Defensive Internationalism: Providing Public Goods in an Uncertain World

Abstract

Defensive Internationalism: Providing Public Goods in an Uncertain World. By Davis B. Bobrow and Mark A. Boyer. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005. 411p. 34.95 paper.Davis Bobrow and Mark Boyer address a topic of considerable current importance in both scholarly and policy circles—international cooperation, particularly among advanced industrial democracies—to produce what the authors call “progress,” that is, “improvements in actual and perceived conditions in fundamental terms—physical security, economic prosperity, ecological sustainability, and cultural continuity” (p. 6), and to avoid “regression,” defined as “worsening of those conditions in one or more of those respects” (p. 6). Their stated goal is to understand (in a clever reframing of the famous Harold Lasswell [1936] quote) “who gives, what, when, and how” (p. 1), since they believe that understanding this question is key to dealing successfully with a range of current global problems.