Early accounts of the development of the discipline of international relations (IR) attribute causal significance to changes in the “real” world. In this respect, historigraphy was a reflection in history's looking glass, such that World War I created idealism, and World War II prompted the revival of realism. The editors of International Relations—Still and American Social Science? remind us that the identity of the discipline is also a reflection of geopolitical and cultural circumstances. The sixteen essays seek to reawaken the question of the identity of the discipline and how this has been transmitted and contested. There is no doubt that the book will be widely read and is likely to find its way onto many postgraduate course lists. It is also likely to find critics and supporters in fairly equal number, which is reason alone to applaud the labors of the editors.

Learning would seem to be a natural topic for the academic study of international politics. Interest in dynamic processes, however, and in learning, in particular, has been uneven, while the impact of contributions to date has been mixed. State Learning and International Change provides a thorough, thoughtful application of a complex biological learning model to international politics. The text is engaging and well written. Modeling and philosophy of science issues are addressed with aplomb and humor. For example, the author refers to the residue from social Darwinist applications of biological models to social science as “pesky,” discusses stocasticity and pleiotropy with reference to striped and spotted cross-eyed bandersnatches, and mentions “deranged mutant-killer-monster snow goons” as a possible method of biological selection, all in the space of a few pages (pp. 59–67).

Joel Fetzer is to be congratulated for a serious attempt to bring a public opinion approach to comparative immigration politics. His book represents an ambitious step toward bridging the gap between policy input and output in the immigration equation of advanced industrialized democracies. Its occasional choppy organization and underdeveloped data analysis tend to distract from the import of the work and leave the reader yearning for a deeper and more substantive discussion.

Clausewitz once observed that in war everything is simple, but the simplest things are very complicated. This seems to apply doubly so to nuclear deterrence. The principle is very simple: A potential enemy is persuaded not to do anything rash by the prospect of devastating retaliation. But it soon gets complicated. What difference does it make if the idea is not only to protect the homeland but also allies? As potential enemies acquire their own means of devastating retaliation, issues of preemption arise, and this requires close attention to the details of force structure. How varied, overwhelming, and surprising need the attacker be, especially if there is little interest in preemption? How much need the defender disperse, conceal, or protect forces, or develop antimissile defenses, just in case the other side is contemplating preemption? What happens if both sides are contemplating preemption at the same time? Can understandings, tacit or negotiated, between potential enemies ease the dangers of a crisis getting out of hand?

Scholars of Middle Eastern studies in the last decade often were preoccupied with two major problems. First, the democratization that has spread over most of the globe seems to have missed the Middle East. Second, there appears to be a growing gap between international relations and comparative politics theory, on the one hand, and Middle East studies, on the other. In seeking to explain why, some point to the highly politicized scholarship that can still be found in Middle East studies. Others argue that the theorists simply have not tried hard enough to fit the special nature of the Middle East into their theoretical models, or that Middle Eastern scholars have not tried hard enough to deal with theory. Two of the three books under review, by Hansen and Heydemann, do a great deal to narrow the gap between theory and reality in the Middle East. The book by Niblock is an example of the kind of highly politicized scholarship that is still found too often in Middle Eastern studies.

Hailed by sympathetic reviewers as the “Communist Manifesto for our time” and condemned by scathing critics as an “impenetrable work of absolute abstraction,” Empire has exploded on an unsuspecting international academic scene. Indeed, the tremendous appeal of the book has transcended the narrow walls of the ivory tower, drawing to its authors a glaring public spotlight that only rarely shines on political and literary theorists. In the ongoing public debate over the virtues and flaws of the study, even its most intransigent detractors can hardly deny that Empire represents a powerful neo-Marxist contribution to the rapidly emerging field of “globalization studies.”

The tide of globalization that has swept the world political economy over the past two decades is clearly a development of epic importance. Given Japan's economic scale—one-seventh of global GNP and more than one-quarter of world savings—its ability and inclination to respond is likewise a subject of broad international concern. Yet, the debate on Japan's evolving political-economic course has so far yielded far more heat than light.

Conceptualizing the sovereign nation-state remains a core concern in the discipline of international relations (IR). Yet, as the volumes by Sarah Owen Vandersluis and Beate Jahn demonstrate, the theoretical location of this conceptual debate is shifting. Questions of identity, like those regarding sovereign nation-states, were answered in the 1990s with reference to terms like social construction. In the new millennium, “the social” is increasingly joined by “the cultural” as an intellectual marker of how serious IR scholars must pose questions of identity. Why this shift? And what difference does it make to our understandings of sovereign nation-states, not to mention IR theory more generally?

This well-documented book analyzes the manifold inconsistent, inefficient, piecemeal, and sometimes counterproductive ways the international community intervened in the dynamics of violence that beset Rwanda before, during, and after the 1994 genocide. Klinghoffer takes a position that runs counter to the popular description of the international community as being totally inactive and uncaring before and during the genocide. Rather, he maintains, interventions did take place, but they failed to achieve their aims. At a descriptive level, Klinghoffer, following Bruce Jones (“‘Intervention without Borders:’ Humanitarian Intervention in Rwanda 1990–1994,” Millennium 24 [Summer 1995]: 225–49), makes this point rather successfully. The book contains many interesting pieces of information that, taken together, force us to acknowledge some new elements in the simple picture that has become so dominant about the international community's conduct in Rwanda.

David M. Lampton's book on the U.S.-China relationship is the best in a series of strong works on the topic in recent years. In contrast to James Mann's About Face (1999) and Patrick Tyler's A Great Wall (1999), books by scholarly journalists that cover the history of the relationship from the late 1960s to the late 1990s and that use declassified documents from the U.S. side extensively, Lampton concentrates solely on the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Moreover, he takes great advantage of his experience as president of the National Committee on United States–China Relations from 1988 to 1996 (he was professor of political science at Ohio State University before serving on the committee, and he is now a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies) to illustrate the ins and outs of U.S.-China relations. In contrast to Mann and Tyler, Lampton had great access to top Chinese leaders (and top U.S. officials as well) on a recurring basis, and the Chinese side is presented here with more insight than in any other source.

This work discusses conflict resolution in the Western paradigm and Cambodia's recent experience of that. Lizee makes a notable contribution to our understanding of the management of transitions from conflict to peace in this sophisticated piece of analysis. The work revolves around the general hypothesis that the failure of the Cambodian peace process is attributable almost entirely to the inappropriate character of the Western-determined peace process. The book starts by comparing the evolution of conflict management processes in the West and in Cambodia; Lizee makes the differences quite clear, and this part of his work is very strong as an indicator of the evolution of socioinstitutional mores in Cambodia (especially pp. 39–43). He argues that a critical tension accounts for the failure of the Paris Peace Agreement (PPA). This is to be found in the Khmer approaches to social harmony through balance-of-power equations and Buddhist values.

Much of the growing literature on human rights issues focuses on the post-1989 democratizations and the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s. It reaches across many disciplines, including work not just by political scientists but also by legal scholars, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, journalists, and practitioners. Much of the literature confronts the tension between the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of stability. Andrew Rigby, who teaches on forgiveness and reconciliation, contributes an eclectic and good-hearted meditation on the dilemma of political reconciliation after mass atrocities.

One of the sharpest and most consequential divisions in international relations lies between those who believe that international politics is a realm unto its own and those who see the lines between domestic and international politics as both permeable and pertinent. For the former group, the consequences of anarchy swamp any potential for politics to be ordered at the international level as it is within states. In this view, the dynamics of domestic political life, such as the rule of law, norms of trust, or the independent effects of institutions, are foreign to the international system.

Since Neville Chamberlain's concessions to Adolph Hitler in Munich in 1938, appeasement has become a term of disrepute. The word is almost an epithet, denoting weakness in the face of aggression. Generations of scholars and policymakers have learned the lesson that appeasement emboldens the aggressor and makes war more likely. Academic attention has focused instead on deterrence theory and the role of coercion and compellence as key elements of international politics.

The significance of European integration as a process and an intellectual focus is undeniable. The economic importance of the European auto sector and its worldwide dimensions are also self-evident. Roland Stephen's effort to deepen our analytical understanding of the former through a detailed examination of the latter thus promises to be of interest to readers from a variety of fields, ranging from economics and politics to the analysis of corporate strategy.

The new collection of essays edited by John A. Vasquez in What Do We Know About War? provides a useful overview of the quantitative literature on war. This book makes no claims to move the field forward significantly but, instead, offers seniors and first-year graduate students a good basic understanding of how statistical analyses have been used to explain the variation between war and peace. The book has significant strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths are the wide array of questions addressed and the attempt to provide a systematic discussion of the current state of the quantitative knowledge on war; its weaknesses are the paucity of attention paid to new insights from the rational choice literature and their implications for the quantitative study of conflict.