Complicit sisters: gender and women's issues across North–South divides

With this book, Sara de Jong makes an elegant, theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich contribution to the critical, feminist and post-colonial literature on humanitarian and development aid. In the opening pages, de Jong observes that ‘there is a tendency of gender and development analysis to separate phenomena occurring in the global North and global South, despite their obvious interrelatedness’ (p. 11). She refers more specifically to how academic debates on gender and development in the global South have been separated from debates on gender and migration to the global North—helping sustain artificial boundaries and North/South power dynamics rooted ‘in the colonial separation between the colony and the metropole’ (p. 10). By simultaneously studying the narratives of NGO workers dealing with domestic issues related to migration, prostitution and gender-based violence, and NGO workers' accounts of international development, de Jong demonstrates how dynamics between North and South play out—including within the global North—in a manner which challenges spaces, distance and geography.