January/February 2020 177Chapters on China, India, the United
States, and the Middle East; on the
crises of liberal democracy in places such
as Weimar Germany; and on modern-
day populist movements reinforce the
notion that liberty is deeply contingent
and often ephemeral.World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It)
BY ALEX J. BELLAMY. Oxford
University Press, 2019, 288 pp.The search for peace is as old as war itself.
In this thoughtful account of the “theory
and practice of peace,” Bellamy takes aim
at the old claim that war is hardwired in
human nature, noting that civilizations
and societies have existed for long periods
in relative peace. He argues that the
movement for world peace is not a
wide-eyed utopian project but a prag-
matic endeavor that builds on a long
history of small victories. Although
religious and ethnic wars seem to be on
the rise, Bellamy is more optimistic
about the historical trend away from
conflict: the great powers have abstained
from war with one another for the
longest period in the modern era; the
United Nations has established norms and
institutions for the peaceful settlement of
disputes, peacekeeping, and the protec-
tion of civilians; and the use of force for
territorial conquest has lost its legitimacy
as a tool of statecraft. War will never be
abolished, but humans do have the
capacity to learn, adapt, and reach for the
moral high ground. Bellamy tracks
ongoing efforts to create “minor uto-
pias” through pragmatic and incremen-
tal steps such as placing legal limita-
tions on the conduct of war, building
institutions for conflict mediation,
cooperating on peacemaking after war,Recent Books
Political and Legal
G. John Ikenberry
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies,
and the Fate of Liberty
BY DARON ACEMOGLU AND JAMES A.
ROBINSON. Penguin Press, 2019,
576 pp.L
iberty has been rare in human
history. In this sweeping account
of the rise of the modern world,
Acemoglu and Robinson argue that
only in rare circumstances have states
managed to produce free societies.
States have to walk a thin line to
achieve liberty, passing through what
the authors describe as a “narrow
corridor.” To encourage freedom, states
must be strong enough to enforce laws
and provide public services but also
restrained in their actions and checked
by a well-organized civil society. The
authors call those states that tread this
path “Shackled Leviathans,” govern-
ments dedicated to upholding the rule
of law, protecting the weak against the
strong, and creating the conditions for
broad-based economic opportunity.
Acemoglu and Robinson argue that it
was in medieval Europe that states
began to find the balance that created
the conditions for liberty and economic
advancement. They had inherited
top-down centralizing institutions from
the Roman Empire and bottom-up
participatory dynamics from the
Germanic tribes that had invaded Rome.24_Recent Books_pp_Blues.indd 177 11/18/19 4:33 PM