748 COMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES / August 2002 Fritzsche, P. (1993). Breakdown or breakthrough? Conservatives and the November revolution. In L. E. Jones & J. Retallack (Eds.), Between reform, reaction, and resistance: Studies in the history of German conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (pp. 299-328). Providence, RI: Berg. Kitschelt, H. (1994). The transformation of European social democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mainwaring, S., & Scully, T. R. (1995). Introduction: Party systems in Latin America. In S. Mainwaring & T. R. Scully (Eds.), Building democratic institutions: Party systems in Latin America (pp. 1-34). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pridham, G., & Lewis, P. (1996). Introduction: Stabilising fragile democracies and party system development. In G. Pridham & P. Lewis (Eds.), Stabilising fragile democracies: Comparing new party systems in Southern and Eastern Europe (pp. 1-22). London: Routledge. Taylor-Robinson, M. M. (2001). Old parties and new democracies: Do they bring out the best in one another? Party Politics, 7(5), 581-604. Roger D. Petersen, Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons From Eastern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 337 pp. Cloth, $59.95. Oxana Shevel, Harvard University In Resistance and Rebellion, Roger Petersen produces an insightful and detailed analysis of the process that leads ordinary people to become involved in resistance and rebellion against powerful regimes. Because the units of analysis in the book are individuals and face-to-face communities rather than nations, the book will be of particular interest to those interested in resistance and political violence as individual-level actions. With the bulk of empirical material centered on the Lithuanian resistance in the 1940s, the book will also be of particular interest to scholars of Lithuania. The book’s rich empirical material draws from extensive interviews with the participants in the Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance. Detailed analysis of the resistance experiences of individuals and communities in Lithuania is smoothly integrated with a discussion of the larger historical and political context in which these resistance activities took place, thus making the book a valuable source to both experts on Lithuania and readers with less knowledge of the area. To answer the question that drives the book—How do ordinary people come to resist and rebel against powerful regimes?—Petersen begins by developing an analytically crisp conceptualization of resistance as an action located on a spectrum of possible individual roles (coded from –3 to +3) that range from various degrees of collaboration (the negative end of the spectrum) through neutrality (0); nonviolent, unorganized resistance (+1); participation in a locally based armed organization (+2); to participation in an armed, mobile rebel organization such as a guerilla army (+3). Ten “triggering” and “sustaining” mechanisms are then identified that work in sequence to drive individuals along this spectrum of multiple possible roles. These mechanisms and the logic of their effects are discussed in the theoretical chapters of the book (the Introduction and Chapter 1). Four mechanisms trigger a movement from neutrality to unorganized, nonviolent resistance (resentment formation, threshold- BOOK REVIEWS 749 based safety calculations with society-wide references, focal points that communicate resentment and risk acceptance, and community-based status rewards and sanctions); two mechanisms further trigger movements into armed, organized resistance organizations (threshold-based safety calculations based on community-wide references and community-based norms of reciprocity); and four mechanisms help sustain armed resistance organizations (threats plus three irrational psychological mechanisms: the value of small victories, the tyranny of sunk costs, and wishful thinking). Once a theory of 10 mechanisms driving the actions of individuals along the spectrum of resistance is laid out, the substantive chapters of the book (Chapters 3 through 9) show these mechanisms at play via resistance and rebellion in 20th-century Eastern Europe. Empirical material about Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance (in the periods from 1940 to 1941, 1945 to 1954, and the perestroika period of the late 1980s) constitutes the bulk of the empirical chapters (Chapters 3 to 6 are devoted to Lithuania in the 1940s, and in Chapters 8 and 9, Lithuanian perestroika-era resistance in the period from 1987 to 1991 is analyzed and compared with the resistance in Czechoslovakia and East Germany in the same period). Chapters 7 presents additional empirical material from several other 1940s Eastern European cases (Latvia and Estonia; Galicia and Volhynia in Ukraine, central Ukraine, and Byelorussia; and Montenegro). Resistance in these states is compared by applying the “mechanisms approach” of the book. Perhaps the most interesting contribution of the book is Petersen’s analysis of the properties of a community that make rebellion against strong regimes possible. This analysis has implications reaching beyond the Lithuanian and Eastern European cases. The structural features of a community that are conducive to the initiation and sustaining of rebellion against strong regimes that Petersen identifies (the density, centralization, and homogeneity of the community and the structural positions of first actors or political entrepreneurs within the community) are generalizable. The identified community characteristics allow one to generate predictions for resistance activities in other geographical and historical settings. An important insight of Petersen’s analysis is that “properties of the community that make rebellion against strong regime possible should be seen not in urban-rural, peasant-worker, but rather along more abstract, generalizable, and, importantly, non-partisan dimensions” (p. 152). At the same time, the structural characteristics of a community are only part of the book’s theoretical approach, and the mechanisms approach and the book as a whole do not constitute a generalizable theory of resistance and rebellion, especially at the national level. As Petersen himself states, the mechanisms approach he employs “aims for explanation over prediction” (p. 12), and the units of analysis in the book are individuals and communities, not nations (p. 8). As such, the part of the book devoted to cross-national comparisons of Eastern European cases in the 1940s and 1980s is weaker and less persuasive than the part devoted to micro-level analysis of the Lithuanian case. The author correctly argues that national culture and history cannot explain individual or regional variation in rebellion activity within a group that shares similar national history and myths. The mechanisms approach may indeed be a more suitable analytical tool when the task is to explain individual- and community-level variation 750 COMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES / August 2002 in resistance within a given nation. However, at the level of cross-national comparisons of resistance and rebellion activities that the book also attempts, the mechanisms approach competes with historical, cultural, and structural explanations. At this level, the mechanisms approach does not offer an entirely satisfying alternative to rival explanations. Reading the cross-national chapters leaves the impression that some, if not all, of the cross-national (and some cross-regional) variations in rebellion activities discussed in the book can be explained with references to different historical experiences and/or structural features of the respective countries and regions, without revoking the system of mechanisms. For example, although Petersen lists the presence and depth of resentment against a particular oppressive regime as one of the mechanisms that trigger resistance, this resentment is also a product of historical experiences (the same could be said about another mechanism, the presence of focal points based around particular national myths or historical events). In this regard, historical experience (and/or national myths) seems to be an equally satisfying explanation of variation in resistance to a particular regime among national and subnational communities that have had different historical experiences. Although resentment and focal points can be called mechanisms, this labeling adds little in terms of explanatory power. Variation in resistance among nations can be explained by alternative theories such as history and/or the strength of national sentiments, which the mechanisms approach does not quite satisfactorily refute. The same can be said with regard to the variation in resistance among regions within the same nation that have had very different historical experiences (e.g., Vohlynia and Galicia in Ukraine, among the examples used in the book). Nevertheless, Petersen’s fine-grained analysis of historical examples of resistance and rebellion that illuminates how various mechanisms work in sequence to push and pull individuals along the spectrum of possible activities during resistance is an important and interesting contribution to the study of resistance, rebellion, and political violence.