One year after the attacks of 9/11, a workshop was held in New York City to explore two questions: How does the United Nations respond to terrorism, and how has the international environment been changed by terrorism? This well-edited selection of chapters, first presented at the workshop sponsored by CUNY's Ralphe Bunche Institute and the University of Oxford's Centre for International Studies, offers a thorough examination of the UN post-9/11, and provides an inventory of the questions now facing scholars of international conflict and international organization.

Editors Jane Boulden and ThomasWeiss provide an analytical framework in their introduction, emphasizing that the work focuses on the United Nations, not terrorism. The two, of course, are inextricably linked. The paradigm shifts examined in UN organizational functions and in the issue area of security are driven heavily by the phenomenon of terrorism. The editors and contributing authors all address the core conceptual problem surrounding the definition of terrorism and the numerous difficulties that stem from the lack of consensus on a definition. Neither the editors nor authors address the fundamental contradiction built into the UN's charter and values, that is, that sovereign states have a right to security (including self-defense when threatened) and that peoples have a legitimate right to struggle for their national self-determination. The inevitable clash of these two rights is captured in the dilemma terrorism poses, and it merits greater exploration in this work. Editors Boulden and Weiss also claim correctly that the existing literatures on terrorism and U.S. foreign policy have generally neglected the role of the United Nations; Bruce Hoffmann's Inside Terrorism (1998) is the exception, and he uses the “definition” chapter to explore why the United Nations has been stymied in its efforts to define and act effectively against terrorism. The more recent and abundant studies of terrorism, such as Yonah Alexander's Combating Terrorism (2002), looks at the counterterror strategies of 10 countries, and Walter Laqueur's The New Terrorism (1999) notes few links between managing terrorism and the United Nations.

The strength and significant contribution of this work is its dual commitment to studying the transforming and interactive effect of terrorism on the UN and the international security environment. To that end, it includes works on international law and the inherent difficulties of interinstitutional cooperation, as well as in-depth looks at the organizational dynamics of the Security Council and the General Assembly. The post-9/11 approach gives Terrorism and the UN a distinct advantage; two leading UN works, Multilateral Diplomacy and the United Nations Today by James P. Muldoon et al.(1999), and the second edition of The United Nations in the Post–Cold War Era by Karen A. Mingst and Margaret P. Karns (2000), must be revised in light of the shattering effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This work will be of interest to scholars of American foreign policy and will be quite useful as a companion reader in foreign policy, international organization, and international conflict seminars. Of particular interest will be the discussion on “The Role of the Security Council” by Chantal de Jonge Oudraat; “The Root Causes of Terrorism and Conflict Prevention” by Rama Mani; and “The US, Counterterrorism, and the Prospects for a Multilateral Alternative” by Edwin C. Luck. All three bridge the multidisciplinary divide posed by the study of terrorism and the UN.

Oudraat's contribution is in her identification of the five trends (pp. 151–52) that drive terrorism to higher levels of salience in Washington, D.C., and the Security Council: an increase in the proportion of terrorist attacks aimed at the United States, the rising number of casualties in attacks, the mounting evidence of a global terrorist network, growing concern over terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction, and state support for terrorism. Coupled with her discussion of post-9/11 trends in militarizing and globalizing international responses to terrorism, Oudraat enriches significantly the discussion on unilateral versus multilateral policy options in the U.S. policy arsenal.

Rama Mani touches on another linkage worth exploring: that international conflict scholars and those focusing on international organizations share a growing interest in the root causes of conflict, especially scholars focusing on conflict prevention. The “root causes” debate has been politically charged, but Rama cogently explores (pp. 225–37) it along three causal axes: poverty/despair, failed states, and “clash of civilizations.”

Finally, Luck, whose recent Mixed Messages: American Politics and International Organization, 1919–1999 (1999) explored long-term trends in U.S. unilateralism, multilateralism, and exceptionalism in international affairs, makes yet another compelling argument for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of conflict and organizations that fight it. He assesses the Bush administration's efforts to invoke multilateral support for the war on terrorism as having been undermined by “a series of self-inflicted disabilities” and “garbled public diplomacy” (p. 75), but it is interesting to note that he rejects outright “complaints about excessive unilateralism in the US response to the terrorist attacks of September 11” (p. 92). Foreign policy and international organization scholars will find this counterintuitive and provocative grist.

Overall, the 10 chapters in this collected work are well edited and coherently organized, and they benefit from a unifying analytical framework. The implicit premise of the work, that greater multidisciplinary research bridging both international organization and international conflict will expedite our understanding of the impacts of 9/11, is compellingly well argued. This book clearly and usefully fills a void in the literature and promises to stimulate continued cross-disciplinary work on the new security environment.