In this book, James N. Rosenau draws together in a helpful, systematic way much of his thinking on global governance and globalization from the past decade. As with other aspects of his work, it is conceptually creative, detailed, and normative. He believes that political science needs to move beyond conceptual frameworks where the nation-state provides the central focus. He justifies this position by arguing that the “the best way to grasp world affairs today requires viewing them as an endless series of distant proximities in which the forces pressing for greater globalization and those inducing greater localization interactively play themselves out” (p. 2). Putting these “distant proximities” at the center of our analysis will challenge distinctions like those between domestic and foreign affairs or comparative politics and international relations.

Part One outlines the theoretical propositions and associated categories of analysis that provide the structure for the subsequent three parts of the book. Rosenau believes that a fundamental transformation has occurred in the world, one that he labels “fragmegration”: dynamics involving processes that are simultaneously localizing, decentralizing, and fragmenting, on the one side, and globalizing, centralizing, and integrating on the other. In these changed circumstances, individual persons become less reliant on tradition and more autonomous as they construct and reconstruct their identities, capacities, strategies, and interests. Consequently, any understanding of politics must build upon the fluidity of these characteristics, particularly as they shape forms of micro–macro interactions. Unintentional or intentional micro (by ordinary persons or activists) inputs or unintentional or intentional macro (by elites or collective actors) inputs are all potential catalysts of change.

Rosenau draws on this reasoning to build a comprehensive set of categories for identifying the principal macroforces and the types of microactors who respond to these forces. Beginning at the microlevel, he focuses on how individuals relate to space and the scale of that space. Those who stress a more proximate horizon are said to inhabit “local worlds,” while those with more distant horizons are occupants of “global worlds.” A third grouping is seen to be so disassociated from public affairs that they have no horizon at all; they are said to inhabit “private worlds.” Within each category, there are, in turn, four types. For example, the author defines four types of global worlds: “affirmative,” “resistant,” “territorial,” and “resistant.” These twelve categories are then mapped on to eight macrofactors: the microtechnological revolution; rapid improvements in skills; the explosion in the creation of voluntary organizations; the bifurcation of global politics; movements of people; the weakening of territoriality, states and sovereignty; crises in authority; and globalization of national economies.

After elaborating on each of the microworlds and their relations to macrodynamics in Part One, Rosenau turns to some additional conceptual challenges arising from these categories in Part Two. He speaks of the need for “complexity theory,” the implications of the skill and information “revolutions,” the nature of authority, and the emergence of “spheres of authority” outside nation-states and intergovernmental institutions. Part Three illustrates the value of the conceptual work by presenting five case studies of issues: progress toward human rights; the challenge of systemic hatred; corruption; prosperity and poverty; and governance. In Part Four, a postscript, he provides a sometimes compelling autobiographical account of his intellectual journey over the past 25 years.

Rosenau's conceptual creativity, his passion for world affairs, and his ability to knit together tidbits of empirical research from across the social science disciplines have permitted him to write a book with much to offer political scientists. Those wrestling with the methodological territorialism of the nation-state era in seeking to understand global politics and global governance, as well as those seeking to understand better the vast range of organizations and activities that have come to be grouped under the heading “global civil society,” will find considerable food for thought. For those interested in globalization theory, the work complements that of such theorists outside political science as Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, Roland Robertson, and Ulf Hannerz, among others.

Rosenau's complex sets of categories and ideal types are open to criticism on three grounds. First, the analytical framework gives little space to aspects of structural power, leaving one with a vision of fluidity of movement and of individual autonomy that may be misleading. Unlike most analyses of globalization, Distant Proximities does not discuss the transformation of capitalism in terms of its global penetration and its perhaps historically unique progress toward globally integrated financial markets and systems. These structural changes in the economy may shape who inhabits which of the author's worlds. Thus, corporate executives, professionals working for global intergovernmental organizations, and nation-state officials working in cooperative arrangements with other states are the most likely inhabitants of several of the global worlds outlined in the book. Similarly, those on the margins of the global economy will congregate in the private worlds and perhaps the “insular” local world.

In providing little place for nation-states in the framework, one also loses sight of power differentials in the system of states, particularly those between the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on the one side and the varied states in the Global South on the other. Most empirical examples, including references to nonstate actors, are drawn from OECD countries, especially the United States. Accordingly, one is left with additional questions. Are the 12 types of microworlds adequate for studying social and political circumstances in countries outside the OECD? If they are adequate, would the vast majority of the world's population be found in only a few of these worlds? If so, are we left with a rather Eurocentric view of fragmegration?

Second, Rosenau makes use of the global–local binary, so often found in the globalization literature. Local and global worlds are distinguished on the basis of the scale of the horizon used by the individual. The difficulty in this approach is that it may not take sufficient account of how the local and the global already interpenetrate each other profoundly. If one walks through the Medina in Tunis and sees Indian spices, DVDs of U.S. movies manufactured in China, and firearms from Russia amidst the many French, Italian, and German tourists, can the inhabitants of Tunis really inhabit a “local world” in such a globalized space? In this respect, does not the author's core concept of “distant proximities” itself undermine the local–global binary?

Finally, Rosenau describes the contemporary period as one of “epochal transformation.” This claim, however, does not draw very much, if at all, on the growing literature of world historians who have come to examine more closely the roots of contemporary globalization and to draw parallels with earlier periods of globalization. They have stressed the integrating and fragmenting effects of empires and technology in the nineteenth century. They have also moved away from “national histories” to look at the flows of ideas, people, biota, and technologies outside Europe and the United States in the past five centuries. These studies force us to think a little more carefully about what is new about the present era and what is continuous with the past. To Rosenau's credit, however, if the integration-fragmentation dynamic is important to the study of globalizing eras in the past, his categories may prove useful to comparative history as well as to the social sciences. This possibility underlines in another way the strengths of this book.