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Recent Books

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states to bolster the interests o
develop-
ing countries). In each instance, post-
colonial leaders were not simply seeking
to renegotiate relations between former
imperial masters and newly liberated
peoples. They o€ered a more far-reaching
critique o
prevailing geopolitical and
racial hierarchies, emphasizing cosmo-
politan solidarities and principled
mechanisms for the redistribution o

wealth and power. Getachew traces
these ideas into the 1970s, when, in the
face o
a powerful Westphalian global
order, anticolonial world-making gave
way to more traditional political strug-
gles that reinforced the nation-state.

Constructing Allied Cooperation:
Diplomacy, Payments, and Power in
Multilateral Military Coalitions
BY MARINA E. HENKE. Cornell
University Press, 2019, 258 pp.

This impressive study provides one o

the best e€orts yet to understand how
and why states have built coalitions to
pursue military operations in the face
oœ human atrocities, terrorism, and the
threat o
weapons o
mass destruction.
Surveying dozens o
military operations
since the end oœ World War II, Henke
shows that coalitions rarely emerge
naturally in response to shared percep-
tions o
threats, through a convergence
o
momentary interests, or from the
coercive e€orts o
a hegemonic power.
They need to be built by “pivotal states”
that can overcome obstacles to collec-
tive action and orchestrate complex
military operations. Henke looks closely
at the coalition-building processes
around the Korean War in the 1950s, the
Australian-led operation in East Timor in
1999, the £ deployment in Darfur in

2007, and the £ interventions in Chad
and the Central African Republic in


  1. Henke ¥nds that building
    coalitions requires “embedded
    diplomacy”—a pivotal state’s complex
    array o
    institutional connections and
    networks o
    relations with other states—
    which creates ways for o ̈cials to make
    commitments, bargain, exchange infor-
    mation, and broaden the scope o
    nego-
    tiations to include other issues. Henke
    demonstrates the importance o
    diplo-
    macy and leadership in building a success-
    ful coalition but does not try to determine
    in which circumstances the use o
    military
    force was (or would be) wise or just.


The Arc of Protection: Reforming the
International Refugee Regime
BY T. ALEXANDER ALEINIKOFF
AND LEAH ZAMORE. Stanford
University Press, 2019, 184 pp.

This short book takes a sobering look at
today’s global refugee crisis and presents
an ambitious agenda for action. A record
70 million refugees have ²ed con²icts in
their homelands in recent decades. Most
o
these displaced people have crossed
international borders and are now trapped
in semipermanent camps or are seeking
asylum in countries increasingly hostile to
refugees. Aleiniko€ and Zamore recog-
nize a few positive developments, such as
the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees, a
£ agreement that calls for rich states and
international ¥nancial institutions to
provide more funding to those developing
countries that predominantly shoulder
the refugee burden. But they argue that
the refugee regime is broken and propose
sweeping reforms, starting with the
expansion o
refugee rights and protec-
tions. The keystone o
their approach is

21_Recent Books_Blues.indd 166 1/20/20 5:09 PM

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