This book examines the gendered policies advocated and implemented by postcolonial developmental states, which are often contested and challenged by women's movements as damaging to their key concerns. The eight substantive chapters plus introductory and concluding chapters cover major debates about gender politics and the state. Included are issues of democratization and the nature of women's participation in formal politics, particularly the creation of quota systems for political representation; governance as global and multilayered; the relationships among gender, knowledge, innovation, and property rights; and analysis of the functioning of the South Asia Research Network (SARN) on Gender, Law and Governance, which the author helped create.

In this review, I focus on four significant aspects of this book: the analyses of the struggle of women street vendors in Delhi (India); the comparison of quota systems in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan; the inclusion of the dimension of “spectacle” to markets, institutions, and ideologies in order to understand governance of polities; and a discussion of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) regime, particularly “how governance of global regimes of production fundamentally affects the ways in which inequalities are being reproduced, between the North and the South, between men and women, and among women also” (pp. 5–6).

Tracing the progress of the dispute between 40 women and the Delhi metropolitan authorities about their right to trade from a pavement, Shirin M. Rai shows how these poor women came into contact with agencies of the state and the law. She situates their struggles in the broader context of the relationship between Indian women and the postcolonial state in order to pose questions about gender politics. The analysis of this case contributes to theorizing the state as a network of power relations with relative autonomy across what Rai refers to as various state factions (such as the Supreme Court, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, and the judicial committee instituted by the Courts) to deal with the trading rights of the women and the police. In this struggle, the class and gender positions of these women influence their negotiations of boundaries to “operate economically and politically in the interstices of the system, only occasionally moving to the ground of legal arrangements” (p. 39).

Analyzing state institutional mechanisms for the advancement and inclusion of women, Rai adopts a comparative approach for examining the quota policies intended to increase women's representation in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Although the countries have a common political history, the quota systems vary across the local and national level in terms of both nature and type of quota instituted. For instance, in Bangladesh and Pakistan, quotas have been introduced at both the local and national levels. In India, quotas exist for elections to local-level institutions, but the bill to set quotas for women in the national parliament is pending after three failed attempts to enact it into law. While quotas are important for inclusion of women in elite politics, they must be considered as only one part of a multipronged strategy for empowering women. In fact, the politics of quotas are also intertwined with the politics of postcolonial citizenship. Rai provides a very strong analysis of the pros and cons of the quota system by considering the existing debates.

As the postcolonial state becomes increasingly entangled in the global networks of economic and political power, gender scholars and activists have had to contend with the multiple forces of globalization. Arguing that governance itself is multilayered, Rai adds a fourth dimension, spectacle, to the often-mentioned three dimensions of markets, institutions, and ideology as central for understanding the governance of polities. Spectacle is particularly important to understand, “as increasingly the media—print, film, and virtual—are becoming a battleground of ideas and spaces where ideologies of governance converge and contend” (p. 132). It is a visual manifestation of power that has implications for the display of gender politics as well: “From Lyndie England in Abu Ghraib to images of burka-clad women in Afghanistan women have both participated in and been the victims of repressive governance regimes” (p. 132). Further elaboration of this idea in terms of concrete examples and/or cases would have been very useful, particularly because of its tremendous relevance to current events across the world. Perhaps this is an area for other scholars to pursue as they examine gender politics in this increasingly interdependent globalizing world.

The processes of globalization have also provided an added impetus to market liberalization and “transformation of the relationship between states and the global economy” (p. 8). Exploring the linkages among gender, knowledge, innovation, and property, Rai suggests that TRIPS institutionalizes “historically exclusionary bounded definitions of what counts as knowledge,” thereby “denying the role of women across the world in the production of knowledge” (pp. 8–9). Examining the growing power of international regulatory institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the author discusses how patents and property rights disregard the social history of the production of knowledge and how the definition of knowledge itself excludes that which has been accumulated and produced by marginalized groups such as women and the poor. The enforcement of TRIPS by the WTO has created additional dilemmas, such as whether “knowledge of agricultural products developed by farmers are common heritage and should not be patented, or whether Northern corporations, by virtue of free access, can patent the same knowledge and product” (p. 149). Such dilemmas are sharpening differences between and among states in the North and South. The gains go to countries that have participated most actively in setting asymmetrical rules of the game (globalization).

Rai's detailed discussions clearly point to the embedded and gendered nature of competitive markets and the inequities that are built into the global property regimes. At the same time, she extends the conceptual framework of the politics of knowledge to consider the creation and early functioning of the South Asia Research Network. The exposition of SARN as a network of knowledge across national borders provides for interesting conceptual orientations. But the analyses of SARN could have benefited from specific instances of the constructive ways in which knowledge production is being shaped, as well as from examples of how dilemmas have been confronted.

In sum, The Gender Politics of Development provides an insightful analysis of the tangled webs of local politics and gender challenges with global issues of governance and the state in order to examine, understand, and pose additional queries about the gender politics of development. This book will be of interest not only to political science scholars but also to those interested in international political economy, gender in sociology, and area studies.