Ryan Irwin's Gordian Knot invigorates the literature on apartheid and the United Nations. Irwin skillfully argues that debates about apartheid at the UN became a microcosm in which broader concerns about the impact of decolonisation, the role of the UN in global governance, and the struggle of postcolonial nation states to gain legitimacy in the international system can be identified. The book weaves a complex picture of the genesis and consolidation of the African Group at the United Nations around the apartheid issue and provides a stimulating interpretation of the struggle to gain legitimacy for their cause on the international stage.

The core contention here is that the struggle against apartheid at the UN acted as a unifying force that bound African states together. By combining their numerical dominance and shared ideas, the African Group transformed apartheid into a transnational issue and pushed the Security Council to impose sanctions upon the South African Government. Irwin provides a detailed and insightful impression of the African group. He identifies the fault lines in the anti-apartheid movement and in doing so reveals the major tensions between African nationalism and Pan-Africanism. What makes the evolution of these internal tensions so fascinating is the effect of the broader debate over the role and function of the UN.

Irwin points out that the African Group at the UN soon termed itself the ‘Informal Permanent Machinery’ which consisted of a rotating, coordinating body that met four times a year. In this way, the African Group was able to consolidate its views and maximize their impact at the General Assembly. ‘The “Informal Permanent Machinery” was the institutional form that African nationalism took in the postcolonial world’ (p. 52). While it is rightly contended that the African Group viewed the UN as an instrument with which to reshape international norms and change the terms of legitimacy of the nation state system, it can be argued that apartheid was not the only issue which presented such an opportunity. The Congo crisis, which also had a direct impact at the UN from 1960–5, was in fact the first moment in which the African Group was formed and used its majority in the General Assembly to influence an international response to a crisis. While Irwin explains how apartheid could be used to harness UN machinery to ‘remake the international order’, his analysis would have benefitted from the inclusion of parallel events at the UN that had a fundamental influence on the African Group.

Proceeding to address the question of American foreign policy towards apartheid, Irwin does an admirable job of establishing the link between the aims of the African group and the effect of their actions on the American position. He maintains that ‘US hegemony flowed from the faith other nations placed in the United Nations’ (p. 95) and that the legitimacy of US policies towards postcolonial problems was deeply dependent on the attitudes of the General Assembly. His analysis of US views of the UN as an instrument that would safeguard its global position differs from many traditional versions that have frequently written the UN out of the history of US foreign policy at the time. Indeed, Irwin rightly contends that control of the UN was a pressing concern for State Department strategists in the early 1960s following the recognition that the organisation was becoming less susceptible to American leadership. It is possible, however, to go further and claim that Washington's relationship with the UN changed as the instruments and forms of global power were recast during the 1960s. As a result, the State Department actively searched for ways to adapt to the altered power balance and reassert control over the UN agenda by developing new forms of cooperation and negotiation with the African Group. The book could have been more explicit about how the international environment at the UN changed and how new ideas were systemised, codified, and legitimised.

Overall Irwin's book offers insight into how apartheid struck at the root of the postcolonial narrative of justice and how it was used at the UN as the vehicle to challenge the liberal international order and the legitimacy of the nation state system. While more could be said about the ability of the UN to function as a means by which international norms could be codified and legitimised beyond the context of apartheid, this is a critical addition to the field of literature. This gripping reinterpretation of the organisation and its use for burgeoning nations states raises many broader questions about the role of the UN as an agent of change in the international system.