Mark Shirk’s Making War on the World: How Transnational Violence Reshapes Global Order expresses profound discomfort with globalization discourse. From Shirk’s perspective, much of this literature narrowly focuses on the question of whether the enhanced global ties of past decades represent an erosion of state sovereignty. From the outset, Shirk refuses the binary set of answers to which—in his estimation—so much of the literature resorts. Shirk instead addresses a more central question, that is, “how do transboundary processes drive political transformation” (12). His book resists the urge to treat the supposed rise in globalization as a novel phenomenon but instead identifies it as an inextricable, almost constitutive, element of state sovereignty across time. For him, states are constantly negotiating transboundary processes, some of which do indeed pose novel challenges. How they negotiate these processes is the subject of the book, rather than whether they retain the capacity to do so without sacrificing sovereignty.

Through three cases studies—eighteenth century piracy in the Caribbean, nineteenth and twentieth century anarchist violence, and twentieth century violence by Al Qaeda—Shirk shows how seemingly foundational challenges to state sovereignty were met with state reconfigura