Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class

Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class. Edited by Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair. London: Routledge, 2004. 324p. 125. 00 cloth, 34. 95 paper. What do a French-educated Algerian revolutionary, a Lakota traditionalist, Kim Dae Jung, a Romanian sex worker in Cyprus, a Guyanese cricket star of South Asian origin and his Afro-Guyanese fans, a Muslim living in Europe, a Tibetan nationalist, a child rug maker in India, and Aung San Suu Kyi have in common? Mainstream theorists of international relations would say: nothing. According to Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, however, the members of this unlikely crowd expose the incapacity of IR to explain or usefully contribute to some of the most important debates taking place within and between countries and regions. The stories they compile also reveal the complicity of IR in the justification and reproduction of the class, race, and gender inequalities constitutive of European and U. S. domination from the fifteenth century to today. Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations argues that although the last decade has seen much criticism of the ahistorical gender- and race-neutral rational actor model that dominates IR scholarship, its critics have neither adequately explained why this model persists nor analyzed its effects on both the participants in and the objects of international conflicts.