Analyses of Latin American border disputes may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner’s study is a useful introduction for readers who are unfamiliar with the Venezuela-Guyana controversy, but specialists are unlikely to find much that is novel in the sources used, the narrative, or the analysis. The author focuses on the legal questions involved and evaluates the arguments advanced by the two countries. The approach seems overly formal and ultimately flawed as a means of examining international relations. Venezuela’s legal position may be weak, as the author suggests, but the quality of the legal argument has had little influence upon the length or the intensity of the dispute.

Since 1962, Venezuela has rejected the 1899 arbitration decision, which awarded the Essequibo territory to British Guiana and established the present border between Guyana and Venezuela. Venezuelan jurists contend that a corrupt deal between the Russian arbitration magistrate and Great Britain provides grounds to declare the 1899 decision null and void. Braveboy-Wagner believes that the evidence of the collusion is minimal and that Venezuela has no legal grounds to appeal the decision after having accepted the tribunal’s decision for over half a century. The author speculates that both nations now have an interest in settling the disagreement, but she is not sanguine about the possibility of solution in the immediate future. The most expedient outcome, she argues, would be for Venezuela to receive a small territorial concession that would give that nation “an outlet to the Atlantic” (p. 273) without depriving Guyana of a source of future wealth. The Guyana government, however, resists any cession of land.

Braveboy-Wagner’s study would have been stronger with a more thorough explanation of some of the geographic issues. For example, it is not obvious from a glance at the map that Venezuela’s present access to the Atlantic through the Orinoco River would be enhanced by a few more miles of land. Although the book contains a chapter on the economic potential of the Essequibo, a hardheaded discussion of the commercial value of the region’s minerals and the projected hydroelectric project on the upper Marzaruni River could have shed some light on the actual, as opposed to the hypothetical, stakes involved in the border dispute.