Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945–1990 . By Arend Lijphart. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 209p. $29.95.

balance are theoretical essays. "The major issue," the editor notes, was to explore "why some civil wars end so that large-scale civil violence is not resumed" (p. 13). The collaborators agreed to weigh the roles of the following considerations: (1) the nature of the issues underlying conflicts, (2) the internal politics of each side, (3) the military balance in the field, (4) the role played by outside parties, and (5) the effect of the polity emerging from civil conflict on the stability of its resolution. Close attention to these variables, it was hoped, would disclose parallels in the successful resolution of civil war. It would be hard to identify a salient theoretical conclusion emerging from the work. All in all, the case studies strike one as more informative than the theoretical essays. Careful analysis of the nuts and bolts of individual cases leaves one with the sense of grasping the forces and circumstances that accounted for each particular outcome at the particular historical moment under analysis. But efforts to identify significant patterns in these chains of events or to anticipate how similar antecedents might lead to similar results in other instances are more labored. Consider, for example, Stephen John Stedman's analysis of the resolution of Zimbabwe's civil war. Here, it seems clear, the aggressive role of the British in cajoling and threatening the various parties and playing them off against one another was decisive in shaping the ultimate solution. But this finding offers little precedent for the other cases. In some (e.g., Sudan, as documented by Donald Rothchild and Caroline Hartzell), outsiders determined to broker the peace played at most a mildly facilitative role. In others (e.g., Nigeria, as depicted in James O'Connell's essay), strenuous efforts by would-be mediators seemed all but irrelevant to the ultimate solution. In light of such diverse findings, the theoretical studies take on an on the one hand/on the other hand quality. Probably it would be wrong to blame the authors of these chapters for the scarcity of strong positions here. The cases making up the universe of civil wars may simply be so heterogeneous that similarities (if indeed there are any) do not stand out in a sample as small as seven. Perhaps our salient moral reaction to civil wars (i.e., as a scourge) seduces us to an unwarranted belief that the processes by which their destructive processes begin and end are somehow of a piece. One illustration of the elusiveness of parallels is evident in the attempt to map a salient theoretical concept—I. William Zartman's notion of a hurting stalemate—onto the case studies. This is the idea that "each side is willing to change policies only if it believes that it cannot achieve its desired ends by violence at a tolerable cost and that its relative position will decline in the future. The hypothesis would be that a stable agreement is possible only if both sides believe this at the same time" (p. 16). The idea is eminently plausible. But editor Roy Licklider puts his finger on the matter in his concluding chapter, when he writes that the concept is deceptively hard to work with. "Stalemate can be defined without undue difficulty but will not produce a settlement by itself; both sides must perceive the current situation as untenable and unlikely to improve in the future. The concept is difficult to operationalize without being tautological; we want to know if a hurting stalemate exists in order to predict whether or not the parties will alter their policies, but we only know if it exists if the parties do alter their policies. " (p. 309). Licklider's acute observation could be extended to the broad genre of attempts to apply rational-choice analysis and other calculative models to conditions faced by political actors in life-and-death struggles. Perforce, a key term in all such analyses must be the costs or rewards of pursuing a particular political objective, as perceived by the actors themselves. The problem here is not so much that these costs are subjectively defined but rather that these definitions themselves are continually emergent; that is, they are likely to undergo continuing redefinition in light of developments both exterior to the hearts and minds of the actors and strictly internal to them. Does all of this mean that there are no meaningful parallels to be found in the processes leading to the conclusion of civil wars? That conclusion would be premature. The best chance of identifying such patterns might be to plot and compare the scenarios of much larger numbers of such conflicts, in the hopes that "family resemblances" would emerge within significant subsets of the cases. Until such a more ambitious analysis can be carried out, these essays serve to remind us just how heterogeneous the world of civil conflict really is.