The current trend toward suicide bombings began in Lebanon in the early 1980s. The practice soon spread to civil conflicts in Sri Lanka, the Kurdish areas of Turkey, and Chechnya. Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians in the 1990s and during the Al Aqsa intifada further highlighted the threat. Al Qaeda's adoption of the tactic brought a transnational dimension. Interest in the phenomenon then surged after the shock of the 2001 attacks, which involved an unprecedented number of both perpetrators and casualties. Since then, suicide bombings have expanded in number and geographical range, reaching extraordinary levels in the Iraq War and spreading around the world to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Britain.

This review covers thirteen of the books published on the subject since 2002. Three analyze the Palestinian case and four others focus on Islamist violence. The other six, including two edited collections, intend to be comprehensive. This review also refers to a few selected publications that discuss the arguments presented in the works reviewed. It aims to give readers a glimpse of the content of the different volumes as well as offer a critique.

The essay reviews these works:

• Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
• Joyce M. Davis, Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
• Diego Gambetta, ed., Making Sense of Suicide Missions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Mohammed M. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006).
• Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology (London: Frank Cass, 2003).
• Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs, translated from the French by David Macey (London: Pluto Press, 2005).
• Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
• Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).
• Ami Pedahzur, ed., Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
• Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, translated from the German by Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
• Shaul Shay, The Shahids: Islam and Suicide Attacks (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004).
• Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (Emmaus Pa.: Rodale [distributed by St. Martin's Press] 2003).

Since 2000, the Modesto City school district in Modesto, Calif., has been engaged in one of the nation's most direct experiments in using the public school curriculum to promote respect for religious freedoms and diversity. While other school districts include discussions of world religions in subject matters such as history or English or provide independent elective courses on world religions, Modesto requires that all 9th grade students take an extended, independent course on world religions. Unlike many other school districts' treatments of world religions, the teaching of respect for religious freedom is an explicit and central purpose of Modesto's world religions course. Modesto's course is part of a "safe schools" policy intended to create a comfortable school environment for all students, and the first two weeks of the course deal with the United States' tradition of religious liberty.

While studying the educational effects of Modesto's course on students' views addresses the question of whether world religions courses should be implemented in public schools, an examination of Modesto's religious landscape yields valuable insight into the question of whether world religions courses can be implemented and in which communities. Modesto is home to a large evangelical Christian population, an active group of politically and culturally liberal residents, and adherents of a wide range of religions including Sikhs, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and animists. The Modesto community's reaction to the required world religions course not only provides evidence about the possibility of successfully implementing required world religions courses in communities around the nation, but allows us to assess whether our nation's ability to deal with the issue of teaching about religion in schools is as bleak as the Kansas, Dover and Odessa disputes seem to suggest.

In his umpteenth book Why? (2006) Charles Tilly has shifted his focus from large-scale historical processes to both present history and personal history, including the illness and mortality of others and himself.

In his discussions of large-scale processes, Tilly has always provided vivid and telling detail, whether of "malefactors who set off ...fireworks" in Dijon in 1642 (Tilly, 1986, p. 2), or of Louis XIV and his finance minister Colbert maneuvering to avoid state bankruptcy, and "to keep smuggling, banditry, bribery, and plunder from getting completely out of hand" (Tilly, 1997b, p. 37). Tilly presents here not an illustrated set of large-scale processes but a very personal cabinet of wonders, stuffed not with crocodile skulls, musical instruments, and deteriorating dice, but with others' writing that has caught his eye, his own acute observations, and appearances by family members, friends, and colleagues.

In a sense, this is not an abrupt departure: we've met various of Tilly's extended family and friends before, in dedications, forewords, acknowledgments, and text, though here Tilly goes further. Why? is not only set in the present, but is about the present: it opens and closes with how various people have tried to make sense of the shattering attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. And though Tilly's wide-ranging discussion of his own family and of illness may appear to be about past and future, this too is fundamentally, and movingly, about the present.

To reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism, we must prevent terrorists from obtaining nuclear weapons or materials. This will require, among other things, a sustained effort to keep dangerous nations from going nuclear--in particular North Korea. This article reviews the efforts the United States has undertaken through the years to keep North Korea from building a nuclear arsenal, arguing that the history of proliferation on the Korean Peninsula is marked by five nuclear crises. A sixth could be on the horizon, further compromising American efforts to lessen the likelihood of a nuclear attack on U.S. soil.

ABSTRACT:

While the refugee protection system is one of international law's most recognizable features, it routinely places massive numbers of refugees in camps in the developing world, where they face chronic threats to their physical security from crime and disorder, physical coercion, and military attacks. Yet key actors responsible for refugee protection, including host states, advanced industrialized countries, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), have failed to prioritize refugee security.

This article asks: (1) Why? (2) What have been the consequences? and (3) What do these answers reveal about how organizations carry out legal mandates in complicated political environments?

Conventional wisdom holds that security only recently became a major problem in the refugee protection system; that UNHCR's role in enhancing refugees' physical security is limited by the agency's legal mandate and practical constraints; and that problems of violence and physical security are largely episodic concerns affecting small numbers in discrete refugee populations. Drawing on historical documents, interviews, data on budgets and performance measures, and legal doctrine, I show this conventional wisdom to be wrong. Only some of the problems associated with the current system can be explained by international geopolitics or by legal compromises reflected in refugee law.Instead, that system's brutal realities also reflect bureaucratic dynamics, political pressures, and legal interpretations shaping the discretionary choices of UNHCR and its nongovernmental organization partners. I develop the argument by tracing the remarkable history of UNHCR as it transformed itself from a refugee advocacy organization with a limited mandate into a modern relief agency.

This evolution helps explain the persistence of security problems and sheds light on the challenges of implementing ambitious legal mandates under uncertainty, particularly when the organizations doing so operate in complex political environments.