BOOK REVIEWS

Lynn M. Sanders Editor

The Confederate Battle Flag: Americas Most Embattled Emblem. By John M. Coski. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 448. $35.00 cloth.) The Confederate battle emblem, a red banner decorated with a star-studded blue diagonal St. Andrews cross, is one of the most politically divisive symbols of modern times. Neo-Confederates argue that the ag represents the noble heritage of ancestors who struggled to preserve the Southern way of life while others, especially Black Americans, contend that the symbol is an offensive reminder of slavery, white supremacy, and bigotry. Why do these two perspectives generate such controversy, especially in an age of spiraling budget decits, post-9/11 fears of terrorism, declining public schools, soaring health care costs, and other pressing public policy issues? John M. Coski, historian and library director at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, attempts in this book to answer these questions. Coski is not a polemicist; instead, he provides a dispassionate account of the agits origins, historical uses, and transformation into an ambiguous symbol of popular culture. The ag began as a square featuring a blue St. Andrews cross on a red background with 13 stars representing all or part of the 13 seceding states. The Army of Northern Virginia rst received the emblem in November 1861, seven months before General Robert E. Lee assumed command. Because the rst national ag of the Southern Confederacy (the red, white, and blue rectangular ag nicknamed the Stars and Bars) was easily confused with the U.S. Stars and Stripes, the Confederate Congress adopted a new design that incorporated part of the battle emblem. Nicknamed the stainless banner, the second national ag ew above the Confederate Capitol beginning on May 14, 1863. In the nal months of the war, the Confederate Congress modied the ag a nal time, creating the third national ag of the Confederacy, sometimes called the modied stainless banner. The new ag featured a vertical red stripe added to the edge of the original stainless banner. The evolution of the battle ag from a banner used by the Army of Northern Virginia to a symbol of divisiveness in American history occurred after the end
THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, Vol. 67, No. 4, November 2005, Pp. 13011316 2005 Southern Political Science Association

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of the Civil War, especially during the twentieth century. Although Confederate veterans occasionally unfurled battle ags during nineteenth century commemorative ceremonies, the St. Andrews cross did not become a cultural icon until the modern civil rights movement got underway after the Second World War. Beginning in the late 1940s, Southern partisans exhibited the symbol in election campaigns, at college football games, and in many other cultural settings. The States Rights Democratic (Dixiecrat) Party famously displayed the battle emblem on a rectangular ag after Alabama and Mississippi delegates left the 1948 Democratic National Convention to protest the partys civil rights plank. Coski recounts numerous examples of modern clashes over the Confederate battle emblem, including the 1993 imbroglio in Alabama, when lawmakers removed the banner from atop the capitol dome because an 1895 state law prohibited any ag other than the U.S. and state ags from ying over the building. Georgia incorporated the battle emblem into the state ag design for 45 years, beginning in 1956. In January 2001, Governor Roy Barnes surprised legislators when he pushed a bill through the General Assembly relegating the battle emblem to a small portion of a new ag under the words Georgia History. Pundits believe that Barnes subsequently lost his reelection bid in 2002 in no small measure owing to the brouhaha over the new design. Next door, South Carolina ew a modied Confederate battle agthe Confederate naval jackover the capitol dome from 1962 until 2000. Lawmakers eventually yielded to political pressure from civil rights groups and removed the ag from the dome, placing it near a Confederate monument on the statehouse grounds where, ironically, it was displayed far more prominently than ever before. In April 2001, Mississippi held a referendum on the state ag design, and voters overwhelmingly chose to retain the Confederate battle emblem. Many books about Confederate symbolism and the New South versus the Old South are written by partisans seeking to venerate or vilify one position over another, but that is not the case here. The strength of Coskis analysis lies in the authors even-handed tone, muscular, jargon-free prose and meticulous research. Coski avoids the histrionics that infect lesser works as he lays out the story in a chronological, methodical fashion, reviewing diaries and letters, newspaper accounts, court decisions, books, articles, and rst-person interviews, ultimately demonstrating that the ubiquity of the symbol ensures it will hold conicting meanings for different audiences. Despite its myriad interpretations and contradictory connotations, the Confederate battle emblem is here to stay. Any realistic and practical solution to the ag wars must accept the inevitability of the Confederate ag as part of Americas cultural landscape, Coski concludes (305). He is correct. Although at times the amount of detail and information may overwhelm the casual reader, henceforth this book will be required reading for anyone who hopes to understand the political controversy surrounding the Confederate battle ag. J. Michael Martinez, Kennesaw State University

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The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era. By Ralph Ketcham. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Pp. 302. $35.00 cloth.) To appreciate this books forward-looking conclusion, the reader must faithfully navigate the authors thoughtful and sympathetic review of more than 400 years of modern political thought. Only then does the fullness of Ralph Ketchams nal advice come into view: Good democratic government in the twenty-rst century, he concludes, may depend on the development of a rationale that accepts the valid aspect of the various modern rationales but as well takes into account a more complex understanding of human nature that makes room for purpose, justice, and higher law (263). The familiar procedural, majoritarian, rights-protecting, tolerance-promoting, anti-imperial forms and justications of democracy no doubt will survive and ourish, but they likely will not be able to achieve good government, which requires not only controlled competition between self-interested individuals, but genuine commitments and contributions by all to a shared, good, just, and moral life with others. For Ketcham, modern democratic thought is truncated because it recognizes only the possibility of selfgovernment at the individual- or, at most, identity group-level. What is needed to overcome this deciency is both a language and the aspiration for reasoned and conscientious recognition of the common good that is applicable in some fashion for all humankind (264). To illustrate what has been lost in the modern era, Ketchams second chapter recounts both the ancient Greek understanding of the social-political nature of humanity and the Confucian ideal of jen, which promotes social benevolence, empathy and good will to others. Platos Socrates, the author reminds us, chose death rather than exilea striking decision that counters contemporary individualistic and cosmopolitan norms. In short, Ketcham concludes that these intellectual traditions accept the irreducible socialness of human nature, the centrality of government in that socialness, and the vast and indispensable potential for social guidance and goodness that the state affords(16). Chapter 3 offers an overview of the intellectual traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Ketcham acknowledges that the historical development and global extension of Western culture has received its political, moral, and social energy from these traditions. Consistent with his modernity thesis, however, Ketcham does not credit these religious traditions with the development and spread of the idea of democracy. Indeed, he asserts that the transcendental foundations of these traditions subordinatethat is, desacralize the ideas of secular community and nation, thereby denigrat[ing] the indelibly social and the deliberately effective political dimensions of human nature (25). At best, this is a cursory reading of these traditions because it requires thinking of Judaism without the idea of people, Christianity without the ideas of Church or the Mystical Body of Christ, and Islam without the idea of umma. What also is missed is the closer connection between these traditions and the modern democratic ideals and practices that Ketcham seeks to advance, like

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justice, equality for all, human dignity, deliberation, rationality, consensus, and universality. The remainder, and majority, of the book provides a detailed and much-needed examination of the idea of democracy as manifested within four distinct modernities. In Chapters 4 and 5, Ketcham denes the rst modernity with the emergence of Francis Bacons inductivist scientic method. Bacons insistence upon examination of the worlds parts and Descartes parallel discovery of the self became the basis for modern individualism, rationality, and Hobbes and Lockes contract theories of government. The founding and constitutional framing of the United States is the practical, political culmination of this new, modern orientation towards the world. In Chapters 6 and 7, the author identies a second emergent modernity, which through the works of Bentham, Mill, Darwin, Spencer, and Dewey extended the original Baconian and Cartesian projects by stripping the individual of anterior natural law rights and duties, thus premising social relationships and political ideas of the good on simple, competitive calculations of individual and aggregate social welfare. The Darwinian contribution of the scientic symbol of progress led many to reject democracy as an inferior form, while others like Dewey, Laski, and Holmes accepted the form but embraced the unidirectional Darwinian orientation to promote a new, more engaged science of government by trained experts. The culmination of these forces gave shape to the activist, liberal state of the twentieth centuryand along with it, the discipline of political science. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 complete the survey of Ketchams third and fourth modernities. He denes the former with late nineteenth-early twentieth century attempts to synthesize rst and especially second modernity thinking with Confucian-based cultures of East Asia. The author recounts these attempts and their limited results in the works of Yang Fu, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Liang Qichao, and other Asian thinkers. The democratic attributes of this third modernity remain under-dened and prospective, yet there is much to learn from the review of these non-Western works of democratic political theory. Ketcham associates the fourth and nal modernity with the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault, in addition to contemporary political theorists Iris Marion Young and Bonnie Honig. Like the other modernities, this one reects the original Baconian analytic, reductionist perspective, yet its aim is the unmasking of all power relations that universalize hierarchies and norms within social relations. Ketchams book is an uncommonly rich examination of the idea of democracy that students and scholars alike will benet from reading and engaging. Serious readers will nd much in it to ponder, to learn from, to remember, and possibly like this reviewer to question and debate with privately. One lingering and now public question concerns the books original premise that ancient Greek and Confucian antidotes await to cure modernity of its democratic shortcomings. A contrary position offers a radically different perspectivein fact, one that suggests that the foundations of these cures account for many of the distortions and pathologies observed in Ketchams four modernities, and they also offer a basis

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for explaining why in many respects the worldincluding most of the authors analyzed in this bookhas been, remains, and likely will continue to be for some time comfortably undemocratic. This and other points of public or private debate, however, do not detract from this book: for they are the direct results of its contributions to a much broader and lively discussion related to the denition of the necessary and accidental attributes of democracy as well as our expectations concerning the boundary conditions for the presence of these attributes today. Charles A. Kromkowski, University of Virginia

The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. By Richard M. Valelly. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. 348. $58.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.) The United States has witnessed two periods of civil rights advancements in its history. By most accounts, the rst reconstruction, which lasted roughly twelve short years, was a democratic failure. Despite the ratication of the Reconstruction Amendments and the passage of numerous pieces of federal legislation, southern whites were successful in re-instantiating racial hierarchies through an elaborate system of state-sponsored segregation and discrimination. Jim Crow lasted for the next seventy years and was dismantled once and for all in the South during the second reconstruction that began in earnest some time in the late 1940s and culminated with the passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both reconstructions were brief but volatile eras in American history. They constitute two strikingly similar attempts to wipe away the moral blot of slavery and discrimination, to provide for the basic rights for blacks which had been guaranteed to other Americans through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And yet they produced two different outcomes. Why? In The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement, Richard Valelly provides a compelling answer. In order to understand how the rst reconstruction failed and how the second succeeded, Valelly argues that we have to understand two aspects of each period: rst, how the party system structure was arranged during both reconstructions (what Valelly calls party-building), and second, how the federal courts were likely to be led by a majority of the Supreme Court (or jurisprudence-building). According to Valelly, the rst reconstruction failed for the same reasons that the second reconstruction succeeded. During the rst reconstruction, party-building by what he calls the bi-racial coalition of 18671868 had to overcome an insurmountable obstacle: creating eleven new Republican parties within the former confederate states where none had previously existed. Furthermore, jurisprudence-building faltered as the Supreme Court was immediately unwilling to rule favorably upon newly enacted civil rights legislation. By 1873, the Court had instituted a states-rights reading

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of the Reconstruction era amendments and legislation, thus severely limiting federal involvement in southern affairs. The valiant effort notwithstanding, Valellys point is that the rst reconstruction was doomed from the start. By contrast, during the second reconstruction coalition-making between white New Deal Democrats and black southerners demanded no more than a take-over of long-standing organizations (17) that had already existed in the South. Party-building in the second reconstruction was thus made easier because, rather than creating new parties from whole cloth, the Democratic coalition had only to commandeer the southern Democratic Party apparatus. The bi-racial coalition of 19611965 in place, the Warren Court was subsequently poised to give an expansive, muscular interpretation to the civil rights legislation that had been passedparticularly the Voting Rights Act of 1965thus ensuring that jurisprudence-building would maintain the civil rights momentum. Despite the rise of the Republican Party in the South and the more racially conservative decisions of the Court in the last several decades, Valelly contends that the second reconstruction has been a fundamental success in the electoral inclusion of blacks. Valelly draws upon literature in three specic academic sub-disciplines. First, he takes his cues from historical-institutionalist scholarship, particularly Stephen Skowronek and J. Morgan Kousser, and their respective historical work on the courts and political parties. Second, Valelly incorporates social movement theory as he explains how extra-partisan forces shaped party coalitions and formal electoral arrangements. Finally, Valelly draws upon rational choice theory as he describes how political actors during each period dened their strategic interests and pursued them. Party politicians, federal judges and coalition leaders are thus looked upon as entrepreneurs in their party-building and jurisprudence-building enterprises. Scholars working in any of these three elds may nd The Two Reconstructions a persuasive and satisfying account. Valellys analysis is straightforward and clear; his writing is equally lucid. The vast majority of the work is qualitative in nature, and Valelly does an excellent job of summarizing not only each chapter, but each section of each chapter. Furthermore, through innumerable tables and charts, Valelly provides a wealth of information on everything from state-by-state troop levels in the South during the rst reconstruction to the number of black elected ofcials before and after the second one. The weakness in Valellys account, however, lies precisely in the moments where it adopts a rational choice approach. Like most rational choice theorists, Valelly accepts as a given the sets of beliefs of the political actors he covers without exploring where these beliefs came from or their causal impact. Thus, ideas on racial equality have no explanatory power in his account. In fact, Valelly suggests that attitudes of white supremacy may be caused by institutional arrangements. In the closing pages, he writes, it is often thought that the persistence of black disadvantage is rooted in the experience of African American enslavement. But disenfranchisement is also an important cause. It may even be more signicant than the experience of enslavement (249).

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Yet, the institutional arrangements of both enslavement and disadvantage were, at a minimum, partially affected by a set of beliefs about racial equality which lead to enslavement and disadvantage in the rst place. Could it be that more racially progressive views in the middle decades of the twentieth century were an important ingredient in the success of institution-building in the second reconstruction, and that the emergence of egalitarian ideas in the twentieth century is part of what distinguished the second reconstruction from the rst? Scholars who want to entertain the theory that ideas matter as much as institutions may thus nd Valellys compelling institutional analysis somewhat incomplete and possibly unconvincing. Yet, it is also clear from Valellys account that institutions must be considered crucial determinants of the success or failure of racial equality in the American case. Christopher Malone, Pace University

Designing Federalism: A Theory of Self-Sustainable Federal Institutions. By Mikhail Filippov, Peter C. Ordeshook, and Olga Shvetsova. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 396. $75.00 cloth, $28.99 paper.) Federalism and Democracy in Latin America. Edited by Edward L. Gibson. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. 392. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.) There are at least two powerful reasons to study federalism. First, federalism is the preeminent institutional formula for overcoming obstacles confronting national integration. Second, it is demonstrably useful as a mechanism permitting the co-participation of central and regional governments in policymaking and therefore crucial to the success of an ample spectrum of policies in complex and heterogeneous societies. Yet, federal systems do not always succeed. They may disintegrate or become, in practice, ineffectual. How to design a federal system that is both stable and signicant? Which institutional parameters might be adjusted to improve federal systems? These are the questions on which both of these volumes shed light. Scholars have previously noted that federalism may be analyzed as either a dependent or an independent variable. The Filippov, Ordeshook and Shvetsova volume tends to focus on the former, thereby sharpening the investigation of enhancements to stability and the maintenance of federal systems. Several of the chapters in the volume edited in Gibson, in contrast, highlight the latter, examining hypotheses about federalisms inuence on the selection and the success of public policies. Though they employ different methods and study different regions of the world, both sets of authors conclude that the stability (the focus of Designing Federalism) and the signicance (Gibsons books emphasis) of federations are contingent on the institutional features of the overall political system, especially political parties. The breadth and provocativeness of these well

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grounded studies position both of them to become extremely valuable tools for understanding federalism in this century. The fundamental purpose of federal design, according to Filippov, Ordeshook and Shvetsova, is to supply a stabilizing institutional context for bargaining over redistributive policy. Federalisms very ability to supply this context, however, also produces the incentives to undermine it. Because different institutional arrangements generate different redistributive consequences, federal subjects are interested in challenging the institutional status quo and adjusting it in their favor. Thus, the central problem of federalism becomes how to generate a stable federation, one that is able to meet the economic and political objectives that justify its existence when the member units are highly motivated to bargain destructively over it. In the nine chapters of the volume, the authors of Designing Federalism buttress their theoretical arguments with case studies (e.g. Russia, the European Union). The opening chapter introduces the theoretical problem concerning federal stability and sketches the main argument of the book: the most important step towards stability or, equivalently, towards institutionalized bargaining (when only details about the federal structure are under negotiation) is to induce an imperfect principal-agent relationship between citizens and their elected representatives. Given that the primary intermediary between citizens (as voters) and political elites (as candidates and ofce holders) is the political party, the authors conclude that an integrated party system encourages the imperfect agency essential for stability-prone federal bargaining. Bargaining, however, occurs between elected representatives, which raises the question: what kind of representation is more stability-enhancing? That states are represented in the national legislature and negotiate directly within the government structure (e.g. Germany) is preferable to arrangements in which representation is built around the subjects of the federation who may confront the center as an outer force (e.g. Canada). For federal stability, however, explicit constitutional design does not sufce and we must resort to individual-level incentives. Thus, to ensure stability three conditions must be met: rst, a balance must exist between the center and the federal subjects; second, bargaining has to be performed within the boundaries of constitutional institutionalized constraint; third, this balance and these boundaries need to be maintained in the self-interest of politicians even when their constituencies may prefer otherwise (imperfect agency). To attain these conditions, integrated political parties are crucial because in these organizations the careers of politicians at different government levels are intimately linked, preventing them from overstepping their respective bounds and destabilizing the federation. However, as Filippov et al. show, there is no unique constellation of institutions that engenders integrated parties or stable and efcient federal relations, so the key is the existence of individual level incentives such that regional and local politicians are impelled to act as representatives of broader interest than those of a narrow constituency. Politicians are thus moti-

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vated because their medium- to long-term career opportunities have become incompatible with extreme forms of particularistic behavior. Designing Federalism is a provocative and sound book that offers a description and assessment of the fundamentally problematic interaction that characterizes federal relations and that must be explicitly resolved and/or contained by institutional means to attain stability in federations. To design a comprehensive federal structure it is necessary to consider fully the variables that may encourage (or discourage) the development of federally integrated political parties. Does federalism matter? How does federalism inuence politics and policymaking? Federalism and Democracy in Latin America explores the signicance of federalism with a special (although not exclusive) focus on one region. The chapters range from explicit cross-country comparisons to case studies of Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela. In conjunction, the chapters offer a vivid picture of the advantages and risks of federal arrangements in countries undergoing democratic transition and consolidation processes. The volume begins with a strong introductory chapter by Gibson that provides a succinct yet comprehensive picture of the revival of federal systems in Latin America and, thus, how their study has gained increasing topical relevance. Gibson argues that systemic factors (e.g. regime type or party system) interact with federalism and determine in practice the balance of power between the different levels of government (i.e. the degree of centralization of the federation). Gibson also sees causality working in the reverse direction: federal systems may contribute to the fragmentation of political parties or to the shifting of resources for political competition and mobilization from the national to the subnational arena. The book is organized around the origin and signicance of federal systems, and several of the individual chapters deal with both of these simultaneously. Two of the chapters are mostly devoted to the political processes leading to the emergence of federal systems: Stepan offers a general perspective (complementing Rikers well-known theory), while Gibson and Falleti aid our understanding of the formation of federations through an analysis of the Argentinean experience. Signicance, the volumes second theme, is studied by examining the interactions between federalism and democracy. To this effect, several chapters devote special attention to representation and malapportionment (Snyder and Samuels; Gibson, Calvo and Falleti), party politics (Penfold-Becerra; Samuels and Mainwaring) and democratization processes (Ochoa-Reza). As a complementary perspective on the signicance of federal systems, this edited volume explores how the institutions and political practices of federalism shape policy. The relevant chapters discuss chiey two issues: how federal institutions limit the policymaking capability of the center (Stepan; Samuels and Mainwaring), and the variables deemed to determine the allocation of scal resources to the subnational units (Diaz-Cayeros; Gibson, Calvo and Falleti). In addition, Federalism and Democracy in Latin America brings to light two potentially fruitful approaches for the comparative study of federations. Stepan

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re-introduces the idea of studying federal systems via a focus on the degree to which they constrain the law-making capability of the democratically elected legislators at the center. Samuels and Mainwaring, for their part, suggest studying federalism as a bargaining game between the center (especially the president) and states (represented by governors and the national congress). The usefulness of each approach is of course contingent on the specic dependent variable under study, but for a wide variety of issues (e.g. the allocation of federal grants to subnational governments), they seem to be complementary. Although these volumes were published within months of each other and both focus on federal design, they do not tend to cite each others body of work; this may be explained by the fact that the contributors to the two books tend to study different regions of the world. Still, the authors share common ground: Rikers classic study of federalism (Federalism: Origin, Operation Signicance, Little Brown, 1964) is central for Filippov et al. and cited extensively in Gibson; naturally, then, both works have a strong avor of incentive-driven actors and institutions. In various senses, the volumes draw similar conclusions: rst, both emphasize the necessity to study the endogenous institutional features of federalism and the broader political system in which they are rooted to explain its features and second, the centrality of political parties to explain stability (Filippov et al.) and centralization (the chapter by Gibson). Federalism by Design has another interesting and, given its implications, groundbreaking feature as its denition of stability is rmly rooted in institutionalized change (156). The success of a federation is thus dependent on its ability to constantly adapt and to reassign policy competencies among levels of government depending on preferences, technology, and political outcomes. At several points in Federalism and Democracy in Latin America it is suggested that federalism may facilitate democratic transitions but hinder democratic consolidation. Yet, the book also argues to the contrary when pointing out that federalism and democracy are linked via institutional mechanisms. Thus, depending on the institutional features of the federation under analysis, federalism may strengthen democratization processes or impede democratic governance. Whether federalism obstructs democratic consolidation is an empirical question that should be addressed promptly. Laura Flamand, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Mxico)

Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies. By Kurt Schock. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Pp. 224. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.) Unarmed Insurrections explores the dynamics of nonviolent protest in order to explain why some movements that eschew the use of armed force succeed at compelling non-democratic governments to undertake political reform while others are quashed under the repressive hand of the state. In answering this ques-

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tion, Kurt Schock moves away from the standard political process explanations of social movements and elite-centered theories of regime change to develop a movement-oriented account of democratization informed by pragmatic theories of nonviolent action. Central to Schocks framework is the premise that states ofcials tolerance of protest depends on the degree to which the legitimacy of their regime is undermined by the presence of dissent. As such, while political elites in democracies where the presence of a plurality of viewpoints is part-and-parcel of the regimes raison-dtrecan afford to ignore some level of dissent, their non-democratic counterparts necessarily resort to repression when faced with even nonviolent protest activity. Even though it is intended to silence dissent, however, repression sometimes results instead in the activation of a political jiujitsu dynamic (42), whereby insurgents convert repression into an opportunity for more extensive mobilization, the exacerbation of divisions within the ruling elite, the enlistment of third party support, and nally, the enervation of state power. Successful nonviolent movements, therefore, are those that remain resilient in the face of repression long enough for protesters to leverage the states increasingly apparent illegitimacy into the actual withdrawal of cooperation by the regimes subjects, allies, and even its own members. While Schock acknowledges that resilience and leverage are obvious enough conditions for movement success (49), the elaboration of these mechanisms allows him to derive several non-obvious organizational attributes that make nonviolent movements more likely to succeed at promoting regime change. Specically, he argues that decentralized organization, network-oriented mobilizing structures, and an eclectic repertoire of nonviolent methods enable challengers to withstand state repression and divert its momentum so as to advance their own democratic aims. Thus, Schock shows how the presence of movements with these attributes in countries like South Africa, the Philippines, Nepal, and Thailand during the 1980s and early 1990s allowed democratizing forces to persevere despite considerable efforts by ruling authorities to suppress their activity. Consequently, in all four of these cases the political jiujitsu dynamic was activated and persistent agitation culminated in the implementation of signicant democratic reforms. In contrast, China and Burma present instances in which challengers failure to build decentralized, network-style movements and deploy a variety of protest methods resulted in their incapacity to regroup following confrontation with state force; as a result, neither of these countries pro-democracy movements succeeded at leveraging concessions out of their respective regimes. Particularly notable in this account is the causal agency assigned to social movements. In contrast to typical portrayals of successful challengers as simply beneciaries of favorable political conditions mediated by institutional political actors self-serving designs, Schock demonstrates how social movement outcomes depend substantially upon the actions taken by protesters themselves to recongure political opportunity structures in their favor.

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And yet, some ambivalence remains with regard to the extent to which protesters act intentionally when they mount successful nonviolent challenges. On the one hand, Schocks justication for supplementing the political process framework with insights from the nonviolent action literature is couched in terms of the latters emphasis on how power is used strategically by social movements to undermine the state and alter the political context (36; emphasis added). The South African case, correspondingly, suggests that nonviolent protesters know what theyre doing when they design organizations that will withstand repression: The creation of umbrella organizations during the mid-1980s, according to Schock, was a deliberate response to the opportunities of the political environment whereby movement organizers learned from their earlier mistakes and consciously developed a strategy of people power that was attuned to the forms of protest that would inhibit the states ability to repress anti-Apartheid activity (58, 60; emphases added). At the same time, though, the sense that luck rather than know-how guides protesters tactical choices is ubiquitous. Schock notes, for example, that virtually all unarmed insurrections have been improvised (163). While both the theoretical and case study chapters emphasize that challengers are cognizant of the incentives created by intra-elite conict and economic crisis and coordinate the timing of mobilization accordingly, their decision as to how protest activity is conducted seems haphazard. It remains unclear, therefore, whether Nepalese and Thai reformers developed effective strategies because theylike those involved in the creation of South Africas United Democratic Frontactually understood the implications of network-oriented and diversied mobilization, or whether it was merely coincidence that distinguished these movements from their Burmese and Chinese counterparts and led them to mobilize in a way that would facilitate the achievement of their goals. This criticism aside, the book offers a compelling explanation of the mechanisms that link nonviolent protest activity to regime outcomes in non-democracies. Its political process-nonviolent action synthesis is innovative and suggests a balanced understanding of the interaction between social movements and their political environments that neither undervalues nor inates the role of popular movements in promoting democratic transitions. As such, Unarmed Insurrections is an important contribution to the literatures on social movements and democratization. Shamira M. Gelbman, University of Virginia

Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy. By Eric C. Bjornlund. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. 383. $55.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.) The coordinators of the groups monitoring the 2004 elections in Indonesia recently estimated that more than 400,000 domestic, and least 541 international

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observers collectively monitored 585,000 polling places accommodating nearly 150 million voters. Whether the election, as most observers agreed, was truly free and fair, the perception that it was has contributed enormously to the domestic and international legitimacy of the Yodohono government. It is almost impossible to imagine an election-monitoring effort of this magnitude being mounted as recently as twenty years ago. How the world moved from the rst tentative efforts in the late 1980s to the point at which the 2004 effort in Indonesia could be considered almost routine is the topic of this book. Eric Bjornlund combines his own extensive eld experience, most of it with the National Democratic Institute, with a thorough combing of the works of scholars and practitioners. Both audiences will be interested in this book. It contains war stories and critical analysis, history and evaluation, check lists for eld workers, and a lucid analysis of the role of election monitors in building democracy. Bjornlund shows how the process has expanded from a concern with the largely administrative activities on election day to a more comprehensive monitoring of the overall electoral process. He also shows how a growing army of experts has been able to move around the world both monitoring elections and, more importantly, training domestic monitors to supplement and eventually replace their efforts. And, through case studies of Cambodia, Zimbabwe, the Philippines and Indonesia (in 1999), he very sensitively explores many of the practical and theoretical shortcomings of an evolving art. His account of the ways in which the mingling of political forces in Zimbabwe in both 2000 and 2002 allowed the government to manipulate the electoral monitoring process (192205) is particularly revealing of just how tricky these efforts can become. Beyond Free and Fair joins a short but growing list of studies of international democracy promotion efforts. One of Bjornlunds central concerns, indeed, is with the question of how and to what extent the once almost purely technical task of monitoring the casting and counting of votes has expanded to the point where it is in many ways indistinguishable from broader democracy promotion efforts. No matter how smooth the process of voting itself, how much can an election truly be fair and free, he asks, absent real party competition, a free press, and so on? This expanded concept of monitoring poses substantial problems for practitioners, including appreciably higher costs and demands for expert knowledge that may be in short supply and concerns about excessive outside interference in home country politics. The troubling alternative, however, which the author explores at some length, is the extent to which less extensive efforts can provide unearned legitimacy (306) to regimes that observe the letter but not the spirit of free elections. To academics who have not been at least tangentially involved in the democracy promotion industry, some of Bjornlunds lists of what organizations monitored what elections, where, may prove tedious at best. On the whole, however, Beyond Free and Fair is a rather remarkably thoughtful book about the globalization of democracy and the connections between the seemingly technical issues of how to run elections and what they mean. It would have been fun, I think, to

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see how some of the criteria detailed here had been applied to elections in more advanced democracies such as the United States, but this kind of speculation is far beyond the scope of Bjornlunds work. You cannot have democracy without elections; but you can have elections without democracy. The explosive expansion of the extent and inuence of the election monitoring industry detailed in this book has helped secure the connection and contributed signicantly to the process of democratization. Those who rely on the results of these efforts without understanding their capabilities and limitations, however, are in danger of accepting what Ko Annan has called gleaf elections. Elections that on the surface meet the putative test of being free and fair often are not, and those scholars who rely on the work of election monitors to certify legitimacy should read this book to understand the general parameters of how these standards are set. Eric Bjornlund has provided both a celebration of an evolving art and a cautionary tale about just what we should and should not read into election observation reports. Edward Schneier, The City College, CUNY

Gods, Guns and Globalization: Religious Radicalism and International Political Economy. Edited by Mary Ann Ttreault and Robert A. Denemark. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004. Pp. 344. $59.95 cloth.) With the end of the Cold War a mere fteen years ago, the number of works devoted to the topic of globalization has expanded enormously, and today the term has become the buzzword to denote the present international order. Early optimism gave way to increasing pessimism as it became apparent that a more democratic and secular world order was not in the makingindeed, the bitter and bloody ethnic and religious conicts that erupted or worsened over the last decade have confounded a number of intellectual analysts who, following Marx and Weber, anticipated a decline in religious fervor as secular modernity expanded. How do we explain the continued resilience of religion and nationalism in the 21st century? This edited compilation attempts to address this puzzle, focusing upon religious fundamentalism and its possible structural relationship to globalization and modernity (i.e. international political economy). Mary Ann Ttreault, one of the books editors, introduces the volume with a note that the choice of case, methodology, and focus was left to the contributor, who was asked only to incorporate as much as possible both religious and political-economic dimensions in the analysis (27). As a result, this 13th and nal volume in the series International Political Economy Yearbook contains a wide variety of cases from diverse disciplines and methodological approaches. Ttreault opens the book with an introductory chapter in which she sets forth her own denitions of essentially contested concepts like fundamentalism, religion, ideology, globalization, and modernity. Her goal is to both dene and clarify

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relationships between fundamentalism and modernity and the ways that globalization has created both the spaces and opportunity structures for politicized religion and terrorism to emerge and operate. The paradox presented here is reminiscent of Benjamin Barbers famous Jihad v. McWorld dialectic, as illustrated in ve basic questions posed by Ttreault and evaluated by co-editor Robert A. Denemark at the end of the book: Does fundamentalism arise for systemic reasons? Can fundamentalism be understood in primarily economic, or political, or cultural terms? Do religious tenets consistently underpin fundamentalist political behaviors? What role does violence play in fundamentalism? And, perhaps most signicantly, to what extent may fundamentalism be explained as a reaction to modernity or globalization? The contributions in this volumeas explained abovecover a wide variety of cases, regions, and religious movements. The rst cases draw from studies of Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, with a chapter focusing upon the rise of the religious right in the United States and another examining attempts by the Christian Right to build an international natural family alliance. Other contributors examine the problem of religious violence and nationalist conict in the Middle East and South Asia, with chapters devoted to India, Pakistan, Algeria, and the Israeli-Palestinian conict. The nal three chapters take a different tack, moving away from questions of violence to the relationship between globalization, economic reform, and religious institutions and movements. The focus here ranges from Irans unique parastatal bonyads to the condition of women in Muslim Indonesia and a discourse analysis of Chinas Falun Gong, a quasiBuddhist/Taoist qi gong group banned and persecuted by the Chinese government in 1999. The chapters by Ttreault and Denemark do a masterful job of introducing, summarizing, and analyzing in a very short space the huge range of concepts and questions surrounding this intriguing and puzzling relationship between globalization, changes in political economy, and the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and religious violence in the modern world. Ttreaults short section on market fundamentalism (1617) is particularly thought-provoking, hinting at ways that our common rigid distinction between secular and religious might be overdone. The volumes most signicant contribution to important contemporary political issues would seem to be the question of religious fundamentalism as a reaction to modernity or globalization. Ttreault, for example, sees fundamentalism itself as a phenomenon of modernity, rather than some form of anti-modern traditionalism. Of course, a major dilemma here entails the very denition of key concepts: globalization, modernity, and fundamentalism. Is it really possible to achieve consensus denitions and frameworks for such essentially contested concepts? Another dilemma with such analyses lies in distinguishing religious fundamentalism from other types of religious, ethnic, and nationalist movements. Can we really compare religions as different as Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Islam,

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and Christianity under the same rubric of fundamentalism? In the case of India, for example, categories developed from the history of Protestant fundamentalism do not travel well, with some arguing that Hindu fundamentalism is really more a matter of Hindu nationalism, something quite distinct. Other signicant regions and movements might also have been included in the study. As Denemark notes in his conclusion, for example, an important region like Latin America has been left out entirely, with many important religious movements (both Catholic and Protestant) arising there in a continent still coming to terms with economic dislocation and neoliberal experimentation. With a title hinting at discussions of religious violence, a chapter on a non-state religious movement like Al Qaeda would have also been relevant. If there is any common element in these diverse cases, it might be the relationship between capitalism, the private market, and religion. Several of the contributors note an intriguing set of paradoxes: many religious movements are both pro-market and skeptical of the state while at the same time populist, nationalist, and protectionist, irting with class politics while ultimately nding it necessary to subsume social divisions into more inclusive nationalist and religious categories. This is a paradox that deserves further study and analysis. Unfortunately, the volume suffers from a lack of cohesion and synthesis, arising most likely from the very freedom to explore with various lenses and methods a set of cases that, in the end, do not really work together to answer the questions posed by the editors. Taken separately, several of the chapters might be of interest and use to researchers looking at those particular countries or cases. As a way to approach the bigger questions, however, the volume does not achieve the ambitious aims it sets out for itself. Thomas Brister, Wake Forest University