The title here tells the story. This is a collection of essays by psychologists and constructivist International Relations scholars devoted to the proposition that each discourse has much to learn from the other and thus that they should form an “ideational alliance.” The adjective ideational is appropriate because each of the two fields, while they disagree on much else, agree that international relations are best approached in ideational rather than strictly material terms. The scholars represented here came together as a group in what has become the standard modus operandi for this kind of collaboration; that is, as fellow panellists at meetings of the International Studies Association (in 2008 and 2009). The volume they have produced follows a standard pattern, with six substantive case studies topped and tailed by essays surveying the field. The result is a stimulating and thoughtful book which works very well within the limits the authors have set for themselves. In so far as it merits criticism, it is because those limits are, perhaps, drawn so tightly that much interesting work is excluded.

The introductory chapter by Vaughn Shannon is very clear about one of these limits: “the contributors to this volume speak most directly to modernist or conventional constructivism, as opposed to critical constructivism” (p. 13). Shannon and Paul Kowert, in the second introductory chapter, “Completing the Ideational Triangle: Identity, Choice and Obligation in International Relations,” set out the agenda that follows from this limitation. The essays in this book home-in on choice, identity, and norms, combining constructivist work in these areas with insights drawn from psychology, specifically with work on belief, roles and identity. The aim is to develop a scientific research programme that challenges the dominance of “rational” theories of decision. This is a legitimate goal and the decision to focus on “modernist” constructivism is defensible; however, it should be noted that a great deal of interesting constructivist work falls outside of the remit of this book. The “practice turn,” for example, is covered only in a footnote (p. 27).

The first set of mini-case studies is entitled “Identity and the Construction of Agents,” with essays by Deborah Welch Larson (“How Identities Form and Change”), Jodie Anstee (“Norms and the Management of Identities”) and Asli Ilgit and Binnur Ozkececi-Taner (“Identity and Decision Making”). Larson's essay is directed against the allegedly static nature of Alexander Wendt's symbolic interactionism and his conception of state identity as a role. The preferred alternative here is Social Identity Theory (SIT), drawn from social psychology, in which identity emerges from self-categorisation and social comparison. Larson illustrates the value of this approach through a brief study of how emergent powers India, Russia and China have defined and redefined their identities in the post-Cold War world. This essay is a model of concise exposition, although the sections on the propositions that China committed to in the “Peaceful Rise” strategy and on how Russia's relations with the United States have improved since President Obama came to power perhaps require updating. Anstee's essay also employs a variant of SIT not to explain change but to explain the way in which an established identity is defended (in this case the way in which the Blair government defended the identity of the UK as a core liberal democratic country in the face of criticism of its detention policies post-9/11). This essay presumably draws on a larger study and is rather too compressed to give more than a sense of the argument. Ilgit and Ozkececi-Taner's essay is more substantial and examines Turkey's Kemalist identity via two episodes: relations with Syria leading up to the Adana Accord of 1998, and the policies of the late 1990's governing coalition led by the moderate Islamist Necmettin Erbakan, leader of the Welfare Party (RP) (the forerunner of the current governing party, the Justice and Development Party [AKP]). This is an interesting and informative essay, but only loosely related to the other papers in this volume. Also, the lack of any reference to subsequent developments such as Turkey's role in the on-going Syrian conflict and the current dominance of the AKP is frustrating.

The second set of cases is entitled “Beliefs and the Construction of Choice,” with writings by: Marijke Breuning on “Reconstructing Development Assistance,” David Patrick Houghton on “Agent-Level and Social Constructivism” and Peter Hays Gries, and Kaiping Peng and H. Michael Crowson on “Determinants of Security and Insecurity in IR.” Breuning looks at the role of leadership in norm diffusion, applying a version of Joshua Busby's model of gatekeeping to George W. Bush's response to the renegotiation of the meaning of development involved in the debates that followed the UN's Millennium Goals Declaration of 2000. This is a very substantial piece of work. Houghton uses the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979 to illustrate the ways in which a psychological approach can bridge the alleged gap between Logics of Appropriateness and Consequences. This is an interesting discussion, but this bridge has been built before and it is difficult to see the value added here. Gries, Peng and Crowson report on a cross-national experiment using Chinese and American students to examine the relationship between symbolic and material gains and losses. This serves as a way of exploring the different notions of security and insecurity promoted by rationalist, as opposed to ideational, theories. Impossible to summarise within the limits of this review, this is perhaps the most innovative paper in the collection and it deserves to be widely read.

In the concluding section of the collection, Rose McDermott and Anthony Lopez ask whether psychology and constructivism are uneasy bedfellows—the answer is “yes” (but also see below)—and Kowert winds up with an overview of “Context and Contributions of the Ideational Alliance”, summarising the volume.

Returning, finally, to the limits of this volume, the emphasis on “modernist” constructivism and the development of a scientific research programme for the study of identity and choice is made very explicit, but there is one rather large area where contemporary psychology contributes to international relations whose omission is nowhere noted, and that is the field of evolutionary psychology. To name only a few titles, works such as Bradley Thayer's Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict (2004), Dominic Johnson's Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions (2004), and Steven Peter Rosen's War and Human Nature (2004) have made important contributions to our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of international behaviour. With the exception of a short discussion on an “adaptationist alternative” in McDermott and Lopez's paper, evolutionary psychology does not feature here at all, presumably because it is insufficiently ideational to merit attention—but one might have hoped that a book with the unqualified term “psychology” in its title would have something to say about this field, if only to explain why its contribution was being ignored. In short, here as with constructivism, the coverage of the field is rather more limited than the title of this book would suggest.