Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and the Changing Calculus of Conflict

Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and the Changing Calculus of Conflict. By Stephen G. Brooks. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 316p. 35. 00. If commerce among nations truly undermines their proclivity to settle differences by resort to arms—as philosophers like Montesquieu and Kant believed so ardently—then globalization should portend a new era of world peace. More than a few overly optimistic liberals like Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000) have made just such a claim. But the world is hardly such a simple place, as we learn in Stephen Brooks's carefully crafted book. Brooks begins by unpacking the multifaceted nature of economic globalization itself, and through the main body of the book he closely examines how individual threads of this phenomenon may pull some nations toward more pacific relations while tugging others in more dangerous directions. A great deal of case-based and anecdotal evidence is marshaled along the way, and some of his arguments are made more convincingly than others. But in the end, he has given us a clear, comprehensive, and forward-looking treatment of a question that has heretofore been dismissed with oversimplified answers.