Nigeria is Africa's most populous country; its citizens are perhaps the best educated on the continent. It is the world's sixth-largest producer of oil. Nigeria also has probably the most elaborate system of government in the region. Yet the country teeters perilously close to massive civil upheaval.

In this compelling new work, Suberu examines the profound political contradictions that make up Nigeria, a nation whose leaders have constantly tinkered with a colonial federal legacy that sought to balance the country's three major ethnic groups. He explores the evolution of Nigerian federalism through its various constitutional experiments and administrative redesigns, including those in the periods of military rule.

While acknowledging the genius of Nigerian federalism in trying to subdue ethnic and regional conflict, Suberu expertly analyzes the troubling flaws in a system that breeds corruption, prioritizes distribution over development, and encourages the country's further political fragmentation.

In the book's final chapter, Suberu outlines bold constitutional reforms that seek to promote institutional innovation in Nigerian federalism to keep pace with the country's growing demographic and ethnopolitical complexity.

A joint Stanford University-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory team of scientists, nuclear engineers and arms control experts has concluded in a new study that North Korea's compliance with the 1994 Agreed Framework can be verified to a satisfactory degree of accuracy. Special effort, however, will be needed from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as support from the US, the Republic of Korea (ROK), Japan and perhaps other countries. Most importantly, cooperation and openness from North Korea are essential.

The 1994 Agreed Framework (AF) between the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has become the centerpiece of recent US efforts to reduce the threat of conflict on the Korean peninsula. Under the AF, the US and its allies (mainly South Korea) will provide the DPRK with two large nuclear-power reactors and other benefits such as annual shipments of fuel oil for the generation of electricity until the nuclear-power reactors being built for that purpose are able to do so. In exchange the DPRK will declare how much nuclear weapon-usable material it has produced; identify, freeze, and eventually dismantle specified facilities for producing this material; and remain a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and allow the implementation of its safeguards agreement.

The AF is now being carried out according to a complex and currently delayed schedule. Fuel oil shipments have been provided to the DPRK, the site for the two nuclear-power reactors has largely been prepared, and construction has begun on some components. The DPRK, for its part, has declared some nuclear weapon-usable material and has identified and frozen some facilities for producing this material.

As emphasized in President Bush's statement at the White House on March 7, 2001, verification is an essential part of any agreement with North Korea. How well can it be verified that the DPRK has no access to nuclear weapon-usable material? What is the potential impact of delays, disagreements, and lack of cooperation on verification? The United States and the international community must answer these questions if the nuclear-power reactor project is to proceed as planned.

The report analyzes in detail both the task of safeguarding the nuclear-power reactors to be provided and also that of dealing with known or suspected nuclear-materials production facilities in the DPRK. Scenarios governing both DPRK cooperation and possible non-cooperation, up to and including abrogation of the agreement are considered.

The challenges of verification examined in this report must be met if a necessary minimum of trust is to be established between the parties and the rewards of the agreement are to be realized. The authors believe that the challenges can be met under the conditions outlined in this report, but that special effort on all sides will be needed to meet them.

This timely study is the first to examine the relationship between competition for energy resources and the propensity for conflict in the Caspian region. Taking the discussion well beyond issues of pipeline politics and the significance of Caspian oil and gas to the global market, the book offers significant new findings concerning the impact of energy wealth on the political life and economies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. The contributors, a leading group of scholars and policymakers, explore the differing interests of ruling elites, the political opposition, and minority ethnic and religious groups region-wide.

Placing Caspian development in the broader international relations context, the book assesses the ways in which Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey are fighting to protect their interests in the newly independent states and how competition for production contracts and pipeline routes influences regional security. Specific chapters also link regional issues to central questions of international politics and to theoretical debates over the role of energy wealth in political and economic development worldwide. Woven throughout the implications for U.S. policy, giving the book wide appeal to policymakers, corporate executives, energy analysts, and scholars alike.

The Caspian Basin has emerged in recent years as a major focus of international affairs for a combination of political, economic, and geostrategic reasons. In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union's dissolution in the early 1990s the region's newly independent states were overshadowed by Russia and attracted little Western and U.S. attention. But over the past several years this region has attracted growing attention from Western policymakers and scholars, as well as the media and the private sector. One of the main reasons for this new focus on the Caspian is its sizable energy reserves. In addition to its potential as a significant oil producer, however, it is also the Caspian's geostrategic location, its diverse mix of ethnic groups, and its unsettled intrastate and interstate conflicts that make it both an enticing and challenging region.

In May 1999, CISAC's Project on Ethnic Conflict and Conflict Management in the Former Soviet Union convened an international conference to examine emerging geopolitical issues of the Caspian Basin region. Scholars, policymakers, and energy executives from around the world gathered to examine the sometimes contending interests, both political and economic, focused on the region, and to seek to develop a comprehensive approach for enhancing political and economic development, mitigating and resolving conflicts, and promoting security and stability in the region. Panelists examined conflicting political and economic approaches to the region and explored strategies for energy development that might facilitate regional economic growth and democratization. They also offered diverse views about whether energy development could promote regional cooperation and integration or was likely to exacerbate existing conflicts.

The conference was part of the Project on Ethnic Conflict's ongoing activities in the Caspian region. Project director Gail Lapidus and others at CISAC have been working closely with scholars and policymakers in the region for a number of years on issues of nationalism, conflict resolution, and regional security. One of the project's central goals has been to encourage and facilitate regional cooperation on a broad range of humanitarian, economic, and political issues. In support of that objective, the project has engaged in joint efforts with key political actors in the region in attempts to develop fresh approaches to conflict management and to construct new regional security arrangements.

The Paradox of Plenty explains why, in the midst of two massive oil booms in the 1970s, oil-exporting governments as different as Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, Algeria, and Indonesia chose common development paths and suffered similarly disappointing outcomes. Meticulously documented and theoretically innovative, this book illuminates the manifold factors--economic, political, and social--that determine the nature of the oil state, from the coherence of public bureaucracies, to the degree of centralization, to patterns of policy-making.

Karl contends that oil countries, while seemingly disparate, are characterized by similar social classes and patterns of collective action. In these countries, dependence on petroleum leads to disproportionate fiscal reliance on petrodollars and public spending, at the expense of statecraft. Oil booms, which create the illusion of prosperity and development, actually destabilize regimes by reinforcing oil-based interests and further weakening state capacity.

Karl's incisive investigation unites structural and choice-based approaches by illuminating how decisions of policymakers are embedded in institutions interacting with domestic and international markets. This approach--which Karl dubs "structured contingency"--uses a state's leading sector as the starting point for identifying a range of decision-making choices, and ends by examining the dynamics of the state itself.

In July 1996, President Clinton established the Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, with a charter to designate critical infrastructures and assess their vulnerabilities, to recommend a comprehensive national policy and implementation strategy for protecting those infrastructures from physical and cyber threats, and to propose statutory or regulatory actions to effect the recommended remedies. The charter gives examples of critical infrastructures (telecommunications, electrical power systems, gas and oil storage and transportation, banking and finance, transportation, water supply systems, emergency services, and continuity of government), and also notes the types of cyber threats of concern (electronic, radio-frequency, or computer-based attacks on the information or communications components that control critical infrastructures).

Some of the critical infrastructures are owned or controlled by the government, and hence the government can, in principle, harden and restructure these systems and control access to achieve a greater degree of robustness. However, the President's executive order recognizes that many of the critical infrastructures are developed, owned, operated, or used by the private sector and that government and private sector cooperation will be required to define acceptable measures for the adequate protection and assurance of continued operation of these infrastructures.

The Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control (CISAC), as part of its ongoing Program on Information Technology and National Security, and the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are conducting workshops to examine many of the issues connected with the work of the Commission. In addition to the questions of vulnerabilities, threats, and possible remedies, we discuss the impact on the marketplace of possible protective actions, cost in terms of capital and functionality, legal constraints, and the probable need for international cooperation.

The first of these jointly sponsored workshops was held March 10-11, 1997, and included participation by members and staff of the Presidential Commission; the Stanford community; the information technology industry; and by security specialists at infrastructure organizations, research companies, and the national laboratories. The results of this two-day meeting are summarized in the following report.

The increasing prospect of a communist and nationalist victory in Russia's parliamentary elections this month has fueled doubts about whether Russia's presidential election, scheduled for next June, will take place.

Even before President Boris Yeltsin's latest heart attack, the odds were only 50-50 for a democratic transfer of power, which has never occurred in Russia or the Soviet Union. There is a determination to preserve the status quo on the part of those who have prospered under Yeltsin's reign - whether Russia's new banking tycoons, gas and oil executives or the entourage of Kremlin aides that surrounds Yelstin. Re-electing Yeltsin, of course, has been their preferred strategy.

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Initially printed as "Signal Our Support for Democracy," Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1995.