Featured Review Exchange Religion and Authoritarianism: Cooperation, Conflict, and the Consequences. By Karrie J. Koesel. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014 doi:10.1017/S175504831500036X Michael D. Driessen John Cabot University, Rome In Religion and Authoritarianism, Karrie Koesel dives deep inside the two largest, most important, and understudied authoritarian regimes on the planet, Russia and China, and charts out the interplay between religious and political elites in each. In doing so, the book makes important and re- freshing contributions to the study of authoritarianism and to the study of religion and politics. Adopting a rational-actor approach to religious-political interactions and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, Koesel highlights the surprising levels of cooperation, alliances, and mutually beneficial relationships across four very different-looking cities in China and Russia. An intensely felt combination of uncertainty, mutual needs, and resources, she argues, tends to lead local politicians and religious elites to bargain and deal with one another in materially beneficial and strategic ways. Koesel’s detailed fieldwork teaches us much about how, exactly, authoritarian regimes inter- act with their citizens, struggle for legitimacy, deal with potential religious rivals, seek short-run goals, and thereby continue to evolve their own ca- pacities to survive and even flourish. She also draws our attention to the resources and material interests that religious elites bring to the bargaining table with local state actors, especially when it comes to faith-based tourism and the religious-run real estate business. By cooperating with 614 Politics and Religion, 8 (2015), 614–625 © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, 2015 1755-0483/15