The Caspian Basin has emerged in recent years as a major focus of international affairs for a combination of political, economic, and geostrategic reasons. In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union's dissolution in the early 1990s the region's newly independent states were overshadowed by Russia and attracted little Western and U.S. attention. But over the past several years this region has attracted growing attention from Western policymakers and scholars, as well as the media and the private sector. One of the main reasons for this new focus on the Caspian is its sizable energy reserves. In addition to its potential as a significant oil producer, however, it is also the Caspian's geostrategic location, its diverse mix of ethnic groups, and its unsettled intrastate and interstate conflicts that make it both an enticing and challenging region.

In May 1999, CISAC's Project on Ethnic Conflict and Conflict Management in the Former Soviet Union convened an international conference to examine emerging geopolitical issues of the Caspian Basin region. Scholars, policymakers, and energy executives from around the world gathered to examine the sometimes contending interests, both political and economic, focused on the region, and to seek to develop a comprehensive approach for enhancing political and economic development, mitigating and resolving conflicts, and promoting security and stability in the region. Panelists examined conflicting political and economic approaches to the region and explored strategies for energy development that might facilitate regional economic growth and democratization. They also offered diverse views about whether energy development could promote regional cooperation and integration or was likely to exacerbate existing conflicts.

The conference was part of the Project on Ethnic Conflict's ongoing activities in the Caspian region. Project director Gail Lapidus and others at CISAC have been working closely with scholars and policymakers in the region for a number of years on issues of nationalism, conflict resolution, and regional security. One of the project's central goals has been to encourage and facilitate regional cooperation on a broad range of humanitarian, economic, and political issues. In support of that objective, the project has engaged in joint efforts with key political actors in the region in attempts to develop fresh approaches to conflict management and to construct new regional security arrangements.

The contributors to this volume address questions central to the development and survival of democratic rule. Brought together under the auspices of a Nobel Symposium on democracy, leading experts in the field examine historical experiences, social and cultural problems, economic development, constitutional issues, the impact of globalization, and the prospects for promoting democratic government. The coverage of the book is global, and the approach is multidisciplinary, providing a unique perspective from leading historians, political scientists, economists, and sociologists. The chapters thus provide an excellent survey of different facets of, and approaches to, democracy, including such fundamental issues as the nature of democratic citizenship, and its prevalence around the world; the relationship between economic development and the progress of democracy; and the influence of international interdependence on sovereignty and democratic accountability.

• Collection of essays covering the fundamental questions regarding the prospects for democracy
• Global coverage, and multidisciplinary approach - political scientists, historians, economists, sociologists
• Contributors include some of the biggest names in the field: Elster, Linz, Przeworski, Lijphart, Bhagwati, Schmitter

Future regional conflicts will almost certainly involve politically less stable nations or other regional actors using theater ballistic missiles armed with either nuclear, biological, or chemical warheads. The United States Air Force is attempting to deal with this threat by developing the Airborne Laser (ABL) with the goal of shooting down missiles while they are still under power and before they can release submunitions possibly containing highly toxic biological agents. This paper presents the results of an analysis of this system. It is based solely on information found in the open literature and using the basic physics and engineering involved in transmitting intense laser beams through the atmosphere. The ABL's potential capabilities and possible theaters of operation are discussed at a non-technical level.

On March 4 and 5, 1996, the Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control, in conjunction with the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, convened a research planning conference on "Police Reform in States under Transition." The conference was unusual in that its primary purpose was to foster an ongoing discussion between academics working in the area of democratization and police reform, and policymakers running police reform programs in countries such as Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, South Africa, and EI Salvador. Our primary goal for the conference was to construct a research agenda that would allow continued dialogue between scholars and policymakers, and would focus on questions of theory and practice immediately applicable to policymakers in the field.

Participants in the conference included Robert Perito, Special Advisor to the Director of the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), U.S. Department of Justice; Frederick Mecke, Director, Office of International Criminal Justice, U.S. Department of State; Arnstein Overkil, Police Major General of Asker and Baerum Police Headquarters in Norway, and advisor to the Palestinian Authority on policing; Diana Gordon, Chair of the Department of Political Science at City College of New York; Louise Shelley, professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University; William Stanley from the Department of Political Science at the University of New Mexico; Jeffrey Ian Ross, a fellow at the National Institute of Justice; and faculty and staff from Stanford University and the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.

Given that organized violence within states is currently more widespread and destructive than war among states, many advocate expanding the concept of security to include elements of political and personal security at the domestic level. Since individuals generally look to governments to provide this security, deadly violence--whether by insurgents, polite forces, or criminal networks--can undermine the stability and legitimacy of state authorities. Unfortunately, democratization has accompanied increases in such violence in many parts of the world.

In a case study of contemporary Benin that has much broader implications, Bruce Magnusson argues that democratizing states must solve simultaneous and interrelated threats to public security in order to survive. At the level of the state, leaderships must safeguard democratic institutions from violent overthrow, particularly by disaffected militaries. At the level of society, democratic legitimacy rests on protection from criminality and from the arbitrary exercise of public and police authority. These challenges must be met jointly within a democratic constitutional framework: domestic order is key to averting military takeover, and likewise constitutionality provides the central guarantee for individual rights and civil liberties.

During the Cold War, the United States carried out a number of covert actions against elected governments in the Third World. Critics of the "democratic peace" suggest these covert operations are potential invalidations of, or at least exceptions to, the proposition that liberal democracies rarely or never wage war on one another. Democratic peace theorists, however, argue that the targets of these covert actions were not long-term, stable democracies, that covert action falls short of interstate war by Correlates of War (CoW) criteria, and that the covert nature of these operations meant that liberal norms and institutions in the United States did not have an opportunity to function. Even so, by forcing the executive to use covert means, democratic institutions may have prevented the higher level of international violence known as war, although they were not robust enough to prevent covert action. Liberal interventionist and anti-communist ideology provided policymakers with a justificatory frame for intervention which, however, did not amount to war between democracies.

This paper describes the development of the first community service learning program for democratic education in South Africa. The Democracy Education Project, which is based on Swarthmore College's innovative Democracy Project, was designed and implemented by a Swarthmore College student working with a high school in a Black community near CapeTown. This case study demonstrates that the successful transposition of a model of community service learning from one country to another requires recognizing the complex relationships among history and culture, and theories and practices of democratic education. It is also crucial to involve the new community as an equal partner at every step of the process. Together, the Democracy and the Democracy Education Projects suggest the potential of community service learning for strengthening citizenship, and for bridging the gaps between races, in the United States as well as in South Africa.

How can scholars translate knowledge concerning problems ofpeace and security across the boundaries of academic disciplines and intellectual frameworks? By what standard should one judge such knowledge? In a rich essay, which may be read fruitfully on many levels, David Dessler argues that we must look beyond epistemological differences between positivist and non-positivist approaches and focus on pragmatics: the purposes for which, and context within which, knowledge is generated. Dessler distinguishes between predictive knowledge, which seeks to identify causal relationships with general validity, and reconstructive knowledge, which explores critically the categories, assumptions, and purposes of predictive theory. Neither form of knowledge can claim precedence; both are crucial for a holistic understanding of phenomena from which social scientists can never fully divorce themselves. Dessler substantiates this distinction by showing the utility of six works in the area of peace and security: Jack Snyder's Myths of Empire, Charles Hale's Resistance and Contradiction, Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work, Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer's The Great Arch, James Ferguson's The AntiPolitics Machine, and David Holloway's Stalin and the Bomb.

Dessler concludes with a warning: the social relevance of research can never be fixed since the audience for the research is not under the deterministic control of the scientist. Dessler's essay stands as a beacon for those seeking to forge a broad-based and responsible science of peace and security.

An earlier version of this essay occasioned a workshop, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation Consortium on International Peace and Cooperation, on "Talking Across Disciplines in the Study of Peace and Security." A summary of the discussion follows the essay.

In August 1991, the people of Moscow and Leningrad demonstrated to the world that democracy is an idea whose time had come for the Soviet Union. As a result, the Soviet
government received a mandate for political reform. This reform, if successful, will result in a political system that will be very different from any that the people in the Soviet Union have ever known-a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Hand in hand with political reform, the Union and its republics will be attempting sweeping economic reforms. While recognizing how difficult it will be for the Soviet Union to achieve economic reform, it is also important to observe that it is at least conceivable now. A critically important component of economic reform in the Soviet Union is the conversion of their defense industry from a centrally managed monolith to a collection of independent, privately owned enterprises, producing civil products.