Benjamin Miller is a Professor in the School of Political Sciences at the University of Haifa, Israel. He is the author of When Opponents Cooperate: Great Power Conflict and Collaboration in World Politics (1995).

'Benjamin Miller's States, Nations and the Great Powers is a superb book. It advances the important thesis that to understand the prospects for peace or war in a given region, we need to examine the interaction between the political conditions that obtain within the region and the actions of great powers from outside the region. Miller's book is masterful in its integration of international relations theory and the comparative method. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from undergraduates and graduate students to scholars, and from policy-makers to journalists to citizens, indeed to anyone who is interested in peace and security in the modern era.' Joseph M. Grieco, Duke University

• 1. Why some regions are peaceful and others are not; 2. A theory of regional war and peace; 3. States, nations and war; 4. Explaining the war-proneness of the Middle East in a comparative perspective; 5. The great powers and war and peace in the Middle East; 6. War and peace in the Balkans: states, nations and great powers; 7. The state-to-nation balance and the emergence of peace in South America during the twentieth century; 8. The emergence of high-level peace in post-1945 Western Europe: Nationalism, democracy, hegemony and regional integration; 9. Conclusions.