In its relations with Peru, the United States has historically placed greatest emphasis on fighting the war on drugs. As Sendero Luminoso, The Shining Path, led an insurgency against the Peruvian government in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States provided ample support against the terrorists located in the jungle, especially those participating in the drug trade. But Peru's victory over terrorism then was due more to improved police intelligence and increased public investment, rather than success in the war on drugs. Now, in the midst of economic troubles and a difficult transition back to democracy in Peru, the Shining Path has made a resurgence. The United States again faces a choice about how to proceed - to continue focusing on the war on drugs or to provide sustained levels of investment in Peru's economy and political institutions, thereby turning this war on terror into a war on poverty.

Universal jurisdiction, the new International Criminal Court, and demands for humanitarian intervention, are three of the most prominent manifestations of the new international idealism. Those who support these institutions and policies tend to believe that justice is best achieved when it is removed and isolated from politics and power. The new international idealism suffers from four fundamental flaws, however. First, it presupposes the possibility of general consensus not just on normative principles but on how and when they should be applied. Second, it minimizes considerations of power, and assumes that norms of right behavior can substitute for national capabilities and material interests. Third, it neglects political prudence: it offers a deontological rather than a consequentialist ethics. Fourth, it consistently slights the value of, and need for, domestic accountability.

For most of the 1990s, American foreign policymakers, analysts of Russia in the United States, and leaders of American nongovernmental organizations have pointed to generational change as the beacon of hope for Russia. Because it was believed that the transition from communism to capitalism and democracy would require a "short-term" decline in the well-being of Russian society--and that the older generations would suffer the most during the transitional period--all hope was placed on the young people. Unlike their grandparents and parents, the younger generation would enjoy the benefits of reform and therefore embrace the reforms advocated by the American policymakers and analysts.

There is a metaphysical crisis in human rights. And just as this crisis is troubling those who write about legal institutions, it is posing a conundrum for those who write in pure philosophy, in comparative political and international studies, and in all the academic areas that deal with identity, values and human belief. Across these disciplinary fields, scholars are asking the same question: as between radically different forms of human existence, how are 'we' to decide whose values ought to trumps others values? Can human rights only be defended from within a set of foundational beliefs that are particular to Western ideological and cultural commitments? This question about the universality of human rights has given rise to a vigorous debate about cultural relativism. Law, as an institution that enforces core political and social values, cannot sidestep this debate. What are global institutions to do, and how is law to aid those institutions, when there is no global consensus about the values that ought shape political and social relations? Put differently, how can decisions about the content of human rights be made without committing cultural imperialism in the same (though possibly subtler) ways that 19th century colonists committed cultural imperialism?

This book compares sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, two regions beset by the breakdown of states suffering from extreme official corruption, organized crime extending into warlordism, and the disintegration of economic institutions and public institutions for human services. The contributors not only study state breakdown but also compare the consequences of post-communism with those of post-colonialism.

This chapter looks at the processes of state formation in postcolonial Africa and the former Soviet Union and asks whether those processes make African and Eurasian states especially vulnerable to civil war. In particular, we ask whether the experience of Africa's postcolonial states suggests a similar historical trajectory for the new states that emerged in Eurasia at the beginning of the 1990s. We argue that, despite important differences between the two historical experiences, conditions surrounding state formation in Africa and post-Soviet Eurasia have inhibited the formation of stable and legitimate states and have made war more likely.

The chapter beings by outlining three broad explanatory factors that scholars have used in trying to explain civil wars since 1945: ethnicity, nationalism, and globalization. We argue that these explanations neglect what Klaus Gantzel referred to as "the historicity of war," by which he means "the structural dynamics which condition the emergence and behaviour of actors" in any given period (Gantzel 1997, 139). We then suggest that a focus on state formation is helpful in providing the historical context for understanding civil wars. After surveying the experience of state-building in postcolonial Africa and in Eurasia, we conclude with comparisons and contrasts between the regions.

This book analyzes a crucial aspect of one of the great dramas of modern times -- the reconstitution of the Russian polity and economy after more than 70 years of communist rule. This is the first book to look comprehensively and systematically at Russia's democratic transition at the local level. Its goal is to explain why some of the new political institutions in the Russian provinces weathered the monumental changes of the early 1990s better than others. Using newly available econmoic, political and sociological data to test various theories of democratization and institutional performance, Stoner-Weiss finds that traditional theories are unable to explain variations in regional govenment performance in Russia. This provocative work, solidly grounded in research and theory, will interest anyone concerned with issues of economic and political transition.

For centuries, dictators ruled Russia. Tsars and Communist Party chiefs were in charge for so long some analysts claimed Russians had a cultural predisposition for authoritarian leaders. Yet, as a result of reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, new political institutions have emerged that now require election of political leaders and rule by constitutional procedures. Michael McFaul traces Russia's tumultuous political history from Gorbachev's rise to power in 1985 through the 1999 resignation of Boris Yeltsin in favor of Vladimir Putin.

McFaul divides his account of the post-Soviet country into three periods: the Gorbachev era (1985-1991), the First Russian Republic (1991-1993), and the Second Russian Republic (1993-present). The first two were, he believes, failures--failed institutional emergence or failed transitions to democracy. By contrast, new democratic institutions did emerge in the third era, though not the institutions of a liberal democracy. McFaul contends that any explanation for Russia's successes in shifting to democracy must also account for its failures. The Russian/Soviet case, he says, reveals the importance of forging social pacts; the efforts of Russian elites to form alliances failed, leading to two violent confrontations and a protracted transition from communism to democracy.

McFaul spent a great deal of time in Moscow in the 1990s and witnessed firsthand many of the events he describes. This experience, combined with frequent visits since and unparalleled access to senior Russian policymakers and politicians, has resulted in an astonishingly well-informed account. Russia's Unfinished Revolution is a comprehensive history of Russia during this crucial period.