How have understandings of fundamental norms of international society changed over time? How does this relate to the decline of interstate violence since 1945? Previous explanations have focused on regime type, domestic institutions, economic interdependence, relative power, and nuclear weapons, I argue that a crucial and underexplored part of the puzzle is the change in understanding of sovereignty over the same period. In this article, I propose a novel means of examining change in these norms between 1970 and 2014 by analyzing the content of UN Security Council resolutions. This analysis is then utilized in quantitative analysis of the level of violence dispute participants resorted to in all Militarized Interstate Disputes in the period. I find that as liberal understandings of fundamental norms have increased, that the average level of violence used has decreased. This points to a crucial missing component in the existing literature: that institutions can only constrain when political actors share the right norms.

However, in the context of the Arab world -in which political sectarianism reasserted itself as a response to the failures of ethnonationalism in particular -Bishara argues it is essential to note the difference and name things accurately. He writes: "Ethnic violence is not ethnic in its essence, but is categorized as such by journalists, officials, academics, political parties and politicians, aid workers, protagonists, vicitimisers and victims. There is thus a 'metaconflict' which revolves around the definition and nature of the struggle, runs alongside it, and constitutes a part of it." For academics in the global North, we must be wary of naming-and thus reproducing-the ethnicization of this conflict, especially when the stakeholders insist the naming is inaccurate. Syrians have already had to contend with the Assad regime's unabashed pursuit of politicide that has ripped their society apart. It is then understandable that Syrians often vehemently reject the layering of yet another dimension of fragmentation to their broken nation-in this particular instance, by describing dynamics in ethnic terms where they would argue those terms do not apply.Despite this criticism, the book is a rich contribution to understanding how and why identity conflicts emerge-even if people disagree about what type of identity is most at work here. This research's causal argument, categorizations, and findings can (and should) be used to inform our understanding of protest and violent conflict beyond cases in the Middle East region. Indeed, this book represents a model of conducting research using local-level data in combination with national-level trends. The case of the Syrian conflict-both uprizing and subsequent civil waris complicated, with a range of local, tribal, ethnic, sectarian, and national dynamics at work. Conducting research that encompasses these intersecting dynamics and considers this broad array of issues is difficult, for which the author must be commended.