The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics, Ken Booth and Nicholas J. Wheeler (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 272 pp., $112 cloth, $38 paper.

At the start of their long-awaited study of the “security dilemma,” Ken Booth and Nicholas Wheeler—professors of international politics at Aberystwyth University—suggest that the subject of their book is a concept that gets to the very heart of their field of study. The security dilemma, they remind us, draws attention to two central realities of international politics, one material (weapons) and one psychological (the uncertainty that surrounds them). These realities, they write, “sustain the pervasiveness of fear, underlie the problems of cooperation, and check the problem of trust” (p. 1).

Corresponding to this insight, the main body of the book offers comprehensive and systematic considerations not only of the realist observation that insecurity can never be avoided in international politics, but also of the idea that insecurity can at least be ameliorated through institutions and norms, and the hope that global society might reinvent itself through the expansion of community.

The book is rare in its potential to reward readings by scholars and students and progressive practitioners of international politics. For theorists, The Security Dilemma assembles and disassembles all previous definitions of the concept, replacing them with a sophisticated “two-level strategic predicament” of interpretation and response. The book also adds a new attitudinal variable, “security dilemma sensibility,” which highlights the potentially ameliorative or transcending role of a neglected dimension in security dilemma theorizing: human agency. For the particular benefit of the international relations classroom, the book's analysis includes many authoritative and readable tours through developments in the field, such as the theoretical disagreements and negotiations that generated theories of collective security, functionalism, and security communities, not to mention the evolution and final distillation of fatalist logic into offensive realism. And, for policy-makers, Booth and Wheeler's study offers their rebooted conception of the security dilemma as an urgent addition to our leadership tool kit in an era of uncertainty—“an idea whose time has come” (p. 265).