Russia appears to have made tremendous progress in becoming a democracy in recent years. In December 1995, Russian citizens voted in parliamentary elections. In two rounds of voting in June and July in 1996, they then elected a president, the first time ever that Russian voters directly selected their head of state. Despite calls for delay and postponement, these two elections were held on time and under law - law drafted and approved through a democratic procedure by elected officials. Large majorities participated in both of these elections: 65% of all eligible voters in 1995, and nearly 70% in both rounds of the presidential vote. While electoral violations tainted both elections, especially the presidential vote, all participants - winners and losers - accepted the election results. After Boris Yeltsin's inauguration, the Communist-dominated parliament approved his candidate for prime minister - Viktor Chernomyrdin - by an overwhelming majority. This too was a first, as Russia's elected parliament had never approved the executive's choice for prime minister under the procedures outlined in a popularly-ratified constitution. Finally, from the fall of 1996 to the spring of 1998, over sixty gubernatorial elections were held throughout Russia. Although there was evidence that results were falsified in some races, the vast majority were recognized as free and fair by all major participants.

Throughout the history of the modern world, domestic regime change- be it democratization, autocratization, decolonization, decommunization, federal dissolution, coups, or revolutions- has often triggered international conflict and war. When a regime changes, decaying institutions from the ancien regime compete with new rules of the game to shape political competition in ambiguous ways. This uncertain text provides opportunities for political actors, both old and new, to pursue new strategies for achieving their objectives, including belligerent policies against both domestic and international foes. In desperation, losers from regime change may resort to violence to maintain their former privileges. Such internal conflicts become international wars when these interest groups who benefited from the old order call upon their allies to intervene on their behalf or strike out against their enemies as means to shore up their domestic legitimacy. In the name of democracy, independence, the revolution, or the nation, the beneficiaries of regime change also can resort to violence against both domestic and international opponents to secure their new gains.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has grown up along with world politics and has, since 1945, offered a special perspective on issues of peace, security, and global well-being. Now its unique blend of international commentary on the arms race, accessible articles on scientific dimensions of politics, and acute political journalism is presented here in a way particularly suited to students of international relations and security studies. Widely known for his creative work in international affairs education, George A. Lopez joins with the former managing editor of the Bulletin, Nancy J. Myers, to select recent articles best illustrating a wide range of issues on peace and security. The volume editors shape and supplement these articles specifically for classroom use. Each chapter includes several thematically linked articles supplemented with maps, data charts, photos, editorial cartoons, and discussion questions. Completing the package of pedagogical features for the volume is a master chart of key terms and concepts in international relations showing their connection to the articles. This new text-reader zeroes in on the core of any international relations course and brings the controversies alive with informed, international voices and new views on age-old questions about the arms race, peace, security, and the prospects for a post-nuclear world politics.

Features articles from the Bulletin of the Atomic Sientists, a unique teaching resource, selected and edited especially for students of international studies. Provides chapter introductions and thematic overviews by leading IR scholar and teacher linking these articles to core course content. Includes maps, figures, tables, high impact photos, and clever, specially-commissioned editorial cartoons. Presents discussion questions framed to show how text-reader content illuminates IR theory and current events. Offers a master chart of key IR terms and concepts as they appear within the reader. Incorporates a wide diversity of international authors, topics, and perspectives. Combines historical perspective with current events. Unlike other readers, Peace and Security is thematicaly unified and cohesive. prospects for a post-nuclear world politics.

In 1992, a year before his death, Yasusuke Murakami published in Japanese An Anti-Classical Political-Economic Analysis: A Vision for the Next Century (English translation, Stanford, 1996). A work that distilled decades of research and thought by a distinguished economic theorist turned social scientist and philosopher, it sold more than 25,000 copies in Japan despite its highly scholarly nature. The book enjoyed such immediate recognition because it offered a sanguine vision for the community of nations and because Murakami's vision was supported by acute insights on, and seminal analyses of the crucial issues relating to economic growth, equality, peace, and cultural diversity we face at the end of the twentieth century.

This volume presents nine essays - by five political scientists, three economists, and a historian - that critically evaluate the vision and analyses in Murakami's book by focusing on his two key contributions. The first is "polymorphic liberalism," a new type of liberalism that reflects the needs of both developed and developing economies and the realities of the diversity of cultures; the second is "developmentalism," a long-term, multifaceted policy intervention in catch-up economic growth. The volume also contains, as appendixes, two essays that further a more complete understanding of Murakami's book: a brief summary of Murakami's "new economics," his replacement for neoclassical economics, and a discussion of England as the first developmentalist success.

All the essays deal, in one way or another, with Murakami's answers to such questions as: What new world order must be created to best provide peace and security to nations? What shared beliefs or principles can help evolve this new world order that is menaced by regional wars and serious international confrontations caused by political, economic, and ethnic-cultural conflicts? How will the character of industrialization change, and what must we do to best respond to changes that are likely to increase political and economic interdependence among nations? And what roles must the United States, the European Union, and Japan play to secure world peace, to maintain an orderly international trade regime, and to reduce disparity in nations' income and wealth?

Although Africa has been one of the least democratic regions of the world, it has been experiencing widespread pressures for democratic change since 1990. Although pressure-from both domestic civil societies and international donors-has failed to bring about a transition to democracy in most cases, it has succeeded in many. Today, about a third of all African countries are at least electoral democracies, and virtually all regimes in sub-Saharan Africa have at least legalized opposition parties. Conventional political science theories view Africa's democratic prospects as grim because of its extreme poverty and deep ethnic divisions. This essay takes a more hopeful and "developmental" view. It argues that democratic change can occur in Africa and must if it is to develop economically. But this will inevitably involve a long-term process of political and social change and, in particular, institution building. African countries need new, more appropriate, and more effective institutions to control corruption, provide a market-oriented enabling environment for economic growth, and generate incentives for political parties to craft broad multiethnic appeals and constituencies. If institutions of governance, electoral politics, and civil society can be strengthened and innovatively designed, there is hope for democracy in Africa. But this will also require heavy international conditionality and pressure for more responsible policies and more effective institutions, as well as greater international support for those African regimes that appear serious about democracy and good governance. African societies are ready for a new democratic beginning, but they require the right institutional frameworks at home and vigorous engagement of the international community if deeply entrenched patterns of statism, corruption, repression, ethnic exclusion, and violence are to be overcome.

The global trend that Samuel P. Huntington has dubbed the "third wave" of democratization has seen more than 60 countries experience democratic transitions since 1974. While these countries have succeeded in bringing down authoritarian regimes and replacing them with freely elected governments, few of them can as yet be considered stable democracies. Most remain engaged in the struggle to consolidate their new and fragile democratic institutions.

Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies provides an in-depth analysis of the challenges that they face. In addition to the complete hardcover edition, Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies is available in two paperback volumes, each introduced by the editors and organized for convenient course use. The first paperback volume, Themes and Perspectives, addresses issues of institutional design, civil-military relations, civil society, and economic development. It brings together some of the world's foremost scholars of democratization, including Robert A. Dahl, Samuel P. Huntington, Juan J. Linz, Guillermo O'Donnell, Adam Przeworski, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Alfred Stepan.

The second paperback volume, Regional Challenges, focuses on developments in Southern Europe, Latin America, Russia, and East Asia, particularly Taiwan and China. It contains essays by leading regional experts, including Yun-han Chu, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, Thomas B. Gold, Michael McFaul, Andrew J. Nathan, and Hung-mao Tien.

Since 1993, Russia has achieved a series of important milestones regarding the articulation of the rules of the game for political and economic competition. Since the popular approval of a new constitution in December 1993, which gave a great deal of power to the president, the division of powers between the executive and legislative branch has been both formalized and respected by actors in both institutions. While critics of this superpresidential system are many, none of these opponents of the new institutional order are prepared to take to the streets to change it. On the contrary, budgets have been passed, governments approved, and laws enacted in a relatively "normal" and peaceful process.

In both Russia and the West, most analysts portray Russia's political system as an authoritarian regime. According to this view, the executive branch of government dictates state policy. Other institutions of the state do not matter since they are too weak either to make policy or to constrain the all-powerful presidency. The traditional components of a liberal democracy--the separation of powers between the president and the parliament, a party system, federalism, rule of law, independent media, and civil society--are all missing in Russia. Unconstrained by the rules and ways of democracy, Russia's president and his government are free to do whatever they want.

Initially printed as "The Myth of Absolute Power," Moscow Times, November 21, 1997.

As the debate on NATO expansion moves to the more public and open setting of U.S. Senate hearings this month, we will begin to hear the true motivations behind those for and against extending the alliance to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. From the right, senators will declare that they favor enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a hedge against a possible Russian threat to Europe in the future. From the left, senators will argue that they oppose NATO expansion because the move eastward will help nationalist forces within Russia and thereby damage U.S.-Russian relations.

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Superpresidentialism, ambiguous federalism, the weakness of political parties and labor and civic organizations, the inordinate strength of big business, and the virtual absence of the rule of law represent major blemishes on Russia's nascent democracy. . . [But] in bemoaning Russia's slow start in consolidating a liberal democracy, we must not forget the important progress made in establishing an electoral democracy in Russia.