LAUSR

authors’ theoretical priors, the military conflict model seems solid. For the economic conflict model, I wondered at the decision to evaluate the rising power of each BRICS country (the independent dimension) purely within its home geographic region, while assessing economic conflict (the outcome to be explained) by counting challenges to the global LIEO, as represented by taking actions against US firms, banks, or preferences for capital account openness. Finally, and with apologies for behaving as a stereotypical case study researcher, I noted that the authors’ list of six (only six?) Brazilian economic conflict events (p. 75) did not mesh with my knowledge of the most important or assertive events in that country’s economic history. The debt defaults of 1930 and 1937 were not unique to Brazil, but reflected the effects of the Great Depression on commodity exporters throughout Latin America. The 1983 event coded as a “default” was actually a debt rescheduling, arguably a cooperative event. There was a brief technical default (no repayment of either principal or interest for at least one quarter) in 1987, not mentioned by the authors, but also essentially unimportant, as all parties understood it to be a negotiating tactic. That the People’s Republic of China had had “only two instances of economic challenge” (p. 131) to the LIEO since 1950 was an even greater surprise. Reservations aside, the authors have performed an important service by taking BRICS and emerging powers seriously, while attempting, with transparency and rigor, to explain what they mean for international relations theories. Their conclusion, strongly supported by the evidence as they have marshaled it, is the hopeful one that even authoritarian rising states may, if allowed to, make their peace with the status quo.