The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York represented both a new threat and an old story. They constituted the first assault of such a magnitude on U.S. territory by a nonstate actor in U.S. history, but they were also merely the next (and, in hindsight, predictable) stage in an ongoing global offensive by radical Islamist groups against the symbols and structures of perceived Western dominance of global political, economic, and legal structures. The attacks were also, in many ways, simply a grand-scale version of the attacks that for much of the twentieth century were a ubiquitous, if low-level, security concern across much of the rest of the world.

Simultaneously explicating the events and aftermath of 9/11 as both novelty and continuity is one of the great strengths of the present volume. The title is well chosen, as it reflects the way that the volume's authors capture the nuances of the transnational response to terrorist organizations' increasingly sophisticated strategies. The authors invite us to consider the likely fate of the human rights regime in the longer term, and to look farther into the future than most administrations, in the United States or elsewhere, are likely to do.

At least two arguments, then, whether implicitly or explicitly made, run through and bind together the otherwise widely ranging chapters in this volume. First, the authors do not take for granted that the Bush administration's declaration of a sea change in international relations reflected the reality experienced by the rest of the international community. While the perception of its own invulnerability by the United States certainly changed in a pervasive and permanent way, many features of the international system of norms and laws have proven to be remarkably resilient. Second, while (perhaps understandably) most early analyses of the immediate responses to 9/11 focused on particular nation-states, the authors of this volume believe that with the waning of the state's centrality to international dynamics, we must evaluate the human rights regime based upon its truly transnational features, examining the state of international laws, organizations, and civil society a decade after that event.

Significantly, it is these transnational structures and processes that we might expect to be most likely to demonstrate continuity and resilience. Individual nation-states are beholden to their people and their territorial commitments. Their leaders are under constant electoral pressure to respond, and to do so in a way that demonstrates significant effort, if not always significant effect. Moreover, the electoral cycle dooms them to consider extremely short-term payoffs. No wonder, then, that analysts of the foreign and domestic policies of the United States and Europe have found so much change, for good, ill, or nought, at the nation-state level.

In this sense, Human Rights in the 21 ^stCentury makes a significant contribution to several related fields that quickly became crowded with concerned observers after 9/11. Since this volume focuses on the international human rights regime, it contributes to regime theory more broadly by evaluating the resilience of those legal and institutional structures so painstakingly erected in the wake of the worst horrors of World War II. The authors also contribute to the crucial debate over the potential power of norms: The volume can also be seen as an extended case study in whether the still-young and fragile norm of universal human rights can withstand an extreme realist turn of the system leader (who was also a key midwife to that regime). Finally, given the magnitude of this test, the authors' findings arguably reflect on human rights theory more generally. Certainly taken together, the arguments found herein tell us a great deal about the ways and reasons that norms mature, sometimes enough to move state behavior off the equilibrium (realist) path.

The chapters range widely in their structure and topic; the editors state in the introduction that they gave the chapter authors substantial latitude, requiring only that they “locate their arguments with respect to broader questions about the regime, and that they say something about the 1990s as a baseline of comparison” (pp. 6–7). Allowing such free rein can be risky, in that it makes the conclusions that can be drawn about the collection taken as a whole necessarily rather broad. There are few analyses among the chapters that are directly comparable in great detail. However, regimes are inherently somewhat messy, and the fact that this particular group of authors chose to speak to this particular cross-section of topics is likely an accurate reflection of the piecemeal nature of the international human rights regime.

Thus, the editors include three chapters (by Jack Donnelly, Morton Emanuel Winston, and Julie Mertus and Tazreena Saijad) that broadly survey the continuities and (fewer) changes in the regime at the system level, followed by two (by Michael Goodhart and Lauri Malksoo) that analyze human rights and terror discourses in the United States and Russia after 9/11. The third section of the volume focuses broadly on Europe, with Jamie Mayerfeld contrasting legal treatment of torture in the United States and Europe, Anja Mihr exploring cross-Europe structures and processes that contributed to the resilience of the human rights regime there, and Patricia Schneider introducing yet another type of comparison, this time between European Union and United Nations human rights mechanisms. The section closes with country-specific chapters focusing on the Netherlands (Peter Baehr) and Canada (Yan St. Pierre), the latter of course the exception to the European focus of the other chapters in this section. And the final section focuses on the impact on nonstate actors that do or should arguably have some responsibilities for human rights, with chapters on nongovernmental organizations (Hans-Peter Schmitz and Lena Barrett) and private sectors (Brigitte Hamm), respectively.

Therefore, not only does the unit of analysis differ across the chapters, but so too does the number of cases each includes and the key variables of interest. While the volume's structure thus makes causal inferences difficult, it does allow us a wide-angle snapshot of the human rights regime as it has both affected and been affected by states, the system, and nonstate actors, as well as how it has both impacted and responded to the redefinitions of terms and shifts in relationships that have occurred in the international security environment since 9/11.

The United States has long held itself above many constraints of international human rights laws (continuing a long tradition of exceptionalism, as Goodhart argues), even while invoking them in instances that are politically expedient. However, many human rights scholars have argued that—even when given only superficial and instrumental respect—such laws and the norms they represent have the power to change interests over time, as generations are replaced, perhaps even supplanting old realpolitik notions of state interest with new ones that see the state's interest as being also served by a just and well-ordered international community.

Crises—for so 9/11 clearly was for Americans' sense of their place in the world—pose the toughest of tests for the durability of more cosmopolitan, less narrowly state-defined norms. Here, and in the willingness of certain state allies to participate in the Bush administration's “War on Terror,” we see clear evidence that the power of the human rights regime to change U.S. behavior has been severely circumscribed. Although the United States enjoyed widespread sympathy in the immediate wake of the attacks, the Bush administration soon demonstrated a willingness to completely discard human rights principles if there was even the remotest chance that doing so would increase national security. While abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons abroad were at first dismissed by the administration as the work of rogue actors, it soon became clear not only that torture was official policy, sanctioned at the very highest levels, but also that the administration was willing to do away with some of the oldest principles in Anglo-American jurisprudence, such as habeus corpus, and some of the oldest principles of jus in bello, such as protections of prisoners of war.

Regardless of the dominance of neoconservatives in the Bush administration, even other branches of the U.S. government eventually were compelled to rein in the most blatant excesses of administration policies, such as the use of secret tribunals to try “enemy combatants.” And just as importantly for the authors in this volume, the abandonment by the United States of the human rights regime did not shake the commitment of European nations to principles and institutions of human rights, but, in many cases, actually strengthened it. Importantly, too, not only was the human rights regime reaffirmed by European states' and international organizations' refusal to support the U.S. approach, but also initiatives that were in progress before 9/11 continued apace. Although the United States was now no longer a key player in the human rights regime, rather than crumble, it continued to evolve. For other states, the principles it represented, and the support they sensed it enjoyed among their constituents, were more important than appeasing the United States. While it can be argued that the regime would be more robust, all else being equal, with U.S. participation, it has survived thus far. If the United States rejoins it, it may be unable to do so as the kind of key player it once was.

The question of the impact of 9/11 and the global War on Terror is arguably the most examined among human rights scholars over the past decade. In a crowded field, this volume stands out as one of the most important works thus far. Its authors make a collective contribution to the conversation that is at once timely and prescient—an essential read for those concerned with the future of conflict and justice.