Although the new interventionism of United Nations peace making, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding begins in 1990–91, such as in El Salvador, Cambodia, and the 1992 Agenda for Peace that Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali submitted to the Security Council, the dominant practices of these interventions were developed in Bosnia-Herzegovina and then Kosovo. Patrice McMahon focuses in The NGO Game on the role of these international missions in promoting civil society through support to non-governmental organizations, both local and international, but the empirical meat of the book occurs in her two case studies of Bosnia and Kosovo. It should, therefore, be of particular interest to readers of the Slavic Review.

The motivation for McMahon's concept of an NGO game is the sharp rise of funding for non-governmental organizations and their presence in post-conflict peacebuilding missions after 1990, then the sharp drop off in each case after a period of time. The “game” is the attraction for people in these conflict-affected cases of this rush of money, although that attraction is never demonstrated, only assumed, and while she argues that this explosion of funds is due to a change in the international system after 1990, her data show that the rise in NGOs funding begins at the end of WWII and drops off dramatically around 1990. Her claim of a boom and bust, which may well be the case, needs to be demonstrated with case-level data, which would be difficult to get and she does not provide. Data are a main obstacle to much of what she argues, but she is quite open about its problems. She situates her argument in the international relations literature, arguing that it has ignored non-governmental organizations. Given its focus on interstate relations and states as often unitary actors, this is unsurprising, although this ignores important recent work on transnational movements that do address NGOs. Why McMahon did not situate her argument in the literature on peacebuilding is not clear because there her arguments about international missions and the consequences of funding NGOs, largely international NGOs with scraps for local NGOs, and their imposed projects and outcomes—that they ignore local NGOs and have negative consequences in general—are extremely rich and make the same arguments at length. There is nothing new in this. It's particularly sad to miss reference to the work by Michael Foley, for example, or Paul Stubbs on Bosnia, and her apparent misunderstanding of why Haitians label their country, devastatingly, as The Republic of NGOs. McMahon makes a strong statement about the new economic power of NGOs, without empirical support and which my data dispute, and while she recognizes differences among types of NGOs and their goals, the analysis and data do not distinguish sufficiently. The difference between humanitarian NGOs and those related to democratization are important, but not sufficiently discussed.

The two case studies demonstrate the true difficulties for SR readers of limited field research. McMahon's evidence is largely from interviews, building in the biases of her interviewees and nothing systematic; in Bosnia, moreover, she only gathers information in the Federation, nothing in the Serb Republic, and the timing matters—she begins in Bosnia more than five years after the peace accord and in Kosovo less than two years after the NATO intervention. Nonetheless, the two cases provide superb comparative insights that I invite. The two had very different conflicts, pre-war civil societies, and international missions; the comparison would be fascinating. I encourage it. More detail on local NGOs in both cases, both before and during their conflicts, and their differences, would be very important for readers to know, as would her intriguing assertion that the “bust” era led local NGOs to create, innovate, and revive.

The many typographical errors are a disappointment (Christopher Hall instead of Hill and community instead of communist period) and factual mistakes (on the role of the US in these interventions, 40, 46; the leading role of the World Bank in needs assessments and its overall approach, 45–46, 52, 56; the origins of responsible sovereignty, 78; that Bosnia was largely Muslim, 94; her total neglect of the role of UNPROFOR, 95; the origins of the federation in Bosnia, 96; that the Helsinki Committee was one of the oldest NGOs in Bosnia, 106) in such a serious work. It is a very important topic.