Mary Dudziak has long filled an important niche linking diplomacy and the law in the context of American international history. Her Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2000) was groundbreaking and now she is at it again.

War Time is not so much a monograph as an extended essay (indeed, Dudziak acknowledges that she first intended only to write an article on the subject). What emerges is a small book on a large topic: how we conceptualize war and locate it in time and the profound social and legal implications of those considerations.

Dudziak compels her readers to think about the implications of “wartime.” These times of projecting national violence enable a suspension of the norms and rules of society, most notably through violations of civil liberties and abandonment of democratic constraints. The rules can be changed because “wartime” is supposed to be temporary, a national emergency that comes along only every now and again, thus justifying short-term compromises in law and values.

What Dudziak shows, however, is that wartime is not nearly as temporary as most people think. By placing small wars into the mix, and showing through creative research the broad expanses of historical time in which military honors have been awarded to soldiers, Dudziak shows that wartime actually pervades American history. These observations are all the more important as the nation now wages a global war on terror with no defined end time in sight.

Dudziak is at her best when she brings her knowledge of the law to bear with original research into legal challenges pertaining to wartime. That narrative takes up about half the book, which consists of four chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The work on the erosion of civil liberties in wartime is important and though Dudziak offers a good deal of original material and case law these matters have been dealt with previously in Geoffrey Stone's comprehensive and exemplary Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (2004), which she often cites.

Dudziak draws on some of the most important recent works on the history of World War II, the Cold War, and the war on terror, which comprise three independent chapters. She challenges conventional thinking about the timeline of World War II – typically conceptualized as Pearl Harbor to VJ Day – and shows how “wartime” constraints began before, and outlasted, the war itself. Similarly, she shows how the postwar conflict with the Soviet Union and China was conceptualized as “wartime,” albeit a prolonged “cold” war.

Dudziak's historical knowledge of the interwar period is much weaker, leading to hoary observations such as “Americans remained isolationist” (40), thus invoking a term that misleads more than it enlightens. She also ignores the extent to which liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt used the security state to attack his critics during the “great debate” leading up to World War II, a discussion that would have strengthened her argument about the arbitrary and misleading conventional time frame of the war. More attention to economic motivations, corporate war profits, and consultation of the most recent scholarship on the military–industrial complex would have enhanced the discussion in these chapters as well.

The “war on terror” chapter, however, may be Dudziak's strongest, which comes as no surprise as she has previously published an edited volume on the legal and cultural impact of the September 11 attacks. She shows how President George W. Bush immediately framed the attacks as an act of war against the United States, thus justifying an open-ended global intervention and the attendant erosion of civil liberties and democratic checks and balances. Dudziak traces deputy attorney general John Yoo's broad justifications, offering a virtual blank check for the President to act as he saw fit “in wartime” regardless of constitutional constraints.

In a brief but fitting and provocative conclusion Dudziak emphasizes that “wartime” is not an actual time but rather a time manufactured culturally and in the service of the exercise of power. “‘Wartime’ is an argument, rather than an inevitable feature of our world,” she points out, “and it need not cause us to suspend our principles” (136). As her book shows how often the declaration of “wartime” has in fact eroded those very principles, the call for “democratic vigilance … public engagement and responsibility” (136) have never been more pertinent than they are today.