Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization, Andrew T. Price-Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2009), 296 pp., $48 cloth, $24 paper.

This book is a compelling and distinctive extension of republican security theory—spearheaded by Daniel Deudney in Bounding Power (2007)—and a significant intervention into debates about environmental security and global health. Combining an appreciation of the importance of material-contextual factors—including, from the point of view of pathogens, the porosity of national borders and the irrelevance of traditional measures of “strategic significance”—with a sober assessment of human cognition and emotions, Price-Smith aims to develop and heighten our appreciation of the distinct and destabilizing political threats posed by disease.

Following a set of theoretical and historical chapters, case studies of influenza, HIV/AIDS, BSE (mad cow disease), and SARS (bird flu) give support to the claim that disease can have profound and multifaceted consequences for political systems. For instance, a chapter on the famous flu pandemic that overlapped with the closing years of the First World War points to evidence that the differential impact of the virus on the military and bureaucratic capabilities of the warring nations had a hand in the defeat of Germany and the collapse of Austria-Hungary. In the latter case, Austria's singular pattern of exposure to the successive genetic variants of the pathogen left its people particularly vulnerable to the deadliest of the viral waves, which struck mere weeks before the empire itself was dissolved.

Contagion and Chaos rediscovers and weaves together insights about the capacity of the natural world to impinge on human affairs—something that was readily understood by the likes of Aristotle, Rousseau, and other early contributors to the republican tradition of thinking about security, but that has fallen out of favor among twenty-first century political scientists. But in making his case for bringing “health security” into the mainstream of security studies (p. 219), Price-Smith leaves to others the task of reinventing academic international relations in light of the rediscovery of such Aristotelian insights. In an age where the renewed threat of pandemic influenza demands the development of local and global response capacities to face down pathogenic threats, the call here is instead for an even more ambitious bridging of the epistemic divide between the natural and social sciences in order to properly realize and respond to our biological interdependence.