Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats, Bruce Jones, Carlos Pascual, and Stephen John Stedman (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 300 pp., $27 cloth.

What are the right kinds of institutions to order a globalized world, where transnational forces “that have stitched the world together can also tear it apart”? This question is addressed with notable range and sophistication in this collaborative work by three individuals with significant research and frontline experience in the area of global policy-making. The authors look to new principles (such as “responsible sovereignty”), to institutional-design innovations (such as a proposed new “G-16”), and, not least, to past experience across a variety of issue areas in answering how the global order can develop beyond its current default position, where international responses to challenges lack even the pretense of predictability and confidence, to a future governed by legitimate and well-functioning multilateral institutions.

Specifically, the book offers analysis, evaluations, and prescriptions for change in the institutional arenas of climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, civil and regional conflicts, economic inequality and insecurity, and natural and manmade biological threats—from pandemic disease to bioterrorism. In the latter area of “security in the biological century,” for instance, Power and Responsibility measures the insufficiencies of the current international architecture (centering on the World Health Organization and the Biological Weapons Convention) against the bar set by responsible sovereignty; it then sets out how the proposed G-16 might work to improve the robustness of the architecture and to plug gaps such as local-capacity problems in the developing world. Here and throughout the authors are alert to the problems of mismatched perceptions and weak bonds of trust among nations that so standardly thwart proposals for meaningful international cooperation, and, moreover, they propose concrete measures to overcome such barriers to collective action—including the idea of replicating in the area of biotechnology the success of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in establishing a consensus-favoring global policy network.

Following the six chapters on specific areas of global responsibility, the book does not conclude without also addressing the acute dilemmas presented by the multidimensional security crisis in the Middle East. This “vital test case” for international order reminds us of the magnitude of the challenges for global institutional design in the twenty-first century, but also of the importance and urgency of meeting them.