Global Security Upheaval: Armed NSGs Usurping State StabilityFunctions by Robert Mandel. Palo Alto, CA, Stanford UniversityPress, 2013. 304 pp. Paper, $32.50.

This book challenges the existing idea that states are the best providers ofsecurity and stability. In this book, RobertMandel takes a self‐professed “devil’sadvocate” position in exploring the global shift in security provision from publicto private hands—arguing that armed non‐state groups (NSGs) can play apositive role in creating security and stability (p. 12).

To persuade us to take armed NSGs seriously as providers of security,Mandel uses a multi‐pronged approach. He demonstrates that a shift isunderway in global security that entails a decreasing ability of sovereign statesto provide stability and security alongwith increasing demands for stability andan increasing ability of armed NSGs to provide it. He defines armed NSGs(categorizing them into five types) and defines security stability, synthesizingexisting approaches to stability and ultimately stripping the concept down tofour elements (security authority, public welfare, internal harmony, and exter-nal autonomy). Employing 12 cases drawn from different types of armedNSGs,he highlights patterns of how these groups succeed or fail in providing a stableand secure local environment and draws inferences from these patterns aboutwhich armed NSGs are most likely to be security enhancing and when.

Mandel achieves his primary goal of getting the reader to rethink the rolethat armed NSGs are playing in the global arena. Both the case studies and thechapter spent conceptualizing types of armed NSGs demonstrate that not all ofthe groups are similar and they are not all similarly bad in terms of stability.

Having achieved that goal, Mandel also seeks to provide something of aguide to armed NSGs and to how the global community of policymakers candeal with them. This endeavor is more difficult.While the book provides a greatdeal of information and well‐thought‐out argumentation, it raises many ques-tions that beg further investigation at minimum.

Mandel focuses on armed NSGs as a potential source of stability, but alsonames five other relevant actors. It is not clear what is lost analytically byexamining only one actor, and one that is likely to emerge only under certainconditions of stability breakdown. Mandel asks us to look beyond states as theonly providers of security stability, yet his conceptualization is still rooted in theuse of force/monopoly on the use‐of‐force ideas that are so dominant in thestate‐centric literature. This harkens back to the existence ofmultiple sources ofauthority that pre‐dated the contemporary international system analyzed byHenrik Spruyt in The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, as well as others.

The 12 cases are chosen because they represent a “wide range of successfuland unsuccessful… effort to achieve security” (p. 8). Mandel acknowledges

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limitations of the case analysis, but mainly related to the number of cases, andnot any other issues with case selection that make generalizability challenging.The cases advance Mandel’s primary goal of causing us to rethink the role ofarmed NSGs, but the lessons from these cases inspire rather than conclusivelyanswer questions about why they emerged in the first place, how they function,their relationship to the populace and the state, and how and when they will beeffective in promoting stability.

Mandel concludes by addressing the normative implications of armedNSGsproviding security stability, and highlights the dangers of these groups provid-ing stability through coercion. This thoughtful account is an excellent conclu-sion to this book that forces us to rethink the role of armed NSGs ininternational politics.

KATHLEEN GALLAGHER CUNNINGHAMUniversity of Maryland

Prisoners of the White House: The Isolation of America’sPresidents and the Crisis of Leadership by Kenneth T. Walsh.Boulder, CO, Paradigm Publishers, 2013. 256 pp. $27.95.

More than 40 years ago, George Reedy, a veteran reporter and former LyndonB. Johnson press secretary, argued in The Twilight of the Presidency that thegrowing power and isolation of themodern presidency had rendered presidentsdeaf to any sources of public opinion beyond the White House and, as a result,had made it impossible for them to govern effectively or democratically.

Kenneth Walsh, a longtime White House correspondent, readily acknowl-edges that the White House can be, in Harry Truman’s words, a “nice prison”(p. 97) and is aware of the dangers of presidential isolation. In fact, he arguesthat the isolation has only gotten worse over the last four decades. UnlikeReedy, however, Walsh contends that some “prisoners of the White House”have managed to scale the White House walls and stay connected to thepeople.

Walsh identifies “four fundamental ways in which today’s presidents keep intouch” (p. 12)—intuition, polls, the press, and Congress—and then evaluatesvarious presidents from Franklin Roosevelt through Barack Obama based ontheir success in using these tools to break out of the White House prison.According to Walsh, four modern presidents, Johnson, Richard Nixon, JimmyCarter, and Bush I, “lost the people”; five, FDR, Truman, Ronald Reagan, BillClinton, and Obama, “stayed connected”; and two, John F. Kennedy and BushII, were “defiant princes”who governed by their own lights more than did othermodern presidents (JFK to his benefit, Bush II to his detriment).

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