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).

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.

Globalization involves a profound re-ordering of our world with the proliferation everywhere of rules and transnational modes of governance. This book examines how this governance is formed, changes and stabilizes. Building on a rich and varied set of empirical cases, it explores transnational rules and regulations and the organizing, discursive and monitoring activities that frame, sustain and reproduce them. Beginning from an understanding of the powerful structuring forces that embed and form the context of transnational regulatory activities, the book scrutinizes the actors involved, how they are organized, how they interact and how they transform themselves to adapt to this new regulatory landscape. A powerful analysis of the modes and logics of transnational rule-making and rule-monitoring closes the book. This authoritative resource offers ideal reading for all academic researchers and graduate students of governance and regulation.

Recent world events have created a compelling need for new perspectives and realistic solutions to the problem of sovereign debt. The success of the Jubilee 2000 movement in raising public awareness of the devastating effects of debt, coupled with the highly publicized Bono/O'Neill tour of Africa, and the spectacular default and economic implosion of Argentina have helped spur a global debate over debt. A growing chorus of globalization critics, galvanized by the Catholic Church's demand for forgiveness and bolstered by recent defaults, has put debt near the top of the international agenda. Creditor governments and international financial institutions have belatedly recognized the need for more sustainable progress on debt as an inescapable step towards economic recovery in many parts of the world. This book is intended to advance the dialogue around these issues by providing a comprehensive overview of the problems raised by debt and describing new and practical approaches to overcoming them. It will be the first in more than a decade to bring together under one cover the voices of prominent members of the international debt community. It will include pieces from the most relevant constituencies: from creditors (the IMF/World Bank, government lenders, private investors) to critics (debtor representatives, activists, and academics) and analysis from economists, bankers, lawyers, social scientists, and politicians. As contributions come from such leading thinkers across a range of disciplines, this book will offer a timely guide for understanding and influencing the debt debate.

Just war theory is the traditional approach taken to questions of the morality of war, but war today is far from traditional. War has been deeply affected in recent years by a variety of social and technological developments in areas such as international terrorism, campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the global human rights movement, economic globalization, and military technology. This book asks whether just war theory is adequate to the challenges these developments pose. Just war theory provides rules for determining when it is justified to fight a war. But some have argued that the nature of contemporary war makes these rules obsolete. For example, genocidal and aggressive regimes may require the use of military force that is not strictly in self-defense, as just war theory requires. In addition, the theory provides rules for determining what the limits are on justified conduct in war. But the random violence of terrorism and the deliberately inflicted violence of torture seem endemic to our age, yet take us beyond the limits set by these rules of conduct in war. By carefully examining the phenomena of intervention, terrorism, and torture from a number of different perspectives, the essays in this book explore this set of issues with insight and clarity.

Just war theory is the traditional approach taken to questions of the morality of war, but war today is far from traditional. War has been deeply affected in recent years by a variety of social and technological developments in areas such as international terrorism, campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the global human rights movement, economic globalization, and military technology. This book asks whether just war theory is adequate to the challenges these developments pose. Just war theory provides rules for determining when it is justified to fight a war. But some have argued that the nature of contemporary war makes these rules obsolete. For example, genocidal and aggressive regimes may require the use of military force that is not strictly in self-defense, as just war theory requires. In addition, the theory provides rules for determining what the limits are on justified conduct in war. But the random violence of terrorism and the deliberately inflicted violence of torture seem endemic to our age, yet take us beyond the limits set by these rules of conduct in war. By carefully examining the phenomena of intervention, terrorism, and torture from a number of different perspectives, the essays in this book explore this set of issues with insight and clarity.

The Northeast Asian region has witnessed phenomenal economic growth and the spread of democratization in recent decades, yet wounds from past wrongs - committed in times of colonialism, war, and dictatorship - still remain. Of all the countries in the northeast region coping with historical injustice, the Republic of Korea has the rare distinction of confronting internal and external historical injustices simultaneously, both as a victim and as a perpetrator. Korea's experience highlights the major forces shaping the reckoning and reconciliation process, such as democratization, globalization, regional integration, and nationalism, in addition to providing valuable insight into the themes of historical injustice and reconciliation within the region.

Although there is no universal formula for reconciliation, the contributors examine the reaction of society from the perspective of citizens' groups, NGOs, and victim-activist groups toward such issues as enforced labor, ,comfort women, and internal injustices committed during the wars to foster a better understanding of the past and thus aid in future reconciliation between other Northeast Asian countries.