As western Sudan continues to suffer much international attention has focused on whether to call what is happening there "genocide." Yet once the term was invoked it did not trigger outside intervention. Terminology turns out to matter far less than was expected. once more the world has dithered while people die

Thinking of modern jihad as simply a cultural extension of Islam is a Common unfortunate mistake. Two new books by Gilles Kepel Olivier Roy offer better historical sociological explanations but they are only a start.

Three new studies of the international community's attempts at postwar state reconstruction in the 1990s offer valuable lessons about how best to handle the job, but they also overgeneralize and miss critical differences among their cases