Description
Book SynopsisAn examination of the promotion of democracy during US military interventions in the 20th century. The work shows this to be one of the central ways in which the US attempts to reconcile the potential contradictions involved in being a liberal great power.
Trade Review“Peceny offers us a well-researched, insightful, and systematic analysis of the curiously mixed motives behind U.S. military interventions in Latin America. Security concerns have been foremost, but liberal ideals have also been crucial in legitimating interventions and in shaping whatever good sometimes came out of them.”
—Yale H. Ferguson,Rutgers University
“Mark Peceny’s book is a welcome contribution to a rather muddy and inconclusive field of inquiry. Peceny’s undertaking is enormously ambitious and wide ranging. . . . He thus restricts the method of democracy promotion to the use of force, and is not concerned with other, ’softer,’ commonly employed techniques, such as assistance programs or even economic sanctions. Limiting the universe in such a way permits rigorous statistical analysis, which, combined with carefully selected, in-depth case studies, sheds considerable light on the dynamics of such interventions.”
—Michael Shifter Latin American Politics and Society
“The book is clearly written and well organized. By combining both quantitative analysis and case studies, Peceny presents the strengths that each approach can offer. The two quantitative chapters report robust findings of multivariate analysis, and the case studies and footnotes provide a wealth of detailed information. . . . I highly recommend this work to scholars and to advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in U.S. military intervention and democratization.”
—Mi Yung Yoon American Political Science Review (APSR)
