Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong. By Alexander B. Downes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. 424p. $49.95 cloth.

ing of narcissism as promoting resiliency and healthy selfesteem. Here narcissism is not solely inward, but a way to fortify and constantly evolve a self that is in communication with society. Self-conscious emotions are therefore not pathologies (or not always so), but rather functions for working within and being a part of “moral communities.” Thus, rather than self-conscious emotions such as shame, guilt, or anxiety inhibiting action (as sometimes assumed in OSS), they can and often are the basis for action and engagement with the world. A final set of contributions come from Naude’s meticulous and precise analysis of postapartheid South Africa, focusing not only on the “state” but also on the importance of the relational space between foreign and domestic policies, the presentation of a state person that involves historical contexts including especially “racialized divisions” playing out across and interdependently between both contexts (pp. 114–21). Naude’s work is so careful it is hard to locate any areas requiring better specification or development. My concerns here are mere quibbles. There is a tension, for instance, between the very precise and important understanding the author deploys of relationalism and the push against “Cartesian dualism” that marks the opening chapters of her work, and the use throughout the book of causal language and the reduction of some of the processes analyzed to somewhat deterministic understandings of social and political relationships. My own sense is that this is a function of her Freudian starting point. As I’ve discussed in a relatively recent book (Restraint in International Politics, 2019), Freud’s more causal, mechanistic views on libidinal drives are less useful than those of his contemporary, Carl Gustav Jung. The latter’s understanding of the libido went beyond individual sex drives, and into “psychic energic” social spaces where collectives channel that build up into processes, including positive and productive ones, that appear quite similar to the “investments” thatNaude so adeptly discusses in chapter 3. Second, while Naude provides a very persuasive treatment of the racialized contexts of South Africa as a state person, gendered contexts are not treated. And yet it is hard to read passages such as the “affective experience derive[d] from the state’s colonial history” left it “feeling emasculated” (p. 122), and not see gendered dynamics to narcissism. There is a growing body of work that engages with the gendered dynamics of ontological securityseeking (Catarina Kinnvall, “Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Hindutva: Modi and the Masculinization of Indian Politics,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 32[3]: 283–302, 2019; Katharine A. M. Wright, Toni Haastrup, and Roberta Guerrina, “Equalities in Freefall? Ontological Insecurity and the Long‐Term Impact of COVID‐19 in the Academy,” Gender, Work & Organization 28: 163–67, 2021; Will Delehanty and Brent Steele, “Engaging the Narrative in Ontological (In) security Theory: Insights from Feminist IR,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22[3]: 523–40, 2009). Future work within and outside of that research community might examine the gendered dynamics of narcissism more directly. For those who think that state personhood is not only useful but also a real social feature of global politics, Naude’s book is an achievement on a number of fronts. It is a splendid blend of careful analysis combined with creativity and innovation, and thus worthy of scholarly attention now and in the years to come.