The first half of Peoples Versus States is organized much like its predecessor. The fivefold classification of ethnic groups introduced in Minorities at Risk also frames the new work, though in a slightly revised form. Also repeated in the new book is a detailed and interesting analysis of regional and global trends in ethnopolitical conflict since 1945, expanded with data for the 1990s. Readers will find the usual blend of statistical analysis and case studies, although the emphasis on regional patterns of conflict so central to Minorities at Risk gives way here to 14 group “sketches” illustrating larger themes of the study.

The book opens on a constructivist note, but in fact Peoples Versus States is firmly rooted in the relative deprivation and social movement theories that underlie the Minorities at Risk Project. Chapter 3 explains ethnic conflict as a function of salience, incentives, capacity, and opportunities, with the emphasis very much on incentives. As in Gurr's earlier work, the theoretical message is that “collective disadvantages are the root cause of ethnopolitical action” (p. 163). States that convey these disadvantages by pursuing discriminatory or repressive policies toward minorities will increase the salience of group identity and create strong incentives for political action.

If the continuities enumerated here suggest that Peoples Versus States is the predictable sequel to an earlier best-seller, readers should not be misled. The book offers a fresh and sometimes counterintuitive view of the contentious late twentieth century. We learn, for example, that the number and intensity of communal conflicts peaked in the early 1990s and showed a steady drop for the rest of the decade, indicating that the “long war” has given way to the “short peace” of unknown duration. Gurr gives governing elites and international organizations a substantial share of the credit for initiating this change. “The upsurge in ethnopolitical conflict in the late 1980s and early 1990s,” he writes, “prompted many creative efforts to contain conflict. The irony is that most observers were so preoccupied with the dynamics of escalating conflict that they overlooked the countervailing tendency to find solutions” (p. 152). The second half of the book reports in detail the global shift in public policies that became apparent by the mid-1990s. These policies place less emphasis on cultural assimilation and political control and focus instead on reducing discrimination, recognizing cultural pluralism, and negotiating political inclusion or autonomy for minority groups.

Chapter 4 documents some of these changes, for example, a decline in state-led discrimination after 1990 and a decline in repression after 1986 in every region except sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter also summarizes 268 cases over 40 years (1955–95) and finds, as expected, that severe repression and severe ethnopolitical conflict often go hand in hand. (This message comes through even more clearly in a later chapter, where risk assessment models highlight government repression as the strongest predictor for both protest and rebellion.) Chapter 5 demonstrates that democratization has encouraged, but cannot fully explain, policy moves toward pluralism and accommodation. New democracies, followed by transitional regimes, show the strongest decline in discrimination and cultural restrictions, but some autocracies have moved in this direction as well, and persistent economic discrimination in old democracies has left ethnopolitical groups in these states only slightly better off than they were in the late 1980s.

The surprise here is what has happened in transitional states: These partial and failed democracies have unexpectedly low levels of discrimination and repression, paired with higher-than-predicted levels of communal unrest. Gurr explains this anomaly by revealing interesting regional differences that help make sense of contradictory findings in the literature on democracy and ethnic conflict. For example, democratization heightened protest and rebellion in postcommunist states between 1980 and 1999, but had the opposite effect in the Third World, no matter how successful or unsuccessful the transition. On closer inspection, he finds that the likelihood of ethnic warfare is “most pronounced, or least controllable, in new states” (p. 163), where leaders have few policy options for responding to ethnic challenges.

Gurr sees democratization as only one of the “dynamics” (p. 176) encouraging greater state responsiveness to communal groups. The others—international pressure, pragmatic governing leaders, and activists that capitalize on international support and domestic responsiveness—all reflect what scholars now recognize as a policy environment with a strong “international dimension” (p. 176). He goes further than most, however, arguing that the United Nations and supportive regional and nongovernmental organizations are part of an emerging international regime of “managed ethnic heterogeneity,” aimed at protecting group rights and reducing identity-based conflict (pp. 277–78). To contain conflict in the future, he calls for “coordinated effort by international actors and major powers to facilitate negotiated settlements, guarantee local and regional security, promote democratic power sharing, and assist economic development” (p. 288).

Peoples Versus States is a book of remarkable range, a contribution not only to the literature on ethnopolitical conflict but also to research on human rights, democratic transitions, and negotiated settlements of civil wars. If this were not enough, Chapter 7 (coauthored with Monty G. Marshall) develops risk assessment models for future protest and rebellion that should be useful to policy professionals searching for strategies to reduce the incidence of conflict. A book of this scope makes many empirical claims, and Gurr does not give equal attention to all of them. Descriptive conclusions—ethnopolitical protest and rebellion declined in the 1990s, ethnonational wars declined, discrimination and repression declined as well—are well supported, but some causal claims get little or no direct examination. For example, Chapter 6 argues that “more ethnonational wars have been settled or contained through international engagement and negotiations since the early 1990s than in any decade of the Cold War” (p. 195). Supporting evidence reveals that two-thirds of the autonomy wars concluded in the last 40 years ended in peace agreements negotiated after 1989, but Gurr does not take the analysis further to show that international engagement contributed to this dramatic turn toward peace.

The breadth of his argument also limits the depth of analysis possible on any single issue. This is especially apparent in Chapter 5, which offers fascinating regime-level data to clarify the complex connection between democracy and ethnic conflict, but lacks the finer-grained precision of institutional analyses. These show that some democratic institutions, especially free elections, party competition, and media competition in segmented markets, can produce high levels of conflict in heterogeneous societies with weak civic institutions (See Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence [2000]).

Reviewers have commented that Gurr is more interested in containing ethnic conflict than in explaining what causes it (e.g., see Ivan Light's review of Minorities at Risk in Society [January/February 1995]: 92–93), and the focus of Peoples Versus States is decidedly policy oriented. This, however, is one of its strengths. The literature on ethnic conflict and conflict management is voluminous but fragmented, and it is dominated by case studies. Most published research is either theoretically engaging or rich in facts “on the ground,” but very little of it links theory and practice in a manner that yields generalizations specific enough to be useful to policymakers. Peoples Versus States does this extremely well, and its conclusions are more persuasive than most because they rest on an edifice of large-scale comparative evidence. This is a “must-read” for specialists and policy professionals and an accessible guide to ethnopolitics for everyone else.