It comes as no surprise, given the circumstances surrounding the Khmer Rouge's rise to power in Cambodia in 1975, that Democratic Kampuchea (DK) remained completely dependent on the largesse of the PRC for survival. Mao's pledge of US$1 billion during Pol Pot's June 1975 visit was, in its time, the largest single aid pledge in PRC history. Yet despite the vast asymmetry that existed between the two countries, time and again, China proved unable to use its power to influence either the politics or policies of its new-born client state in matters outside of the domain of trade and commerce. In order to explain this counterintuitive outcome, in this book Andrew Mertha argues that despite China's relative military might, the relative strength of DK military institutions rendered them largely impervious to Chinese intervention; with respect to infrastructure development, despite the considerable sums invested, the degree of fragmentation and lack of coordination that prevailed on the Chinese side “resulted in complete project failure.” In the end, Mertha argues that China's constrained ability to influence DK politics and policy throughout the short-lived regime remained a function of bureaucratic-institutional integrity. To make his case, Mertha continues to build upon and further refine the model of fragmented authoritarianism he brought to bear with impressive analytical force in his earlier work. Brothers in Arms offers a robust and fascinating case that represents both a logical extension of his earlier work, and an imaginative interrogation of its underlying principles.

In The Politics of Piracy: Intellectual Property in Contemporary China (Cornell University Press, 2005), Mertha addressed the pitfalls of intellectual property rights under in a single-party state without fully-developed legal frameworks. Whereas previous analyses focused either on the lack of resources for dealing with the problem intellectual property theft and the persistence of piracy, or on the corrosive impact of rent-seeking by unscrupulous agents of the Party-state, Mertha demonstrated how the problem of pirated products in China is instead related to the fragmented nature of political authority. As he documented, the promulgation of satisfactory IPR-related laws and regulations did not necessarily result in meaningful enforcement, as new measures were forced to pass through China's byzantine network of bureaucracies across the domains of copyright and trademark enforcement, riven with actors and agencies at odds with each other, undermining effective implementation.

For his second book, China's Water Warriors (Cornell University Press, 2008), Mertha demonstrated that the rapid expansion of actors entering the policy-making process over the course of the reform era failed to either ameliorate or displace the key dynamics that characterize “fragmented authoritarianism.” Instead, bureaucrats within government agencies opposed to large hydropower projects were increasingly allying themselves with newly emerging nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the press in hopes of swaying public opinion in order to stymie or thwart dam construction.

In this, his third monograph, Brothers in Arms, Mertha returns again to the “fragmented authoritarian” model of Chinese policy-making, but this time applies it to demonstrate how China's internally fractured bureaucracy produced suboptimal foreign policy outcomes even in its dealings with a weak, disorganized client state. He finds that, despite the vast asymmetry in both power and resources between the two nations, “it was in fact China that ended up as the subordinate party” (p. 4). The chief reason for what Mertha characterizes as “complete project failure” was the existing “bureaucratic fragmentation in China combined with an institutional matrix strong enough to resist Chinese demands or too weak to act on them” (p. 9). He further develops a truly novel line of analysis comparing what on the face would appear to be two strikingly similar Leninist party-state systems – a regime sub-type within which the consensus view sees little internal variation. Mertha instead demonstrates not only that in each case “institutional integrity demonstrated substantial deviation from the Leninist ideal,” but also that the manner “in which individuals navigated the two institutional environments was markedly different” (p. 11). Stripped down to their bare fundamentals, Mertha's “tale of two Leninist systems” finds that the undergirding “leadership across a piece” (kuaishang lingdao) and “leadership across a line” (tiaoshang lingdao) principles of Chinese bureaucratic organization contrasted with the more fluid indigenous organizing principle of interest in Cambodian politics of the “string” (khsae). Whereas the tiao/kuai organization of Chinese bureaucracy produced “regularity, predictability, and functionability,” the DK's rather more “fluid, unpredictable, and ultimately personal nature” of Cambodian bureaucratic organization eluded the best attempts of Chinese policy-makers to oversee and manage their DK counterparts.

Mertha's study represents a rare triumph of comparative research design, made possible by the author's impressive mastery of both Chinese and Khmer, as well as his sensitive and nuanced readings of the functional power relations motivating both systems. The choice of DK as a case study is novel insofar as the original fragmented authoritarian framework describes a politics in which bureaucratic actors within a regime modify, frustrate, or even block the realization of each other's preferred policies, frequently because of cross-cutting interests. Pol Pot's DK offers an unlikely context within which to analyse rational bureaucratic behaviour, triggering a certain level of “conceptual dissonance”; but it is precisely for this reason that case presents such compelling possibilities for analysis. Situated at the intersection of domestic and foreign policy analysis, Brothers in Arms represents a remarkable marriage between two richly detailed and informative case studies, and theoretical insights that make the book indispensable reading.