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This paper investigates the principal competing visions of global politics that are currently advanced in the public discourse about globalization in opposition to the traditional state-centered perspective. The first part of the paper develops an analysis of ideal models as cultural resources that grounds the different reading of human bonds. The second part applies the notion of ideal models to the new scenario of globalization, and identifies four alternative interpretations of the notion of global politics: namely Neo-liberalism, Cosmopolitanism, Alter-globalism, and Dialogue among Civilizations. The principal characteristics of these four notions are presented in order to map the current debate on the future of global politics.

Business Power in Global Governance. By Fuchs Doris. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007. 233 pp., $55.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1588264923). The Enclave Economy: Foreign Investment and Sustainable Development in Mexico's Silicon Valley. By P. Gallagher Kevin, Zarsky Lyuba. MA: The MIT Press, 2007. 232 pp., $21.00 paper (ISBN-13: 978-0262572422). Textures of Struggle: the Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand. By Pangsapa Piya. Ithaca, NY: IRL/Cornell University Press, 2007. 217 pp., $18.95 paper (ISBN-13: 978-0801473760). Globalization and Labor: Democratizing Global Governance. By Dimitris Stevis, Terry Boswell. UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008. $27.95 (ISBN: 0-7425-3785-4 978-0-7425-3785-9). These books explicitly underline the necessity to revive and continue the “global governance” debate that has dominated both academic and policy relevant circles since the Commission on Global Governance in the 1990s. Technological developments, increase of foreign direct investment into and in some instances the subsequent abandonment of particular industries, increasing tensions of global and national union politics, and the questionable fate of workers, are issues that inform and fuel a number of debates whilst globalizing capitalism continues its omniscient advance. The four texts I review in this piece ask crucial questions about the impact of the expansion of neoliberal capitalism on societies and on people and fundamentally question the utility of the idea of “global governance” that does not take into account corporate power and workers' struggle. Each book gives useful and well informed answers in the context of increasing social antagonism against globalizing strategies still operating at the level of intergovernmental and corporate organization, as well as the domestic arena. Each text challenges mainstream assumptions regarding the impact of globalisation at the popular level, and also challenges widely accepted ideas coming out of business and academic discourses for the advantages of a global free market economy. Each volume also revokes the idea that globalization has reduced the role of the state, and outlines clear state activities in the management of global capitalism, rendering unfounded the allusions made by ideas of global governance for its potential to reduce national governments' involvement. “Governance” is a post-Cold War concept and was discussed in the early 1990s at a meeting in Konigswinter at which time the Commission on Global Governance was born. Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson and Guiana statesman Shridath Ramphal co-chaired this meeting and created perhaps the first definition of global governance: Governance is the sum of the many ways …

Our age is marked by two main trajectories: globalization and democratization–which are not readily compatible. While the move toward democracy requires a certain civic equality among all participants, globalization in its present form fosters or enhances social inequality. The paper concentrates on three main types of inequality: those of power, wealth and knowledge. In each of these domains the presentation follows a prominent mentor or set of mentors: in the first domain the political scientist Samuel Huntington; in the second the economist Amartya Sen; and in the last the philosophers Heidegger and Gadamer. By way of conclusion, the paper issues a plea for cosmopolitan or global democratic justice, as a counterpoise to prevailing modes of global inequality and inequity.

Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, David Held, Anthony McGrevv, David Goldblatt, Jonathan Perraton (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 540 pp., paper (ISBN: 0-8047-3627-8), $29.95; cloth (ISBN: 0-8047-3625-1), $75.00. Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy, Daniele Archibugi, David Held, Martin Kohler, eds. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 352 pp., paper (ISBN: 0-8047-3535). $22.95; cloth (ISBN: 0-8047-5344), $60.00. The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change, Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, Kathryn Sikkink, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 318 pp., paper (ISBN: 0-521-65882-9), $22.95; cloth (ISBN: 0-521-65093-3). $59.95. Books reviewed in this article: David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture Daniele Archibugi, David Held, and Martin Kohler, (eds.) Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, (eds.) The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change

Unpacking Globalization: Markets, Gender, and Work. Edited by Linda E. Lucas Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. 333 pp., $90.00 cloth (ISBN 0-7391-2157-X), $38.95 paper (ISBN 0-7391-2158-8). Unpacking Globalization , edited by Linda E. Lucas, explores the ways in which globalization has transformed the lives of women, the nature of women's work and gender relations more broadly. The purpose of this collection is to draw together a range of quantitative and qualitative analyses in order to begin to answer the question posed by Beneria (2003) as to whether or not the shift to a market economy has had a beneficial impact on women and gender relations. In order to do so, this collection of 28 chapters combines theorizations of globalization at the macro level with studies done at the national and local levels. The authors base their research in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America and engage a wide range of contemporary issues, including: the feminization of survival, the role of the United Nations and civil society, the opportunities and limitations of transnational women's activism, human security and human rights, migration, social security and well-being, female sex workers, political representation, affirmative action policies, the gendered nature of organizations, spaces and opportunities for women's empowerment, entrepreneurship and micro-credit. While the contributors to Unpacking Globalization all share a theoretical and practical commitment to feminism and to the need to promote gender equity in development processes, their perspectives remain nonetheless diverse, with some retaining a critical view of (gendered) globalization, some viewing recent transformations as progressive in terms of gender relations and others voicing optimism about the progressive potential of globalization if properly directed and managed. Unpacking Globalization is divided into four sections. Part I explores the ways in which globalization has affected women's lives as well as the ways that women have mobilized locally and …

The Limits of Culture: Islam and Foreign Policy. Edited by Shaffer Brenda. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 352 pp., $50.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-262-19529-1), $25.00 paper (ISBN: 0-262-69321-6). By the second half of twentieth century, the existing approaches to international relations theory no longer appeared adequate for explaining the enormous events taking place in the international arena. In part as a result, cultural studies entered the field through constructivism. Cultural constructivists assert that social norms shape and change foreign policy over time, not the structure of the international system (Hopf 2002). The impact of cultural phenomena, including religion, on politics became an increasingly popular focus of study. Various scholars have tried to understand the extent to which cultural background influences the decisions and decision-making processes of political elites (Katzenstein 1996). After the September 11 attacks, researchers have been particularly motivated to better understand how religion shapes the world views of individuals. In The Limits of Culture , Brenda Shaffer takes this interest a step further, examining the impact of culture—and religion as an aspect of culture—on the foreign policies of states. In the past, the mainstream approaches to international relations and foreign policy analysis, such as realism and even neoliberalism, did not accept the idea that culture in general, or religion in particular, had a significant impact on the preferences of a state's foreign policymakers. Constructivists, although almost certain that culture and history are critical determinants of a state's behavior, have also paid limited attention to the impact of religion on foreign policymaking. In The Limits of Culture , Shaffer suggests that she is attempting to test whether these theories are still valid for the twenty-first century given the conditions created by globalization. Although this question may provide an intellectual starting point, it is not easy to follow it throughout the book. Actually, Shaffer starts with an analysis of the basics of culture and identity and then explores Islam's role in the formation of identities. How these religious …

Globalization and International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative Futures. By Mark Rupert, M. Scott Solomon Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. 192 pp., $66.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-2942-8), $24.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-2943-6). The cover of Globalization and International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative Futures features two pictures. The first picture shows Paul Wolfowitz, the former President of the World Bank; the second picture is a landscape of Hong Kong that shows the disparities in life between those who inhabit the city's downtown high-rise buildings and those who inhabit its shabby apartments. The fact that Paul Wolfowitz is no longer President of the World Bank may have been a source of concern for the publisher as well as the book's authors: Mark Rupert and Scott Solomon. In fact, the ousting of Wolfowitz—which was engineered primarily by the Bank staff, much to the annoyance of the Bush Administration in the United States—could be viewed as representing a change in the politics of globalization that may enhance the kinds of policies that Rupert and Solomon advocate in the book. In essence, Rupert and Solomon assert that the current era of globalization needs to be analyzed anew, through a critical theoretical framework that uses “historical materialism to sketch some of the more significant ways in which globalization is being contested and point toward some of the possible worlds that could emerge from the politics of globalization” (p. 2). It is Rupert and Solomon's use of historical materialism as an analytical framework that makes Globalization and International Political Economy unique within the literature on globalization. Much of this literature can be grouped into two categories: the anti-globalization literature and the pro-globalization literature. Examples of the former include works by Joseph Stiglitz (2003), whom Rupert and Solomon cite as a critic of neoliberal globalization (pp. 50–51), and Robert Wade (2004). Examples of the pro-globalization literature include works by Jagdish Bhagwati (2004), Martin Wolf (2004), and Miguel Glatzer and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (2005). This …

Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks. By Valentine M. Moghadam. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005. 272 pp., $49.95 cloth (ISBN: 0-8018-8023-8), $18.95 paper (ISBN: 0-8018-8024-6). Published a decade after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks , by Valentine Moghadam, provides a detailed examination of the emergence of transnational feminist networks, the neoliberal globalizing processes that have given rise to them, and the policy agendas that these networks have pursued. Locating herself firmly within the tradition of feminist international political economy, Moghadam seeks to demonstrate that transnational feminist networks are the organizational expression of both the transnational women's movement and the ideals of global feminism. A former staff member of the United Nations and a consultant to international organizations, Moghadam guides the reader through the complex, acronym-filled worlds of six policy-oriented transnational feminist networks, and the other movements and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with which they are affiliated. Her goal is to demonstrate how these organizations have contributed to the construction of a more equitable global civil society. Globalizing Women is divided into eight chapters that address the gendered effects of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, the emergence of transnational feminist networks during the 1980s, the organizational characteristics of these networks, and the challenges they pose to the gendered injustices of global neoliberalism. The second chapter of the book contains one of the best reviews of feminist scholarship on globalization available. Focusing largely on the effects of global economic processes, Moghadam demonstrates how the increasing liberalization and deregulation of markets and the increased activity of multinational corporations have created increased inequalities among nations as well as among groups differentiated by gender and class. She argues that, by putting gender at the center of their analysis, feminist approaches to globalization and feminist scholars highlight how central the maintenance and exploitation of gender inequalities is to the global spread of neoliberal ideologies. From the increasing demand for workers to be flexible to the …

Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. By Mary Kaldor. Oxford: Polity Press, 2003. 200 pp., $56.95 cloth: (ISBN: 0-745-62757-9), $22.95 paper: (ISBN: 0-745-62758-7). In the summer of 1982, a small, explicitly transnational group, END (European Nuclear Disarmament), sponsored an international conference for peace movement activists at a time when the larger movement had captured the attention of mass media in United States and Western Europe. The movement—and the conference—also piqued the concern of elected officials in the West and sparked the imagination of activists around the world. END organizers wanted to help coordinate activist efforts not only to stop the next round of nuclear weapons modernization in Europe, but also to unmake the Cold War, dissolve the bipolar bloc system that organized world politics, unite Europe, and promote human rights and democracy. Conference folders—which contained programs, addresses, and polemics in various languages—were marked by language. One participant crossed out “German” on her folder, and wrote “European” below it. Noticing another participant, obviously from the United States, she started experimenting with broader identities, finally fixing on “Global Citizen.” The peace movement, for END, was always about more than nuclear weapons, including forging an identity among activists and citizens not bound by national or bloc boundaries. Mary Kaldor's Global Civil Society: An Answer to War continues this effort to conceptualize and create workable global governance and identities. END was a small portion of the very large peace movement of the 1980s. Most of the activism came primarily from groups that were nationally based and focused on particular weapons systems or arms control proposals like the US movement's nuclear freeze (Meyer 1990). Never a mass movement, END emphasized ideas as much as mobilization, explicitly working to unravel what E. P. Thompson (1982a, 1982b) called the ideology of exterminism and cultivate alternatives. Thompson wrote polemics for activists (see especially Thompson and Smith 1981), trying to promote a broad change in ideology from the bottom up. Along …

There is a basic distinction between poverty, which has always been with us, and destitution, which has become more pronounced only recently given the assault on traditional communities and their life–support system. Destitution is directly attributable to processes of development. This paper investigates the psychological structures with which the mainstream cultures of politics live, but especially the ego defense furnished by poverty alleviation (particularly “celebratory” accounts of the decline of poverty) to consolidating middle class consciousness. The presently trendy slogan of globalization can be read as the newest effort to disguise both the declining political clout of the historically disadvantaged and an interest in poverty.

The New Global Economy and Developing Countries: Making Openness Work, Dani Rodrik (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1999). 168 pp. paper (ISBN: 1-56517-027-X), $13.95. Book reviewed: Rodrik, Dani The New Global Economy and Developing Countries: Making Openness Work

The Information Revolution and World Politics. By Elizabeth C. Hanson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. x+280 pp., $27.95 paper (ISBN: 9780742538535). Information technology and world politics has become an increasingly important subject in the field of international relations. Its related courses have been listed in the curricula of many programs of political science and international relations. However, there are very few books that attempt to draw the overall picture of the information revolution and how it influences world politics. When I took my course of “Information Technology, Globalization and Governance” as a graduate student at Rutgers, my professor listed Ronald J. Deibert's (1997) Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation as one of the core readings. Afterwards, I also read James N. Rosenau and J.P. Singh's (2002) edited volume of Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance , and Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen's (2005) edited volume of Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm among others. All of them are outstanding scholarly works and help readers understand such an important, but fast-changing topic in global affairs. From the perspective of serving as a textbook for students interested in this subject, Betty Hanson's Information Revolution and World Politics is the best textbook with a “big picture” of this subject so far. The development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has always been an important driving force behind our globalizing world. These new technologies have radically altered the methods of communication used within and among all kinds of communities, especially over interstate borders. This information revolution …

Ethnicities and Global Multiculture: Pants for an Octopus. By Jan Nederveen Pieterse. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007. 254 pp., $72.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-4063-4), $24.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-4064-2). In Ethnicities and Global Multiculture , Jan Nederveen Pieterse takes a look at globalization from the viewpoint of ethnicity and multiculturalism. Most fundamentally, he argues that globalization cannot be properly understood without reference to issues related to the world's multiple ethnicities and to the historical dynamics of multiculture. The eight chapters in the book are revised from works that have appeared in print or oral publication over the span of more than a decade of research on the cultural dimensions of globalization. Nederveen Pieterse begins Ethnicities and Global Multiculture with two chapters that explore the nature of ethnicity and its relation to nationalism. He argues that ethnicity comes in various guises, most of which ought to be better recognized in social science scholarship, which typically focuses on ethnic conflict. According to Nederveen Pieterse, ethnicity in one place and time cannot necessarily be equated with ethnicity in another place and time. He distinguishes four types of ethnicity: (1) domination ethnicity, which arises in the context of nation-states as nationalism; (2) enclosure ethnicity, which is achieved by confinement to a certain region, such as a ghetto; (3) competition ethnicity, which refers to a state of conflict among ethnic groups; and (4) optional ethnicity, which is voluntarily adopted by means of symbolic appropriations. What these ideal-typical distinctions make clear is that the ethnic experiences across the world …

The Open Economy and Its Enemies: Public Attitudes in East Asia and Eastern Europe. By Jane Duckett, William L. Miller Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 284 pp., $85.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-86406-0), $34.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-68255-8). Globalization—in its various forms—remains a much studied topic in international and comparative political economy. However, despite the likelihood of wide ranging effects brought about by the integration of goods, peoples, and ideas, scholarly attention has been limited, surprisingly, to but a few of globalization's potential consequences. Most attention has been given to questions of whether greater market integration matters for domestic policy outcomes, with “outcomes” defined in terms of public spending and the health of the national economy. Far fewer studies consider the influence of openness on the health of representative democracy. Moreover, those extant studies that examine the economic impact of globalization focus primarily on developed welfare states—that is, on those economies that are best equipped to cushion the volatile effects of opening up (see, for example, Scheve and Slaughter 2001). Very little is known about what is arguably a far more critical question: the degree of public support for globalization in lower- and middle-income democracies. In this regard, Jane Duckett and William Miller's The Open Economy and Its Enemies fills a large hole in the globalization literature. Based on an exhaustive data collection effort aimed at assessing mass and elite attitudes in two “newer democracies” (the Czech Republic and South Korea) and two “semi-democracies” (Ukraine and Vietnam), the book easily offers the most comprehensive account to date of attitudes toward the world capitalist economy in lesser-developed countries. To sift through the many issues surrounding attitudes toward economic and cultural openness, Duckett and Miller conducted a series of focus group studies (involving 130 participants in all) and representative surveys of mass publics and public officials (totaling over ten thousand interviews) in these four countries during 2002 and 2003. The utility of Duckett and Miller's approach …

Religion and Politics in the International System Today. By Eric O. Hanson New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 350 pp., $70.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-85245-5), $26.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-61781-2). Eric Hanson's Religion and Politics in the International System Today “proposes a post-Cold War paradigm based on the interaction between the contemporary globalization of the political, economic, military, and communication systems and the significant role of religion in influencing politics” (p. 17). The book complements the rapidly growing body of post-September 11 scholarship on religion and international affairs—such as Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile by Pavlos Hatzopoulos and Fabio Petito (2003) , The Sacred and the Sovereign by John Carlson and Erik Owens (2003) , Bringing Religion into International Relations by Jonathan Fox and Schmuel Sandler (2004), The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations by Scott Thomas (2005), and Religion and Politics: Cultural Perspectives by Bernhard Giesen and Daniel Suber (2005). Unlike these books, however, Hanson confronts explicitly the relationship between religion and the evolving complexities of global politics, economics, and technology. Religion and Politics in the International System Today is divided into two parts. The first part contains four chapters in which Hanson explains his self-described “new paradigm for world politics” (p. 17). The first chapter lays out Hanson's views of the salient features of what he calls the “political and EMC” systems (by which he means the political plus economic, military, and communication systems) in the world today. The following chapters take “a political perspective on religion and politics” and a “religious perspective on religion and politics,” respectively. Finally, Hanson includes a brief history of the “religions of the book, meditative experience, and public life” as a background for the case studies that follow (p. 92). The second part of the book is an application of Hanson's theoretical framework to religion and politics in five regions: the West; East Asia; South and Central Asia; …

Getting Globalization Right: The Dilemmas of Inequality. Edited by Joseph S. Tulchin, Gary Bland. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005. 261 pp., $55.00 cloth (ISBN: 1-58826-346-0), $22.50 paper (ISBN: 1-58826-322-3). In the fifth century BC, Plato (2000:745) warned Athenian legislators that “in a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues—not faction, but rather distraction—there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty, nor, again, excess of wealth, for both are productive of both these evils.” Despite Plato's warning, growing inequality has become the signature of our times. Considering the scandalous gulf of inequality, it is not surprising that the subject has captured the imaginations of many scholars and yielded an enduring literature (see, for example, Seligson and Passe-Smith 1998; Tilly 1998; Hurrell and Woods 1999; Cornia 2005). Joseph Tulchin and Gary Bland's edited volume— Getting Globalization Right: The Dilemmas of Inequality —is a welcome addition. In seven detailed case studies (Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, and Turkey), the contributors to Getting Globalization Right explore how democratic countries have dealt with the combination of globalization pressures, deepening problems of income distribution, and the absence of clear policy options (p. 3). Rather than measuring the impact of globalization on poverty, they focus on how these democracies have or have not been able to deal with the persistent dilemmas created by inequity. The common thread throughout the volume is the idea that globalization is not independent of politics, and, thus, “politically effective and responsive democracy” is the key to “getting globalization right” (p. 3). As Steven Friedman and Simon Schwartzman demonstrate in their …

On the Cutting Edge of Globalization: An Inquiry into American Elites. By James N. Rosenau, David C. Earnest, Yale H. Ferguson, Ole R. Holsti Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. 216 pp., $72.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-3975-X), $32.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-3976-8). To understand the sources and future of globalization, it is essential to understand the individuals who are at the forefront of this movement. Yet, considering how vibrant and varied the literature on globalization is, systematic examinations of the people who are on the front lines of it are surprisingly rare. They are often presumed to have certain traits, and some of these presumed characteristics have received a fair amount of scrutiny—as exemplified by Peter Furia's (2005) examination of cosmopolitanism. But a large-scale systematic study of who these individuals are, what they do, and what they believe has heretofore been lacking in the literature. Just such an analysis is the great contribution of On the Cutting Edge of Globalization , by James Rosenau, David Earnest, Yale Ferguson, and Ole Holsti. The book illuminates who these people are. It tells us about their behaviors and their priorities. It shows us how they differ from other elite decision makers and what these characteristics mean for the future of globalization. The centerpiece of the research reported in this book is a massive survey of elites. Rosenau and his colleagues surveyed this population twice, conducting one survey in 1999 and another in 2003. These surveys are used to examine the differences between elites who are at the forefront of globalization (dubbed “Cutting-Edgers”) and those who are not (“Other Leaders”) and to explore variations in the views of the two groups over time. Rosenau and his colleagues adopt a broad view of the types of …

Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power. By John Agnew. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. 296 pp., $64.50 cloth (ISBN: 1-59213-152-2), $21.95 paper (ISBN: 1-59213-153-0). In Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power , which is a contribution to the literatures on both globalization and US foreign policy, John Agnew offers some cogent arguments about the rise of US hegemony and its effects on other countries. He convincingly critiques international relations theorists who characterize the United States as an empire. He rejects realist readings of US foreign policy and world politics that define power only in relation to territorial statehood. According to Agnew, it is US society as much as the US government that shapes US hegemony and its effects on globalization. Agnew outlines his main arguments in Chapters 1–3. He is adamant that the US relationship with the rest of the world is best described as “hegemony” and not “empire.” To use the term “empire”—as Andrew Bacevich (2003), Niall Ferguson (2004), and Chalmers Johnson (2003) do—is to suggest that US power is territorialized, centralized, and mostly coercive. Instead, according to Agnew, US “hegemony” is a form of social domination and persuasion that is increasingly not state sponsored or state dominated. It is rooted in soft power: the ability to reproduce US cultural norms and consumption practices throughout the world, which is an essential feature of globalization. In short, the United States has spread a paradigm of social order—the “marketplace society”—that is profoundly rooted in the US historical experience, and even such previous holdouts as India …

A Possible World: Democratic Transformation of Global Institutions. By Heikki Patomaeki, Teivo Teivainen. London: Zed Books, 2004. 256 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 1-84277-406-9), $22.50 paper (ISBN: 1-84277-407-7). A Possible World , by Heikki Patomaeki and Teivo Teivainen, is a very ambitious attempt to envision a democratic system of global governance. As a start, the two authors seek to transform the world's major international institutions by making them more democratic. These institutions include the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the international courts. In addition, Patomaeki and Teivainen seek to create entirely new global institutions that would increase participation by the world's citizens in shaping world affairs, thus democratizing global governance even further. These new arrangements include a world parliament, global referendums, a global truth commission, a debt arbitration mechanism, global civil society organizations, and global tax organizations. The early literature on “global governance” carefully stated that the term does not refer to the rise of holistic, formal institutions that would have the authority to manage international affairs above the states. This literature describes global governance as a diffuse system of governance in which—given the complexity of world affairs and the multiplicity of issue areas—states create steering mechanisms without presuming the rise of hierarchical institutions (Young 1999; Nye and Donahue 2000; Rosenau 2002). In contrast, A Possible World seeks to rectify the current unjust situation in which Third World citizens, who constitute about 85 percent of the world's population, are grossly underrepresented to say the least in today's undemocratic international organizations. From another perspective, the forces of globalization are homogenizing and unifying the world, thereby affecting everyone. Yet, the norms of democracy have not been applied to globalization itself. Indeed, the world's key international organizations are …

Caught in the Crossfire: Revolutions, Repression, and the Rational Peasant. By T. David Mason. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Litttlefield Publishers, 2004. 328 pp., $78.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-2538-4), $30.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-2539-2). David Mason has been a pioneer in the systematic study of civil wars (Mason 1984; Mason and Krane 1989; Mason and Fett 1996; Mason, Weingarten, and Fett 1999). Caught in the Crossfire: Revolutions, Repression, and the Rational Peasant reflects that experience. As Mason says, it draws several important and different research traditions together: classical theories of the causes of revolutions, dependency theory, rational choice analysis of why individuals participate in revolts, social movement theory, analysis of state response to large-scale social violence, democratization, globalization, war termination, and peacemaking. The theoretical analysis is supported and illustrated by two very good case studies. The result is an impressive and very well written book that could serve as a text for graduate or undergraduate courses. The central argument of Caught in the Crossfire is straightforward. To understand civil wars in the Third World, we need to focus on the behavior of peasants, whose choices shape these conflicts. Economic inequality by itself does not produce revolution, but the local effects of globalization—in particular the shift from subsistence to export agriculture—does. One response to this shift is to mobilize peasants to participate in nonviolent protests of various sorts. These protests generally rely on pre-existing social networks, which is one reason why ethnicity plays a significant part in such conflicts. They also use strategies already in the cultural repertoire of the peasants. The key question is how the government will respond to these protests. Mason explains why governments that are dominated by elites and that have few resources but face enormous needs so often see violence as the best, or indeed the …

Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North–South Relations. By David Slater. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 296 pp., $69.95 cloth (ISBN: 0-6312-1452-6), $34.95 paper (ISBN: 0-63121453-4). Is globalization merely US imperialism masked as the philanthropic diffusion of neoliberalism into the Third World? In Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations , David Slater—drawing primarily from the deconstruction methodology of James Derrida (1992), the critical theory of Michel Foucault (1979, 1980), the structural theory of World Systems Theory (although Wallerstein is not cited), and the postcolonial perspectives of a myriad of Latin American scholars—argues that it is. More specifically, Slater asserts that the United States (with the aid of such neoliberal organizations as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization) has sought to liberate the Third World from its indigence for the purpose of establishing a Southern hemisphere of “quasi-sovereignties” (see Jackson 1996:60) that can be easily manipulated politically. Slater argues that the neoliberal order creates an asymmetry of structure that facilitates the dominance of the North over the South in “a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of [the US] government which impose[s] market organization on society for non-economic ends” (p. 93). In short, the United States seeks to use the neoliberal economic order to achieve its political goal of geopolitical imperialism. Drawing on dependency theory, Slater explains that the neoliberal project in Latin America helps sustain the wealth of the United States by importing raw materials from the South and exporting processed goods from the North—a relationship that clearly favors the North. This argument is not a new one (see Wallerstein 1974). Nonetheless, as Slater argues, it is one that has been largely abandoned with the discursive hegemony of neoliberal theory. …

Global Collective Action. By Todd Sandler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 314 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-83477-5), $24.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-54254-5). In Global Collective Action , Todd Sandler's goal is to leave the ivory tower. Sandler is a trained mathematician who turned economist first and international relations theorist second. Global Collective Action shows that he is tired of writing for an ever shrinking club of specialists (p. 31). Sandler has made many important contributions to game theory, one of the most powerful tools of the social sciences. Global Collective Action is based on this forbiddingly technical scientific discourse. Yet, almost none of these technicalities are visible in the book. Nevertheless, Sandler's message is powerful. Sandler applies game theory to globalization, which he approaches in fairly broad terms. Globalization encompasses “the significant rise in transboundary transactions” (p. 3), but it also involves “noneconomic exchanges, e.g. pollution or cyber viruses” (p. 4). Globalization is present in the accelerated spread of ideas, including terrorist ideas (p. 173), in the expansion of criminal activity (p. 160), and in any increase in transnational complexity (p. 17). This broad definition is appropriate given that Sandler is interested in how problems can be solved even if the recourse to one government's monopoly of sovereign power is not an option. Specifically, he considers global health, foreign aid, rogue states, terrorism, civil war, atmospheric pollution, and the governance of outer space. Global Collective Action makes two main points. First, many more games can be identified in the interactions among states than the canonical prisoner's dilemma (p. 12). Second, in analyzing games, the “aggregation technology”—that is, how the decisions of multiple actors interact to produce a final solution—matters (p. 38 and following). Both points are well taken. The main implications of a prisoner's dilemma have long ago made their way into the social sciences at large. For example, for …

Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance. Edited by Sheila Jasanoff, Marybeth Long Martello. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 376 pp., $67.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-262-10103-3), $27.00 paper (ISBN: 0-262-60059-5). As the watchword for the new millennium, globalization is both valorized and vilified (Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Friedman 2000). In either case, it is rarely denaturalized and recognized for the plethora of socially constructed processes that it is. The contributors to Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance seek to address this omission—and much more—in the context of environmental governance. Rather than dichotomizing the local and the global, this book demonstrates that both are essentially contested, dialectically constituting each other, and deployable in multiple arenas as rhetorical strategies. Most important, the authors of the thirteen case studies contained in the volume generate surprising insights from their unifying premise: that the generation, communication, and diffusion of knowledge is an eminently political project. Thus, Earthly Politics stands as an important antidote to two trends in international studies: the polarization that has occurred around the phenomenon of globalization, and the epistemological bias that privileges the supposedly objective neutrality of science over other ways of knowing. The book accomplishes this by importing significant insights and methodologies from other fields. International relations has been referred to as “the borrowing discipline.” Historically, international relations borrowed much from economics; more recently, the constructivist turn has been inspired by imports from sociology and philosophy of science. Earthly Politics advances the constructivist research agenda by drawing from the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies. How we understand environmental problems, the editors and contributors believe, shapes how we manage these problems. Yet, our understandings can never be divorced from discursive and cultural influences, an insight that is key to both the constructivist turn and postmodern influences in international relations theory (Katzenstein 1996; Lapid and Kratochwil 1996). The interdisciplinary orientation of Earthly Politics comes not only from an epistemological commitment of editors …

Globalization and Armed Conflict. Edited by Gerald Schneider, Katherine Barbieri, Nils Petter Gleditsch. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. 384 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-1831-0), $32.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-1832-9). Over the past two decades, the “democratic peace” hypothesis—namely, that wars do not occur between democracies—has received a great deal of attention; James Ray (1995) and Steve Chan (1997) provide thorough reviews of this literature. Closely related—in fact one of the strongest candidates for an alternative explanation—is the “liberal peace” hypothesis, which posits that economic development and mutual trade are powerful inhibitors of war (see, for example, Keohane and Nye 1977; Russett and Oneal 2001). Both of these hypotheses have distinguished pedigrees in qualitative liberal political theory and can be traced to the beginnings of the nineteenth century. Both hypotheses are sufficiently simple that they have been invoked in public policy debates. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, for example, reformulated the liberal peace hypothesis in 1996 in the following terms: “Countries that both have McDonald's restaurants don't fight each other.” Both hypotheses have been used to explain the transition from the fratricidal Western Europe of the first half of the twentieth century to Europe's present status as a zone of peace. The empirical support for the two hypotheses, however, is quite different. Evidence for the democratic peace is so strong that arguments against it require methodologically esoteric appeals to alliance linkages, control variables, and expected conflict frequencies under a null hypothesis. The liberal peace, in contrast, suffers from two very conspicuous and large-scale failures: World War I and World War II. Those empirical challenges continue to the present. Friedman's “McDonald's hypothesis,” for example, lasted only three years before the United States began bombing attacks on the Serbian capital of Belgrade, a city with seven McDonald's …

East Asia and Latin America: The Unlikely Alliance. Edited by Peter H. Smith, Kotaro Horisaka, Shoji Nishijima. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003. 32 pp., $80.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-2375-6), $29.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-2376-4). East Asia and Latin America: The Unlikely Alliance —edited by Peter Smith, Kotaro Horisaka, and Shoji Nishijima—brings together a group of researchers who focus on relations between these two regions. The book sits comfortably in the area of comparative political economy. At the same time, the editors try to contextualize the comparative framework with an introductory analysis of the challenges that globalization poses to these regions and a concluding section on traditional foreign policy analysis. Ties between these regions have been quite erratic in the past, oscillating from periods of neglect to times of mutual interest and high expectations about the potential for increased interregional links. Since the 1970s, however, both East Asia and Latin America have been more uniformly keen to explore and exploit the potential of their links (Matsushita 1993). The collapse of import substitution in Latin America and the simultaneous success of East Asian economies with outward and more market-oriented policies led the Latin American countries to look to East Asia as a source of inspiration. In fact, mainstream economists have argued that the Asian Miracle was one of the reasons behind Latin America's shift toward more openness in the late 1980s and 1990s (Edwards 1995). At that point, the comparison between regions became a very topical issue among political elites, and interregional relations have …

The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance. Edited by Rodney Bruce Hall, Thomas J. Biersteker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 272 pp., $65.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-81861-3), $23.00 paper (ISBN: 0-521-52337-0). In 1999 Claire Cutler, Virginia Haufler, and Tony Porter published a pioneering collection of essays on the subject of Private Authority and International Affairs . Although Bruce Hall and Thomas Biersteker's The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance is not strictly speaking a sequel, it is a splendid follow-on to the earlier book and a major contribution in its own right to the burgeoning literature on the role of private (that is, nonstate) actors in global politics. Private or nonstate actors in their myriad types have been of some interest for many years (see, for example, Mansbach, Ferguson, and Lampert 1976) but have truly come into their own with recent writings on globalization, international political economy, postinternationalism (see, for example, Rosenau 1997, 2003), cultural diversity (Berger and Huntington 2002), and terrorism. The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance resulted from a 1999 workshop organized by Hall in consultation with Biersteker at the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. The workshop was inspired in part by the work of the late Susan Strange on the devolution of state authority to private actors (for example, Strange 1996), and Cutler was one of the participants and a contributor to this volume. Other contributors include Stephen Kobrin, Louis Pauly, Saskia Sassen, Ronnie Lipschutz and Cathleen Fogel, Mark Juergensmeyer, Phil Williams, and Bernedette Muthien and Ian Taylor. Hall and Biersteker provide unusually insightful and provocative introductory and concluding chapters that highlight the major points in the individual chapters and reflect on their common and divergent perspectives. As Hall and Biersteker note (pp. 3–4), traditional approaches to the study of international relations have asserted …

Fire on the Rim: The Cultural Dynamics of East/West Power Politics. By William H. Thornton. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 240 pp., $72.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-1706-3), $26.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-1707-1). William H. Thornton's Fire on the Rim: The Cultural Dynamics of East/West Power Politics is a sustained, eloquent, and combative critique of realism, neorealism, reactionary modernization, and neoliberal globalization. It is also a bold effort to construct a framework of moral realism through the systematic incorporation of culture into international relations theory. Thornton's new moral geopolitics represents a cultural realism of the Left (p. 22), but more than anything else, Fire on the Rim convincingly demonstrates that it is quite possible to theorize about global politics from places other than Europe and North America. Fire on the Rim will no doubt make its mark on the debates about cultural and civilizational conflicts that are bound to increase and deepen as globalization continues. In the first chapter Thornton sets the stage for his in-depth analysis of Asian countries with a general critique of the theories and models used to understand the dynamics of Asia's integration into a global system dominated by Western values and ideas. He derides the sterility of the idealist–realist debates in international relations theory, but follows up with attacks on postmodernism and postcolonialism as well. Postmodernism is criticized for its alleged antipolitics; postcolonialism for its anti-Westernism and supposed fetish for difference. Asian theories and models also come under Thornton's scrutiny. The Chinese model of development, namely authoritarian developmentalism, is the subject of a spirited critique; but Taiwan and Korea are highly praised for balancing development and democracy. In Thornton's view, Japan falls somewhere in between. The South Korean political-economic model is painted as radical (unlike Singapore's growth-first strategy), but also as the one approach that might lead other Asian countries to prosperity combined with …

City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent. By David A. Westbrook. New York: Routledge, 2004. 400 pp., $97.95 cloth (ISBN: 0-415-94,539-9), $27.95 paper (ISBN: 0-415-94,540-2). The rapid pace and unpredictable direction of social and political change in our world seems to be forcefully undermining the established terms of political life. It appears to be more and more difficult, if not impossible, to think of politics solely within the national context. Such terms as the “nation-state,”“national identity,” and “national economy” have been loosing their explanatory power. The increasing interconnectedness of societies has made the national context more vulnerable and exposed to global, regional, and local pressures. Political globalization, for example, is giving rise to the increasing importance of global, regional, and local actors in the formation of political community, thereby undermining and limiting the ability of the nation-state to maintain its status as the main and sovereign locus of governance. Economic globalization—that is, the globalization of capital—is challenging the authority of nation-states by creating a borderless, supranational, global market place. Cultural globalization is rendering the idea of national identity problematic by giving rise to local reactions in the form of ethnic, religious, and cultural identities, which have recently paved the way for the emergence of alternative conceptions of modernity and a new politics of recognition. Yet, a quick glance at the last two decades reveals a mixed picture in terms of the impact …