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The two studies under review, by Matthew Levitt and Lina Khatib et al., present very different pictures of Hezbollah, pictures which are not necessarily conflicting and are indeed, in many ways, complementary. Levitt focuses on the group's long record of terrorism dating back more than 30 years to the early 1980s and its violent attacks on US marines and French forces then based in Lebanon. Over that period, of course, as Lina Khatib and her co-authors demonstrate, Hezbollah has grown in stature as a political party. Khatib and her colleagues portray a party that has deliberately sought to keep Lebanon a weak and divided country, despite the efforts of the West and Gulf Arab states to strengthen the Lebanese state. These two studies add immensely to our knowledge of Hezbollah and its extraordinary rise over the past three decades to become one of the major political and military actors in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UN is approaching its seventieth birthday in 2015. Kofi Annan, its seventh secretary general, and the only incumbent not to have come from a national government, has written the most honest and insightful memoir of any occupant of the thirty-eighth floor, Interventions. Despite terrible setbacks in Bosnia and Rwanda, the United Nations remains the most representative and successful international organization in history. As Mark Mazower points out in his Governing the world, an acutely penetrating history of international governance, the successes of the UN are more than the founders of the ill-fated League of Nations could have dreamt of. Mazower's tour de force combines a history of the intellectual ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their eventual realization in the League of Nations and the UN. While his conclusions question whether faith in international institutions has been lost, the reality of universal membership of the UN and establishment of an International Criminal Court might suggest otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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