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In this article, the authors investigate the relationship between states'political leaders'ages, their regime type, and the likelihood of militarized dispute initiation and escalation. They examine more than 100,000 interstate dyads between 1875 and 2002 to systematically test the relationship between leader age and militarized disputes. The results show that, in general, as the age of leaders increases, they become more likely to both initiate and escalate militarized disputes. In addition, the interaction of age and regime type is significant. In personalist regimes, the general effect reverses; as age increases, the relative risk of conflict declines in comparison to other types of regimes. Increasing leader age in democracies increases the relative risk propensity for conflict initiation at a higher level than for personalist regimes, while the impact of increasing leader age is most substantial in intermediate regimes.

In recent years, constructivist thinking about global politics has brought a breath of fresh auto international relations. By exploring questions of identity and interest, constructivist scholars have articulated an important corrective to the methodological individualism and materialism that have come to dominate much of IR. As the books under review indicate, constructivism has also succeeded in demonstrating its empirical value—documenting a new and important causal role for norms and social structure in global politics. Theoretically, however, the approach remains underspecified. In particular, constructivists typically fail to explain the origins of such structures, how they change over time, how their effects vary cross nationally, or the mechanisms through which they constitute states and individuals. Missing is the substantive theory and attention to agency that will provide answers to such puzzles, as well as ensure the development of a productive research program.

Shin reviews FUTURE TRENDS IN EAST ASIAN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS edited by Quansheng Zhao.

Although exceptionalism is an important dimension of China's foreign policy, it has not been a subject of serious scholarly research. This article attempts to identify manifestations of exceptionalism in China's long history and explain why and how different types of exceptionalism have arisen in different historical periods. The analytical approach is both historical and theoretical. It explores how international structure has interacted with perceptions of history and culture to produce three distinctive yet related types of exceptionalism in imperial, Maoist, and contemporary China. While resting on an important factual basis, China's exceptionalism is constructed by mixing facts with myths through selective use of the country's vast historical and cultural experiences. The implications of contemporary China's exceptionalism -- as characterized by the claims of great power reformism, benevolent pacifism, and harmonious inclusions -- are drawn out by a comparison with American exceptionalism. While American exceptionalism has both offensive and defensive faces, Chinese exceptionalism is in general more defensive and even vague. While not determinative, exceptionalism can suggest policy dispositions, and by being an essential part of China's worldview, it can become an important source for policy ideas, offer the ingredients for the supposed construction of Chinese theories of international relations, and provide a lens through which to view emerging Chinese visions of international relations. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Ltd. & ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research.]