Earlier studies of economic sanctions underestimated the role and importance of more subtle forms of coercion because they concentrated attention on highly public, formally legislated attempts at economic coercion in world politics, such as the cases of Italy in the 1930s and Rhodesia since 1965. The author agrees with Galtung, Knorr, and others that in highly public cases, sanctions will often fail in their avowed political purpose because they actually stimulate nationalism and thus resistance in the target-state; he argues that in an increasingly (but unequally) interdependent world, relatively subtle sanctions can be politically effective—with only moderately purely economic effects—by exploiting the LDC's typically fragmented interest-group and class structure. In order to describe and explain how such economic coercion works, it is necessary to bridge several “islands” of literature: on economic sanctions, on the structure of dependency, and on the causes of political instability.

Soviet political scholars have argued that, since 1970, it has become impossible for the United States to pursue a “positions-of-strength” foreign policy effectively. These analysts feel that in the past, the U.S. has relied heavily on projecting its military strength in diplomatic affairs, and that changes in the international political and economic order now prevent the continuation of this policy. A study of the positions-ofstrength issue in Soviet scholarly journals reveals that Soviet scholars do not agree on how the United States will react to this development. While the majority contends that the U.S. will try to regain its ability to pursue positions-of-strength diplomacy, a significant minority believes that the time is right for a deepening of Soviet-American cooperation. Although the prospects for cooperation appear less promising at present than they did during 1972–1975, the study shows a general softening on the subject of cooperation since 1970.

Britain's experience with the Concorde Project was characterized by changes in the objectives of governmental policy for which the Concorde was to be an instrument. Early in the project, the British state used the Concorde to rationalize Britain's aircraft industry and to enter the E.E.C. Later, the international objective became less salient; the domestic objective, instead of encouragement of efficiency, became maintenance of the industry's employment levels in order to promote political stability. The shift in the purposes of policy can be linked to changes in the power relations beween Britain's society and state. The changes in power relations raise issues about recent characterizations of the British polity and other advanced industrialized societies.

For a long time, the Soviet pattern of development and use of computing differed from the West in terms of time-scale, philosophy, institutional arrangements, capital decisions, and applications. Starting in the late 1950s, a major political, military, and economic reassessment of the value of computing took place; during the next dozen years, the overall Soviet view moved much closer to that of the rest of the developed world. This new perception has been backed by large political and economic commitments. Apparently the Soviet leadership is hoping that computer technology will make the existing economic system more efficient and effective, and will thus help to avoid fundamental reforms that are politically unacceptable. A massive transfer of foreign technology over the last decade has made the Soviet computer industry less isolated than during the 1960s, but its interfaces with the outside world are still narrowly defined. Serious difficulties remain in trying to transplant a sophisticated and pervasive technology into a systemic environment very different from that in which it originated and thrived.

Political scientists have recently turned to the Weberian concept of patrimonialism to explain political stability in some Third-World states. Indonesia during the Guided Democracy period is an example of a regime with strong patrimonial characteristics, although its collapse canot be explained in patrimonial terms. The New Order regime has sought to consolidate its power in patrimonial style. Efforts have been made to de-politicize the masses while confining political competition to non-ideological jockeying for power within the elite. However, the New Order's dependence on economic development to obtain support from key groups outside the military elite has tended to push the regime toward increasing regularization and bureaucratization and growing conflict within the military elite. Moreover, the depoliticization drive may not be effective in the long run. In these circumstances, the patrimonial distribution of the spoils of office as a means of maintaining political stability is likely to be increasingly supported by direct repression.

Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations is a fine work which is right to defend the “moral reality” of war and to dismiss relativist approaches. But he does not provide a defense of his position against beliefs (for example, in absolute pacificism, in revolutionary war, or in collectivist approaches) fundamentally at loggerheads with his own. If the discussion of just war is to be more than an exchange of opinions, there must be attention to ethical foundations.

Ever since arresting the progressive deterioration of the physical habitat emerged as a live political issue in the United States in the early 1960s, it has been a subject of continuing disputation—both as to the urgency of repair and protection, and as to who should bear responsibility for deciding what and how much to undertake or to leave undone. Since all societies, especially industrial societies, are exposed to proliferating damage and hazards from diverse sources, environmental programs compete for support with a multiplicity of other claims on disposable resources. Since nearly everything that is done to maintain a decently livable physical habitat affects to some extent the distribution of income within and among nations, public authority has become increasingly the focus of environmental repair and protection, and the budgetary decisions of government the core of that focus—claims of some economists and other specialists to the contrary notwithstanding. The four books compared in this article consider these and related issues from various perspectives, both domestic and international.