Reviews

Raymond H. Garthoff, The Great Transition: American‐Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Books, 1994, 834 pp., $44.95 h/b, $19.95 p/b.

Nicholas Barr (ed.), Labor Markets and Social Policy in Central and Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press/World Bank, 1994, xviii + 387 pp., $19.95 p/b.

E. A. Rees, Stalinism and Soviet Rail Transport, 1928–41. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1995, xiii + 307 pp., £45.00.

William J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life. Macmillan in association with St Antony's College, Oxford, 1994, ix + 341 pp., £25.00.

David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, xvi + 464 pp., £19.95.

Joseph L. Wieczynski (ed.), Operation Barbarossa: The German Attack on the Soviet Union, June 22, 1941. Salt Lake City: Charles Schlacks, Jr. Publisher, 1993, v + 339 pp.

Keith Sword, Deportation and Exile: Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939–48. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1994, xiii + 269 pp., £45.00.

Andrew Baruch Wachtel, An Obsession with History. Russian Writers Confront the Past. Stanford: Stanford University Press (available, outside North America, from Cambridge University Press), 1994, viii + 276 pp.

Beatrice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, xvi + 421 pp.

Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions, trans, and ed. Gordon C. Wells & Peter Baehr, Cambridge, Polity, 1994, viii + 287 pp., £39.50.     

Book reviews

Tedium or clarification in the study of international relations: the Plethora of “hegemonic decline” works among American scholars

Theodore Geiger, The Future of the International System: The United States and the World Political Economy, Allen and Unwin, Boston and London, 1988, 190pp, £8.95 pbk.

David P. Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alliance, Basic Books, Inc., New York and Wheatsheaf, London, 1987, 288pp, £16.95.

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House, New York, 1987, 677pp, $24.95.

Robert Nisbet, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, Harper & Row, New York, London and Sydney, 1988, 145pp, $17.95.

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon and Schuster, Inc., New York, London and Sydney, 1988, 392pp, $7.95 pbk.

Robert O'Neill and David N. Schwartz (eds), Hedley Bull on Arms Control, Macmillan/IISS, 1987, £27.50.     

Minority Religions and the Context of Violence: A Conflict/Interactionist Perspective

Violence (broadly defined to include collective as well as individual violence) associated with the recent rise of newer religious groups or 'cults', as well as longer-term minority religions, is examined, using a conflict orientation. The interactional nature of such violence is discussed, with accusations of violence concerning minority and newer religions placed in a conflict perspective that stresses the interdependency of religious groups and their opponents. Special attention is given to allegations of: (1) violence derived from group teachings and practices, with a focus on major recent tragic events involving religious groups; and (2) violence directed against members and groups by others, including private individuals and organization, as well as governmental entities.     

Risk assessment with adolescent sex offenders

The paper describes an evaluation of a risk assessment tool's effectiveness in distinguishing adolescent sexual offenders who had committed further sexual offences from those who had not. The sample consisted of 50 male adolescent sexual offenders referred to a forensic outpatient service within a healthcare setting. The adolescents within the sample were designated recidivists versus non-recidivists using two methods: clinican's judgement and Home Office records for reconvictions. The risk assessment achieved a moderate to high level of sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing the recidivists from non-recidivists using clinician's judgement of recidivism as outcome. However, the tool was unable to distinguish recidivists from non-recidivists. The risk assessment tool described has potential in the identification and modification of contextual and clinical risk factors, in informing professionals’ decision-making and in developing and implementing a comprehensive risk management plan.     

New Region,New Story: Imagining Mobile Subjects in Transnational Space

This paper investigates the changing relations between citizens and Europe's internal borders by seeing these relations as objects of governmentality of mobilities. It focuses on the particular discursive space of one transnational ‘corridor in the making’, studying how, through practices of visioning and strategy-making, governmental actors make new transnational governmental territories by breathing life into the imagined mobile subjects of these future territories. These mobile subjects play a central part in the politics of emergent transnational governmentalities and in legitimising potential border-crossing infrastructures. In a case study of the COINCO project (Corridor of Innovation and Co-operation), linking Oslo, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Malmö and Berlin, it is shown how deconstructing imagined mobile subjects reveals the will to power over mobility and sheds light on how governmental practices are remaking European borders.     

Keywords revisited: The present as history

The Partition of India (1947) is commonly understood as a violent territorial and political separation of peoples, their forced evictions and migration as well as communal upheavals. But India's Partition can be seen as something more than separation of communities and the creation of distinct national identities. This paper suggests that refugee rehabilitation, one of the important processes of the post-Partition years, formed the rubric through which we remember 1947. Rehabilitation and resettlement of refugees formed the narrativizing principle of a number of novels that were written in the 1960s and 1970s in Bengal that deliberately looked at the fall-outs of the Partition other than communal tensions and migrations. Rehabilitation created a different experiential reality for a large number of refugees, and issues of home, settlement, livelihood, and work created a new body of literature that re-looked at Partition in important ways. In the course of this paper I examine some such novels in Bangla; one of which, Shaktipada Rajguru's Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (From Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi), is the story of a group of refugees’ journey to Dandakarnaya and then onto Marichjhapi in the Sunderbans that probes the circumstances behind one of Partition's most forgotten histories.