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High-level political attention in the Euro-Atlantic and, increasingly, in the Asia-Pacific regions is shifting towards the Arctic. There is an obvious need for new thinking about security in this unique part of the world, which constitutes a part ...

In collaboration with Johan Galtung, Dietrich Fischer has produced a short book that encapsulates much of Galtung's contributions as a 'Pioneer of Peace Research'. Fischer provides a twenty-page introduction to Johan Galtung's life and thinking an...

One of world's leading China specialists, David Shambaugh has published yet another major book on China. This latest, his seventh with Oxford University Press, focuses on China's approach to the world. Shambaugh's book intends to reveal the big pi...

The Japanese title of this book may be translated into English as 'Between War and Peace'. The author, Professor Ping Yi (Peking University Law School), examines Japanese 'Just War' concepts between just before the Sino-Japanese War (1894) and the...

The Israeli NGO, Breaking the Silence, has collected a total of 145 testimonies from Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers who served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) in the time period 2000–2010. The testimonies have been divided acc...

Only a year after publishing A Concise History of the Arabs (reviewed in JPR 50(6), 768-769) John McHugo publishes this very timely and concise modern history of Syria. As Syria has descended into a vicious civil war with no apparent end in si...

In Shifting Sands Joel Migdal tries to write a comprehensive account of the United States' attempts at forging a stable Middle East at as low cost as possible. The book is more detailed as the account gets closer to the present, but Migdal essen...

Many have emphasized how war and statebuilding often go together, but Morris argues that war also produces institutional, social, and economic change that in the long run makes war less likely. Paraphrasing Tilly, 'war made the state', but the sta...

Conflict statistics usually deal separately with state-based conflicts and such forms of one-sided violence as genocide, massacres, etc. But many (if not most) deaths from one-sided violence occur during war or in its wake. This book reviews the w...

The history of Truman's role in the birth of Israel has produced so many publications that it has almost become a separate genre. The quality of these histories varies greatly, and the truly good ones are few and far between. Given the competition...

This book provides comprehensive accounts of four mainstream theories—liberal, realist, critical, and gender— and assesses their strengths and weaknesses against six crucial themes which continue to shape the debate on human security: Military in...

In this thought-provoking volume, Newman evaluates major strains in the often contradictory scholarship on civil wars. Concerning the divide between quantitative and historical scholarship, he clearly favors the latter, while identifying some cont...

This book explores the connection between the grievances of ethnic groups and the onset of civil violence, distilling previous work by the authors and their co-authors using the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset on politically-relevant group dy...

When it comes to the Middle East, the Bush administration is generally perceived as incompetent and ideologically driven. Daniel Zoughbie provides a much more nuanced picture, but that does not make it a less scathing appraisal. Using a wide range...

The starting-point for Colaresi’s interesting and innovative book is the dilemma between transparency as a central value in liberal democratic theory and the requirement for secrecy in foreign policy. The need for secrecy is accepted by most citiz...

This book reviews the evolution of wealth and inequality in the developed world since the early 1700s. The core thesis is that since the return on capital (r) tends to exceed economic growth rates (g), capitalist economies have an inherent tendenc...

Galia Golan has investigated a series of Israeli peacemaking attempts from 1967 until 2008. She analyses each case with care, looking at the various factors that stood in the way of success, and those that pushed in a positive direction. The resul...

The energetic Hans Günter Brauch has launched a new major publishing enterprise, Pioneers in Science and Practice. The most recent addition to the series is a volume on Bruce Russett, edited by his close collaborator Harvey Starr. An informative e...

This book seeks to apply findings from the literature on nonviolent action to give insight on four “non-traditional” areas: verbal abuse, online defamation, and conflicts over euthanasia and child vaccination. The author first describes the major...

Gandhi's interpretation of nonviolent resistance had as its ideal aim conversion of the opponent, rather than success based on coercive, though unarmed, resistance. The Vykom Satyagraha, waged from 30 March 1924 to 23 November 1925 in the princely...

This book presents a careful analysis of how the Norwegian facilitation of talks between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) unraveled, leading back to war that led to the annihilation of the rebels. Talphahewa dra...

To make better sense of contemporary nonviolent struggles and the burgeoning body of writing about them, A Guide to CivilResistance is worthwhile for both newcomers and experienced scholars. The range of topics is broad, covering different metho...

Louisa Lim's book on the long shadow of the Tiananmen protests shines in its deft portraits and probing interviews of those involved. Well-written and easy to read, the book flows smoothly from person to person, offering a wide range of different,...

Just three years after his widely read history of the Great Leap Forward (cf. JPR 48(2)), Frank Dikötter has now written a history of Communist China 1945–57. Like his earlier book, this one draws heavily on party archives in China. The author e...

Russian experiments in power projection had become so misguided by late 2015 that a coherent analysis of their pattern was at risk of lagging behind the latest headline. Yet this neat and carefully edited volume conceptualized in mid-2013 and upda...

Norway’s formal involvement in the civil war in Sri Lanka started in 2000 and ended in May 2009, when the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) were militarily defeated. This book details how the Norwegian Foreign Ministry (MFA) tried to contribute to a negotiated ...

It would be unfair to expect from a book thoughtfully researched at the start of this decade to give an accurate account of the true measure of coerciveness in Russia’s foreign policy at the middle of it. Indeed, the authors assumed that Russia ‘’...

Various authors (including Acemoglu & Robinson and Fukuyama) have recently published impressive books on political and economic development. Boix adds to this by asking why and how states are established, when different political regimes appear, a...

The Israeli right is today the dominant political force in Israel. When Israel was founded, however, the political right was in the minority. The Israeli Labour party dominated the state for the first thirty years. In 1977 that changed with Menach...

If politics is about who gets what, when and how, then Alex de Waal's new book on war in the Horn of Africa is all about politics. Yet, it is far from a typical political science book. Drawing on thirty years of experience, Alex de Waal employs an...