Postconflict reconstruction has become an increasingly prominent topic of international policymaking in recent years. Fighting and winning wars, while still a prominent part of global political life, has been joined by more or less comprehensive efforts to put back together the societies devastated by violent conflict. Under such circumstances, an important part of the vocation of scholars of world politics should be the development of systematic social-scientific knowledge about such processes of reconstruction, perhaps in part so that we can contribute to ongoing debates about these processes in appropriate ways. These two books constitute impressive but incomplete contributions to the ongoing scholarly conversation, illustrating as they do two different approaches to the study of postconflict reconstruction.

The two books present very differently from the outset. In From War to Democracy, Anna K. Jarstad and Timothy D. Sisk have assembled a team of specialists to contribute to a single edited volume designed to bring together the literatures on democratic transitions and postwar peacebuilding. With one eye on the sphere of practice and another on the sphere of academic debate, they guide their contributors through the exploration of four “dilemmas” that present themselves when an introduction of democracy into postconflict situations is attempted (pp. 21–26): which parties to include in a fledgling democratic system, the relative balance of elite versus mass control of the political process, the appropriate level of involvement by the international community, and short-run versus long-run effects. Their overall conclusion is that given these dilemmas, “there is no single or ideal sequence for a war-to-democracy transition,” and that therefore the “uniqueness of context” must be foregrounded in determining the proper course of action for any particular situation (p. 252). But there are also some more general lessons, particularly the cautionary note that pressing for elections too soon after the cession of hostilities may be detrimental to long-term democratic stability (pp. 248–49).

Kenneth H. Jarausch's After Hitler, on the other hand, is adamantly opposed to general lessons, focusing exclusively on the experience of Germany after World War II and repeatedly cautioning readers to be skeptical about the transferability of the German experience (e.g., p. 280). Instead of a general framework, Jarausch provides an in-depth account of the multifaceted process through which German society recovered from the Nazi experience and its aftermath, gathering up the numerous threads of this process under the concept of the “civilized society”: a society in which “peaceful exchanges among various elements in society” are the norm, and tolerance and responsibility replace genocidal annihilation (pp. 12–13). His account emphasizes the combination of factors, ranging from Soviet heavy-handedness in East Germany to the appeal of American films and rock-and-roll music to West German youth, that produced contemporary Germany, a society not fully civilized—no society ever is—but a society that is more civilized than its predecessor, and one that can perhaps as a result of its experiences play a special role in helping its neighbors to the East in transitioning from Communist rule toward a more civil society.

At first glance, one may be tempted to regard these differences as merely cosmetic, a question of the “richness” of a detailed case-study account versus the “rigor” of a broader effort to evaluate general propositions. Or, one might be tempted to regard these two books as simply having different dependent variables: a robust civil society on the one hand, a peaceful democracy on the other. But such characterizations would be somewhat misleading. The differences between these two books are methodological, in the sense that they do not involve issues of the kind of data that one uses or the way that one presents results, but instead involve more fundamental issues of research design and the relationship between theory and empirics. In its quest for nomothetic knowledge, the Jarstad and Sisk volume locates itself in a tradition of hypothesis testing and the drive to look for cross-case covariations between variables, a tradition that sacrifices in-depth knowledge of any particular situation for a broader set of claims about what is generally the case. In his historical-analytical identification of contingencies and (implicitly) moments where the course of events might have been very different, Jarausch eschews such nomothetic knowledge in favor of a more comprehensive account of one particular society's journey from the trauma of war to its present-day situation. But much of the Jarstad and Sisk book sits uncomfortably within its declared nomothetic framework, suggesting space for a further elaboration of their project in a more historical-analytical direction.

The nomothetic orientation of Jarstad and Sisk's volume is perhaps most apparent in their treatment of the four dilemmas that they identify. Each dilemma arises because of adverse effects that, according to the relevant literature, democratization can have on peacebuilding and vice versa. In her contribution to the volume, Page Fortna promptly converts this into a series of sophisticated regression models designed to distinguish between the direct and indirect effects of peacekeeping on democratization (p. 51)—the kind of models that could, in principle, resolve the dilemmas in question by finding the optimal mix of factors for promoting both democracy and peace. But the data tell a different story: “[P]eacekeeping is good for democracy, and bad for it at the same time,” because while its indirect effects on democratization (by promoting stable peace) are good, its direct effects are largely negative (p. 76). Faced with such a repudiation of a simple solution, one might have expected to find the remaining chapters in the volume devoted to detailed examinations of how actors manage to deal with these dilemmas in practice, but what we get instead are brief accounts of how peacebuilding and democratization impede each other, as when “formal criteria for inclusion in peace processes” lead paramilitaries to adopt “new forms of violence” so that they can continue to be included (p. 97), or when the uncertainty of electoral outcomes provokes violence instead of an acceptance of the democratic process (p. 165). In other words, the remainder of the chapters largely confine themselves to illustrating the lawlike relationships identified in Fortna's chapter, and empirically identifying concrete manifestations of the different combinations of variables that Fortna's models contain.

There is, however, another way to go about dealing with dilemmas, which is to treat them not as opportunities for trade-offs between likely effects, but as composed of fundamentally irreconcilable demands and tendencies that concrete historical actors have to negotiate practically because they are not susceptible to consistent intellectual reduction. This kind of analytical social science, which would concern itself more with posing dilemmas sharply then with providing neat solutions to them, would not concern itself with elucidating relationships in general, but with clarifying the abstract logic of democratization or peacebuilding and then using that abstract clarification as a way of making sense of concrete situations. As Max Weber might have said, such an analytical ordering of actuality would use general statements not as conclusions but as instruments: as means for making sense of the dynamics of a complex world. Far from making the dilemmas go away, such an approach would shed light on how the tensions between peacebuilding and democratization play out in practice.

Such an analytical approach is more closely exemplified by Jarausch's book, which delves into one situation in detail. By looking at how a variety of processes and mechanisms concatenate to generate outcomes, he provides both an empirically rich account of how Germany became a stable democracy and a historically sensitive survey of the variety of factors implicated in the reconstruction process. Those factors range from the relatively idiosyncratic and situationally specific—like the fact that the German army had experienced a complete defeat in 1945, leaving no room for the kind of “stab in the back” myth that had sustained German militarism after World War I (p. 35)—to broader phenomena like the traditional identification of liberal values with a Western or Occidental tradition encompassing both Germany and the occupiers of its western regions (p. 112) and the anticommunism of the Cold War that enabled stable, encompassing electoral coalitions to form (p. 137). The analytical narrative that Jarausch constructs details the way that these factors come together to foreclose options, such as a neutral but unified Germany, and to make the emulation of the American model of society and polity quite an attractive option (p. 64). Although he does not provide the kind of abstract account of causal factors that would allow the reader to comprehensively appreciate just how creatively specific actors were able to combine items to achieve outcomes, he does hint at such a catalog from time to time. A more explicit and rigorous analytical apparatus in which mechanisms were spelled out (on the model of Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, and Doug McAdam, Dynamics of Contention, 2001) would have helped to solidify the argument.

Would the embrace of such an approach negate the benefits promised by the elucidation of nomothetic generalizations? Chief among those benefits, famously, is the ability to give policy-relevant advice about appropriate courses of action based on their expected outcomes. But historical-analytical social science has its own kind of advice to proffer: a more phronetic kind of advice, rooted in a practical sensibility about situations and how their potential might be developed (as in Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, 2001). Developing and refining such a practical sensibility is perhaps best accomplished through detailed analytical reconstructions of concrete situations, so as to call attention to their most salient aspects. A follow-upn volume to Jarstad and Sisk's might easily take this tack, substituting detailed examinations of concrete situations for the anecdotal illustration of large-n generalizations; the volume's contributors clearly have a wealth of situationally specific knowledge on with to draw, and such a volume would allow them to use that knowledge to its full extent. Such a volume would also expand on the insight that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for postwar peacebuilding and democratization, but would be able to do so without remaining shackled to a methodology that is ill-suited to the analysis of concrete situations in their specificity. There are ways to handle multiple cases that do not involve forsaking specificity in order to pursue generalization—and such ways just might be better than a regression model for the guidance of practical action.