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Gorbachev's Last Gamble: Soviet Foreign Policy & the End of the Cold War

research agenda. The volume, which stems from a 2008 conference on regional and theoretical perspectives, organized in Montreal by the International Political Science Association, is thus a timely snapshot of the current state of development and represents an important contribution to the understanding of the discipline. It is a seminal work that will be required reading for everyone who teaches or researches in political science and perhaps too, for students who want to trace the emergence of all those states that emerged from the euphoric chaos of 1989 and its aftermath. For this reviewer the one chapter on Georgia alone would have been worth the price of the book; it stands almost as a metaphor for the whole confused story the editors have set out to map. Emerging from the dead hand of Marxism/Leninism to face independence, civil war and chaotic political struggle, the two distinguished academics whose contribution this is, show that while reformers drew heavily on the western, and mostly US, influence of political science, the traditionalists sought refuge in the so-called Georgian past, from which to shape its future. A new constitution, growing external relations and visiting scholarships and a budding political science discipline in the universities have all influenced attempts to find a ‘middle way’ (p. 138) through the deeply polarized political society, meaning that Georgians not only struggle to change the country’s future, they also struggle to shape its past. A fragmented political science community signifies what the authors term ‘a multiplicity of historical narratives, an inconsistency in virtual worlds, in which the society reflects itself’ (p. 144). They conclude, sadly, that at present it would be unrealistic to expect that political science might have any significant influence on policy-making. We can only hope that is an interim judgement because they also conclude that policy-making is ‘weakly institutionalised but strongly motivated—this holds good for both politics and political science in Georgia’ (p. 145). In the meantime this book is a model for similar studies and will be so for some time to come.