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The editors of Bridges and Boundaries asked contributors—nine political scientists and eight historians, all of them North American—to reflect on their respective disciplines and the way they go about “the study of international events” (p. 1). We should notice a positivist disposition here. While contributors “share an interest…in the state, politics and war” (p. 2), events are the stuff of international relations. That the state, politics, and war are complex institutional phenomena perhaps not reducible to events points to conceptual issues that this volume fails generally to address. Instead, contributors discuss the many problems attending generalized explanation and empirical fit—theory and science—as if their shared interests imply a common stock of core concepts.

Robert Pinkney, a respected British Africanist, takes on an ambitious task: examining the interaction of three Anglophone states (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) with the international community since independence, but primarily since the end of the Cold War opened up new avenues for mutual influence.

J. Ann Tickner's Gendering World Politics revisits—in the best sense of the term—many of the same themes she explored in her pathbreaking 1992 book, Gender in International Relations. The current volume comes almost a decade after that first book appeared—a decade during which both the field of international relations and the subfield of feminist IR have seen dramatic change and, especially in the case of the latter, exponential growth. Gendering World Politics brings us up to date on the current state of debates within IR and provides a thoroughgoing and sophisticated introduction to what is now a very sizable feminist IR literature. Perhaps the most important contribution of this book, however, is that it allows Tickner to move forward an agenda she has been exploring for a number of years now, to encourage “conversations” between mainstream and feminist IR, and, in particular, to ask why authentic conversations, despite a decade of both turmoil and growth, have not been more forthcoming. As she writes in the Preface, “I have spent much of this time trying to understand why the intellectual gulf between different IR approaches is so wide and why conversations between proponents of these various approaches can be so difficult” (p. x).

Forty years ago Arnold Wolfers lamented that scholars had failed to examine those rare occasions, following great wars, when statesmen gather to refashion the norms and institutions of international politics. He noted in his (1962) Discord and Collaboration (pp. 137–38) that creating a new order after the close of war is “one of the trickiest tasks of diplomacy,” for how that order is fashioned will have a profound impact on the subsequent pattern of war. Charles Doran's (1971) The Politics of Assimilation, Robert Randle's (1973) The Origins of Peace, and my (1991) Peace and War: Armed Conflict and International Order provided empirical support for Wolfers' insights, but G. John Ikenberry offers the first study that links peacemaking to specific types of international order.

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.

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.

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.

In the past ten years there has been a burst of theoretical and empirical research on the topic of learning in international relations. Russell J. Leng's new book is the latest addition to this body of scholarship, and it builds on his past research on learning and crisis bargaining. Leng examines the role of learning in crisis bargaining strategies within ongoing, inter- national rivalries. He asks a series of questions, including: Do patterns of crisis behavior repeat from one crisis to the next?

Studies of the relationship between the distribution of power and prospects for conflict or cooperation have a distinguished history in the field of international politics. Several competing theories have been offered to explain variation in foreign policy behavior as a function of power distributions. Moreover, a wealth of empirical evidence suggests the crucial role that power plays in international bargaining. The Origins of Major War is a deeply penetrat- ing, extraordinarily wide-ranging, and judicious treatment of the onset of major conflict, and it offers an explanation and some evidence for the relationship between power differentials and major power conflict. Copeland provides a dynamic theory of major power war, building upon classic realism. In my view, his diagnosis and combination of prescription are substantially correct.

Few concepts in international relations have aroused as much debate and emotion among political leaders, activists, and scholars as that of sovereignty. Diplomats continually invoke it, transnational organizations attempt to circumvent it, and scholars debate its meaning and wonder whether globaliza- tion is making it obsolete. Yet, most accept the premise that sovereignty is not only the foundation of our international system but also one of the few consequential institutions we have in world politics.

This complex, ambitious, and large book seeks to question, reformulate, and enhance the scope (and methods) of inter- national relations theories, particularly those formulated within a realist framework. The authors question that frame- work, the Westphalian model of putatively unitary nation- states, quantitative methods of empirical investigation, and the levels-of-analysis paradigm. The breadth of their critique is extensive and, consequently, highly ambitious. Rather than approach international relations as a system of unitary nation-states inspired by realist principles, which is arguably a partial and simplified portrayal of contemporary research, the authors favor a complex system of "overlapping, layered, and linked polities" that have both horizontal and vertical dimensions. The latter dimension is particularly important, as it concerns patterns of authority, identity (including ethnic- ity), and institutions that compete for the loyalty of individ- uals.

When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s, as the Vietnam conflict was escalating, I took Stanley Hoffmann's mesmeriz- ing course, "Causes of War." I thought back to this class as I read Cynthia Enloe's book, which deserves all the superla- tives it has accrued. The experience of reading now and remembering back left me wondering: Without Enloe to consult (her first book on militarism and gender came out in the early 1980s), what were we missing in Hoffmann's class? The answer, I think, is this: We could understand well enough the contending theories about why nations go to war; but in the absence of Enloe, we were less able to ask how militaries could manage such massive mobilizations that required the often calamitous sacrifice of precious lives even for wars whose purposes seemed remote or unconvincing.

It's not every day that you find a book that argues for its own irrelevance. This is not, of course, how Mark Franke characterizes his project in Global Limits—but it is the upshot, and he is admirably candid in putting together the individual pieces of the argument pointing to it.

Too often edited volumes are a farrago of barely related essays that amount to the academic equivalent of the prover- bial camel: a horse built by committee. Lowell S. Gustafson is to be commended for compiling a coherent collection of essays that are united not only by their common conviction that Thucydides' great work does indeed possess a "theory of international relations" but also by their common desire to contrast this theory with current trends in the discipline. According to the contributors, Thucydides is not the father of "realism" or its variants because his understanding of inter- national politics is essentially moral: Every approach to international politics that studies power to the neglect of justice, necessity to the neglect of freedom, will prove to be an inadequate tool with which to understand the political deeds of human beings. However much we may be impinged upon by necessity, we remain fundamentally free, and how- ever much we may seek brute power, we nonetheless also strive to be just.