War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America

Scholars of Latin America have recently begun to apply the bellicist approach to state building to the region, the central claim of which is that wars are a great stimulus to centralizing state power and building institutional capacity. This article argues that current applications of these models of state building are too narrowly specified to be of much use in Latin America or elsewhere in the developing world. Replacing the focus on interstate war with the more general phenomenon of interstate rivalry, alongside the consideration of intrastate rivals, allows us to account for the impact of both external and internal forces on the development of the state. I demonstrate the utility of this approach through several cross-sectional time-series analyses that provide evidence that external and internal rivals affect the Latin American state in a manner consistent with the general nature of bellicist theory.     

Reviews

Gilbert Rozman, Seizaburo Sato & Gerald Segal, eds, Dismantling Communism: Common Causes and Regional Variations. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, x + 405 pp., £28.50. Ben Fowkes, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993, xv + 228 pp., £40.00

Stephen Whitefield, Industrial Power and the Soviet State. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 279 pp; £35.00

Steve H. Hanke, Lars Jonung & Kurt Schuler, Russian Currency and Finance: A Currency Board Approach to Reform. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, xvi + 222 pp., £35.00.

Gregory S. Alexander & Grazyna Skapska eds, A Fourth Way? Privatization, Property, and the Emergence of New Market Economies. New York, London: Routledge, 1994, xxiii + 336 pp., £40.00 h/b, £14.99 p/b.

John and Carol Garrard (eds), World War II and the Soviet People. Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990. New York: St Martin Press, 1993, 268 pp. $45.00.

John Barber & Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II. London and New York: Longman, 1991, xiii + 252pp

Richard Debo, Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918–1921. Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1992, xiii + 502 pp., £42.00.

Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, xvii + 312 pp., $24.95, ;19.95.

Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, xi + 289 pp. £32.50 h/b, £12.99 p/b.     

Book reviews

Word Processing for Solicitors, Kevin Townsend and Kate Taphouse, Gower Publishing, 1983 £12.50

Computer Law, Colin Tapper, Longman, London and New York, 1983 Third Edition, £9.50

Understanding Computer Contracts, Martin Edwards, Waterlow Publishers, 1983 £6.50

Data Protection: Perspectives on Information Privacy, Edited by Colin Bourn & John Benyon, Department of Adult Education, University of Leicester, 1983 £5

The Computer in Court, Alistair Kelman and Richard Sizer, Gower Publishing Company, 1982 £15.50

Principles of Database Systems, Jeffrey D Ullman, Pitman Publishing Ltd, 1982 Second Edition £13.95

Computers and the Law Teacher, A report of the proceedings of a conference held at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, Edited by David V Marshall, North Staffordshire Polytechnic, 1983 £3     

Public accountability: Effectiveness, equity, ethics

This article tests a wide range of government activities against requirements for public accountability. The article explores the incentives for ethical behaviour by public officials; the need for more outcome focused performance indicators, tensions between parliamentary and managerial accountability; the standards of accountability applied to public providers of services can be applied to private providers; the utility of spelling out service requirements in advance; the impacts on accountability of the convergence of the public and private sectors; the need, where responsibility for programs is collaborative, for a clear governance framework, tensions between representative and participative democracy, and trends towards more participative and collaborative leadership.     

Breach of Confidence as a Privacy Remedy in the Human Rights Act Era

This article examines the impact of the Human Rights Act (HRA) on the current lack of a remedy for non-consensual publication of personal information by the media. It argues that the action for breach of confidence is now ripe for development into a privacy law in all but name and that the normative impetus for this enterprise can be found in the HRA which will require domestic courts to consider Convention jurisprudence. It will suggest that when Strasbourg decisions are examined in the context of more general Convention doctrines, they may be seen to suggest the need for an effective privacy remedy. Drawing upon approaches from other jurisdictions it seeks to demonstrate that principled solutions may be found to the thicket of legal problems associated with such development. It contends that the main objection to this enterprise, the perceived threat to media freedom, is largely misplaced, as analysis at the theoretical and doctrinal levels reveals that speech and privacy interests are in many respects mutually supportive and the areas of conflict small and readily susceptible to resolution.     

Federalism and democratization in Russia

The scholarly literature on democratic transitions has largely ignored developments at the local level and the relationship between federalism and democracy. In this work I examine the development of federalism in Russia and I assess the impact of Russia's highly asymmetrical form of federalism on democratisation. The study shows that federalism far from promoting democracy has allowed authoritarianism to flourish in many of Russia's eighty nine regions and republics. Federalism and democratization in Russia exist in contradiction rather than harmony. In a vicious circle, authoritarianism at the centre has been nourished by authoritarianism in the region and vice versa. “Elective dictatorships” and “delegative democracies” are now well entrenched in many republics, and mini-presidential systems are firmly established in a majority of the regions.