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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Francis Fukuyama (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 608 pp., $35 cloth, $18 paper. Francis Fukuyama, the [...]

The transition of countries from dictatorship to democracy has been examined. The results show that they face many hurdles during this process such as violence.

Whereas most research on the democratic peace has focused on relations within pairs of states, research on the relationship between democratization and armed conflict has centered primarily on the behavior of individual states. Moreover, the existing literature has placed primary emphasis on explaining the effects of democratization on war, rather than military disputes more generally. In this article, we find that certain types of democratic transitions markedly increase the risk of such disputes within dyads, even when economic and political relations between states are taken into account. Particularly prone to violence are dyads in which either state undergoes an incomplete democratic transition; that is, a shift from an autocratic to a partially democratic (or anocratic) regime that stalls prior to the establishment of consolidated democratic institutions.

John Vasquez is right to insist that students of international politics should, justify their theories in terms of Imre Lakatos's (1970) criteria for distinguishing progressive research programs from degenerative ones. [...]

Thompson and Tucker raise a number of issues pertaining to our work in their article, the most important of which is their claim that regime transitions are statistically independent of [...]

The study of international relations is supposed to tell us how the world works. It's a tall order, and even the best theories fall short. But they can puncture illusions [...]

The idea that democracies never fight wars against each other has become an axiom for many scholars. It is, as one scholar puts it, 'as close as anything we have [...]

APSA President Robert Jervis stands out among contemporary scholars of international politics for his highly original, multifaceted contributions to understanding the dilemmas of conflict and cooperation, especially in the nuclear [...]

Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda by Michael Barnett. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2002. 215 pp. $25.00. During the Rwanda genocide, Michael Barnett, a distinguished scholar [...]

The tension between law and politics places transitional justice under cross-pressures. The impetus to hold perpetrators legally accountable for atrocities and major rights violations has emerged in part from the expectation that subjecting political behavior to the apolitical judgment of law will exert a civilizing effect. As demands for accountability have risen, politics has played a central role at every step. The past decade has seen a flourishing of research in empirical political science on the relationship between law and politics in postconflict and postauthoritarian justice. This research has tried to explain the turn to individual legal accountability and the development of norms and institutions for accountability. Research has stressed the role of politics in shaping the implementation of trials and other modes of accountability. It has also examined the consequences of these modes of accountability. We address research on each of these topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses imperial Britain's strategies, successes and failures in attempting to prepare its far-flung possessions for democratic self-government. Attempt of Great Britain to do what the U.S. and the United nations have been trying to accomplish on a shorter timetable in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor; Exploration of several examples to illustrate these efforts of Great Britain on these countries; Suggestion that in countries with weak political institutions the transition to democracy carries a higher risk of civil or international war.

In this essay, we survey the literature on international criminal tribunals and transitional justice. We argue that the literature has been dominated by two general orientations, a legalism that is premised on a logic of appropriateness and a pragmatism premised on a logic of consequences. We also consider a third orientation, guided by a logic of emotions, that recognizes the significance of transitional justice but emphasizes strategies that diverge from the model of legalism. Our primary concern is with scholarship in political science, although we also consider work from the disciplines of law, history, and sociology and from practitioners and advocates. The normative positions of scholars have heavily influenced the development of literature in this field, in which scholarship, practice, and advocacy are deeply intertwined. Advocates and individuals who have played key roles in the development of international criminal justice institutions, domestic tribunals, and truth commissions have been prominent in setting the agenda for scholars. Nonetheless, there is also a growing body of rigorous social science research that attempts to assess empirically--and sometimes critically--the claims of advocates and practitioners and to explain changing strategies of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the possibility of Russia's reversion to its accustomed pattern of autocratic politics, state-dominated economics and militarized foreign policy. West's response to Russian developments; Debate on Russia's future role in Europe; Russian backwardness and competition with Europe; Consequences for Russian foreign policy; German pattern of aggression and late development; European political system and relevance to the future.

Conventional wisdom holds that the success of Gorbachev's domestic reforms would probably enhance Western security, but that there is nothing the West can do to make this outcome more likely. This conventional wisdom is right on the first count, but wrong on the second. The author supports his conclusion by three bodies of evidence: the effect of the international environment on the domestic politics of great powers in general over the past century; the history of the Soviet Union in particular; and the current constellation of political forces in Gorbachev's Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specialists in the study of Soviet foreign policy increasingly feel torn between the positivist culture of political science clepartments and the holistic traditions of the Soviet area-studies programs. In fact, these approaches are largely complementary. Examples taken from literature on Soviet security policy and on the domestic sources of Soviet expansionism show how positivist theories and methods can be used to clarify holist (or traditionalist) arguments, to sharpen debates, to suggest more telling tests, and to invigorate the field's research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]