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).

For a long time, how nuclear facilities were protected from terrorists and thieves has been largely the prerogative of the facilities themselves or individual governments. But the September 11 terrorist attacks and statements by Osama bin Laden have raised new concerns about preventing terrorists from stealing or attacking nuclear material that is often not well protected. As a result, new international standards have been adopted, calling on states to provide stronger protection for nuclear material.

So far, however, these standards are very general and lack effective enforcement. To remedy these shortcomings, the UN Security Council should consider such measures as providing a greater role for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The article asserts that globalization has made the world a more dangerous and less orderly place. The authors argue that since the emergence and expansion of globalization in the 1990s, the world has experienced more problems such as increasing terrorist activity, widening gaps between religious and cultural ideologies, unstable global financial systems, expanding dangers of pandemic disease, and the growing threat of global climate change.

The continued spread of democracy into the 21st century has seen two-thirds of the almost 200 independent countries of the world adopting this model. In these newer democracies, one of the biggest challenges has been to establish the proper balance between the civilian and military sectors. A fundamental question of power must be addressed—who guards the guardians and how?

In this volume of essays, contributors associated with the Center for Civil-Military Relations in Monterey, California, offer firsthand observations about civil-military relations in a broad range of regions including Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Despite diversity among the consolidating democracies of the world, their civil-military problems and solutions are similar—soldiers and statesmen must achieve a deeper understanding of one another, and be motivated to interact in a mutually beneficial way. The unifying theme of this collection is the creation and development of the institutions whereby democratically elected civilians achieve and exercise power over those who hold a monopoly on the use of force within a society, while ensuring that the state has sufficient and qualified armed forces to defend itself against internal and external aggressors. Although these essays address a wide variety of institutions and situations, they each stress a necessity for balance between democratic civilian control and military effectiveness.

International terrorism carried out by nonstate actors and the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to dangerous states have emerged in recent years as the most significant security threats to the international order. Although the nature of the threats has changed dramatically, the legal regime governing the international use of force has not undergone a comparable transformation. Many commentators and strategists see a growing disconnect between states' security needs and the international law security architecture. Contending that the international law rules and international institutions established by the U.N. Charter are ill-suited to meeting contemporary security threats, these commentators and policymakers advance new doctrines to expand the entitlement of states to use force unilaterally in self-defense.

This article rejects this perspective and the associated prescriptions for new legal rules to regulate the international use of force. It demonstrates that the U.N. Charter created a two-tiered system of rules and standards to govern the use of force. With respect to unilateral uses of force by states, the Charter employs a bright-line rule: to guard against erroneous and bad-faith invocations of the right of self-defense, force may be used unilaterally only in the event of an armed attack. The Charter employs a more flexible standards-based approach, subject to the procedural safeguards of collective decision-making by the Security Council, to authorize force to confront threats to international peace and security.

The article challenges the widely held assumption that the competing interests of the Permanent Members will inevitably produce gridlock in the Security Council with respect to collective action against the new security threats. To the contrary, there is an underlying affinity of interests among the Permanent Members with respect to these threats. The Permanent Members all face major international terrorist threats, and they all seek to preserve their near-monopoly over WMD. Accordingly, the Permanent Members share an interest in confronting international terrorism and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Because these contemporary security threats--unlike the rivalries of the Cold War era--do not implicate competing interests of the Permanent Members, the Security Council's security architecture is actually better suited to addressing today's threats than it was to countering the state-versus-state conflicts for which it was designed. The recent behavior of the Permanent Members reflects their increasing cooperation on the basis of this affinity of interests.

The article further argues that the use of force pursuant to the Charter's collective security provisions carries with it greater legitimacy, greater prospect for success, and less danger of destabilizing error or abuse than would force exercised pursuant to doctrines that expand the right of states to use force unilaterally. The Article also identifies pragmatic policy and diplomatic steps the Permanent Members should take to build upon their underlying affinity of interests regarding international terrorism and WMD proliferation so as to strengthen the capacity of the collective security architecture to confront these threats.

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.

At their meeting in India in July of 2005, President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed that the United States and India should resume cooperation in peaceful nuclear energy matters. Their cooperation had ended in 1974 after the Indians conducted a nuclear explosion which the United States concluded was a nuclear weapon test. After achieving a tentative agreement with Prime Minister Singh, Bush called upon Congress to amend the Atomic Energy Act's prohibition on U.S. nuclear assistance to India so that he could carry out the agreement. Before the end of its 2006 session, Congress did so. It approved a bill authorizing the negotiation of a new U.S.-India nuclear cooperation agreement. The authorization was not a "blank check." In this new statute, Congress insisted upon having an opportunity for reviewing whatever final agreement the administration negotiates with India. It demanded that, before it considers whether to give approval to that agreement, the agreement be submitted for approval to both the IAEA and to the international Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).