor’ Abdul Hakim Amer. Amid this, the intervention aimed at restoring national pride. Contemporary official Egyptian claims maintained that the war ‘did not bear the character of an invasion but was meant to help a sister-Arab country’ (p. 174). Despite this, the author reveals that many Egyptian troops considered this ‘revolutionary’ endeavour to be a mission civilisatrice and literally resorted to the field manuals of British colonialism in their attempts to pacify Yemen’s tribes. ‘The Egyptian government did not control the events of 1962’ (p. 32), Ferris notes, and quickly the conflict slipped out of control. Despite criticizing American imperialism, ‘by 1962 Egypt was importing roughly 50 per cent of its consumption of wheat, more than 2 million tons annually’ from the United States (p. 103), which provided favourable trade terms. But when an October 1962 three-year agreement with the US expired in 1965 without renewal, Nasser was particularly exposed, forcing him to the negotiating table. Even before this, the bankrupting effect of the conflict caused shortages in Egypt: ‘in early 1964 meat fats, sugar and tea topped the list, while by the end of 1966 the items of primary concern were soap, fluorescent light bulbs, sandals and cooking oils’ (p. 209). Beyond the narrow involvement of Egypt, the author analyses the intervention within a Cold War context: ‘Yemen, from the Soviet perspective, was an inconsequential backwater. Its remote mountain villages hosted few Communists for the party ideologues to nurture; its ancient tribal system held little promise for mobilization on the basis of class solidarity’ (p. 71). Despite this, the coup ‘fit in with a board worldview in which “revolution” was a step forward, to be encouraged’ (p. 94), and under Khrushchev Soviet generosity was substantial. Despite this, the author demonstrates how the USSR received little in the way of return: loans were repeatedly written off, and Nasser resisted providing the

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Book reviews one thing it truly sought—permanent port facilities for its navy in the eastern Mediterranean (p. 149). The author also places the conflict in a regional context: ‘from October 1962 until December 1967, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were locked in a bloody struggle to control the outcome’ (p. 2). Significantly less attention is paid to the Yemeni participants. True, Nasser’s gamble concerns Egypt’s embroilment in Yemen, rather than the Yemeni conflict in and of itself. Still, given the author’s expertise on the conflict and his impressive access to substantial archival source material, it seems wasteful not to have given slightly more attention to the Yemeni angle. With a price tag of around US$500 million and at least 5,000 dead soldiers (p. 194), ‘Egypt lost more troops in the Yemeni civil war than in any of the wars with Israel with the possible exception of the Six-Day War’ (p. 195). Nasser’s gamble allows readers to understand better-known episodes of Egyptian history in clearer context: the fierce clampdown against the Muslim Brotherhood in 1965−66 may have sought to distract domestic attention from an unpopular war, and the bombast and grand-standing before the June 1967 war took place while Nasser was attempting to extract his troops. The soldiers at the time are now in their 70s and 80s, and the conflict shaped an Egyptian generation. Likewise, though Yemen remains a republic, it is Saudi Arabia, and not Egypt, which has significant influence over Yemeni affairs. Richard Phelps, Quilliam Foundation, UK The killing zone: the United States wages Cold War in Latin America. By Stephen G. Rabe. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. 247pp. Index. Pb: £13.99. isbn 978 0 19533 323 7. There exists a substantial body of literature, much of it highly critical, on the US role in Latin America during the Cold War. Stephen Rabe has over the years made his own noteworthy contribution to the field with archival-based studies on the increasingly interventionist policies towards the region pursued by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations as well as a searing indictment of the US part in stoking racial tensions in its successful bid to prevent Cheddi Jagan from leading British Guiana to independence in the 1960s (US intervention in British Guiana: a Cold War story, University of North Carolina Press, 2005, reviewed in International Affairs, 82: 3). Much of the passion and outrage exhibited in the latter work has been carried over into his latest opus, a general survey that draws on the existing historiography and the author’s own research: ‘The United States’, he forthrightly concludes, ‘undermined constitutional systems, overthrew popularly elected governments, rigged elections, and supplied, trained, coddled, and excused barbarians who tortured, kidnapped, murdered, and “disappeared” Latin Americans’ (p. 194). The present work is put forward as a salutary corrective to the triumphalism that marked the official and media response to the United States’ Cold War ‘victory’ over the Soviet Union, while ignoring the particularly heavy human and material cost that was paid by Latin Americans (and others in Asia and Africa). The book serves an essentially didactic purpose; it is aimed at those with a fairly limited knowledge of the region, the author even offering to answer questions from interested readers. Its overall appeal will be enhanced by the crisp writing style. In a departure from other works on the Cold War in Latin America, Rabe supplies readers with plenty of background information on the history of US interventions in the region prior to 1945 in order to elucidate the strong element of continuity in subsequent

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International history US policy, not least the lingering attitudes of ethnocentrism, racism, condescension and cultural contempt towards Latin Americans that has all too often informed the stance of leading US policy-makers up to the present. Uniquely, he also provides a concluding chapter on the long-term legacy of the regional Cold War: the psychological scars, the truth commissions, the prosecutions for human rights abuses in Latin America; and the partial opening of government records at public insistence and the occasional expressions of ‘regret’ on the part of the United States. In line with the findings of other scholars, Rabe privileges perceived US national security concerns over narrower economic motivations (for example, the immediate interests of United Fruit in Guatemala) as the prime motor of intervention and emphasizes the wider considerations of US credibility on the global stage as an additional motive for US action (for instance, in Lyndon Johnson’s decision to invade the Dominican Republic in 1965 and the Nixon administration’s attempt in 1970 to block the democratic election of Salvador Allende in Chile). He contests the argument of some scholars, most recently Hal Brands in Latin America’s Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2010, reviewed in IA 87: 2), that the radical left provoked the military reaction in the 1960s and 1970s: ‘the “theory of the two demons” ignores historical chronology and trivializes the methodical abuse of human rights and the campaign of state terror perpetrated by antiCommunists in Latin America’ (p. xxxii). The point about chronology is certainly apposite in the case of Brazil, but less clear cut in others; the author tellingly omits any mention in his account of the systematic atrocities carried out by the Maoist guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso in the 1980s, which unleashed a blind, indiscriminate counter-­insurgency campaign by the Peruvian military, or of the more convoluted situation in Colombia. Some may also object to Rabe’s further contention that ‘Communist nations played minor roles in Latin America’ (p. xxx); with hindsight this may seem self-evident, but at the time perception and not a little hysteria in Washington counted for more than objective reality. Rabe’s language is at times quite unsparing, a testament to the suppressed anger that suffuses this work. Pinochet’s methods after the 1973 coup in Chile are likened to Stalin’s violent proceedings in the 1930s; as for the man, ‘along with being a tyrant and a murderer, he was a thief ’ (p. 139). Short, graphic descriptions are proffered of the effects of the car bombs that killed General Carlos Prats and his wife in 1974 and Orlando Letelier and his assistant in 1976 as well as of the modus operandi of the Guatemalan military and the Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s. On the US side, special contempt is reserved for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger: the Argentine military ‘regime’s anti-Semitism did not seem to register’ with the latter, ‘whose family fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s’ (p. 143). Rabe is also scathing about the Reagan administration’s profound lack of knowledge about Latin America. Only President Jimmy Carter and a few US officials win qualified praise for their policies and humanity. Rabe covers a lot of ground in a relatively short text. The focus is inevitably on the major US interventions that have been well chronicled. The US role in the right-wing reaction to the democratic opening during the early Cold War is in consequence downplayed perhaps much too readily. The anomaly of the benign US reaction to the Bolivian revolution of 1952, with its nationalization of the tin industry and extensive land reform programme, in contrast to the hostile contemporaneous US stance towards Arbenz’s Guatemala, is simply not recorded. Rabe has, it seems to me, also missed a golden opportunity in a work of a general nature to present British Guiana as a separate, detailed, and revealing case-study that stands on a par with the better-known interventions in Guatemala, Cuba and Brazil. Philip Chrimes

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Book reviews Visions of power in Cuba: revolution, redemption and resistance, 1959−1971. By Lillian Guerra. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2012. 467pp. Index. £46.50. isbn 978 0 80783 563 0. Available as e-book. Lillian Guerra’s innovative, intensely researched, elegantly written, at times almost lyrical book is no standard history of the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban revolution. In contrast to the bulk of the existing literature on this formative period, it does not dwell very long on the outward manifestations of political and socio-economic transformation, or chart the burgeoning confrontation with the United States, nor does it always place Fidel Castro at the front and centre of the narrative. Rather, the work is an ambitious multilayered excavation of the variegated meaning of the revolution to its participants. The latest addition to the University of North Carolina Press’s Envisioning Cuba series, Guerra’s book most closely approximates its intended purpose. The author frames the decade within a reified ‘grand narrative of redemption’, fashioned by Fidel Castro—the ‘self-appointed prophet’, sole determinant of change and only legitimate critic of his own policies—and propagated by state officials, with the intent of forging unshakeable domestic unity in the face of internal and external challenges to a historical project aimed at overcoming the legacy of Cuba’s colonial and neo-colonial past. In this, the mass rallies of the first years served an important function: they constituted ‘the evidence of the 26th of July Movement’s unparalleled political legitimacy and the means for generating such evidence in the national and international arena’ (p. 38). Within such an all-embracing narrative, there was no room for any hint of dissent which was now defined as counter-revolutionary, anti-patriotic and a form of historic treason; in practical terms, it was the rationale used to justify inter alia the early disappearance of the non-government press, the loss of traditional student autonomy at universities, and the purge of existing trade unions. The book fittingly culminates with the emblematic self-criticism of poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, marking for the outside world—not least left-wing cultural figures previously supportive of the revolution—the belated realization that conformity was the norm in Cuba. Guerra, while recognizing that repression in Cuba never approached the levels found in the Soviet Union, does an excellent job of painstakingly uncovering the various subtle and unsubtle methods of intimidation that were applied in this ‘grassroots dictatorship’, in which ordinary people were complicit in buttressing an increasingly authoritarian regime. She points as well to the many contradictions, paradoxes and ironies of the revolutionary process: the occasional emulation of the practices of the despised Batista regime; the use of the Ofensiva Revolucionaria of 1968 against micro-businesses to rectify socialism as much as to extirpate capitalism; and evidence of party members’ belief in claims made by the party’s own newspaper. This, then, is a work that will not sit comfortably with those who have uncritically chosen to exculpate the regime over the years on the grounds that the revolution’s trajectory has been sadly distorted by unabated US hostility. Guerra’s principal interest is in the many ‘counter-narratives’ that she has managed so successfully to retrieve from her eclectic sources, divergent visions of the direction of the revolution not only of those who did not share its apparent goal of a world turned upside down and opted for exile early on, but also of enthusiastic supporters of the promise of the revolution—immediate beneficiaries such as the poor, women and blacks. The tragedy of the revolution was its betrayal of these supporters, who were guilty of little more than ‘unintended dissidence’: Cuban officials ‘did not so much lead the Revolution as constrain, stifle, and suppress the many visions of change voiced by their followers in order to avoid

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Europe negotiation, accountability, competition from other parties, and power sharing of any kind’ (p. 362). Critical of the long history of US interference in Cuban affairs, the revolution represents for the author a lost opportunity to have achieved a more socially inclusive and freer society in the wake of the historic achievement of overturning the entrenched pre-1959 neo-colonial regime, if only its self-appointed leaders had ‘allowed citizens to define the scope and reach of social change for themselves’ (p. 258). In a work in which so many actions are invested with symbolic meaning, there is always a danger of reading too much into a given event. For example, did Cubans—surely limited in number—really feel that they ‘fulfilled a self-imposed political “penance” for having failed to join [Fidel] during the real, historic struggle against Batista’ (p. 139) by climbing Pico Turquino in the Sierra Maestra after Castro had done so on 1 January 1960? Was cutting cane truly ‘a collective act of white contrition for past privilege and socioeconomic wrongs from which most whites benefited’ (p. 153)? The veracity of such assertions is frankly unknowable at this remove in time. Guerra’s interpretation of the evidence from documentary films, while intriguing, may also be taken as stretching a little too far the seeming import of every unintended and subconsciously motivated gesture. The primary audience for this book, as the author recognizes, is fellow Cuba scholars. With only a loose chronological framework and approaching the subject thematically, the book presumes a fair amount of prior knowledge in readers and may well prove somewhat challenging to the relative novice. From the perspective of Cuba specialists and aficionados, however, the work constitutes a stimulating, original—and in some circles, provocative— contribution to the historiography of the Cuban revolution. Philip Chrimes

Europe German Europe. By Ulrich Beck. Cambridge: Polity. 2013. 98pp. £16.65. isbn 978 0 7456 6539 9. In this little book, respected German sociologist Ulrich Beck provides a pithy critique of recent developments in the European Union and some neat suggestions for confronting the problems that plague it. Drawing on his seminal work on the ‘risk society’, he elegantly argues that risk can generate opportunities, freeing politics from existing rules and institutional constraints. The eurozone crisis raises the possibility of real risks, and it is in this context of potentially loosening shackles that Beck goes on to lay out both the shortcomings of the approaches currently being adopted and his own vision of how the crisis could and should be more effectively addressed. One thing Beck is clear about is that responses to date have been hugely ineffective. Nor is there much doubt about whom he holds primarily responsible for this. Angela Merkel—dubbed ‘Merkiavelli’—is criticized for her refusal to choose between the national and the European, her preference for avoiding action, and her focus on domestic electoral considerations. As the crisis continues, he argues, we are faced with a stark choice between continued muddling through and moves towards genuine European political union. Beck’s book is a good read, and I have a degree of sympathy with some of its arguments. His critique of economic analyses and of the tendency of political scientists to concentrate narrowly on institutions at the expense of anything else is well taken. And the lethal impact of austerity policies on poorer EU member states is hard to deny. So, too, is his argument that wealth is being redistributed from ‘bottom to top’ (p. 7).

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Book reviews Yet I confess that, overall, I remained unconvinced, and for at least three reasons. First, his critique seems overdone. For all his obvious dissatisfaction with the policies pursued by Angela Merkel, it seems, to this reviewer at least, that her success in avoiding the disintegration of the eurozone (and, according to some analyses, helping the EU through the worst of the eurozone crisis—though this remains to be seen), while maintaining high popularity ratings at home has represented a remarkable political balancing act. Second, Beck’s frustration with those who cling to the nation-state model, refusing to understand that the solutions to the problems confronting us are transnational in nature, is all too clear. He offers, however, little in the way of practical proposals to move beyond the primacy of national politics. The Europe he clearly longs for is simply failing to ­materialize. If even the financial transactions tax—in which he seems to place inordinate faith—is failing to materialize in any meaningful way, what hope, then, for the ‘utopian yet realistic’ European system of social security he calls for? As for his stated wish that the election of François Hollande might lead to a shift in power away from Germany, the less said the better. Finally, the cosmopolitanism in which Beck places so much store is a peculiarly limited one. For one thing, it seems restricted to a mobile, educated elite. The notion that northern Europeans should dilute their contempt for the South because Greece is a ‘cradle of European civilization’ is one that may resonate among classical scholars, but is unlikely to elicit broader appeal. Erasmus students might certainly feel fondly towards their host country, but Erasmus students are not Europe’s problem. Nor are the kinds of people who might opt to take a ‘voluntary European year’ in order better to empathize with EU citizens from other member states. Deep-seated popular antipathy towards Europe and indeed towards political elites (particularly, though not uniquely, among the less well off ) will not be addressed by gap years or volunteering. And this is without posing another question about Beck’s brand of cosmopolitanism: why should it be restricted to Europe? Why should young Europeans, anxious to learn about and empathize with other cultures, not set their sights further afield, to China, or India, or—heaven forbid—the United States? In this European insularity, at least, Beck shares something with many of the political elites he criticizes so elegantly. Anand Menon, King’s College London, UK European security: the roles of regional organisations. By Bjørn Møller. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2012. 516pp. Index. £75.00. isbn 978 1 40944 408 4. Available as e-book. When picking up Bjørn Møller’s new book on European security and the roles of regional organizations in it, one cannot escape the question: what more is there to say about this subject? There is certainly no lack of individual volumes on the European Union and NATO (see for instance Ron D. Asmus, Opening NATO’s door, Columbia University Press, 2002; Lawrence C. Kaplan, NATO divided, NATO united, Praeger, 2004; Michael E. Smith, Europe’s foreign and security policy, CUP, 2004; Jolyon Howorth, Security and defence policy in the European Union, Palgrave, 2007; Janne Haaland Matlary, European Union security dynamics, Palgrave, 2009, reviewed in International Affairs 85: 4; Wallace J. Thies, Why NATO endures, CUP, 2009, reviewed in IA 86: 3), and even the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), in the words of Møller an ‘almost completely forgotten’ organization (p. 237), has received its fair share of treatment (see e.g. David Galbreath, The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Routledge, 2007). What has been lacking is a volume that takes a comprehensive and critical view on how the various regional organizations that make up the European security architecture contrib-

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Europe uted to turning this war-torn region into a tightly coupled security community in less than 50 years. It is this gap that Møller sets out to fill, a task in which he succeeds admirably, if he can only keep his readers’ interest through the first half of the book. The first three chapters are dedicated, as one would expect, to the three constitutive elements of the subsequent analysis: security, international organizations and regions. Unfortunately, they read as somewhat detached essays, which, even if they are individually connected to the subject-matter at hand, could have been more focused and easily pulled together in one or two introductory chapters. Rest assured, they are well-informed and comprehensive treatises on the main academic debates contained in these three constitutive elements, to which the book’s overly long 166-page bibliography may also testify. Anyone in the trade could probably benefit from reading them, if only for the opportunity to refresh one’s own memory of key themes in International Relations theory. Nevertheless, Møller is not always able to restrict himself to what is relevant to his subject. It is also odd that he chooses to spend a whole chapter on the United Nations in a book about regional organizations. The author’s extreme wealth of knowledge is more appreciated when he turns to different conceptualizations of Europe. From here on, the chapters on NATO, the OSCE and the Council of Europe, and the EU respectively are considerably more to the point. Particularly intriguing are his observations about NATO. Whether the alliance was part of the solution to the security problems of Western Europe, or part of the problem, during the Cold War the author leaves open for debate (p. 234). He is clearer in his judgements about NATO’s role after the end of the Cold War, as when he observes that ‘NATO is no longer NATO but something else, retaining merely the name, but none (or very little) of the original substance’ (p. 221). His subsequent concerns about NATO having abandoned its original identity as a defensive alliance, and hampered Europe’s relations with Moscow (and Beijing) by engaging in offensive operations in places like Yugoslavia in 1999 and Libya in 2011, is convincingly argued (pp. 212, 215, 235). Not surprisingly, Møller is more positive in his reading of the EU’s role in consolidating European security. Yet he offers his thoughts on this issue without a sense of political activism or ideal naivety. It is refreshing when Møller approaches the EU through the lens of IR theory, seeing the rather more specific integration theories as a part of a broader tradition. As Møller points out, there is a lack of understanding of what the EU is, and too much focus on integration as process—which explains perhaps the tendency to forget the peace rationale behind the European integration project (pp. 264, 307). Consequently, those who criticized the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize going to the European Union would be well advised to read Møller’s book. Finally, the book could perhaps have spent more time on how the EU’s turn to military power may be distorting the Union’s identity, since he after all spends so much time on NATO’s changing identity. Nevertheless, Møller does warn against the EU’s ‘growing emphasis on military power at the possible expense of its traditional and much more effective “soft power”’ (p. 309). As he at the same time offers some regrets about the growing irrelevance of the OSCE, Møller does not only offer a comprehensive understanding of how all these organizations were necessary for securing Europe in the first 50 years after the Second World War. He also offers a convincing analysis of how the European states (and the United States) through these organizations—and NATO in particular—have not necessarily always made the right choices for consolidating these gains over the last 20 years. Per M. Norheim-Martinsen, Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, Norway

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Book reviews Six moments of crisis: inside British foreign policy. By Gill Bennett. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 223pp. Index. £20.00. isbn 978 0 19958 375 1. Defending the realm? The politics of Britain’s small wars since 1945. By Aaron Edwards. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2012. 319pp. £70.00. isbn 978 0 71908 441 6. If there is one thing that most commentators on British foreign policy can agree on, it is that Britain doesn’t do strategy well. Instead, policy-makers tend to lurch from one problem to the next in a reactive fashion. Too often, they either fail to draw on any historical knowledge to inform their decisions; or draw false analogies from their own experience. It is therefore fantastic to read two books that reflect on Britain’s historical practice of foreign and defence policy-making. Each is well researched, superbly written and provides new insights into British decision-making. Gill Bennett’s book, Six moments of crisis, analyses key moments in British foreign policy-making, namely: sending British forces to Korea in 1950; challenging Nasser over Suez in 1956; applying to join the EEC in 1961; withdrawing from East of Suez in 1968; expelling KGB operatives in 1971; and sending the taskforce to the Falkland Islands in 1982. Gill Bennett, a former Chief Historian at the Foreign Office, has written a book that is well informed and deeply researched using archival material. Her locus of decision is the Cabinet or Cabinet Committees, and decisions are, for her, made by ministers. As Bennett puts it: ‘government policy is made by government ministers, not by officials, special advisors, Brussels, or Washington’ (p. 4). Each event is set within the immediate political issues of the day since ‘ministers always think about more than one thing at a time’ (p. 5). There are telling details throughout—such as Manny Shinwell, the Defence Secretary in 1950, describing Britain’s commitment of troops into Korea alongside US forces as ‘Militarily not v[ery] desirable. Psychologically inevitable’ (p. 26)—that resonate with Britain’s recent decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan. Margaret Thatcher’s reaction to the Argentinian invasion was to ask ‘Were the Islands really British?’ because ‘there is no earthly point in sweating blood over it if it’s not ours’ (pp. 170−71)—revealing a more pragmatic side to the politician. Different leadership styles are described, with Attlee driving discussion towards a decision on the basis that ‘some men will be ready to express a view about everything. They should be discouraged’ (p. 21). In contrast, Macmillan gave his Cabinet free rein to speak on joining the EEC in 1961 to ensure that the decision would clearly be a collective one. There are also reminders of what was actually going on when these decisions were made. During the Suez Crisis, Britain continued to plan for a possible conflict with Israel in support of Jordan right up until October 1956 (p. 63). When the Commonwealth was canvassed about Britain joining the EEC, Duncan Sandys reported back that the leaders of Australia, Canada and New Zealand ‘expected Britain to make an application to the Common Market and “would be surprised if we did not do so”’ (p. 78). Overall, this book successfully plunges readers into the historical moment and reminds them that foreign policy is, as Attlee noted, about human beings making ‘important decisions on imperfect knowledge in a limited time’ (p. 21). Aaron Edwards’s book explores Britain’s conduct of small wars in the post-1945 era. The author’s focus is on civil–military relations and the politics of fighting counter-insurgency campaigns. Like Bennett, Edwards offers rich historical descriptions of important casestudies. The book begins with the evacuation of Palestine in the late 1940s and follows the retreat from Empire in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden, before exploring the conduct of counterterrorism in Northern Ireland and the recent Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns.

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Europe This is important history and needs to be told. Certain themes constantly emerge. Economic pressures are apparent across the decades. Anxieties in Whitehall and political divisions within the Labour Party were as much a feature of Britain’s Mandatory administration in Palestine as its later occupation of southern Iraq (p. 48). Experienced colonial policemen were moved from crisis to crisis in the postwar decades, with mixed results. A major recurring point is the importance of an effective Special Branch, viewed as crucial to defeating insurgents and terrorists in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and later Northern Ireland (pp. 78, 179). Yet the deployment of personnel and tactics from colonial conflicts in Northern Ireland would lead to tragedy and farce in the early years, as when banners were used to quell riots in Londonderry bearing the phrases ‘Anyone crossing the white line is liable to be shot’ and ‘Disperse or we fire’ in English and Arabic (p. 199). The brutality of the retreat from Empire is, importantly, present here. In a six-month period in 1949, the RAF flew over 1,000 strike operations in Malaya, dropping 6,900 tonnes of ordnance (p. 66). Whole populations were resettled and over 5,000 arrested for terrorism offences (p. 80). In Kenya, 1,086 Mau Mau were executed, mostly by hanging (p. 91), between 160,000 and 320,000 were detained (p. 91) and racist attitudes were omnipresent. One sergeant major told a court his orders at a road block were to ‘shoot anybody he liked, provided that they were black’ (p. 101). Guidance from senior officers argued that ‘If, in the course of the using of such force, troops are unfortunate enough to cause the death of an innocent person, or damage to property, the Law will regard this as an unavoidable accident’ (p. 102). The later chapters on Iraq and Afghanistan are weaker, with Edwards re-treading the buildup to war in Iraq rather than giving enough detail on its conduct. His conclusion that ‘Despite the dedication and professionalism of the armed forces … the politicians failed the soldiers’ (p. 252) is unsustainable. Far too little recognition of failures at the senior military level is offered. A more critical reader of events might note that the UK defence budget is one of the largest in the world and has remained so despite no existential threat to the UK mainland. An alternative story, of military leaders promising the earth to naive civilian politicians and then crying foul when they cannot deliver, is perhaps more convincing. The lack of serious doctrinal thinking and learning from past experience within the military has undoubtedly contributed to such failures. This is perhaps where both books are not as useful as they might be. They are resolutely ‘pre-theoretical’, offering no real reflection on the processes being described. If one were being critical, they are structured in a very British fashion—describing events, one after another, rather than theorizing as to what style of leadership, decision-making structure, doctrine or civil–military relationship works best and when. This reader was left wishing that such intelligent writers would give a larger sense of what lessons they thought could be learned from the events they described. Jamie Gaskarth, University of Plymouth, UK A special relationship? British foreign policy in the era of American hegemony. By Simon Tate. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2012. 182pp. Index. £65.00. isbn 978 0 71908 371 6. The author aims first to examine how postwar British governments perceived the special relationship; and second to show how they successively followed Churchill’s wartime practice of the special relationship. Buttressing the argument and present throughout the narrative is the idea of neo-Gramscian hegemony relating to the power of prestige, status

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Book reviews and moral standing to draw others into one’s desired pathways. What emerges from this is a view of British foreign policy pursuing Churchill’s overlapping three circles of Empire and Commonwealth; Europe; and the United States. But, and the key point for the author, this is part and parcel of what is a sort of multilateral hegemony, in which there is a division of labour between Britain and the United States, with the latter providing the main means of coercion and the British using ‘their European ties and imperial fraternity to better guide and influence European and Commonwealth governments to support Anglo-American foreign policy objectives’ (p. 11). This is the basis of the special relationship and resulted in British governments, notwithstanding their diminished economic and military power, believing that they did not have ‘a reduced ability to influence American policy-making or an inability to perform an independent and influential British foreign policy role’ (p. 9). Prima facie, this does not seem an easy case to make. Part of the thesis rests on the idea that British leaders followed Churchill’s wartime special relationship policies, often with an exaggerated belief in their success. There is a problem with this at least regarding Churchill’s peacetime administration. Churchill knew the difference between what he had written in his wartime memoirs and reality and by early 1952 he had no illusions about the junior status and limited effectiveness of Britain. As he journeyed on the Queen Mary to meet Truman in early 1952, he lamented, ‘They have become so great and we are now so small. Poor England!’ (Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: the struggle for survival, 1940−1965, Constable, 1966; entry 1 January 1952, p. 377). British foreign policy failures are attributed to overestimating the success of Churchill’s wartime policies, failure to acknowledge limitations of the special relationship and consequently a failure to redesign alternative foreign policies (p. 98). But these claims beg a whole series of questions, which are not resolved in the book and are not in accord with much extant scholarship. Another important component of the thesis is that Britain could play a part in US hegemony by delivering Europe and the Commonwealth to support US policies. This leads the author to speak repeatedly of Britain’s leadership role/hegemony in Europe, which does not resonate plausibly and there is too much elision of what the reality might be and British supposed perceptions of it. More importantly, the author fails to mention the huge row between Britain and the United States when Britain refused to take the l­eadership in ­developing integrated policies for Europe in the Marshall Plan. Britain did not lead in Europe in the 1950s and that was made absolutely clear by the end of the decade and specifically with the ­humiliating attempts in the 1960s to gain entry into the then European Economic Community (EEC). Furthermore the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) was seen by the Americans as anything but helpful for their ‘hegemonic’ ambitions for Western Europe, because if Britain entered the EEC with the whole of EFTA, this would have compromised the EEC politically as some members of EFTA were neutrals: in this, Britain was hardly delivering Europe to America’s hegemonic designs. The claim that Macmillan was simply trying to rehearse the role played by Churchill (though the author never fully clarifies what role that actually was) is not convincing, at least on the basis of evidence provided here (p.  97). This work is perhaps over-ambitious. It certainly does not deliver a persuasive case and there are things that worry one. The author uses the term multilateralism, but does not discuss the particular American understanding of that term in its postwar planning (p. 62). There are references to lend-lease payments, but lend-lease provided goods and services: the whole point being that there were no payments involved (except for post-hostilities deliveries). The text is sloppy at times: ‘reply a familiar geopolitical role’ should be replay, and ‘whether it possible’ should read ‘whether it is possible’ (both p. 8), ‘apt clarify’ should

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Europe read ‘apt to clarify’ (p. 31) and so on. Venn is not referenced (p. 50). And finally there is a reference to a work by Alan Dobson, ‘Churchill’s Cold War’ in Diplomatic History 29: 1, pp. 149−77, 2005. In fact, the page numbers given refer to an article by Vojtech Mastny. ‘Churchill’s Cold War’ is at pages 203−207 and is a book review by Dobson of Klaus Larres’s Churchill’s Cold War: the politics of personal diplomacy (Yale University Press, 2002). It looks from the text that the author should have cited Larres in the first place. This is just another puzzling aspect of this sometimes frustrating work. Alan Dobson, University of St Andrews, UK Britain’s quest for a role: a diplomatic memoir from Europe to the UN. By David Hannay. London: I. B. Tauris. 2013. 316pp. Index. £30.00. isbn 978 1 78076 056 8. At no time could the release of a book examining the virtues of remaining a central part of an integrated Europe be more apt. As the nation groans under the strain of the most severe challenge to its membership of the European project for almost 40 years, Britain’s quest for a role is a keen weapon in the armoury of those urging caution upon Britain’s rulers. Spanning 50 years of service as a British diplomat and peer during some of the toughest moments in the country’s foreign affairs, Hannay masterfully integrates vivid personal accounts from the coalface of diplomacy with an authoritative grasp of the fundamentals of Britain’s national interests. Starting with junior postings in Tehran and Kabul (1960−63), then as delegate to the European Community (1965−70), First Secretary to the accession negotiations to the European Community (1970−72), private secretary to the European Commissioner (1973−76), Minister to the British Embassy in Washington (1984−85), Ambassador to the European Communities (1985-1990), and Ambassador to the United Nations (1990−1995), Hannay sports the type of résumé that would amply support any claim that he was, to borrow a well-worn phrase, ‘present at the creation’. Packed with fascinating but never sensational details, Hannay’s lucid account of his career is powerful affirmation—if ever it was needed—that the professional class of civil servants, constituting the permanent layer of historical knowledge and experience in a transitory political structure, are the custodians of the national memory. Consequently, Britain’s quest for a role is more than a memoir; it is a highly informed analysis of Britain’s post-imperial role and delivers a forceful message regarding Britain’s future as a world player. In a simple chronological journey through a career that embraced Britain’s tortuous entry into the European community, relations with the United States in the period of Thatcher and Reagan, debates over European Monetary Union, the collapse of former Yugoslavia, and the post-Cold War introspection of the United Nations, Hannay carefully fuses the unique context of each chapter, each posting, each new role, with a core thesis about Britain’s relations with Europe and the United States which few observers would challenge: that since 1945 Britain has failed to reconcile the desire both to be a meaningful member of Europe and to remain ‘special’ to the United States. According to Hannay, the debacle of the British−French−Israeli invasion of Suez in 1956 (that provoked extreme American censure) and the rejected membership of the European Economic Community a year later profoundly impacted on Britain’s role in the world, the new ‘quest’ for which ‘looks little nearer to a definitive conclusion than it was at the beginning’ (p. 278). For Hannay, that ‘role’ lies primarily in a European context and that ‘quest’ has largely defined the diplomatic landscape of his career. Indeed, it is to Britain’s flawed relationship with Europe that Hannay devotes much of his ire, complaining that the ‘negative consequences’ of not fully engaging in the European

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Book reviews project from the outset ‘were to dominate my own professional life and that of several generations of British politicians in both main parties’ (p. 280). Moreover, this disconnect with a modern Europe has been poorly compensated by Britain’s relationship with the United States. Hannay’s mid-1980s spell in Washington proved for him that, even at the so-called height of the ‘special relationship’, British influence had ‘limits’ and ‘there was no such thing as a golden era when there had been no differences between us’ (pp. 119−20). Yet in bemoaning British obduracy over continental affairs, Hannay rejects any notion that Britain should ‘choose’ Europe over the United States. Rather, it is only as a credible part of a European foreign policy framework that Britain’s influence in Washington would likely be enhanced—a persistent message from the Americans Hannay believes has been crucially underappreciated in London. Electing for a distinctly separate association with the United States has only muddied the diplomatic waters. The British link with the United States is vitally important, but must not be overstated. For instance, the phrase ‘the special relationship’ is, for Hannay, ‘a genuine obstacle to a more mature and sophisticated understanding of the evolving nature of the relationship’ and ‘the sooner Britain moves away from that spurious claim to exclusivity the better’ (p. 285). Britain’s unique, even ‘special’, connections with the United States are no substitute for its broader and in the longer term more rewarding connections with Europe. As for the current storm over Europe, Hannay is optimistic the country will ‘overcome its European doubts and demons’ (p. 300), but urges all political parties to convince the kingdom that successful membership of the European Union ‘is a vital and an achievable national interest’ (p. 298). Britain’s quest for a role thus provides fascinating detail and unique insight into the machinations of international politics and diplomacy while also delivering a potent message that will be of value to student and scholar—and maybe the odd politician—alike. Charlie Whitham, Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK

Russia and Eurasia* Wheel of fortune: the battle for oil and power in Russia. By Thane Gustafson. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 2012. 672pp. Index. £29.95. isbn 978 0 67406 647 2. Available as e-book. ‘This is a book about Russian oil and the making of the new Russia,’ begins Thane Gustafson’s massive tome Wheel of fortune: the battle for oil and power in Russia. What follows over the course of 500 pages is a thorough history (supported by a further 100 pages of endnotes) of the symbiosis of oil and politics since the unravelling of the Soviet Union. Gustafson masterfully cuts through the confusion of the immediate post-Soviet period to distil a clear narrative about the struggles of the first Russian oil majors and the oligarchs who came to control them; the contributions and failures of international investment in Russia’s oil sector; the genesis of energy-attuned leaders; and the evolution of the institutions regulating the sector today. After four decades of studying Soviet/Russian politics and a concurrent two decades of leading IHS CERA’s Russian and Caspian energy consulting team, Gustafson has a rare combination of academic understanding and industry acumen, which informs a top-notch analysis of the forces shaping Russia’s current economic and political trajectory. *

See also James Ryan, Lenin’s terror: the ideological origins of early Soviet state violence, pp. 1046–7; and Marlene Laruelle and Sebastien Peyrouse, The Chinese question in Central Asia: domestic order, social change and the Chinese factor, pp. 1076−7.

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Russia and Eurasia The book takes readers through stories of a motley cast of characters: from a handful of obscure Siberian oil generals who inherited control of prize fields, to budding businessmen who rose to become some of the richest in Russia, to public servants for the city of St Petersburg who came to dominate the country’s political machine. Gustafson’s research draws on scores of personal interviews with key government and industry players over 20 years. With a keenly observant eye, Gustafson tracks the impact that each of these individuals had on the course of development of the oil industry and its relationship with the political apparatus. Russia’s oil companies grew out of an idiosyncratic planned economy that kept near complete separation between Moscow ministry officials and field workers on decisions concerning production targets, distribution and exports. By the mid-1990s some oil majors sought out new methods of achieving economical and efficient production from foreign companies. Yukos, led by former banker Mikhail Khodorkovsky, embraced a western approach full-on and achieved wild success, which flew in the face of Soviet-era acceptable practices. Gustafson argues that a clash was inevitable, and Khodorkovsky possessed both the bravado and the naivety to run seriously afoul of the system. It is perhaps in his tragic case-study of Khodorkovsky’s Yukos that Gustafson’s work shines brightest, as he discounts short-sighted interpretations of Khodorkovsky’s missteps—for example, the notion that Khodorkovsky was made a target purely because of political ambitions—and projects forward the impact of Yukos’ dissolution on the oil sector as a whole. Kremlinsupported Rosneft has risen to a pre-eminent position from Yukos’ ashes, while Khodorkovsky’s continued languishing in a Siberian prison ten years on is a warning to those who would think to challenge the state in its most strategic of sectors. Just as Gustafson’s study draws upon his varied experience as both an academic and consultant, Wheel of fortune at times appeals to different audiences. The meticulous organization and thematic repetition of the book’s first half reads well as an instructive device, and the book is certain to become an indispensable contribution to syllabi devoted to modern Russia or the intersection of politics and energy. The chapters on Russia’s current oil taxation scheme and the long roots of the country’s baffling regulatory system represent a heady due diligence that helps to explain why decision-makers in Russia’s oil sector do not behave ‘rationally’ as major international oil companies would expect. In fact, Gustafson declares that investing in Russia is a ‘brave bet’. The language throughout the book is easy and measured, coloured by an occasional Russian idiom that underscores Gustafson’s appreciation of the culture and history of his subject. Gustafson concludes his seminal work with an appeal and an implicit warning to the current and future leaders of Russia. The political stability and economic prosperity Russians have enjoyed in recent years is in largest part thanks to oil. While some politicians have argued that to avoid the resource curse Russia’s economy must grow separately from its hydrocarbons, the reality is that oil rents are a crucial component of government revenues and diminishing returns throughout the oil sector threaten the very core of Russia’s economy. Russian oil majors today are exploiting the labours of the Soviet period—when exploration was not constrained by economic factors—without having adequately invested in its future. The country’s destructive tax and regulatory regime fail to incentivize the exploration and development needed to keep Russia afloat in the long term. In the end, Gustafson’s optimism prevails: his belief in the power of individuals over institutions means that Russia is not path-dependent, its fate not sealed—there is still action that can be taken to right Russia’s course. Catherine Yusupov, CMX Caspian and Gulf Consultants

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Book reviews Edge of empire: a history of Georgia. By Donald Rayfield. London: Reaktion. 2012. 512pp. Index. £35.00. isbn 978 1 78023 030 6. Available as e-book. Georgia: a political history since independence. By Stephen Jones. London: I. B. Tauris. 2013. 382pp. £35.00. isbn 978 1 84511 338 4. Analysts of the Caucasus have waited a decade for a comprehensive and serious book on Georgia and now two have come along at once. Writing about Georgia is no easy task. Most historians fall at the first barrier, a fiendishly difficult non-Indo-European language possessing its own alphabet. Both Donald Rayfield and Stephen Jones have won the linguistic battle and have decades of acquaintance with the country dating back to Soviet times. An underlying theme of both books is Georgia’s ambiguous geographical position, both at the margins of Europe but with persistent aspirations to join the European club. In Donald Rayfield’s sweeping historical narrative, a recurrent theme is the search for a big power patron. From the seventeenth century onwards, we read of Georgian ambassadorial delegations beating a path to the door of popes, kings and tsars with appeals to protect Georgians against invaders—always to come home disappointed. The frequent forays by Presidents Eduard Shevardnadze and Mikheil Saakashvili to Washington DC in the hope of winning US protection are part of an old tradition. Stephen Jones writes about domestic politics and concentrates on Georgia’s political history since the end of the USSR, but comes at the same issue from a different angle. His analysis of Georgia’s political culture explains why an old system of patronage is so enduring. Patronage in Georgia cannot be reduced to a matter of corruption, but is better seen as an organic system of networks and connections that Georgians have relied on to circumvent inadequate (and often colonial) government. The Georgian word upatrono (literally ‘patronless’), Jones tells us, ‘is often used as an expression of pity, and sometimes refers to Georgia as a whole’ (p. 134). Seen this way, the whole nation is a client in search of a patron. Rayfield begins with archaeology and finishes with the upheavals of 2012. Breathtaking and breathless, his book is the equivalent of watching Shakespeare’s history plays in fast-forward mode or being put on the back of a Georgian steed and charged across the mountains of Khevsureti at daredevil speed. We get history in the old-fashioned sense, a tide of kings, usurpers, wars and treaties. Even in the twentieth century, the author has a penchant for telling us about spies, plots and assassinations, both in Soviet Georgia and amidst the Georgian exile community in Europe. It is not always a male story: Rayfield quotes European ambassadors in Istanbul in the year 1600 as expressing their admiration for a princess named Gulchara and writing that ‘in Georgia all politics are in female hands’ (p. 183). But it is a relentlessly bloodthirsty one. Here is a typically gruesome paragraph: ‘Guria, too, was alarmed, and released Tsutski, who plotted to replace Levan Dadiani with his respected younger brother Ioseb. Levan survived an Abkhaz assassin, who stabbed him in the back as he leant over a balustrade; he then gouged out his brother Ioseb’s eyes (confiscating all but a pauper’s portion of his property), strangled and quartered Tsutski, firing the remains from a cannon’ (p. 195). Edge of empires is strong on drama, but lacks analysis on economics, social change or even (strangely, given the author’s deep knowledge of the subject) Georgian literature. Stephen Jones is as much a political scientist as a historian and at times he seems deliberately to underplay the drama of the tumultuous years he is describing. His topic is Georgians’ struggle to build a new state for the first time in the modern era, coping with the competing challenges of a Soviet legacy, Georgian tradition, poverty and systemic violence.

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Middle East and North Africa Jones points out the continuity between different administrations and declines to portray the 2003 Rose Revolution as the Year Zero that many enthusiasts claimed it to be. Both Shevardnadze and Saakashvili, writes Jones, ‘exploited a weak constitutional court, an undisciplined opposition, and a large party majority in a single chamber parliament’ (p.  144). In two such substantial works any reviewer will inevitably find passages to take issue with. My main concern with both books is that they have a tendency to treat ‘Georgia’ more as the homeland of ethnic Georgians than as a geographical space inhabited by many nationalities. Thus I would have liked to read more about the Armenian urban class who made Tbilisi a prosperous city but Rayfield merely tells us at one point, ‘Georgia’s problems were ethnic: Tbilisi was an Armenian city administered by Russians’ (p. 319). Curiously in such a comprehensive study, Rayfield also omits mention of two cataclysmic episodes in the twentieth century. Although he does mention ‘oppression’ of Ossetians, he passes over the military operation by the Menshevik government which devastated South Ossetia in 1920 (he does mention the ravager of Ossetia, Valiko Jugheli in another context). Moreover, there is nothing here about the largest Stalinist deportation of an ethnic group from Georgia, that of more than 100,000 Meskhetian Turks from southern Georgia in November 1944. In more modern times, Jones gives too little space to the Abkhaz and Ossetian narratives in the conflicts with Tbilisi. Those Abkhaz, Ossetians and others who came up against the sharp end of Georgia’s upsurge of extreme nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s would certainly dispute Jones’s assertion that Georgian nationalism was a ‘paler version of most European nationalisms’ (p. 237). After all this was an era when non-Georgians were labelled as ‘guests’ or agents of Russia, thousands fled the country and even Ossetian teachers of the Georgian language were sacked from Georgian schools. These are blemishes in two otherwise authoritative works. Last October Georgia made another lurch forward when Saakashvili’s ruling party was defeated by the coalition of Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. The two are still engaged in a fight to death. This drama came too late for either author. But Jones’s clear-sighted conclusion in which he warns about Georgia’s persistent ‘political and economic polarization’ now seems even more prescient. Thomas de Waal, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, USA

Middle East and North Africa Revolutionary Iran: a history of the Islamic Republic. By Michael Axworthy. London: Allen Lane. 2013. 496pp. Index. £25.00. isbn 978 1 84614 291 8. Available as e-book. For many in the West, the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to be something of an enigma. Although the marketplace is teeming with books that seek to unravel the complexities of Iran’s post-revolutionary regime, much of this literature tends to be overlooked by those involved in the policy-making process. Indeed, the Iranian state is viewed overwhelmingly as a threat to regional order and security in the Middle East, but the deeper understanding that would be required to deal with it effectively and meaningfully is all too often lacking. A good starting point for those wishing to gain a better understanding of Iran can be found in Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran. Presenting a lively and accessible narrative of the Islamic Republic, which delves deep into the background and origins of the current regime, the book promises to inform a general audience of what lies beneath the apparent

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Book reviews backwardness and irrationality of the Iranian state. Highlighting the nuances, ambiguities and paradoxes of Iran, it challenges common misperceptions and explores the reasons for the Islamic Republic’s endurance while also considering the challenges that it now faces, more than 30 years after the revolution that brought it into being. Drawing mainly on secondary sources for much of his analysis, especially in the chapters that deal with the historical background and the immediate lead-up to the 1979 revolution, Axworthy is often at risk of simply reiterating narratives that have already become a commonplace in the literature on twentieth-century Iran. But there are occasions when he moves beyond this, exploring competing interpretations of certain key episodes in Iran’s history. Of particular note in this regard is his discussion of the 1953 coup to remove Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, where he refers to Darioush Bayandor’s controversial Iran and the CIA (Palgrave, 2010), in which it is argued that the CIA’s role in ­Mossadegh’s removal should not be overstated. Sympathizing with Bayandor, Axworthy suggests that the mistakes made by Mossadegh himself, as well as the role played by the clergy in mobilizing anti-Mossadegh demonstrations on the streets of Tehran, should also be considered in assessments of this defining moment in Iran−US relations. While this interpretation may not be a popular one, it is a credit to Axworthy that he considers such challenges to mainstream views in Revolutionary Iran. The main strength of the book, however, lies in the detailed and lengthy chapter on the Iran−Iraq War. Here, in addition to a range of secondary sources, Axworthy makes use of archival research, and he also points to some interesting information gathered from his own interviews with military personnel. The chapter details the various stages of the eight-year war, explaining why opportunities to make peace proved so elusive for so long. It also shows how both state and society in post-revolutionary Iran have continued to be affected by the conflict long after Khomeini’s declaration of a ceasefire in 1988. Importantly, the book’s discussion of the Iran−Iraq War provides us with some useful indications of how we might expect Iran to act militarily in the future. Axworthy observes that the Iranians never retaliated with gas weapons in response to Saddam Hussein’s use of mustard gas against Iranian troops, and he also stresses that the Iranian human wave attacks that were portrayed at the time as examples of either fanaticism or martyrdom were, on the contrary, ‘rather like the young men of Kitchener’s army preparing for similar infantry attacks against prepared defences on the Somme in 1916 or elsewhere’ (p. 219). Overall, he paints a picture of Iranians as rational beings, ill-disposed to using their limited military capability in an aggressive and expansionist manner. This is a crucial point to note, especially in the present climate of tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme. Equally important for us in the West to understand is the deep sensitivity to western influence that drives so much of what Iran’s ruling elite do and say. Revolutionary Iran does a good job at teasing out the underlying roots of this sensitivity, and it also shows how the dislike of Iran’s leaders for some of the consequences of the western model is ‘a real concern—no abstruse clerical obsession’ (p. 418). The spread of western culture and the advance of the forces of globalization are feared not only because of the implications that they could have for the survival of the regime as it currently stands, but also in light of a broader Iranian desire for independence and self-determination. It is heartening that a former head of the Iran section in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (1998−2000) has been able to paint such a balanced portrait of the Islamic Republic; one can only hope that his successors are equally able to appreciate the intricacies of this complex state. Evaleila Pesaran, University of Cambridge, UK

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Middle East and North Africa Lebanon after the Cedar Revolution. Edited by Are Knudsen and Michael Kerr. London: Hurst. 2012. 323pp. Index. Pb.: £16.99. isbn 978 1 84904 249 9. Lebanon currently appears determined to confirm some of the distressing conclusions of this new volume on the country’s tumultuous politics since the 2005 ‘uprising for independence’. The authors of Lebanon after the Cedar Revolution argue that hopes for change expressed in that brief moment of exhilaration have virtually all been dashed. The country appears more fractured than ever as regional turbulence helped to undermine peaceful coexistence among its confessional communities. Increasingly apprehensive Lebanese political elites resorted to sectarianism and solicited foreign support; all to the effect of underscoring the permeability and weakness of the Lebanese state. In eleven excellent and richly sourced essays, the authors of this volume dissect how and why this has been the dismal outcome of what was supposed to be a ‘revolution’. Although their work does not make for comfortable reading, they present what is probably the best-informed and documented analysis of this hapless country’s politics for over a decade. In retrospect, the mass uprising, sparked by the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri in February 2005 and rather speciously termed ‘the Cedar Revolution’, was everything but a revolution. Eight years on, familiar themes indeed have continued to rear their heads. In her essay, Amal Hamdan argues that the 1989 Taif Accord may have modified the distribution of power among the Sunni, Shi’i and Christian Maronite communities, but it failed to resolve Shi’is’ unceasing grievances about their exclusion from executive government. Marie-Joëlle Zahar documents how foreign intervention in Lebanese politics is mostly a function of Lebanese factions seeking to prevail over each other. Élizabeth Picard shows how the country’s national army and security forces continue to be prone to fragmentation and foreign meddling as they collectively fail to preserve the state’s monopoly on violence. Sari Hanafi demonstrates how dismal living conditions and being kept in ‘spaces of exception’ prompted perpetual violence in the country’s Palestinian refugee camps. While stressing continuity in all these matters, some of the authors offer fresh insights. By underscoring the agency of Lebanon’s political leaders, Zahar effectively takes issue with the common ‘truncated perspective’ of regional shockwaves holding the country hostage. Referring to opinion polls and based on his fieldwork, Hanafi sees no evidence of omnipresent jihadist militants—let alone Al-Qaeda—in the Palestinian camps. Yet for truly new assessments one has to turn to the second part of the book. Hannes Baumann dissects what he calls the ‘contractor bourgeoisie’, exemplified by the Hariris, Prime Minister Najib Mikati and businessman Issam Fares, who used their lucrative stints in business in the Gulf to rise in political prominence at home. They all versed themselves in Lebanon’s sectarian rules of the game. But at the same time their success points to the importance of class in Lebanese politics. In his chapter on ‘sects and the city’, Nasser Yassin talks to Beiruti youth and concludes that they are accustomed to coexist and routinely mix with members from other sectarian groups, but without abandoning their distrust and resentment informed by sectarian stereotyping. Sune Haugbolle studies the sprawling ‘memory culture’, whereby artistic and sometimes hilarious cultural expressions re-evaluate the country’s bloodiest episodes of violence and war. For this to inform fundamental reassessments, he persuasively argues that public forms of remembrance need to be married to serious social history writing on the civil war. Critical readers will still find issues to quibble about. Perhaps most importantly, it remains unclear exactly what the authors mean when introducing the term ‘corporate consociationalism’ in order to contrast Lebanon’s illiberal features of inter-sectarian conflict

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Book reviews management with Arend-Jan Lijphart’s ‘consociational democracy’. Throughout the book the term variously connotes ‘rule by proxy’ from Damascus, unevenly shared power among communities, and predetermined state positions in accordance with rigid and unquestioned primordial group identities. Lebanon’s illiberal variant of consociationalism presumably also encompasses Picard’s account of the post-Taif state that has become more coercive due to an authoritarian turn in the culture of military institutions and civil−military relations. More conceptual precision is wanting here, as putting Lebanon in a category of its own in this way has implications for assessing the very desirability of the consociational model in a context of postwar recovery, in Lebanon and beyond. The authors argue that consociationalism, and the extent to which it is echoed in the Taif Accord, remains the only available remedy for the country’s troubles if only its letter and spirit are fully implemented and duly respected. Yet one could counter, as Lijphart’s critics have done, that even fully liberal consociationalism is unlikely to give guarantees against the pork barrel politics, immobilism and gridlocked decision-making that the editors in turn hold responsible for violent interconfessional competition in Lebanon. Neither does it make much sense to blame Lebanon’s realities for not living up to a generic, normative notion of political engineering that is still to prove its utility outside a handful of western European nations. Indeed, it is questionable whether Lebanon’s current controversies are still about the intricacies of consociational power-sharing as such. To argue the latter, Hamdan’s chapter cites Hezbollah officials stating that the country’s political system unfairly marginalizes Shi’is and, hence, needs to be adjusted in their favour. No mention is made of Hezbollah’s foot-dragging to campaign seriously for such a constitutional overhaul, causing many Lebanese, including disgruntled Shi’is, to suspect that such utterings are designed as a mere threat to keep the party’s disarmament at bay. Entangled as the issue of Hezbollah’s weapons is with the present-day spillover of the Syrian crisis, the party’s priorities in both—and not Lebanon’s consociational imperfections—are currently bringing the country to the brink of another violent episode. Reinoud Leenders, King’s College London, UK Dynamics of change in the Persian Gulf: political economy, war and revolution. By Anoushiravan Ehteshami. London: Routledge. 2013. 292pp. Pb.: £27.99. isbn 978 0 41565 758 7. Dynamics of change in the Persian Gulf tackles the complex interplay among the domestic and global forces that are reshaping the political economy and international relations of the region. In contrast to many recent studies of the impact of globalization on the Gulf that concentrate solely on the rapidly internationalizing Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, Ehteshami integrates Iran and Iraq into a comprehensive account of a region in flux. The result is a valuable overview that captures the sharply divergent trajectories of development within the Gulf and examines this vitally important geostrategic subregion from a rigorously international perspective. Ehteshami argues that political economy, conflict and revolution have been the three main and interrelated drivers of change in the Gulf. Thus, the region has ‘experienced both peaceful political transition and violent revolutionary change’ (p. 109) as the political upheavals and cycles of confrontation in Iraq and Iran ‘have made a lasting impression on the policies and perceptions of their smaller neighbours’ (p. 133). This volatile dialectic is reflected in the structure of the book, which is divided into four sections that concentrate respectively on power politics, political economy, political systems and processes, and

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Middle East and North Africa conflict. Individual chapters explore patterns of historical development and political evolution, interstate conflict and the role of outside powers in regional security structures, and the repositioning of the Gulf in the changing global order. This interdisciplinary approach draws out the nature of the region’s ‘security dilemmas’, which has triggered three interstate wars since 1980 and left the region dangerously unstable and unbalanced. Importantly, Ehteshami makes the point that this is not a new phenomenon: rather, ‘the subregion’s modern history has been closely tied to the dynamics of great power politics’ since at least the beginning of the Cold War period (p. 209). Indeed, one of the very earliest flashpoints between the United States and the Soviet Union occurred over the winter of 1945−46 as the United States opposed Soviet attempts to establish a foothold in Iran. This placed the Gulf ‘firmly on the great geopolitical frontline against the Soviet Union’ and established that the ‘domestic stability of the Gulf monarchies would be a direct security priority of the West’ (p. 28). Oil was the catalyst behind the geostrategic value of the Gulf. Oil exports integrated the states of the Gulf firmly into the international economic system as Gulf oil became a motor of western economic growth in the postwar era. Securing stable access to regional supplies and the western guarantees of security that underpinned this became the pillars that structured the international relations of the Gulf after 1945. Mutual economic interdependencies bound the oil-producing Gulf states into the world economy and predated the acceleration of economic globalization in the 1970s and global interconnections in the 1990s. No less significant was the impact of oil revenues, not only in compressing processes of socio-economic transformation into two or three decades but also causing ‘severe dislocation across the subsystem’ and intensifying regional polarization between the GCC states on the one hand, and Iran and Iraq on the other (p. 83). In one of the most valuable sections of the book, Ehteshami pinpoints the major geopolitical trajectories that already are redrawing the international relations of the Gulf. He situates the region firmly within what he terms the ‘Asianization’ process: ‘the emergence and consolidation of a wholly Asian nexus in which West Asia and East and Southeast Asia constitute the core of a new pan-Asian community being predicated on a widening network of economic, cultural, security, and political contacts’ (p. 89). Gulf−Asia connections have moved far beyond the energy realm to encompass major joint ventures, trade and investment flows, military agreements, and an increased cultural and soft power exchange. At a time of financial crisis and economic austerity in the West, Asian partners are making rapid inroads into the Gulf that accelerate the internationalization of the region and increasingly offer viable alternatives to western-led models of economic and political development. The paradox facing the GCC states is that they remain dependent upon security relationships with western powers, notably the United States, even as commercial ties with Asia thicken and proliferate. At a time when the Obama administration is refocusing attention on its ‘pivot to Asia’, the Gulf ’s importance to countries such as China and Japan continues to increase. This emerging gap will inevitably have an impact on issues such as the international community’s position on Iran and Iraq, as the dominance of the westernled approach to both is diluted. Once again, Ehteshami identifies the crux of the dilemma facing regional officials and international partners alike: the Gulf states, ‘having served the energy needs of one side of the world for a hundred years are now serving the other, but their institutional relationships have not caught up with these new realities’ (p. 105). Ehteshami succeeds in packing an enormous amount of information into an accessible format that will benefit both students and practitioners. Although his writing sometimes is a little breathless, and while the still unfolding Arab Spring protests may soon render

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Book reviews some of the material out of date, Dynamics of change in the Persian Gulf offers a comprehensive guide to the major trends that will define the future of this vital world region. As old certainties are being shattered by the unrest across the Middle East and North Africa, it is more important than ever to identify the broad directions of travel and contextualize them within the fundamental shifts under way in the global order. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Sub-Saharan Africa Multiethnic coalitions in Africa: business financing of opposition election campaigns. By Leonardo R. Arriola. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2013. 304pp. £19.99. isbn 978 1 10760 543 5. Ever since, in the early 1990s, Africa was engulfed in the so-called third wave of democratization, there has been constant debate about the nature of democracy on the continent. Whatever definition has been given, at the core of the changes that had taken place was the holding of multiparty elections. Indeed, most recent studies of African democracy have concentrated primarily on the question of the holding of regular multiparty contests and on the extent to which defeated incumbent politicians agree to step down and allow their victorious electoral rivals to take over government. The main criterion for the consolidation of democracy is deemed to be the holding of regular elections—a process that is habitually called the ‘deepening’ of democracy. The theory upon which such analysis is built is broadly institutional, meaning here that the holding of regular electoral contests is taken to instil in society and government the good habits of a democratic political culture. Thus, the more elections are held, the more democratic the country is likely to become. Yet there soon emerged a conundrum: despite the fact that many governments in Africa were clearly deficient, and sometimes very unpopular, elections did not seem necessarily to usher in the victory of their political adversaries. In fact, even when multiparty elections were held and judged to be ‘free and fair’, incumbents were often returned to power, no matter how blatantly undemocratic they were. Ostensibly authoritarian and corrupt politicians seemed able to win elections against all the odds adduced by democratic theory. In many other cases, incumbents were able to ‘manage’ multiparty competition in such a way as to undermine the challenge of the opposition and to prevail in the elections. Much was made of the manipulation of ethnic affiliation, which Africanists tended to view as the main reason why multiparty elections did not result in a balanced democratic dispensation. Incumbents were able to intimidate or co-opt ethnic rivals, thus preserving control of a sufficiently ‘productive’ ethnic coalition to ensure electoral victory. The recognition that elections in Africa would continue to reflect the country’s ethnic map despite the best efforts of the donors who advocated and funded elections, was an admission that democratic theory, based on ‘one person one vote’, could not explain the outcome of many electoral contests other than in ‘traditional’ terms. In other words, the holding of regular multiparty elections could not bring about greater democratization so long as Africans continued to vote along ethnic lines. In cases where one ethnic group was dominant, there seemed little prospect of change unless opposition politicians managed to put together a multiethnic coalition capable of defeating the incumbent. So the question Leonardo Arriola asks is: under what circumstances can the opposition put together such a coalition in the face of the incumbent’s policy of co-opting electoral rivals? His answer is both commonsensical and original. It is commonsensical because anyone looking at that

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Sub-Saharan Africa question would likely come up with the same answer. It is original because he identifies the key to such coalition building where few people have sought it. Arriola’s argument is simple and clear. Multiethnic oppositions can only emerge and eventually prevail in electoral contests if they can tap financing that is not controlled by the incumbent. Only when such financing is available to the challenger can (s)he ‘buy in’ upfront political support from politicians representing other ethnic groups. The key here is that a coalition is formed not on the basis of promises of future rewards after the elections, but on the more concrete foundation of financial commitment today. This may appear overly cynical, but Arriola shows quite convincingly that in the absence of such financing, most multiethnic coalitions are stillborn. Taking as examples Kenya and Cameroon, the author provides plenty of evidence that the successful transition to multiethnic coalitions in the former and the absence of such coalitions in the latter are best explained by his theory of ‘pecuniary coalition building in multiethnic countries governed through patronage’. Multiethnic coalitions in Africa is thus an extended demonstration of why other approaches have failed to answer the question at hand and how the author’s theory provides a ‘scientific’ demonstration of the validity of ‘pecuniary coalition building’. The author belongs to those political scientists who believe that it is possible to identify and test theories of causality in their discipline, much as it is done in the so-called hard sciences. For this reason he provides a quantification of the relevant variables, which he then submits to regression analysis and other statistical methods. Despite the valiant efforts made to prove the validity of his theory, Arriola concedes that he has to rely on existing databases and on the identification of convincing proxies for the variables on which there is no statistical material available. So, in purely ‘scientific’ terms, his theory stands or falls on the relevance and accuracy of such proxies. On the whole, the author provides a plausible and at times compelling discussion of how best to identify the countries where the incumbents have lost the capacity ‘to command the political allegiance of business’. And the conclusion he reaches—namely, that economic and financial liberalization is conducive to the emergence of ethnic coalitions that will favour the greater democratization of society—follows quite neatly from the demonstration. The book is intriguing because it makes two assumptions. The first is that, since most African societies are multiethnic, their politics are ipso facto based on considerations of ethnicity. The second is that the formation of multiethnic opposition is the key to the deepening of democracy on the continent. Not only are those assumptions debatable— they may or may not turn out to be causally significant—but it is also unclear that ethnic division is the main impediment to more democratic politics. Readers will not fail to wonder whether this apparently new theory of democratization in Africa is not in fact an obstacle to the understanding of politics on the continent. That this should be the case after decades of political analysis of Africa is not unconnected to the current fashion of seeking out more ‘scientific’ accounts of the viability of democratic politics on the continent. It is also an indirect way of validating the present policy prescriptions to the effect that economic liberalization and particularly financial deregulation are prerequisites to a more democratic dispensation in Africa. But the question remains: is such an approach a more convincing account of the political evolution of politics in Africa? Could it be that the causal link between financial deregulation and fairer multiparty elections is in fact a way of avoiding staring the obvious in the face: that is, the fact that informal political factors (for which there are precious little hard ‘data’) are as important as the formal ones discussed in the book? Patrick Chabal, King’s College London, UK

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Book reviews Nigeria since independence: forever fragile? By J. N. C. Hill. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2012. 173pp. Index. £55.00. isbn 978 0 23029 852 1. Available as e-book. After more than 50 years of independence, it has been suggested as a fact by Wale Adebanwi and Ebenezer Obadare that Nigeria is in a permanent state of emergency. What remains contested are the questions of why and what to do about it. This concern is not unique to Nigeria as it is a product of the post-colonial condition of crisis that has plagued most parts of Africa. Nigeria since independence: forever fragile? contributes to the debate by seeking to understand the ‘cause, extent and complexion of Nigeria’s failure’ (p. 4). The central issue that the book addresses is that ‘despite being a failed state, Nigeria has avoided breaking up’ (p. 2). The work takes this paradox seriously by making it central to the analysis undertaken in its five main chapters. This is done by focusing on the contradictory role of three main factors that are at once pulling Nigeria apart and binding it together. These three factors are federalism, oil and its associated revenue, and the armed forces (p. 5).The first chapter concentrates on the emergence of the concept of the failed state, the causes and consequences of state failure, and its specific application to Nigeria. Crucially, the book takes state failure to mean the inability of the Nigerian government to exercise total control over the length and breadth of its territory and the failure of the state to provide positive political and economic goods for its citizens. The second chapter examines the origin, similarities, differences and factors fuelling the insurgency groups in Nigeria and its implication for state failure. The third chapter unpacks the challenges confronting federalism in Nigeria and demonstrates how federalism is both contributing to state failure and helping to keep the country together. The next chapter draws on insights from the rentier state theory and the concepts of prebendalism and neo-patrimonialism to highlight the contradictory role of oil in both tearing the Nigerian state apart and keeping it together. A similar approach is also adopted in the fifth chapter to highlight the contradictions inherent in the activities of the armed forces in Nigeria. The book contributes to the burgeoning literature on the failed state in Africa and illuminates the difficult policy challenges that must be confronted if the problems of state failure are to be tackled effectively. It suffers, however, from a number of shortcomings of which two are particularly salient. First, the book fails adequately to problematize the concept of failed states and thus does not engage with the extensive literature that is critical of the concept. As a result, it reproduces many of the limitations inherent in the concept and thus limits the potential contribution the book could have made. For example, by treating insurgencies (i.e. violence) as strictly a cause and a consequence of state failure (p. 2), it fails to see how violence has multiple functions and the implications of these functions for state capacity. For instance, the emergence of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta is not merely a symptom of state failure, but in fact via its activities in collaboration with actors within government, it has been able to create an alternative system of power, profit and protection within the Niger Delta. The second issue that is not clear is why the failed state thesis is a better framework for exploring the situation in Nigeria compared to other less ethnocentric concepts like limited statehood. Indeed, the concept of limited statehood focuses on state capacity in terms of geography and functions, which also seem to underpin the particular definition of a failed state adopted in the book. As a result, the evidence of state failure presented in the book can simply be reinterpreted as part of the difficult historical processes of statebuilding and nationbuilding in the aftermath of a repressive colonial state. Consequently, the conclusion that ‘Nigeria is likely to remain failed for the foreseeable future’ (p. 7) lacks any predictive value and adds little to what we

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Sub-Saharan Africa already know, as the book ignores the more salient issue of why insurgencies escalate or de-escalate (i.e. their dynamics) and what this means for state capacity and state–society relations in Nigeria. The second weakness of the book is the failure to engage critically with the political economy of oil. Unfortunately, the role of the oil industry as an institution, the actions and activities of oil transnational corporations (TNCs) and the nature of their relationship with the state are central to understanding the character of the Nigerian state. Thus, the suggestion that ‘the growth of the oil sector has stifled the economic imagination of the country’s politicians and community leaders’ (p. 91) is not only misleading but also rooted in the now discredited concept of rentier myopia, which seeks to obfuscate the exploitative nature of the relationship between oil TNCs and the state; to absolve oil TNCs of any wrongdoing; and to put problems associated with the resource curse squarely at the door of the Nigerian state. Nevertheless, the book adds useful insights to our understanding of the challenges of statebuilding in Nigeria and should be of keen interest to those interested in African politics. Uwafiokun Idemudia, York University, Canada Peacebuilding, power, and politics in Africa. Edited by Devon Curtis and Gwinyayi A. Dzinesa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. 2012. 353pp. Index. Pb.: £29.50. isbn 987 0 82142 013 3. Available as e-book. This collection of papers offers an in-depth discussion of approaches to, and the politics of, peacebuilding in Africa. The chapters in the first section of the book look at main themes and debates in peacebuilding, while the second section focuses on underlying ideologies and peacebuilding institutions. The book ends with a selection of case-studies. That many of the authors of the 15 chapters are African adds significance to the book as a welcome contribution to the field of African peace studies. What makes the book particularly interesting is the emphasis on peacebuilding as a process in which local and global ideas interact: ideas that are mediated by local, national, regional and international actors. A central theme throughout the book is thus the clashes between local and global ideas about peace, and the contest over legitimacy and ownership over both the process and the objectives of peacebuilding. The chapters in the book engage with issues such as the paradoxical situation whereby emancipatory local ownership in practice requires a role for the international community that contradicts the very principles of local ownership, but also with the differences between local and international expectations of what this local ownership should entail. This is topical and relevant, as it is becoming more and more clear that local actors may not necessarily share the objectives, strategies and priorities of externally driven peacebuilding programmes. Scholarship on local resistance to externally driven peace processes has developed quickly in recent years. The papers brought together by Curtis and Dzinesa are all based on rich case material and written by experts in their field. As such, the collection is a welcome contribution to this debate in peace studies. One of the most interesting chapters is that on the International Criminal Court (ICC), by Sarah Nouwen. Perceptions in Africa of the ICC are ambiguous: whereas sometimes, and in some contexts, it is perceived as an instrument to end brutal civil wars, it is on other occasions considered to be an instrument of western policing over Africa, or as a political instrument to sideline unwanted political actors, such as Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba, while leaving others with similar human rights records untouched. Based on the ICC’s

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Book reviews e­ xperiences in Uganda and Sudan, Nouwen’s chapter is a provocative reflection on the ICC’s ‘no peace without justice ideology’ and engages with the ambiguity towards the court as felt on the African continent. She argues that the core of the problem lies in the fact that the ICC is dependent on others (states) for cooperation, which means that ‘these others can use the Court as an instrument to pursue their strategic aims’ (p. 187). Although in a different way than in the other chapters in the book, this problematic is essentially about issues of ownership and foreign interference in peace processes in Africa. Whereas the book promises a critical discussion of contests over local ownership and legitimacy in peacebuilding, it does not always deliver upon this promise. Chris Landsberg’s chapter on the Pan-African Ministers Conference for Public and Civil Service is in itself informative, as the Conference is perhaps little known. The very interesting issue of how ‘peacebuilding and reconstruction initiatives are shaped by global ideas and approaches, but also … are interrogated and adapted to African conditions’ (p. 123) is mentioned but not well developed in the chapter. Also, the tension between the ‘natural threat of dependency on donors’ and African insistence on ownership (p. 127) is highly relevant, especially when the author later argues that the Conference fails on the level of implementation. Because this is at the very core of the problematic of the ownership debate development practitioners and policy-makers are faced with, it begs for a critical reflection, which is not delivered. In the view of this reviewer, the absence of a reflective chapter in which the tensions and issue that are highlighted in the individual chapters are brought together and critically discussed is the main weakness of the book. Nevertheless, the book offers a good overview of peacebuilding and particular issues related to the African context. Based on rich case material from all over the continent, both in the case chapters as well as in the thematic chapters, the book offers insightful discussions on relevant themes. Meike de Goede, University of Edinburgh, UK

South Asia Policing Afghanistan. By Antonio Giustozzi and Mohammed Isaqzadeh. London: Hurst. 2013. 231pp. Index. £49.99. isbn 978 1 84904 205 5. With hindsight, the last decade could be remembered as one dominated by illusions about externally initiated political reconstruction of fragile states. Afghanistan in particular emerged as the example par excellence of failed internationally induced state-building. The political discourses about the reconstruction of Afghanistan reflect the naivety as well as the increasing disillusion within the international community: in the aftermath of 9/11, democracy became the dominating buzzword in international policy circles. In accordance with an increasing realism among international donors about the situation in Afghanistan, the term has been replaced by ‘state-building’ since 2005 and by ‘security’ since late 2008. One can argue that the political agenda on Afghanistan has changed to exactly the opposite of how reconstruction should take place: from ‘hard’ security to ‘soft’ democracy, not the other way round. The reconstruction of the Afghan police, which lies at the heart of domestic security, is a crucial example of how a wrong priority can prevail from the outset, as this book by Antonio Giustozzi and Mohammed Isaqzadeh impressively illustrates. In early 2002, the beginning of the intervention, the German government took on the reorganization of the Afghan police. In full accordance with the enthusiasm of reconstructing Afghanistan, the German efforts to rebuild the police were guided by the ideal of the policeman

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South Asia as the ‘citizen in uniform’. This approach, which included two years of intensive training courses for Afghan policemen, however, did not take Afghan realities into account, such as the high degree of illiteracy, the strong clientele networks and the lack of understanding of the rule of law. It is not surprising that the heavily underfinanced German mission had hardly any impact. The number of trained policemen did not exceed a few hundred, while the Afghan state needed more than 50,000. Policing Afghanistan shows how this initial approach has changed alongside the political discourse since 2005, particularly the EUPOL mission and the US-run CSTC-A approach. Now the focus was laid on a quick and intensive training of a gendarmerie, which should be able to make use of physical force, but was hardly trained in the legal framework the police are acting in. Particularly CSTC-A, which subcontracted private security firms, was thereby able to produce a much larger number of policemen. Yet the reputation of the police did not improve. Quite the contrary: Afghans usually describe the police as ‘bandits in uniforms’. They have become another competing force in a ‘market of violence’. Ultimately, the discredit of the police was so strong that the international donors distanced themselves more and more from the idea of building a state-loyal police force. Instead, the NATO troops tended to rely increasingly on local militias—the so-called Afghan National Auxiliary Police and Afghan Local Police—which usually belong to certain strongmen and compete with the official police forces. In short, the book convincingly shows how the expectations of the United States and its allies were far too high in the beginning of the intervention, and how the pragmatics of the last years have contradicted the vision of creating a state-owned monopoly of force. A book on the reconstruction of the police runs the danger of becoming too technical and thus tedious to read when describing the manuals and instructions of the police reform. By analysing the rebuilding of the police force from the angle of political economy, Giustozzi and Isaqzadeh cleverly avoid this trap. Following this approach of re-establishing the police provides the entry point to understanding the complex field of security production. The logics of local big men, of the workings of patronage networks and corruption; the dense inter-linkages between the Karzai government in Kabul, local as well as provincial politics; and many other facets of Afghan politics are analysed through the lens of police reconstruction. The book’s strength is that by doing so, it not only provides a differentiated analysis of the current status of the project ‘rebuilding of police’ in Afghanistan, but includes locally collected data and detailed examples of political actors’ logics in the country, which are rarely discussed in a general national overview. Though a minor shortfall of the book is that a summary of how the empirical material matches the political economy approach is missing, the book is worth reading for both those who intend to gain a deeper knowledge of the complex field of Afghan politics and those who have an interest in topics such as intervention policies or police reform in general. Conrad Schetter, Bonn International Center for Conversion, Germany

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Book reviews East Asia and Pacific* The Chinese question in Central Asia: domestic order, social change and the Chinese factor. By Marlene Laruelle and Sebastien Peyrouse. London: Hurst. 2012. 271pp. Index. £40.00. isbn 978 1 84904 179 9. The Chinese question in Central Asia looks at the implications of Chinese interactions with societies in Central Asia over the last two decades, after the demise of the USSR led to the formation of new republics to China’s west. One of the consequences of this change was the establishment in 1996 of the Shanghai Five grouping (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan), based initially on the need for confidence-building measures in the new security environment. This was later to become the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) when Uzbekistan joined the group in 2001. A second consequence was the energizing of the Uyghur separatist movement in China’s north-western Xinjiang region, a result in part of the emergence of self-determination movements in post-Soviet societies. Both of these questions have been much discussed, and are important parts of Marlene Laruelle and Sebastien Peyrouse’s account. But their overall focus is refreshingly wider. Their aim is not so much to explore Chinese agency in the SCO or the Uyghur question, but to look at the changes which took place from the early 1990s onwards from Central Asian perspectives. This they do across a number of areas, and the transdisciplinary approach they adopt is another welcome characteristic of this book. In economic relations, the authors demonstrate the substantial growth in trade and investment between China and Central Asia on a foundation of growing transport infrastructure investment. They also note the asymmetrical nature of this: China is a major trading partner for each of these countries, but Central Asia only accounts for a small percentage of China’s trade, and while Chinese exports are mainly finished products, its imports are primarily raw materials. On energy, Laruelle and Peyrouse describe the importance of Central Asian oil and gas for the diversification both of China’s energy imports and of the markets which Central Asian countries supply. In oil, they show how Russia and the western energy majors are well ahead of China in Central Asia, though Beijing has taken the lead in exploiting Turkmen gas. Another feature of this book is the use of Central Asian and Russian sources, both written and from field work. This enables the authors to give detailed accounts of the political and social receptions to China’s engagement with Central Asia. The broad conclusion is that there are debates in each of the five states, with elite responses tending to be more positive towards China than popular ones. But the reactions also vary between countries, with Kazakhstan’s the most negative, and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, ‘the two poorest and more fragile countries’ (p. 191), the most positive. Laruelle and Peyrouse outline clearly where there are concerns in Central Asia about Chinese migration or the impact of Chinese economic growth, and they suggest in a later chapter that there is a latent suspicion of China which is a legacy of ‘Soviet propaganda’ (p. 175). They also spell out fears that Central Asia is caught between Russia and China, and that this dynamic is reflected in the SCO. Their conclusion, however, is that on balance good *

See also Judith Shapiro, China’s environmental challenges; Joanna I. Lewis, Green innovation in China: China’s wind power industry and the global transition to a low-carbon economy; and Philip Andrews-Speed, The governance of energy in China: transition to a low-carbon economy, pp. 1041–3.

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East Asia and Pacific relations between the two major neighbours are in Central Asian interests, not least because any rupture might force them to choose between Moscow and Beijing. The European Union and United States are only bit players in this drama, as are India and Iran (though the former’s cultural impact is described at one point as being greater than China’s). If there is one thing missing from this account, it is exploration of the broader global context. We see hints of it in concluding comments that much of the concern in Central Asia about China may be a reflection of concerns about the impact of (post-Soviet) globalization, raising the intriguing thought that China’s impact on Central Asia is primarily as a mediator of globalization through investment in transport links; the promotion of trade in the name of development; economic migration; and the overseas propagation of the culture of large countries. Ultimately, it is China’s size which may be at the heart of its impact on Central Asia, whose population across five countries of 60 million compares to the nearly 1.4 billion in China. In the past, the sparse population of Xinjiang (22 million) might have moderated this impact. But we read that Uyghur involvement in Central Asian economies is declining while that of the Han and China’s other ethnic groups is growing, including from provinces on China’s east coast. The spillover effect of China’s development is causing nervousness; this book gives an excellent and balanced account of how this is felt in Central Asia, no longer just ‘south of Russia’, but now also ‘west of China’ (p. 191). Tim Summers, Asia Programme, Chatham House China’s search for energy security: domestic sources and international implications. Edited by Suisheng Zhao. London: Routledge. 2012. 216pp. Index. £85.00. isbn 978 0 41562 793 1. Energy is the lifeblood of any modern economy, and many countries have made energy security a top priority on their national security agenda. This is especially true for an economy as massive as China’s—the country being a rising power in the international system with 1.3 billion people to feed and a rapidly growing, demanding middle-class. In order for this economy to thrive, every effort must be made to ensure the supply of ‘fresh blood’; the world’s eyes are on China as ‘the dragon’ goes global in its search for energy. Therefore, the lens of energy provides a unique angle for understanding China’s domestic and international policies. This book, a collection of papers published in the Journal of Contemporary China and edited by accomplished China scholar Suisheng Zhao, is a valuable and timely contribution to the field. The essays in this volume are centred on three themes. The first two chapters present an overview of China’s understanding of energy security. For Chinese leaders, ‘energy is not purely an economic issue, and oil is no common commodity’ (p. 19). Measures such as upgrading industrial structure, developing energy conservation and finding new sources of energy supply are taken domestically, while a series of ‘energy diplomacy’ efforts with the aim of guaranteeing China’s energy supply have been made internationally. Energy security is a serious concern even among university students, who ‘have a high level of energy consciousness’ (p. 45). The following four chapters are centred on China’s domestic policies in the search for energy security, and thus aim to unpack the ‘black-box’ of Chinese energy decisionmaking. China’s domestic energy policies, the contributors argue, have four main objectives: supply security, economic efficiency, social equity and environmental protection (p. 49). A variety of actors are involved in energy policy-making, including China’s top

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Book reviews leadership, government ministries and departments, stakeholders and interest groups, social actors and communities (pp. 50−52). Through the participation of these multiple actors, the decision-making process has become increasingly consultative, iterative and participatory. Yet it is also increasingly prone to deadlock, inaction and paralysis (p. 72), which weaken China’s capacity to make and implement efficient energy policies. The domestic impact of the country’s search for energy security is illustrated by several case-studies, which include the contested Three Gorges Dam Project, the possible establishment of an ‘oil city’, and the resettlement policy on the Nu River. Social marginalization and forced migration are also discussed, among other domestic impacts. As China’s search for energy security takes on global dimensions, so do its impacts. The last part of the book concentrates on China’s global search for energy security and the energy factor in its foreign relations. Suisheng Zhao clearly shows how, for the Asia-Pacific countries, China’s energy diplomacy has resulted in new opportunities on the one hand, but sources of conflict on the other. He further argues that competition with the United States and China’s neighbours is likely to intensify as oil prices continue to rise and the demand for imported oil increases. Jonathan Pollack is a bit more optimistic about the future of Sino-US relations in the energy sector; in his view, there are many elements of commonality in the energy requirements of both countries which are often obscured or overlooked (p. 165). He believes that the conditions for better relations between the two countries exist and that more substantial efforts are needed to sustain the relationship. China’s presence in Africa is often analysed through the lens of energy and natural resources, and the last two chapters—covering China’s diplomatic efforts in Darfur and its oil-focused trade relationship with Angola—also fit in this category. The merits of China’s search for energy security lie not only in the unique and fresh perspective it takes in investigating China’s domestic and international policy through the lens of energy, but also in the carefully selected and well-structured chapters by several authorities in the field. This book is a must-read for any scholar, student, policy-maker or member of the general public who seeks to understand China’s present and future energy policy and its domestic and global implications. Kai Sun, Ocean University of China, China

North America Foreign policy begins at home: the case for putting America’s house in order. By Richard N. Haass. New York: Basic Books. 2013. 192pp. Index. £17.99. isbn 978 0 46505 798 6. President of the Council on Foreign Relations, stalwart of recent Republican administrations and prolific writer, Richard Haass represents the epitome of the US foreign policy establishment. One of the few remaining self-consciously ‘realist’ Republicans, Haass has spent his lucrative post-Bush administration years berating his former employer and outlining a more pragmatic approach to foreign policy in an age of relative American decline. Dedicated to Brent Scowcroft, this short book—evidently intended for a general rather than specialist readership—neatly encapsulates both the virtues and flaws of this approach. Divided into two parts, focusing first on geopolitics and the ‘return of history’ (the term jarringly goes unattributed to Robert Kagan), and then addressing possible options for US foreign policy and a range of domestic concerns, Haass sets out a lucid, fluently composed and wide-ranging analysis. Admittedly, much of this omits critical depth in favour of

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North America breadth of coverage. Most chapters barely last more than seven pages (the ‘Middle East morass’ merits a magisterial four), providing concise yet mundane perspectives on a host of vastly complex questions from China’s rise to the problems of America’s crumbling infrastructure. The made-for-the-press soundbites—‘Nonpolarity is inevitable, but its character is not’ (p. 20); ‘Today’s global world is unlike the advertised Las Vegas: What happens anywhere does not stay there’ (p. 73); ‘But to say that history has returned is not to argue that history as we knew it has returned’ (p. 78)—do little to alleviate the anodyne nature of most of what is presented here as a bold vision for how Washington can shape world events rather than being shaped by them. The central argument advanced by Haass is that ‘the world needs American leadership, but that American leadership requires the United States to first put its house in order, something that in turn will require its being more restrained in what it tries to do abroad and more disciplined in what it does at home’ (p. 160). Seeking to pre-empt criticism of his position as ‘isolationist’, Haass maintains that the approach he favours remains that of a committed, but more modest, internationalist. Commending the merits of ‘doctrine’ rather than wholesale improvisation, Haass sets out his own opaque doctrine of ‘restoration’, at whose centre is the notion of ‘solvency’: ‘the idea that what the United States does abroad should not undermine the fundamental economic health and strength of the country’ (pp. 112−13). Embracing a more modest defence budget, fewer ‘wars of choice’, and greater conditionality in foreign relations, US ‘leadership can take place from in front, behind, or somewhere in between’ (p. 110). The complementary domestic aspect features ‘five core elements: reducing the federal deficit and the ratio of national debt to GDP, putting into place a comprehensive energy strategy, improving the quality of education, upgrading the country’s physical infrastructure, and modernizing an out-of-date immigration policy’ (p.  122). For some lay readers, this little monograph will deserve praise as a thoughtful and encyclopaedic panorama of the ills of both America and the broader world, setting out a series of pragmatic, rational and carefully tailored prescriptions for a more modest US role during an era of what Haass, rather naively, describes as ‘strategic respite’ for Washington. For others, this precisely begs the question. A book of 192 pages that could be read either as a retrospective rationalization of the Obama record or as a manifesto for Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential bid ought to occasion urgent pause for thought. One concern here is that, contrary to the author’s apparent intent, Haass leaves the impression that America is increasingly, and perhaps irrevocably, at the mercy of global forces and actors that it can neither shape nor well comprehend. Second, much of the prescriptive element comprises more wishful thinking than grand strategy. Nowhere, for instance, does one glean a sense of how one judges ‘vital’ US interests or the conditions under which Washington should act unilaterally or intervene militarily, while in terms of America’s profound political dysfunction the ‘problems are easier to list than to resolve’ (p. 156). Third, nowhere are the potentially malign effects of encouraging American public insularity accorded even modest consideration. The consistent American engagement with the world after 1945 represents an aberration in the republic’s history. It would be all too complacent to imagine that strident calls for a more modest and selective role can sustain, rather than undermine, enduring public support for the heavy burdens of genuine international leadership. The irony of the Haass analysis is not so much that foreign policy begins at home but rather that, should his selfconsciously sage advice be taken, it may once more end there as well. Robert Singh, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

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Book reviews US foreign policy and democracy promotion: from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama. Edited by Michael Cox, Timothy J. Lynch and Nicolas Bouchet. London: Routledge. 2013. 222pp. Index. Pb.: £26.99. isbn 978 0 41567 980 0. Available as e-book. It is not easy to arrive at a concise summary of United States foreign policy in general, and trying to do so by encompassing the period from the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901, to the current incumbent, Barack Obama, built around the theme of ‘democracy promotion’ is more difficult still. Each of the presidents profiled in this edited book came into office at a different period in the history of the United States, and each faced his own set of challenges. Some of those were the result of international chaos such as the World Wars faced by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In other cases, they were facing domestic economic and/or political strife, as Jimmy Carter did when he took office in 1977. Whatever their differences, though, all the national leaders profiled here had a number of things in common, not least of which was a strong belief in, and commitment to, the United States system of political democracy and a capitalist market economy. Where they differed—sometimes greatly—was in the way(s) in which that belief was manifested in the foreign policy each advocated. Despite the title of the book, its chapters are studies of the perceived role of democracy and a capitalist economy as they have driven foreign policy, rather than focusing exclusively on ‘democracy promotion’. A number of questions are implicit that are tied to understanding US foreign policy decisions: can one country really ‘promote’ democracy in another? Was this ever really a goal of US foreign policy and if so, when? And, perhaps the most important underlying question, what, if anything, has the United States gained from a policy of promoting democracy when it tried to do so? These are not unimportant questions nor are they easy to answer. Furthermore, the revisionism already surrounding the administration of George W. Bush and the legacy that he left the current president, Barack Obama, suggests that these are questions well worth exploring. This edited volume attempts to do that, although in some chapters more successfully than in others. The overall orientation of the book can be seen quite early in the editors’ introduction, when they write about the Bush doctrine specifically but policy in general that ‘the United States is not like other countries and has a very special mission—and that mission has always been, and is bound to remain, the liberation of others from the bonds of tyranny’ (p. 3). The idea of American exceptionalism is one that has been debated, most recently in the 2012 presidential election. There are other instances throughout the book where the underlying assumptions (biases) of the particular author are apparent. For this reviewer, that undermines the argument that the author is trying to make. That said, in general the arguments are all well presented and do not stray far from the overall themes of the volume. Among the more important conclusions are the facts that the individual president matters when it comes to determining American foreign policy, and that we need to put the various presidents and their decisions into the historical context of the time in which they were made. The section on John F. Kennedy in chapter six in particular makes some important and often overlooked points about Kennedy’s perception and understanding of nationalist movements in the developing world, and how Kennedy sought to ‘channel the nationalism towards democracy rather than communism’ (p. 103). The author, Jon Roper, offers an interesting explanation of how that perspective affected Kennedy’s understanding of US foreign policy during his short administration. While the book has much to commend it, there are a few aspects that I found disconcerting. For example, the first substantive chapter is on ‘Democracy promotion from

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North America Wilson to Obama’, which sets the stage by drawing heavily on what has become known as liberal internationalism. The next chapter looks at Theodore Roosevelt, but the chapter following goes back to Wilson in a way that did not contribute much more than what had been introduced earlier. I thought that the chapter on Truman would have benefited greatly from reference to primary sources, especially when mentioning something as critical as the Truman Doctrine. The chapter on Reagan was confusing in that the author refers to events that actually occurred during the previous Carter administration as the rationale for Reagan’s decision on the Strategic Defense Initiative, but the section reads as if it were Reagan who made those decisions. And although the editors justify their decision as to which presidents to include and why, I found the exclusion of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush to leave gaps in the narrative. Despite its shortcomings, this edited volume offered some interesting insights into US foreign policy that are not often addressed, especially comparatively. Joyce P. Kaufman, Whittier College, USA The Secretary: a journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the heart of American power. By Kim Ghattas. New York: Times Books. 2013. 368pp. Index. Pb.: £10.99. isbn 978 0 80509 868 6. In this absorbing and highly readable work, Kim Ghattas, the BBC’s State Department correspondent, has attempted the ambitious task of combining personal memoir, an on-the-road record of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s term and an appraisal of the modern reality of US power. Speaking at a Chatham House event this January, John Bolton was asked what he thought incoming Secretary of State John Kerry would bring to the job; his reply: nothing apart from racking up more air miles. During her four years, Clinton, codename ‘Evergreen’, would travel a million miles criss-crossing the globe in a threadbare Special Air Mission plane that could only fly ten hours at a time. Ghattas would be there for 300,000 of those air miles, a professional witness to US power as it lived through the Arab Spring, the WikiLeaks scandal and hundreds of other moments of history. The Secretary shows the human story, through Clinton’s and Ghattas’s own perspectives, of the reality and exercise of power. It also shows the sacrifices that power entails: Clinton is forever on the move and the book’s photographs visibly demonstrate how the exhaustion aged her. Only nine months into the job and she had flown 140,000 miles. Ghattas describes the exhaustion of living in ‘the bubble’ with colourful anecdotes punctuating the endless air travel: the State Department press corps draws straws for the best seats at the back of the plane, Clinton loves Pakistani mangoes and the King of Saudi Arabia wears trainers under his robe. As Ghattas is still in post in Washington, however, you feel that there is a lot more being held back for when she departs the BBC. To better understand US power Ghattas explains her personal story as having lived at the receiving end of it as a citizen of Lebanon during the civil war years (1975−90). She describes the book as a ‘journey’, as while growing up under the bombs of war she looked to US responsibility for having to live cowering in basements, navigating sniper allies and rushing across no man’s lands. Ghattas was not alone in blaming the United States; she interestingly observes that ‘the blame also allowed our warlords to abdicate their own responsibility to end the war’ (p. 60). Ghattas explains that under the bombs ‘I had no ability to empathize with the “other” side’ (p.105), yet with a Dutch mother her world-view was widened when in her twenties she met and fell in love with the ‘other’, someone whose grandparents had died in the Holocaust.

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Book reviews The book paints a glowing picture of ‘Hillary’. What jumps out is both her energy and her ability to empathize and connect to people of all persuasions. Ghattas explains that ‘Hillary always reacted first as a person, as a mother … her empathy was real’ (p. 104). She can wake up in Japan at 4.30am during a minor earthquake after a long flight but still be buzzing come morning. Wherever she went she carried her personal legacy as a former first lady of the United States, giving what Ghattas described as ‘a one-two punch … the combined power of America and of Hillary’ (p. 35). The book does not pretend to go deep into the political science of Clinton’s politics or ideology. Beyond her personal popularity and connections to the global elite several aspects of her approach to the role emerge. One is her belief in public diplomacy and better connecting American diplomacy with people around the world. Town hall meetings and the use of new communications tools (the State Department employs 150 full-time social media staff and 900 diplomats use social media) allowed Clinton to engage with civil societies of the states she was visiting. She also deployed an army of special envoys, charged with empowering people to solve their own problems. Yet the book does not paint an in-depth human picture of Clinton, as perhaps her armour does not allow even journalists close to her to uncover the full personality. A possible run in 2017 for the presidency maybe explains why she keeps her cards close to her chest, although considering the political firestorm around the Benghazi attacks that killed US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, you feel that Ghattas could have been more rounded in a critique of her term in post. What gives the book its most unique and potent narrative, however, is Ghattas’s out­ sider’s take on US power from inside the bubble, once both her and Clinton’s backgrounds have been laid out. As her ‘journey’ reaches its close, she writes that ‘the difference between American power when I lived on the receiving end of it and today is that the gap between what American says it’s doing and what it is doing is becoming narrower’ (p. 336). The revelation is, as she writes, that ‘one of the reasons countries and people were so often disappointed in the United States was their unrealistic expectations of what the US should and could do’ (p. 115). Here is the great contrast between the Bush and Obama presidencies. Ghattas originally thought she might be witnessing a decline in US power but then explains that the Obama policy of leading from behind is in fact a new, more modest style of American leadership—nuanced diplomacy that sometimes gave the impression that the US was reluctant. Ghattas considers a multipolar world as a ‘recipe for global gridlock’ (p. 195); instead of perceiving decline in the Obama administration’s foreign policy, she sees America ‘expanding its reach and redefining its role’ (p. 288). She is, however, not entirely consistent in this nuanced message about power being redefined, simultaneously describing the country as a ‘superpower on a budget’ (p. 136) and warning of the dangers of ‘America seemed to be thinking itself into further decline’ (p. 166). Towards the end of the book, Ghattas writes that she had ‘reached the end of my own journey’ (p. 336) which highlights that perhaps the whole experience was a four-year answer to a question as to what US power really is. What makes the book so interesting is that both Ghattas and Clinton make for the perfect prism through which to learn more about such an important debate. James Denselow, King’s College London, UK

1082 International Affairs 89: 4, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

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Latin America and Caribbean Latin America and Caribbean* The Mapuche in modern Chile: a cultural history. By Joanna Crow. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. 2013. 288pp. Index. £63.50. isbn 978 0 81304 428 6. The subtitle of Joanna Crow’s deeply impressive book does it something of a disservice, as it may well deter some potential readers: its subject-matter is far more than is generally implied by the term ‘cultural history’. It is true that she frequently employs poetry (‘the most well-known and widely critiqued form of Mapuche cultural expression’, p. 216), popular music, photography, theatre, ethnographic studies and literary criticism throughout her text, yet she does so to interrogate the broader relationship between the Mapuche, Chile’s largest and most active indigenous group, and the Chilean state and society more generally, from the ‘pacification’ of Araucanía in the late nineteenth century to the end of Concertación rule in 2010. This is the first English-language book to tackle the subject in such a long timeframe, apart from Florencia Mallon’s Courage tastes of blood (Duke University Press, 2005) that focused on the fate of a single Mapuche community. Although an unequal power relationship has always framed interaction between the Mapuche and the Chilean state—as manifested most recently in the violent confrontations over hydro-electric projects on the upper Bío-Bío river and over logging concessions— Crow shows that the relationship is not a simple story of state repression and indigenous resistance. One of her principal insights, gleaned in part from her research in regional archives, is that there has been no ‘unified state discourse on the indigenous question’ (p. 220), as commonly supposed; different elements of the Chilean state have responded in diverse ways to Mapuche demands. She demonstrates too how the Mapuche have influenced mainstream Chilean culture, in particular Chile’s Nobel laureates Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda (concerned, however, more with an indigenous past than with the present) as well as Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara, leading proponents of the New Chilean Song Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. For their part, Mapuche leaders over the entire period have often successfully straddled both worlds, politically and socially: there were community heads who collaborated with the Chilean state during the pacification; politicians who—counter-intuitively—adhered to political parties on the right as much as on the Chilean left; and present-day Mapuche opponents of free-market economic policies and anti-terrorism legislation who have launched their critique ‘in state-funded publications, through projects with regional state museums, or while working for central state institutions’ (p. 218). Crow proffers a more complex portrait of the Mapuche experience during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973−90) than is usually allowed. Owing to the ‘inconsistent, even incoherent’ (p. 176) official discourse of the military regime on the indigenous question, which ‘both denied and did not deny the cultural and ethnic diversity of Chile’ (p. 153), Mapuche associations were able to ‘use the new laws of social organization to create a small space for themselves and make tangible demands of the state’ (p. 154). The experience, then, was not a wholly negative one: in consequence, ‘of all the regions, Araucanía recorded the highest vote in favour of Pinochet in the [1988] plebiscite’ (p. 177). Conversely, the author is fairly harsh—since so much more was expected with the return to democracy—in her assessment of the relationship between the Mapuche and the four centre-left governments of the Concertación, which attempted to project a consensual, harmonious multiculturalism. In *

See also Stephen G. Rabe, The killing zone: the United States wages Cold War in Latin America, pp. 1052–3; and Lillian Guerra, Visions of power in Cuba: revolution, redemption and resistance, 1959–1971, pp. 1054–5.

1083 International Affairs 89: 4, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

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Book reviews addition to the continuing pursuit of neo-liberal development policies that worked to the detriment of indigenous people and the invocation of Pinochet-era anti-terrorism legislation to quell open dissent, the proceedings of the ostensibly conciliatory Commission for Historical Truth and New Treatment of Indigenous Peoples (CVHNT), established with great fanfare in 2001 by Ricardo Lagos, Chile’s first socialist president since Salvador Allende, comes in for extended criticism: ‘[l]ike the Rettig Commission [on Truth and Reconciliation] more than a decade earlier, the CVHNT did not so much bring closure to a historical conflict as trigger further conflict about how to deal with that history in the present’ (p. 194); it also attempted to draw a historical line in 1990 to exclude from consideration the contentious actions of recent Concertación governments. Crow barely touches on the subsequent government of Michelle Bachelet (2006−10); she does not mention at all its vote in September 2007 in favour of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, though she does acknowledge—almost it seems as an afterthought—that Chile’s belated ratification in 2008 of International Labour Organization Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples enabled protesters to block the construction of a governmentsponsored airport near Temuco (p. 229). My main criticism of this illuminating work is that its analysis is occasionally reduced to the stance of particular, not necessarily representative, personalities at the expense of the more general socio-economic and political factors at play. The chapter on the period 1938 to 1964, for instance, revolves around Mistral, Neruda, the political machinations of one particular Mapuche leader (Venancio Coñuepán), and the public persona of a Mapuche opera singer (Rayén Quitral). Aided by a greater range of sources, subsequent chapters profit from a more integrated approach. Crow’s outstanding concluding chapter, moreover, consummately draws together all the various strands of the preceding argument. In brief, this sensitively written book provides readers with a full appreciation of the plight of the Mapuche in modern Chile. Its lucid prose, free of the jargon that all too often mars such works, made it a joy to read. Philip Chrimes

1084 International Affairs 89: 4, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

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