Book Notes
| Published date | 01 November 2003 |
| Author | Are Hovdenak |
| DOI | 10.1177/00223433030406014 |
| Date | 01 November 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Notes |
Gaiduk, Ilya, 2003. Confronting Vietnam:
Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict,
1954–1963. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson
Center Press. xxi + 286 pp. ISBN 0804747121.
Based predominantly on Soviet primary sources,
this book adds new insight into Soviet policy
towards Vietnam in the years preceding the
Vietnam War. The author strongly argues that, in
this period, the Soviet Union was mainly a passive
observer of events in Vietnam, contending that
whatever happened there was beyond its influ-
ence. Moscow regarded the 1954 Geneva agree-
ment as a guarantee against war in Southeast Asia
for the foreseeable future. However, the Soviet
Union was not able, or willing, to secure a full
implementation of the agreement, which dis-
appointed the North Vietnamese leadership.
Although the Kremlin was positive towards a
Communist victory in the region, it did not
assign any geostrategic importance to Indochina,
and was determined that Soviet involvement
there should not be of such a scale that it hindered
the process of détente with the United States and
its allies. According to Gaiduk, this explains why
Soviet leaders, after the Geneva conference, were
eager to assign primary responsibility for Vietnam
to their Chinese allies, thereby making the
Chinese their agents in Asia. However, from the
late 1950s, Moscow found the situation in
Vietnam increasingly difficult. The Soviet leaders
had to deal with a North Vietnamese leadership
with an increasingly militant view on how to
reunify Vietnam, as well as its former Chinese
allies, who had now become Moscow’s main rival
regarding influence within the Vietnamese Com-
munist leadership. As a result, the Soviet leaders
began to disengage from Indochina in the early
1960s. This is a well-written and interesting
account of the Soviet–Vietnamese relationship,
and a valuable addition to the many new publi-
cations focusing on ‘the other side of the Vietnam
War’. Mari Olsen
Henderson, Errol A., 2002. Democracy and
War: The End of an Illusion. Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner. 190 pp. ISBN 1588260518.
Like his mentor J. David Singer, Errol Hender-
son is intensely skeptical of the democratic peace
thesis. Yet, he does not resort to alternative para-
digms like constructivism or reliance on case
studies in order to refute it. He sets out ‘to hoist
the democratic peace on its own petard by using
the same basic research design used to support it’.
Separate chapters examine the dyadic and
monadic democratic peace, extrastate (colonial)
wars and civil war. He finds all four aspects of the
democratic peace wanting and concludes that,
rather than an empirical law, it is a great illusion.
He agrees that in the post-World War II era there
is a lack of warfare between democracies, but
accounts for this through ‘a combination of
factors including bipolarity, nuclear deterrence,
alliance aggregation, and trade links’ that have
contributed to ‘the formation of an international
security regime among the major-power democ-
racies and their minor democratic allies’. His ‘van-
ishing trick’ for dyadic democracy – to include
political dissimilarity in the regression equation
for militarized disputes – is likely to be contro-
versial. At the monadic level, he finds democra-
cies to be more prone to initiating militarized
disputes; this result is, however, driven by India
and Israel, whereas Western democracies are less
war-prone. For extrastate wars, he finds democra-
cies to be significantly less involved in the post-
World War II period. And for civil wars, he finds
an inverted U-curve between democracy and civil
war that is familiar to many democratic peace
theorists; he asserts, however, that this finding
contradicts the democratic peace. In short, many
democratic peace theorists may accept his results
but will interpret them differently.
Nils Petter Gleditsch
Karmi, Ghada & Eugene Cotran, eds, 1999.
The Palestinian Exodus 1948–1998. Reading:
Ithaca. 264 pp. ISBN 086372244X.
Aruri, Naseer, ed., 2001. Palestinian Refugees:
The Right of Return. London: Pluto. 294 pp.
ISBN 0745317774 (hardback); 0745317766
(paperback).
Rogan, Eugene L. & Avi Shlaim, eds, 2001.
The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of
1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
234 pp. ISBN 0521791391 (hardback);
0521794765 (paperback).
These are three highly readable books challenging
traditional historiography on the Middle East.
The first two books focus on the history of the
Palestinian refugee problem and address the
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 40 / number 6 / november 2003
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