Stanley Hoffmann once referred to the United States as the “heartland” of IR. Given the importance of his essay, “International Relations: An American Social Science,” to the forging of the dominant self-image of the discipline, the editors were right to publish it as the lead contribution to the volume. Many readers will welcome the opportunity to read once again Hoffmann's finely crafted argument and fluent prose, which qualities are less evident in many of the subsequent contributions.

Two main themes underpin the book. The first is the extent to which IR continues to be bound to the cultural and economic interests of the United States. The second, dealt with below, is whether the recent proliferation of approaches enhances the standing of the field. Regarding the former, there is broad agreement among the contributors that America continues to dominate the study of IR. I use the term “broad” because the editors are unwilling to furnish a compelling criterion for what counts as dominance. As Robert Crawford writes in the Introduction, “this volume offers no consensus on how `American intellectual hegemony' should be conceptualized, measured, and defined, nor do our contributors agree on the degree to which nationality in any guise ultimately matters” (p. 6). Kim Richard Nossal's chapter is not so reticent. His survey of fourteen IR textbooks shows “how an image of world politics is constructed and thus world politics understood, and how this is reproduced from one generation to the next in a hermetically sealed Americocentric vacuum” (p. 183). The argument would be much stronger if Vossal had demonstrated that textbooks produced in other national contexts are not guilty of ethnocentrism.

Concerns about methods resurface in A. J. R. Groom and Peter Mandaville's essay. To sustain their argument that there is an emerging “continental” disciplinary identity, the authors conducted a survey that they describe as “dirty and very unprofessional” (p. 159). They should be applauded for being so candid about the limits of their method, but this surely provides grist to the mill of those who believe that much of what passes for scholarship outside the United States lacks rigor and precision. More substantively, there is no doubt that Groom and Mandaville are right to argue that IR in Europe is gaining in strength, but does this generate a European perspective on the international?

This relationship between national (or regional) community and world view is hotly debated elsewhere in the volume. The case of Canada is instructive here. Tony Porter contends that nationality is only one variable influencing how IR is taught and researched. Mark Neufeld and Teresa Healy support this contention through their engagement with “minority currents” in Canadian IR. Exponents of these critical perspectives share the following two propositions. The first is a disinterest in policy advocacy (which is not meant to imply a lack of concern for concrete political practice), and the second is a commitment to critical pedagogy. Here we read that realism and idealism offer only two versions of the same dominant discourse. This is contrasted with “Critical IR,” which apparently succeeds in connecting with students who are concerned with issues of social justice. These observations are interesting but beg many questions, such as how this teaching strategy works with students (a majority?) who would rather work for Microsoft than join the brigade of anticapitalist protestors. At a more specific level, it would have been useful if Neufeld and Healy had told us more about the details of their pedagogy. For example, does it work best with case study teaching? Should reading be directed, or is it better to allow students to roam more freely into other disciplines and explore other mediums?

Roger Epp's chapter shows us that critical theory is more convincing when the authors “just do it” rather than talk endlessly about its virtues (while parodying the positions of so-called uncritical theory). Epp's interest is in indigenous peoples and what their neglect tells us about IR. The one theoretical approach that has engaged with them is the English School, even though its narrative of the expansion of international society has relied on “a domestication of aboriginal peoples” (p. 312). Even a rewriting of such narratives to include aboriginal diplomacy risks seeing aboriginal cultures only insofar as they were recognized by European sovereign states. Epp concludes his essay with a warning that pluralism is limited unless there is a genuine commitment not just to represent but also to listen to the other.

Feminist thinkers have long made this argument. In her chapter on transcending national identity, Jan Jindy Pettman reminds us of the gender inequalities built into both academic IR and global political practices. As a critique, this is powerful stuff. It is less convincing in the claim that there is a transnational community of women based on the “near-universal ways in which so many women experience identity conflicts and different kinds of violence” (p. 261). In support of this claim she quotes Virginia Woolf's famous contention that, “as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world” (p. 261). Only a few years after Woolf wrote these words, women showed that they did want their country and made significant sacrifices for its survival. Pettman is aware of the importance of location and the fact that there are many tensions within the world of women along race and class lines. But this raises the question of how much diversity the feminist project can allow while maintaining its commitment to the emancipation of women as a transnational identity based on shared values and experiences.

D. S. L. Jarvis's chapter on identity politics has a great deal to say about feminism. It is highly critical of standpoint feminists for privileging the gender variable over other identities. Postmodern feminists are dismissed for retreating from the main IR agenda. The main contention is that identity tribalism is a blind alley: We are different in many important ways, Jarvis argues, but what matters is what we share, such as a repulsion against violence and poverty. Jarvis's answer to the second thematic question underpinning the book is that the recent proliferation of approaches does not constitute theoretical progress.

More is not better for Kalvi J. Holsti either. He mobilizes a polemical critique of those who inhabit what he calls Identityville—the “postmodernists, poststructuralists, critical theorists, feminist standpointers of unlimited hues, hermeneuticians, empiricists, historical sociologists, symbolic interactionists, and post-Marxists, just to name some of the more prominent (pp. 81–2). Interestingly, one of Holsti's criticisms of the inhabitants of Identityville is their lack of tolerance and respect for other approaches. There is no evidence that these qualities are present in Holsti's reading of critical theory. Traditionalists in glass houses should not throw stones.

Those who fear theoretical diversity might, ironically, gain some sustenance from Chris Brown's argument. In an engaging chapter, Brown argues that the discipline was founded upon Anglo-American liberal principles, and “the modern discipline has not yet escaped from its liberal internationalist past” (p. 217). In other words, the gap between traditionalists and postmodernists may not be as wide as either side would like to think.

A telling critique of the framing of International Relations: Still an American Social Science? is that all the authors are located in institutions of higher education in Western nations. To show convincingly that there is diversity in international thought, the book should have included a greater focus on the research and teaching of IR in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and so on. There is diversity out there, but not enough of it is represented in this otherwise lively collection of essays on the state of the discipline.