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.

In his essay “Beyond Hegemonic State(ments) of Nature,” J. Marshall Beier offers one of the book's clearest examples of how postcolonial theory productively disturbs mainstream IR. Beier demonstrates convincingly that early European travelers' fascination with what they called anarchy and chaos among the Plains Indians “has underwritten not only orthodox international relations theory, but the project of state-making and construction(s) of the modern Western ‘self’ as well” (p. 83). IR scholars justify their subsequent “near total neglect” of indigenous Americans' political institutions by reaffirming these early interpretations of what were actually highly ordered and complex political institutions. Beier deftly weaves together Lakota accounts of their political system and of how contact with Europeans produced the chaos wrongly attributed to Lakota “tradition”; Europeans' gendered and racialized dismissals of the Lakota as inherently war-obsessed savages; and nineteenth- and twentieth-century political science. In the process, he reveals the dependence of European and U.S. conceptions of the state on the imperialist project of misreading, disrupting, marginalizing, and virtually erasing the aboriginal presence.

The other nine substantive essays take up mainstream IR's complicity in maintaining U.S. and European domination of global capital and of definitions of democracy, human rights, secularism, and citizenship. Each demonstrates how what Michel Foucault calls the “will to power” is served by the way IR represents or ignores specific international problems. For example, Shampa Biswas shows us that popular and academic defenses of Western secularism in response to the increased visibility of Muslims in Great Britain deploy a construction of Britishness as white and Christian. Anna M. Agathangelou finds that the internationalization of production and finance and the activities of the predominantly male jet-setting transnational economic elite so central to analyses of globalization found in The Economist and IR textbooks alike depend on equally internationalized sexual and domestic service industries whose workers are largely migrant women. The invisibility as well as the femininity of workers in what Agathangelou calls the global “desire economy” make possible the existence, comfort, and pleasure of the visible global class and simultaneously allow IR scholars not to see or take seriously workers' new challenges to that gendered invisibility. The volume argues that deconstructing IR's claims to objectivity, rationality, and universality in a way that is sensitive to the power of representation, to the benefits that the powerful gain by silencing alternative explanations of the world, and to the persistence of imperial practices is necessary to make political science relevant and to contribute to struggles against global inequality and injustice.

This is an engaging read, and both the well-written and accessible introduction and the generally well-chosen essays make an important contribution to the critical literature on globalization. The book suffers from several problems, however. The essays are not equally successful at reaching the editors' main goal, that is, to follow their deconstruction of IR with a reconstruction of a “counternarrative” that actively resists domination. Siba Grovogui's essay comparing IR scholars' current dismissal of postcolonial theory to French elites' dismissal of leftist Algerian claims in the aftermath of Algeria's war for independence, and Sankaran Krishna's use of a Guyanese cricketer to analyze tensions between ethnic and national identities, are particularly unsatisfying in this regard.

The contributions are also uneven with respect to their attention to race, gender, and class. Only Agathangelou's study of migrant sex and domestic workers, L. H. M. Ling's analysis of attempts by Europe and the United States to recolonize Asian economies in the late 1990s, and Chowdhry's critique of human rights discourse on child labor adequately address the editors' concern with how race, class, and gender simultaneously determine global processes. In most of the other essays, discussions, particularly of gender, seem tacked on and marginal. For example, in an otherwise excellent critique of Western claims to a long tradition of secularism, Biswas mentions gender briefly and only in relation to controversies over the veil. She bypasses a perfect opportunity to dissect the paradox that while fundamentalist Christians and Muslims forge a powerful alliance in opposition to reproductive and sexual freedom, each continues to use the other's “treatment of women” to prove its difference and superiority.

The essays in Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations, while collectively promising somewhat more than they deliver, nevertheless can and should serve as theoretical and methodological models for future anti-imperialist and feminist readings and reconfigurations of the world and as the basis for a much-needed rethinking of the field of international relations.