Documenting a rare political occurrence, Rachel McCleary examines the evolution of the two major elite groups in Guatemala—the organized private sector and the military—during the country’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Arguing that the transition resulted from a stalemate over economic policy, she shows how the two elites altered their relations from disunity (during the period from 1982 to 1986) to unity (from 1993 to the present). Not only does she describe a nonviolent settlement, she also discusses the development of democracy in a country that was directly caught up in Cold War relations between the United States and the USSR. Thus she makes a serious contribution to the study of democratization as well as to Latin American history.

This is an edited collection of case studies from The Pew Charitable Trust. The chapters were written by knowledgeable experts on different subject areas such as the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, the 1992 Vietnamese peace negotiations, the third United Nations Conference on the law of the sea, Nigeria’s problems with debt and the International Monetary Fund, expansion of the European Community and the resulting conflicts with the United States over GATT fair trade practices, and finally the very complex issues related to preserving the rain forest in Brazil and the “internationalization” of Amazonia. Chapter-length case studies on each of the latter topics are preceded by the editor’s introductory chapter, which introduces the reader to a framework for analyzing the issues of justice and ethics in each of the cases.