Miller, Benjamin, 2007. States, Nations, and the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xviii + 500 pp. ISBN 9780521691611
| Author | Douglas Lemke |
| Published date | 01 January 2009 |
| Date | 01 January 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433090460010915 |
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 46 / number 1 / january 2009
152
traces the history of the Palestinian struggle for
statehood from the Mandate to the present. He
argues that the Palestinians have continuously
found themselves trapped in an Iron Cage which
has been imposed on them by, first, the British
Mandate and then by a combination of Israeli and
Arab policies. Far from putting all the blame on
external factors, Khalidi analyses the actions of the
Palestinian political leadership in their search for
statehood. He does not hesitate to criticize
Palestinian leaders, whether the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem in the 1930s and 1940s, or Yassir Arafat
in the 1990s. Although the story Rashid Khalidi
tells is not a new one, he adds valuable new per-
spectives. By using available Palestinian archival
material, he is able to reconstruct some of the
problems faced by the Palestinians from a
Palestinian perspective. This is rarely done, and it
is symptomatic that most of the history of
Palestine has been written based on British, Israeli
or US sources. The result is that although the
history of the Palestinians has been written and
rewritten countless times, the Palestinian history
has not yet been finalized. Khalidi has once again
given a vital contribution to de-orientalizing
Palestinian history. Along with his prior work,
Palestinian Identity (1997), The Iron Cageprovides
important insider perspectives for anyone seeking
to understand Palestinian nationalism.
Jørgen Jensehaugen
䊏Martin, Andrew & Patrice Petro, eds, 2006.
Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular
Culture, and the War on Terror. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press. x ⫹246 pp. ISBN
9780813538303.
Rethinking Global Security is an excellent read that
covers an important field within new security
studies, namely, the use and role of intermedia
sources (television, Internet, radio, satellite
imaging, etc.) on conceptualizations of (in)secur-
ity among policymakers and the public. The
volume comprises ten essays that cover different
aspects of the use and manipulations of media
sources and consequences of such utilization.
Topics range from satellite imaging control in the
USA to the stronger role images can play and how
they transcend political agendas. Vital here is also
the problematic issue of the contexts of images.
Several chapters naturally consider the two latest
Gulf Wars as key empirical examples of different
media uses. Herein lies perhaps a general weak-
ness of several essays. In the attempt to interpret
images from the Middle East region, the lack of
proper knowledge of regional culture and history
is occasionally visible. The result is a feeling of
over-interpretation of images and an uninten-
tional edging toward the shadow of Orientalism,
the opposite of the authors’ intent. One example
is the non-argued quote of Danner, in Grajeda’s
chapter on images of torture, that the tortures
depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos were add-
itionally humiliating because of Islamic views on
body and sexuality, when it can easily be argued
that the situations endured by the prisoners are
not culturally dependent, that they would be
humiliating across any cultural or religious affili-
ation. However, despite the few reservations men-
tioned above, the essays, each in its own way,
cover new ground in understanding contem-
porary security thinking and consequences of
current security practices, and therefore the book
is certainly well worth the read.
Naima Mouhleb
䊏Miller, Benjamin, 2007. States, Nations, and
the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and
Peace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
xviii ⫹500 pp. ISBN 9780521691611.
That some regions of the world are overwhelm-
ingly peaceful while others suffer from continual
violence is immediately apparent, widely recog-
nized, but ignored by the majority of international
conflict scholarship. Older systemic theories
operate at too high a level of aggregation to offer
insights about regional variation in conflict
propensity. Similarly, since dyads generally involve
territory and peoples much smaller than regions,
theories about dyadic international behavior also
largely ignore region-level variation. While there
have been a number of interesting studies about
conflict variation across regions (prominent works
by Kristian Gleditsch and by Barry Buzan come to
mind), Benjamin Miller offers what he suggests is
the first comprehensive theory to account for
regional variation in international conflict. He the-
orizes that cross-regional variation in conflict is
caused by both regional and global forces. Within
regions the ‘state-to-nation’ balance determines
whether irredentism, secessionism and other con-
flict-prone motivations are present. Regions where
nationalities are not well represented by the
borders of member states have state-to-nation
imbalances and are characterized by weak states
that frequently fight each other because of, or in
efforts to address, their imbalances. But the intraregional
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