Capsule Reviews

As Gibson's book reminds readers, land issues lie at the heart of racial politics in contemporary South Africa. Employing opinion surveys to investigate South African attitudes about land, Gibson finds that for black South Africans, the expropriation of ancestral lands remains the central feature of the hated apartheid state. They view the redistribution of territory as a necessary righting of historical wrongs.

The collapse of Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko's regime in 1997 began a decade of horrendous conflict involving the Congo and most of its neighbors, killing probably more than five million people. Reyntjens has written a perceptive account of a war whose origins lie in the advanced decay of the Congolese state at the end of Mobutu's 32-year reign and in the ethnic conflict in neighboring Burundi and Rwanda. Reyntjens delineates the geopolitical motivations of the different players and the diplomatic and military relations between them.

In lives lost, wars spawned, and reputations ruined, the territorial dispute over Kashmir surely ranks near the top of all the world's intractable conflicts. Schaffer, a retired U.S. ambassador with decades of experience in South Asia, has written an exemplary account of the United States' efforts over 60 years to settle, or at least manage, this problem. From 1948 to 1989, U.S. diplomacy fluctuated between engagement and quiescence.

Relations between China and India have thawed since the beginning of this century, and there has been a lot of talk about common interests, especially on the Indian side. Holslag analyzes the forces that are drawing the two nations closer, such as growing trade and investment ties, "road diplomacy" (tacit cooperation on opening up transportation routes in places such as Myanmar and Nepal), and shared concerns over the unstable buffer states of Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan.