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.