development of a world society or cosmopolitan society
on the basis of the court’s universal values. He offers Barry
Buzan’s (2003) From International to World Society? as a
framework for thinking about the ICC because “it expo-
ses some of the key tensions between a society of states
and world society, including the role of collective enforce-
ment” (p. 83). Roach applies Isaiah Berlin’s theory of value
pluralism and David Held’s cosmopolitanism to discuss
the tension between the ICC’s universal morality and the
autonomy of national communities in an innovative way.
He concludes that the ICC constitutes a weak form of
cosmopolitanism with the potential to move global poli-
tics in a more cosmopolitan direction. He adds that the
ICC faces the challenge of maintaining discursive legiti-
macy in a new global cosmopolitan society; otherwise it
risks becoming the rigidly legalistic enforcer of a new repres-
sive form of global governance (p. 94). This last concern
vastly overstates the risk of growth in the ICC’s power.
The court was deliberately designed in a way that makes it
dependent on cooperation from states, and so if at any
point it loses broad consensual support, it may well be
ineffective, but certainly would be unable to impose its
will through coercion. Roach spends the bulk of his time
on development of the normative theory, with a fairly
limited discussion of its application to the ICC. His analy-
sis of the cosmopolitan potential of the ICC is certain to
frame subsequent discussion on this point if the court
continues to grow in strength and authority.
The final chapters focus on particular challenges the
ICC faces in reconciling its effort to ensure a universal
end to impunity with national politics and legal cultural
autonomy. Chapter 6 reviews the aggressive resistance of
the court’s authority by the United States, Chapter 7
addresses the tension between Shariah law and inter-
national criminal law, and Chapter 8 examines the poten-
tial for cooperation between the ICC and the UN Security
Council. Each of these chapters concludes with innova-
tive and interesting but also somewhat radical proposals
for gradual accommodation between the ICC and its oppo-
nents. In the end, this book raises more questions than it
answers for political scientists who want to understand
the potential role of the court in world politics. It does
offer a clear conceptual framework for analyzing the polit-
ical role of the ICC as an institution. Future researchers
will thus want to build on this work.
Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global
Assemblages. By Saskia Sassen. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006. 502p. $35.00.
DOI: 10.1017/S1537592707071423
— Joachim K. Rennstich, Fordham University
The globalization literature has now reached a level of
maturity that allows one to distinguish between different
schools of thought. Whereas the first two stages broadly
dealt with the process at large (its development and man-
ifestation), the latest generation of scholarship seems mostly
concerned with its current and future governance. Saskia
Sassen’s latest contribution to this dialogue is similar to
Andrew Drainville’s recent volume (Contesting Globaliza-
tion, 2004) for which she wrote the introduction. Both
defend the need to situate the globalization discourse in
concrete locations to gain a fuller understanding of it.
More specifically, in Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medi-
eval to Global Assemblages, Sassen presents an extensively
developed criticism of the globalization literature. Sassen
argues that both critics and proponents of the globaliza-
tion concept in its latest iteration miss crucial develop-
ments of the transformative processes captured by the term
“globalization” in their focus on established actors and
institutional forms. She argues for the need to situate glob-
alization more concretely and broadly, in terms of both
space and place (i.e., territory), and for the establishment
of new organizing logics, which manifest themselves in
new combinations of authority and rights. Even though
Sassen builds on her previous scholarship, this is a novel
work—and a most welcome and important contribution
to this field, as she not only points out the shortcomings
of existing approaches, but provides a well-theorized prop-
osition on how to remedy them.
Sassen is mostly concerned with the failure of existing
theoretical approaches to globalization to escape what
she terms the “endogeneity trap” (aiming to understand
globalization by confining its study to the characteristics
of globalization, i.e., global processes and institutions),
arguing instead for an approach that focuses on neither
the Y (globalization) nor the X (global process and insti-
tutions). Instead, albeit never explicitly, Sassen argues for
an evolutionary approach to the study of globalization,
explaining globalization through the complex and dynamic
organizing logic that binds its core elements. Evolution-
ary models are characterized by a focus on change, dynam-
ics, and selection. Change in this view is constant and
yet never linear in its unfolding; its pace, intensity, and
impact are shaped by the environment in which it unfolds.
Such change processes affect the development of environ-
ments that in turn produce “feedback effects.” The human
political, social, and economic world constitutes such an
environment of dynamic change and feedback effects.
According to Sassen, this allows the opening of “possibil-
ity space” where potential options for change become
possible.
Grasping this process requires us to “historicize both
the national and the global as constructed conditions”
(p. 4)—a difficult and complex task, as Sassen admits.
Rather than focusing on the complex wholes—the national
and the global—she instead proposes to disaggregate each
of them into their foundational components, namely the
establishment of territory, authority, and rights, therefore
separating these processes from their “particular historical
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Book Reviews | International Relations
416 Perspectives on Politics

encasements” (p. 5). By studying the organizing logic driv-
ing the specific combination of these interdependent com-
ponents, she hopes to better understand the formation of
both the “national” and the “global,” and the “tipping
points” that precipitate “particular assemblage(s) of spe-
cific institutionalizations of territory, authority, and rights”
(p. 404).
The first part of the book focuses on the foundational
shifts, whereby the national was constructed through a
repositioning of particular medieval capabilities. Sassen
then proceeds to examine a similar foundational shift
currently underway, centered on the disassembling of
the national and the emergence of new assemblages asso-
ciated with global digital technologies and relations. Sas-
sen’s core contribution is precisely her disaggregation of
“the glue that for a long time held possibly different nor-
mative orders together under the somewhat unitary dynam-
ics of nations.” Not to be confused with a vision of
globalization as a mere “denationalization” process, Sas-
sen’s approach allows for the identification of globaliza-
tion as a “proliferation of specialized assemblages” with a
tendency toward a remixing of constitutive rules—the shifts
of the private-public division, the microtransformations
of the relationship of citizen to the state and the “multi-
plication of partial systems, each with a small set of sharply
distinctive constitutive rules, amounting to a type of sim-
ple system” (p. 422). Though not exactly mirroring the
medieval world of overlapping domains of authority, ter-
ritory, and rights, this newly emerging system sheds the
overarching “Westphalian” logic for a new one that allows
for multiple sets of borderlines (both within as well as
across existing national ones), coexisting normative orders
that shake up established meanings of private and public,
as well as coexisting and parallel establishments of rights
(and wrongs).
Territory, Authority, Rights is a call to arms for an inno-
vative and evolutionary approach to the study of global-
ization. The strong emphasis Sassen puts on questions of
epistemology makes it therefore somewhat surprising that
she does not draw more explicitly on the existing litera-
ture in this field or even mark her work explicitly as belong-
ing to it. We are presented with evolutionary models of a
variety of creations, selection mechanisms, and path-
dependencies, the establishment of systems through dupli-
cation of certain organizational arrangements (forming
capabilities), yet nowhere does the author place her own
approach explicitly in this literature.
Although they are slowly emerging as an analytical tool
in political science, evolutionary approaches are well-
established in many other sciences (especially economics).
This might explain both Sassen’s excitement about the
possibilities of such an approach and its explanatory power,
as well as her reluctance to place her work in this category
before an audience largely unfamiliar with evolutionary
approaches outside biology and regrettably prone to asso-
ciating social scientific evolutionary studies with “social
Darwinism.”
The problem of such a stealthy evolutionary approach
becomes apparent when she invokes the concept of com-
plex systems, largely ignoring the existing literature in this
field. This limits her analysis of the dynamics of such
systems, the core focus of what her model aims to explain.
Yet, compared to the task Sassen takes on in this book,
these are minor quibbles from a more than sympathetic
reviewer thankful for such a well-crafted and rich analysis.
Territory, Authority, Rights is endowed with a theoretical
depth all too often lacking in existing approaches seem-
ingly stuck in the endogenous trap Sassen so eloquently
evades.
Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the
Balance of Power. By Randall L. Schweller. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006. 200p. $29.95.
DOI: 10.1017/S1537592707071435
— Evan Resnick, Yeshiva University
In this insightful and elegantly written book, Randall
Schweller examines the phenomenon of underbalancing,
which he defines as situations in which “threatened coun-
tries have failed to recognize a clear and present danger,
or, more typically, have simply not reacted to it or, more
typically still, have responded in paltry and imprudent
ways” (p. 1). The study is motivated by the failure of
many states throughout history to act in accordance with
the cardinal prediction of structural realist theory that states
will tend to balance against rising powers that threaten
their survival, through the acquisition of arms and/or allies.
Schweller argues that domestic political factors account
for this discrepancy, enhancing or diminishing the ability
and/or willingness of states to mobilize their national
resources in response to systemic dangers.
Specifically, Schweller identifies four variables that shape
the balancing behavior of a given state. These are elite
consensus, elite cohesion, government/regime vulnerabil-
ity, and social cohesion. The first two variables affect a
state’s willingness to balance, while the latter two affect its
ability to mobilize the national resources necessary to bal-
ance. In short, he hypothesizes that a state will be more
susceptible to underbalancing if its political elites are
divided about the source and urgency of the threat, its
political leadership is fragmented by internal fissures, its
government is politically weak and highly vulnerable to
electoral or violent deposition, and its society is rent by
deep social divisions. By contrast, a state that possesses a
united and cohesive political elite, a politically secure
regime, and an integrated society will be more likely to
balance threats effectively. Schweller adds that if such favor-
able conditions obtain in the absence of an external threat,
the result will not be defensive balancing behavior but,
rather, opportunistic expansionism.
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