Turkey's, Japan's, and Russia's experiences of defeat against the West and their efforts of modernization have received a fair amount of attention from historians, sociologists, and political scientists, but few studies have compared the three countries' relations with the West in the last century. Ayşe Zarakol's enquiry is a timely addition to international relations literature. A major argument she puts forward is that after their respective defeats—the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Japan in World War II, and the Soviet Union in the Cold War—the defeated realized their backwardness vis-à-vis the West. In order to overcome their inferior status in the international system, these states “believed Westernization to be a goal that a state could achieve by trying hard enough, and saw it as a solution that might allow them to recreate their past privileged position in the new normative universe” (p. 10). However, since their reforms and modernization policies ended in failure, Zarakol asserts, they were stigmatized in both their own minds and the minds of others, which created an ontological insecurity for all three.

The book's first section (more than one-third of its whole) surveys the evolution of the modern international system after Westphalia. Zarakol examines how the established European states stigmatized the Ottoman, Japanese, and Russian empires as inferior and pushed them to the margins of the system. As a result of “auto-Orientalism,” the three empires internalized this foreign narrative about themselves and sought to transform their inferior state identities in order to catch up with the West. The theoretical framework here mainly derives from Norbert Elias's Established-Outsider model and Erving Goffman's stigma theory. Also in this first part Zarakol probes theoretical issues such as Hegel's master-slave dialectic.

Zarakol applies Elias' and Goffman's sociological theories to international relations, and in the book's second part she reconstructs the coping strategies of Turkey, Japan, and Russia. For each case study, she gives a brief historical account starting from the nineteenth century. She employs stigmatization theory to analyze the post-defeat paths followed by Turkey between 1919 and 1939, Japan between 1945 and 1974, and Russia after 1991. While the chapter on Turkey is grounded in both Turkish and English sources, those on Japan and Russia are based entirely on secondary sources published in English.

Zarakol's research agenda is promising and she is asking the right questions, but the answers she delivers are unconvincing. One problem lies partly in her application to states and foreign policy of theories devised to understand the psychology of individuals and societies. Another is that, because the timeframes examined in each country are quite different, the external conditions within which each state dealt with stigma varied significantly. Furthermore, Zarakol pushes bits and pieces of information that are open to multiple interpretations into the procrustean bed of her argument. An example is her arguments about the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), an early-1900s reform movement that allied with the Young Turks, and its policies. For Zarakol, the CUP “followed an aggressively revisionist agenda intended to recapture the Ottoman Empire's glory days, and, as a proto-fascist movement, oversaw some of the brutal actions committed in the name of the empire” (35). Yet prominent Ottoman historians such as Şükrü Hanioğlu, Hasan Kayalı, and Feroz Ahmad have argued that the CUP was not nationalist until the end of World War I. Indeed, Unionists' war objectives were Ottomanist rather than pan-Turkist or Pan-Turanist; they hoped to maintain an empire similar to the Austro-Hungarian model, with power shared between Arabs and Turks. Zarakol's arguments are left open to doubt also by some minor material errors and lack of documentation. But if we look beyond the inaccuracies and questionable interpretations, the main argument of After Defeat remains plausible. This is an informative book that will appeal to students and scholars in political science and international relations, and to any interested in the comparative history of national self-imaginations.