Home › Review Essays ›

Review Essays Articles

Review Essays, Middle East
Commercializing the Crisis

Critics and audiences agree: Ben Affleck has done it again. With its numerous award nominations and victories, including last night's Best Picture, Argo will surely join Gone Baby Gone and The Town as an Affleck-directed box-office success, and rightfully so. In Argo (based on Joshuah Bearman’s 2007 article in Wired, which itself is about the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis), classic movie elements are strung together to weave a story that leaves the viewer hostage to the film’s suspense. 

By Ben Kassahun, Eric Guajardo, Joshua Barthel  |  February 25, 2013
Share|
Review Essays
Myanmar at a Crossroads

Draw a circle, instructs Thant Myint-U in his recent book Where China Meets India, around Myanmar’s second largest city, Mandalay. Give it a radius of 700 miles, roughly the distance from Washington DC to Chicago. Within this circle lives ten percent of the world’s population, nearly all of it poor.

By John Corbett  |  July 8, 2012
Share|
Review Essays
A Limited View

The protests that erupted in Daraa in March 2011 catapulted the Syrian Arab Republic into the global spotlight, but the policies of the al-Assad regime have captured the world’s attention for decades. Both Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez have autocratically presided over a state antagonistic toward its neighbors and at times brutally repressive of its citizens.

By John Corbett  |  July 7, 2012
Share|
Review Essays, Americas, Middle East
An Eye for an Eye

Mark Osiel’s provocative new book, The End of Reciprocity: Terror, Torture and the Law of War, provides detailed discussions of a number of important moral and legal issues arising for the United States in its ongoing response to the threats posed by the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The specific focus is the US-deployed counter-terrorist methods of sustained detention, torture, and targeted killing of suspected terrorists. The author, Mark Osiel, displays a wide knowledge of relevant literature in a number of fields, including international law, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies.

By Seumas Miller  |  July 6, 2009
Share|
Review Essays, Europe
Evaluating the Euro

The euro turned ten on January 1, 2009, which called for a reflection on its first decade.

By Ophelia Eglene  |  March 21, 2009
Share|
Review Essays, Asia Pacific
Pakistan's Overbearing Army

Fifty years ago this October 24, Pakistan’s first Army Commander in Chief overthrew the prime minister, imposed martial law, and abrogated the constitution. That jarring rotation from civilian rule to martial law spawned five decades of overhauled constitutions, three protracted periods of martial law, and the overthrow of four civilian governments. In Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within, renowned Pakistan expert and former New York Times journalist Shuja Nawaz examines the tumultuous history of Pakistan’s overbearing army.

By Malou Innocent  |  December 19, 2008
Share|
Premium Content
Become A Member
Review Essays
Debating Trade Reform

One helpful way to consider serious ideas and proposals about reforming the global trade regime is to organize them into three clusters or sets of approaches—participation, leadership, and holistic change of paradigm. Dennis Patterson and Ari Afilalo, the authors of The New Global Trading Order, focus on the last of the three. The first cluster emphasizes ways to increase the transparency, public participation, and accountability of the WTO and associated national and international institutions.

By David Deese  |  September 28, 2008
Share|
Premium Content
Become A Member
Review Essays
Rethinking Economic Reform

The co-authors of Human Rights and Structural Adjustment, M. Rodwan Abouharb and David Cingranelli, present a simple and straightforward argument: the economic reform programs initiated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, which tended to be lumped together under the awkward phrase "structural adjustment," caused a progressive worsening of human rights conditions in the countries that undertook them. The longer a country was exposed to structural adjustment, the worse the country's human rights conditions became.

By Michael Lofchie  |  August 16, 2008
Share|
Premium Content
Become A Member
Review Essays, Americas, Asia Pacific
A Dubious Recipe

Amy Chua, Professor of Law at Yale Law School, has written an ambitious book covering a vast array of empires and other powers. The work reaches from the Great Persian Empire to Rome and the contemporary US hyperpower. Her analysis also includes an outlook on the possible challengers to the latter, namely China, the European Union, and India.

By Armand Clesse  |  March 15, 2008
Share|
Premium Content
Become A Member
Africa, Review Essays
Assessing the Nuclear Threat

While Langewiesche’s new work has a great “hook,” it offers little new insight into Pakistan’s role in Abdul Qadeer (A.Q.) Khan’s aid and abetment of nuclear weapons proliferation. Moreover, it is largely silent on the danger that Pakistani nuclear weapons might, in the midst of political chaos, slip into al-Qaeda’s murderous hands.

By Richard L. Russell  |  March 15, 2008
Share|