Content area
Full Text
The Arms Dynamic in World Politics. By Barry Buzan and Eric Herring. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998. 325p. $59.95 cloth, $22.50 paper.
Barry Buzan and Eric Herring have written an ambitious, noteworthy, and integrative book. It is a substantial reworking of Buzan's An Introduction to Strategic Studies: Military Technology and International Relations (1987). In this new book, the authors endeavor to shed the Cold War cast of the earlier volume and avoid the technological determinism evident there. They also wisely drop the pretense of providing an introduction to strategic studies.
Buzan and Herring give readers, and themselves, a full plate. They want to narrow the divide not only between security studies and peace studies but also between security studies and world politics. (American practitioners of security studies, particularly those of the realist variety, will be surprised to learn that security studies and world politics are not identical.) Work from the relatively new enterprise of critical security studies is added to the mix (although the value-added of what some might characterize as the latest version of navel-gazing will not always be apparent to the unconverted). They survey, comment upon, and attempt to link work on military innovation and revolutions in military affairs, the diffusion of military technology, military industrialization and the arms trade, proliferation, arms races, the use of force, deterrence, compellence, symbolic politics, arms control, nonoffensive defense, disarmament, and strategic nonviolence.
Less intrepid souls would wilt in the face of such a task. Buzan and Herring rise to the challenge by adapting the analytical framework first used in An Introduction to Strategic Studies. Part I of The...