Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2021 -

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the development of liberal internationalism from its origins in the 19th century to its current crisis. Liberal internationalism is a set of ideas and institutions oriented around national sovereignty and free trade embraced by proponents seeking to support the current norms of (Western) liberal democracy. Ikenberry (Princeton Univ.) points out, though, that the relationship between liberal internationalism and its predecessor (imperialism) is complex, noting that liberal internationalism not only replaced imperialism but also grew out of it. Ikenberry compares the current challenge waged against liberal internationalism to those it faced in 1919, 1945, and 1991. The text makes an excellent source for retracing that history; indeed, in doing so Ikenberry shows his comparative view of the current situation to be apt. But the absence of the threat of the Soviet Union now means that there are fewer incentives for contributing to the international order. The book is written from a US and to a lesser extent a British perspective, such that Wilson and Roosevelt are presented as key architects of liberal internationalism. Ikenberry's text succeeds in the rare accomplishment of maintaining readability while avoiding superficiality. The book is an impressive work of scholarship, with extensive references to both secondary and primary literature.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty.

Scholars of international politics typically distinguish global from domestic society. Domestic politics is accordingly characterized by its hierarchal order, while international politics is viewed as being anarchical. The difference is critical to the thesis of this book by Milewicz (Univ. of Oxford), who contends that while domestic (and mostly Western) European states became intentionally democratic via a constitutionalizing of their politics, the same has not been true internationally. Here the "constitutionalizing" of world politics describes a gradual and unintentional process of using treaties and other mechanisms to bring order to the international scene. Drawing on Great Britain, the US, and Sweden for domestic examples, Milewicz proposes an overall theory to explain the contrasting ways different states democratize and what this difference tells us about global governance and international politics. Milewicz offers a rich legal history of these three states, alongside a detailed overview of the evolution of international law and politics. Separate chapters offer historical overviews of the rise of democracy and of constitutional law domestically, as well as the global rise of the modern state-centric order. The book will be an excellent addition to collections on international law and politics, as well as those on human rights.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.

Since the 1960s, the cultural turn has transformed the academic study of politics and economics. Perhaps because it often focuses on the poor and the powerless, the cultural turn has been less prominent in diplomatic history. Consequently, the 11 authors whose essays make up Culture Matters are innovative in their exploration of the Anglo-American "special relationship," which encompasses P. G. Wodehouse, Hollywood, Downton Abbey, and Beatlemania, among other subjects. Sam Edwards's fascinating chapter looks at George Washington in "'A Great Englishman': George Washington and Anglo-American Memory Diplomacy, c. 1890-1925." Throughout the text, identity, memory, and symbolic representation crowd out traditional topics. For more on the cultural-turn context, Pedro Aires Oliveira, Bruno Cardoso Reis, and Patrick Finney's "The Cultural Turn and Beyond in International History" in The International History Review (2018) provides an overview, and Elizabeth T. Kenney, Sirpa Salenius, and Whitney Womack Smith's "Blurring Boundaries: Race and Transatlantic Identities in Culture and Society" offers an example of its application in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies (2016). The impressive volume under review shows how "culture matters to the vitality of the Anglo-American special relationship and to our understanding of it" (p. 271). Aimed at enlarging what has been a marginal field of study, it includes an extensive bibliography.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers and advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Miller (Univ. of Haifa) offers a "parsimonious" theoretical explanation of grand strategy, defined as "a set of ideas (or a 'theory') informing the overall approach that a state pursues to maximize its security and protect itself against actual or potential threats to its value." Drawing on the history of US foreign policy since World War II, Miller proposes a model based on four "ideational" approaches to security--offensive and defensive realism, and offensive and defensive liberalism--rooted in two systemic conditions, i.e., the distribution of capabilities and balance of threat. To support his argument, Miller analyzes key events in the conduct of US foreign relations "from Truman to Trump," with particularemphasis on the Cold War period. A provocative read, this book is a timely and significant addition to the growing literature on grand strategy, generating ample intellectual fodder for discussion. An elaboration of Miller's 2010 article on the subject of grand strategy, this is an erudite book that will be of interest to all students of US foreign policy, and one that belongs in all libraries with collections on international relations and US foreign affairs.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty.

This excellent book makes a unique contribution to the literature on efforts to denuclearize North Korea. Contributors address such questions as whether a lasting peace is possible in the peninsula; whether the "reunification" of the two Koreas is a prerequisite; whether economic sanctions on North Korea are helpful; what roles China, Japan, and South Korea should play in US-North Korean negotiations; and whether the US can strike a deal with North Korea that prevents it from cheating. Overholt (Harvard Univ.) summarizes two opposing theories about the denuclearization puzzle--"Theory One" argues that believing negotiations will force denuclearization is a fantasy; "Theory Two" maintains that negotiations can lead to denuclearization because North Korea is looking for a way out of its unsustainable isolation. Both theories recognize that denuclearization will not come quickly as North Korea's nuclear arsenal is its only source of security. Two difficulties for successful negotiations are the issue of defining denuclearization and the challenge of verification. This indispensable volume would have benefitted from a final chapter summarizing the similarities and differences between contributors' viewpoints while examining the prospects for resolving the nuclear dilemma in the post-Trump era. A useful addition to North Korea and Nuclear Weapons (CH, Sep'17, 55-0393), edited by Sung Chull Kim and Michael Cohen.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

One hundred twenty-two states voted for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2017, outlawing development and use of nuclear weapons and providing a pathway for nuclear weapon states (NWS) to destroy existing weapons. Yet the nine NWSs ignore the treaty while investing billions of dollars on modernizing their nuclear arsenals. This excellent book examines such modernization efforts and their impact on international security, providing detailed information on the nuclear modernization programs of the US, Russia, and China. Examining why such programs may endanger strategic stability and the prospects for global nuclear arms control, Warren (RMIT Univ.) and Baxter (SUNY Albany) offer an outstanding collection of essays addressing how emerging technologies affect nuclear capabilities, policy implications of modernization, and strategic outlook with the return of great power rivalry. Some authors (Kroenig and Trotti) argue that modernization is essential to maintaining global stability through "extended deterrence." Others (Reif and Sanders-Zakre) argue that modernization of the US arsenal is unnecessary, unsustainable, and unsafe. Other chapters address the difficulty of achieving US-Russian arms control, NATO's nuclear modernization, and the impact of US nuclear modernization on the nonproliferation regime. This timely volume offers a useful update to Barry Buzan and Eric Herring's The Arms Dynamic in World Politics (CH, Apr'99, 36-4732).Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.

Part history, part policy recommendation, this coauthored text results from a remarkable collaboration between a former defense secretary and an anti-nuclear weapons activist. That the book exists at all is a remarkable achievement. Authors Perry (Stanford Univ.) and Collina (Ploughshares Fund) explain how the US president came to have sole authority over "the button." They also make two provocative but compelling policy proposals: to abandon ICBMs as weapons that do more to create instability than deterrence, and to declare a no-first-use policy for the US. The arguments presented here are well reasoned and backed by solid evidence, and the backgrounds of the authors add credibility. The book is not perfect. As one example, it describes the Stuxnet worm as the first cyber attack to cause physical damage--a claim that is at best contested and at worst dead wrong. More significantly, the authors should have paid more attention to the survivability of C3I (command, control, communications, and intelligence) systems, as much of their argument is premised on the idea that the US could credibly respond to a nuclear attack without relying on a launch-on-warning system. That said, this book takes its place as a vital part of the discussion on what to do with the American nuclear arsenal.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals. General readers.

This is an audacious, important overview of the critical issues energy politics and policy face: audacious in that its nearly 800 pages cover a wide array of diverse, unconventional issues such as climate, gender and energy, energy justice, and traditional fossil, nuclear, and renewable energy technical and policy domains. Providing a common groundwork of analysis mostly drawing on the work of political scientists, the editors include chapters on regional energy politics covering North and Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Appropriately, the introductory overview chapter--written by editors Hancock (Colorado School of Mines) and Allison (Univ. of California, Riverside)--sets the stage for the remaining contributions by placing the genesis of energy politics in the oil embargo of the 1970s. That event underscored the emerging geopolitical landscape for almost all future debates on energy security, supply vulnerability, barriers to cooperation, and the evolving global, institutional context of resource governance vis-a-vis asymmetric markets, trade relations between suppliers and users, and collaborative instruments for managing climate and environmental externalities. Each chapter includes extensive, up-to-date references and addresses future research needs and policy challenges. The volume should be especially useful as a reference work directing students and researchers to further explorations.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.

In his new book Kroenig (Georgetown Univ.) takes on the claim that China, and to a lesser extent Russia, pose a threat to the global leadership of the US. The text provides a strong theoretical argument for the advantages of democracy over autocracy in the foreign policy realm. To be successful in foreign policy, Kroenig posits, countries need to have a strong economy, effective diplomacy, and viable military power. Kroenig tests his theory through historical case studies, ranging from ancient Greece to the modern Cold War. The case studies are supplemented by Kroenig's current assessments of China, Russia, and the US, as contenders for global dominance. The reader is offered a convincing picture that democracies fare better in foreign policy outcomes and that the US is currently in a stronger position than critics may believe. The arguments made here recall those of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in Why Nations Fail (CH, Sep'12, 50-0390), as referenced by Kroenig, and also align with those of Walter Mead in Power, Terror, Peace, and War (CH, Sep'12, 50-0390). The breadth of Kroenig's historical case studies and the parsimony of his analyses help this book stand out, making it a must-read for understanding the current international environment.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.

Reading this essay by Shachar (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Univ. of Toronto) with six contributed responses is like getting the dream dinner invitation to hear cutting-edge thought on borders. Shachar presents her thesis that physical/administrative/political borders have become passe: borders are not physical places but legal spaces that states can manipulate to yield desired outcomes, allowing states, for example, to capture undesirables and apply parallel legal rights regimes within those spaces, while also expanding outward beyond national borders, allowing extraterritorial inspection and exclusion from spaces within other countries' territory. This reimagination of the Westphalian system proposes that while physical borders remain in place, their meaning changes--contradicting conventional expectations of both reified national borders and global borderless territories where rights are supposedly protected through international agreements and treaties. Shachar focuses on how states exclude. Six amazing authors respond to her thesis, engaging legal geography, law, political theory, political science, sociology, and historical accounts to critique and offer alternative or complementary views. These texts Include astute discussions of technology and how it contributes to altering border spaces, as well as how we exclude migrants even after their successful border crossing. Shachar's response to critics follows, and the book ends with a fantastic bibliography.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.

In 1970 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution that resulted in the "Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations." This volume is meant to serve as a commemorative recognition 50 years hence. The 21 contributors--all well-established international law scholars, most from Europe with one Canadian and one from the US--provide a wealth of commentary and analysis. Vinuales (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) offers two introductory essays and divides the remaining essays into two parts. The first part focuses on 12 international legal principles or clusters of thought embodied in the declaration. The second part examines principles that emerged from the trajectory of events following the enunciation of the declaration, principles specifically having to do with human rights, humanitarian law, the global environment, and the emergent global economy. All the essays are erudite and supported by a wealth of original source material. This book will be a valuable resource for those interested in international law and international organization.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

This excellent book successfully engages the literature on UN peacekeeping with scholarship on international relations (IR) theory. Oksamytna (King's College, London) and Karlsrud (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs) have arranged the contributions of nine scholars into a superb "one-stop shop" for readers who want an overview of how different theoretical perspectives address the issue of post-Cold War UN peacekeeping operations. Contributors examine the capabilities and limits of individual IR theories for explaining peacekeeping missions and their effectiveness. All seek to answer the same question: "Why does UN peacekeeping take the shape that it does," applying a particular theory of IR to a case study from their own research. Together they highlight the shortcomings of the dominant realist theory and the important contribution of alternative theories (from constructivism and liberal institutionalism to practice theories, including critical security studies, feminist institutionalism, and complexity theory) to the understanding of phenomena (such as peacekeeping) that do not neatly fit the realist model. The collection illuminates the often underestimated yet important role of the UN in world politics while unpacking the complexity of its bureaucracy, showing how its agencies function at the international, national, and local levels--thus offering a useful complement to Ramesh Thakur's The United Nations, Peace and Security (1st ed., CH, Jun'07, 44-5899).Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.