The Politics of Sexual Harassment: A Comparative Study of the United States, the European Union, and Germany. By Kathrin S. Zippel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 274p. $80.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Why was Germany so much slower than the United States to outlaw sexual harassment? What role have feminist organizations, academics, women in political parties, and femocrats (governmental equality officers) played in generating this policy change? How did the European Union act to require member states to legislate given that most member states were opposed? Does it matter that German policymakers have framed the problem largely as a gender-neutral violation of dignity, rather than as an individual right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex? Is it better to rely on individual litigants to enforce the law or work through collective bargaining agreements and labor councils? And what are the implications of the findings of sexual harassment policy for the future of this issue, feminist policy change, and the policy process more generally? Kathrin Zippel answers these questions and more in her well-researched, comprehensive, and clearly written book.

Peace Operations and Global Order. Edited by Alex J. Bellamy and Paul Williams. New York: Routledge, 2005. 242p. $115.00.

The literature on peace operations has been dominated by case studies and by efforts to glean policy-relevant lessons in order to improve ongoing or future peacekeeping operations. More explicitly theoretical studies that seek to embed such interventions within the broader debates in international relations or comparative politics are more recent and less developed. Peace Operations and Global Order contributes to these debates by bringing insights from critical theory that raise new questions about how peace operations and the post–Cold War international system shape one another.

Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge. Edited by Thomas Carothers. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006. 350p. $50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The checkered history of rule-of-law promotion is only one part of a larger program of external intervention that has aimed to reshape economic policies and political institutions throughout the post–Cold War world. Those efforts—labeled good governance, state building, and postconflict intervention—have, if anything, intensified and broadened since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This dispassionate and valuable evaluation of rule-of-law promotion reflects directly on the record of international assistance for legal reform, as well as the likely success of that even more ambitious agenda. Two introductory essays by Thomas Carothers, well known for his research on democracy promotion, offer a critical account of international assistance for legal reform, emphasizing the knowledge deficit that plagues claims of successful international influence. The following chapters attempt to fill that knowledge gap, at the same time underlining obstacles to sharper evaluation and learning on the part of donors and practitioners.

Trading Blocs: States, Firms, and Regions in the World Economy. By Kerry A. Chase. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 322p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The focus of this book by Kerry Chase is that the process of international trade liberalization has resulted in the development of three major regional economic blocs: the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and a partial regional agreement in Asia largely driven by Japan. These three economic blocs are known in business schools as the “triad” of Europe, North America, and Asia. In The Regional Multinationals (2005), I have shown that the majority of international trade and investment takes place within these triad blocs rather than between them, and that even the world's largest 500 firms average over 72% of their sales within their home region. Basically, the analysis by Chase is fully consistent with such findings.

Governing Water: Contentious Transnational Politics and Global Institution Building. By Ken Conca. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 456 p. $70.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.

Ken Conca presents what is close to a definitive statement of the transnational politics of water, but his larger purpose is to demonstrate and correct the inadequacies of current theories of international environmental politics (IEP). This well-written and well-argued book is a theoretical advance on the regime theory commonly used in IEP and has garnered two prestigious prizes: the Harold and Margaret Sprout award and the Chadwick F. Alger Prize.

Children's Human Rights: Progress and Challenges for Children Worldwide. Edited by Mark Ensalaco and Linda C. Majka. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005. 288p. $82.50 cloth, $32.95 paper.

Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food. By George Kent. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 290p. $49.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

The body of literature on international human rights has grown tremendously in the last three decades or so. The two books under review here expand this body of literature and aim to contribute to our understanding of the development and growth of human rights regimes—systems of norms, rules, and decision-making procedures—in two different but related areas: The volume edited by Mark Ensalaco and Linda Majka deals with the rights of the child; George Kent's work focuses on the right to food, or, more precisely, on what he calls the right to adequate food.

Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population. By Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 329p. $37.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

One in six Chinese men is unlikely to ever find a wife, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing (p. 261). There are currently over 111 million more men in China than women, and 120 men to every 100 women in the 15–34 age category. India's skewed sex ratio is also rapidly approaching the 120:100 ratio. What happens to societies that explicitly select for disproportionate numbers of male offspring, through abortions of female fetuses, infanticide of girls, neglect of female infants, or other forms of direct and indirect violence against girls and women? It is to this question that Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer turn in their extensively researched and richly detailed book.

Protecting Human Rights: A Comparative Study, Advancing Human Rights. By Todd Landman. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 218p. $54.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Political scientists have finally begun to take international law seriously. Todd Landman's new book is an admirable example of this new trend. Situated at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics, it is a sustained study of the role of democratization, development, international socialization and international law on governments' human rights practices since the mid-1980s. It is a global quantitative study that comes to some very different conclusions from the existing literature in this genre. In contrast to the pathbreaking work of Cona Hathaway (“Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?” Yale Law Journal 111 [8, 2002]: 101–99) and Linda Camp Keith (“The United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Does It Make a Difference in Human Rights Behavior?” Journal of Peace Research 36 [no. 1, 1999]: 95–118), the key finding in Landman's study is that international treaty law has contributed to improvements in human rights behavior. How does he come to this unorthodox conclusion, and what does this mean for our understanding of international law and democratic development?

Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order. By Jeffrey W. Legro. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 272p. $39.95.

When do states (decision makers and their publics) rethink their world? Why and how does this happen? Change in ideas, shifts in paradigms, the overthrow of ruling ideologies have long been the focus of various theoretical perspectives. Here these questions are framed and analyzed through constructivist lenses.

The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century. By Robert J. Lieber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 268p. $28.00.

This volume joins a cottage industry of books on the proper American role in a post-9/11 world. In it, Robert J. Lieber advocates an active U.S. foreign policy based on American primacy.

Demilitarizing Politics: Elections on the Uncertain Road to Peace. By Terrence Lyons. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005. 232p. $49.95.

When a peace agreement is negotiated in civil wars today, there is a seemingly reflexive turn toward democratization as a way to move social conflicts from the battlefield to the halls of parliament; such agreements invariably entail a political transition requiring divisive and inherently difficult electoral processes. Terrence Lyons captures the complex and often contradictory dynamics of elections in the wake of civil war peace agreements in his well-designed, thoroughly researched, and coherently argued book. The principal argument of Demilitarizing Politics is that the conduct of war itself creates institutional structures of conflict that linger into the postwar period and that critically inform postwar electoral politics.

Trading Voices: The European Union in International Commercial Negotiations. By Sophie Meunier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 248p. $35.

One often hears that integration in Europe magnifies the political voice of European countries on the international scene. The larger size of the European Union market surely makes investment in any particular European country more attractive, and importers are certainly more eager to satisfy a regulatory requirement if doing so will give them access to the entire European market. But does unity bring negotiating clout, too? This is the question Sophie Meunier investigates in her book Trading Voices.

The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. By Manus I. Midlarsky. New York: Cambridge University Press, 480p. $75.00 cloth, $28.99 paper.

An impressive body of work is emerging that aspires to explain what appears to defy explanation: genocide. Although most of these studies focus on individual cases, scholars are increasingly developing theoretical frameworks and applying a comparative method to explain not individual genocides but the very phenomenon. Manus Midlarsky's highly ambitious, original, and impressive book aspires to bring us closer to understanding genocide in the contemporary age. Avoiding monocausal explanations that locate homicidal tendencies either in cultural or strategic variables, Midlarsky draws from international relations theory, comparative politics, and psychology to explain what makes genocide imaginable and executable. Written with controlled passion by a scholar deeply committed to using social science theory and methods to understand this highly emotional topic, The Killing Trap is an invaluable contribution to genocide studies.

From Resource Scarcity to Ecological Security: Exploring New Limits to Growth. Edited by Dennis Pirages and Ken Cousins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 280p. $60.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

With the near quadrupling of the world population in the last century, the melting of the polar ice cap, and the increased frequency of hurricanes such as Katrina and other “natural” disasters, the issue of ecological security is receiving renewed attention. Ecological security focuses not only on threats resulting directly from environmental degradation but also on the economic ramifications of failed environmental policies, military threats that stem from conflicts over scarce resources, and ecologically related health risks. The idea of ecological security achieved a measure of popularity during the 1980s as researchers and policymakers began to consider the broad security implications of crises related to natural resources. In this new volume, the editors and contributing authors try to forecast the potential security ramifications of current environmental trends over the next 30 years. Ecological security serves as an umbrella term throughout the volume for evaluating the risks to humanity created by inaction, weak policies, or slow implementation of environmental policies regarding population, water, food, energy, global climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity.

Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats. By Daryl G. Press. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 218p. $32.50.

Deterrence by Diplomacy. By Anne E. Sartori. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 176p. $32.50.

In Cold War deterrence, nothing was more important or disturbing than the credibility problem. Success depended on conveying credible threats, yet it was hard to see how to make retaliatory threats credible in mutual nuclear deterrence, particularly in extended deterrence or to prevent conventional attacks. It was also hard to make nuclear retaliation threats credible against nonnuclear powers; nuclear use would arouse condemnation, set an awful precedent, and stimulate nuclear proliferation. In fact, how were retaliatory threats of any sort made credible?

International Democracy and the West: The Role of Governments, Civil Society, and Multinational Business. By Richard Youngs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 232p. $99.00.

In his seminal article published nearly 30 years ago, cleverly called “Second Image Reversed,” Peter Gourevitch outlined a set of arguments for why and how to study the international causes of domestic outcomes. This framework had a profound effect on several literatures, but only a minor ripple in the study of regime change. A handful of international relations scholars, including John Owen and Mark Peceny, have made important contributions to this field, and a smattering of comparativists have added the international dimension to their list of independent variables that influence regime type, but the subject could not be considered a mainstream field. In fact, the third-wave transitologists gave only passing attention to the international dimensions of democratization. Laurence Whitehead did write an important chapter on international dimensions of democratization in the four-volume study on transitions from autocratic rule edited by Louillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Lawrence Whitehead. Yet, in one of the introductory essays in this study, Schmitter wrote that one “of the firmest conclusions that emerged … was that transitions from authoritarian rule and immediate prospects for political democracy were largely to be explained in terms of national forces and calculations. External actors tended to play an indirect and usually marginal role” (in O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Southern Europe, 1986, p. 5). Scholars and policy analysts writing about democratization after the end of the Cold War have devoted more attention to international factors, yet the subject is still grossly neglected. This absence of scholarship is all the more surprising given the foreign policy debates in Washington, Brussels, Moscow, and Tehran about the role the United States in fostering “regime change.”