This collection of essays on international sanctions, published in the widely respected Macmillan series on international political economy, has none of these signposts to its origins. The editors provide no preface that might give the reader some sense of where the collection came from—or why. There is no rationale offered for the topics included or excluded. There is no attempt to provide a unifying theme or puzzle, and there certainly is no central argument. To be sure, there is an introduction, but it bills itself as an “overview” and lives up to that title, for it is no more than a brief outline of what is to come. The nine chapters that follow clearly indicate that their authors have had no herding. The only commonality among them is that they focus on international sanctions. In short, this is a collection that just is.

Taken for what it is—nine essays on sanctions between ridiculously expensive Macmillan/St. Martin's cloth covers—the book provides a useful and intellectually stimulating reflection on this tool of statecraft. First, several essays employ methods that depart from the common approaches in the international sanctions literature: A. Cooper Drury uses statistical analysis of U.S. presidential decisions on sanctioning; William H. Kaempfer and Anton D. Lowenberg prefer public choice; Valerie Schwebach uses formal modeling; Daniel W. Drezner uses Boolean analysis to explore Russian economic statecraft.

Second, this collection offers a number of analytically rich case studies that will appeal to traditionalists who might be less than taken with the results of the above approaches. Jason Davidson and George Shambaugh focus on incentives as a tool of economic statecraft, a theme picked up by Curtis H. Martin, who examines the all-too-often ignored case of the 1994 agreement between the United States and North Korea as an example of the differences between sanctions and inducements as instruments of foreign policy. Daniel W. Fisk's chapter on the American sanctions against Cuba does an excellent job of locating the Helms-Burton sanctions of the mid-1990s in a broader political perspective, looking beyond the usual arguments about the domestic roots of American efforts to sanction Cuba. Steve Chan chronicles the seemingly endless debate in the United States over whether China should receive most-favored-nation (MFN) status—or “normal trade relations,” as some Americans have unilaterally decided this centuries-old European convention should now be called. Of course, the debate has continued long after MFN status was granted, although it now focuses on whether MFN status should be withdrawn over such matters as the Chinese government's crackdown on the Falun Gong movement or Beijing's initial responses to the air collision near Hainan. David M. Rowe revisits the Rhodesia sanctions of the 1960s and 1970s and examines the domestic political effects of the boycott on Rhodesia's important tobacco industry.

This collection features an interesting mix of methods and case studies, but there are some significant holes in the coverage of contemporary sanctions. For example, there is no discussion of sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s or against Iraq since 1990, even though those cases remain crucial episodes. There is no exploration of the various ways in which the international community has sought during the post–Cold War era to sharpen and smarten sanctions. (Perhaps that is not surprising, since the book tends to limit its focus to the national level, rather than explore sanctions from a multilateral perspective.) Perhaps most important, there is no extended discussion of the normative implications of sanctions, an issue that has increasingly engaged both policymakers and academics over the last decade.