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Blood on the Doorstep: The Politics of Preventive Action. By BARNETT R. RUBIN. New York: Century Foundation Press, 2002. xvi, 256 pp. $46.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
This excellent book, as its subtitle indicates, explores the politics of preventive action in regions of potentially violent conflict. Barnett R. Rubin, director of studies and senior fellow at New York University's Center on International Cooperation, served for six years as founding director of the Center for Preventive Action (CPA) of the Council on Foreign Relations. The CPA, established in 1994, has received funding from the Carnegie Corporation and the Century Foundation (formerly the Twentieth Century Fund) to "push the question of how to stop mass killing into the forefront of U.S. foreign policy" (p. xiii). Blood on the Doorstep: The Politics of Preventive Action describes some of the major conflicts with which the CPA has dealt and draws lessons from those experiences for future preventive-action efforts.
In two introductory chapters, Rubin discusses the work of the CPA and the types of conflicts with which it has dealt: ethnic conflicts, failing states, humanitarian disasters, genocides, and civil wars. His second chapter lays out a perceptive analysis of the global/systemic, state-level, and individual-level sources of such conflicts....