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Book Reviews

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which allow states, movements and parties (of all faiths) to mobilize women in the name of divinely ordained gender relationships.
In selecting this volume under the Rethinking the Canon rubric, I am not suggesting that it has been overlooked by specialists in either South Asia or religious studies. Although its publication date is 1998, most of the contributions and the framing chapters by Amrita Basu and by Patricia Jeffery derive from a major conference held in 1994. It may well be the case that the multidisciplinary approach adopted has marginalized the impact of the book on mainstream political/international relations literature. However, I have been puzzled for several years by the extent to which its analytical framework and empirical data have not been seen as a valued point of reference for the growing body of literature on the gendered impact of armed conflict in the post Cold War world, including those appearing in this journal. After all, we should be able to cope with a bit of multi-disciplinarity. We particularly need to face up to the challenge that this book poses to categorical claims for the uniformity of women's experiences of violent conflict (the 'womenandpeace' perspective).
While I would feel no reservations in recommending the volume to this journal's readers for (re-)reading solely within its own self-defined parameters (women in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka), it shows a striking prescience in larger terms. The conceptual concerns it encompasses include: confrontations between secularism and religious faith in the lives of women and men; claims and counter-claims around tradition and modernity; the international-regional-national-local nexus; the problematic nature of women's agency. Although it does not propose a definitive set of explanatory factors, the reader consistently encounters material that bears on the emergence of the Taliban regime in neighbouring Afghanistan and on ethnonationalist discourse and its interface with globalization.
I have a further reason for my recommendation. Given their backgrounds, it is not particularly surprising that the editors and contributors succeed in interrogating the above themes without over-dependence on the normative assumptions of western individualistic liberalism. In my view, however, a particular strength of this volume is that it maintains its consistent attention to the material conditions of women's lives while still achieving a nuanced and sensitive approach to the significance of faith in the lives of women and men. (Barbara Metcalf 's chapter on a contemporary pietist movement within Islam is just one example.) As a secular humanist, I surely cannot be alone among the readership of this journal in needing all the help I can get to comprehend the role of personal belief (of all faiths) in the post-11 September world. When this help comes from deeply committed feminists, then it is doubly welcome.
A further point in favour of this collection is that, unlike some volumes derived from a conference, the material is thematically well balanced. Amrita Basu starts off with some of the framing questions behind the tri-partite division into 'Gender, Nation, State'; 'The Everyday and the Local'; 'Agency and Activism' . (Hereinafter, the singling out of particular chapters is a question of my personal priorities, not a reflection of the chapters' relative strengths.) The inclusion in Part I of Ritu Menon on identity and abduction in the aftermath of partition and of Tankika Sarkar on the significance of nineteenthcentury nationalist movements constitute added value for the non-specialist reader and avoid the all too common failing of ahistoricism in the analysis of so-called 'new wars' .
The chapters in this section also demonstrate the central role played by the ongoing construction of hegemonic and despised masculinities by successive regimes, thus contributing -though perhaps not intentionally -to the still scanty literature in this area. Shelley Feldman's chapter on Bangladesh is the first, but by no means the last, to locate her material within the changing macro-economic context of the 1990s. She demonstrates that, contrary to much analysis of Islam and modernity, 'political Islam represents the relative success of the modernization project and the development of an outwardlooking entrepreneurial elite ' (p. 35, emphasis in original).
The concern of this section with the nation-state in South Asia has obvious implications for feminist scholarship on the statistical and substantive representation of women in formal political structures. After all, South Asia has had proportionally far more women political leaders than most countries in the West, albeit often elected principally on grounds of their family lineage. Amrita Basu notes at the very outset that 'female heads of state like Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan and Kaledia Zia of Bangladesh . . . both fortify and defy Islamic strictures on women's freedom' (p. 1), but this theme is not pursued. In fact, there is an explicit recognition that an overly state-centric approach would be a distortion (p. 8), reinforced by Patricia and Roger Jeffery's account in Section II (Everyday and the Local) of the phalanx of routine institutionalized inequalities of community, class, gender and generation at the local level.
It is perhaps special pleading to recommend the final section -'Agency and Activism' -even more highly than the preceding two. As I have discussed elsewhere ( Jacobson 2001), the rapidity of the proliferation of gender and conflict literature has led to some major conceptual and methodological lacunae. The contributors to this section would almost certainly reject any claims to be exemplars; nevertheless, they present some of the most cogently argued material in this area that I have read to date.
Amrita Basu combines analytical and methodological strengths in her account of field work with Hindu women's mobilization under the banner of the anti-Muslim nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the early part of the 1990s. During the 1991 election campaign, the BJP had been prohibited from shouting religious slogans. Women certainly demonstrated their agency in reaction: I marched with processions of women who appeared to be observing these dictates on the streets. But as soon as they entered the courtyards of people's homes, cries of . . . [V]ictory to the Lord Ram! and [W]e will build a temple there! filled the air.
(p. 180) I read this with a shock of recognition. I have observed the conduct of women during the symbolically significant marches of the Protestant Orange Order and the loyal orders in Northern Ireland. During one particularly tense period, the singing and chanting of inflammatory material was banned. This did not stop the wives and female kin of male marchers from carrying out a virulently anti-Catholic running commentary from the sidelines. I suggest that there are other sites where women are actively involved with violent ethno-nationalism that should be a priority for feminist research.
In contrast to the BJP material, Malathi de Alwis presents a vivid and carefully framed account of women's deeply felt commitment to building the Mothers' Front in Sri Lanka, while not ignoring the problematic elements of the maternalist banner. Katy Gardner reflects on the complexities of resistance and Islamic revivalism in Bangladesh, linking it with the countervailing forces of migration. Patricia Jeffery's summative chapter 'Agency, Activism and Agendas' is a worthy end in terms of South Asian scholarship and the global context. Her reminder that 'politicized religion also spills over national boundaries' (p. 238) is typical of the way in which this volume merits its status.

Ruth Jacobson
University of Bradford, UK development from inside and below, drawing on the perspective of those usually silenced in development discourse: Third World women. Rai's consideration of Third World women, furthermore, spans a spectrum including rural peasants struggling for scarce resources, urban factory workers living out the dreams of industrialization and academics/activists/officials trying to get heard in policymaking circles. Thus Rai refreshingly diversifies the portrayal of Third World women in contrast to the unidimensional, victimized image that the conventional literature usually presents.
Additionally, Rai underscores the complex, interstitial positioning of Third World feminists vis-à-vis various levels of power, especially the state: [T]he gendered nature of development discourses can be understood only if we take into consideration the processes of postcolonial state formation, the socioeconomic trajectories set by nationalist elites and the struggles of women's movements against these, as well as their complicity . . . (pp. 12-13) Neither pawns nor generals, women must negotiate with power even as they remain wary of it. This ambivalence pertains whether women are dealing with postwar, postcolonial nation-building in the 1950s-60s; intellectual critiques such as post-modernism and post-development in the 1980s; the backlash of neoliberalism in the 1990s; or ideological agendas such as the UN Decade of Development (1970-80) and today's globalization. Rai demonstrates this point subtly. In the heady, early days of nationalism, for instance, newly independent, Third World states effected an alliance between two camps of male elites: former colonizers and current leaders. The first group treated indigenous women as silent victims of the new order; the second, as a model of virtuous motherhood representing the new nation. Women were caught in between, understanding all too well their oppression by patriarchal elites protected from critique by nationalistic fervor, as well as their exploitation by former colonial masters. In such a context, the key task becomes the advancement of an indigenous, woman-centered program of development without succumbing to either re-colonization or domestic domination. Thrown into the mix, further, is the complicated relationship between white feminists and feminists of color, especially under the rubric of 'global sisterhood' .
Domestically, Rai remonstrates against both nostalgic reconstructions of the state as well as overzealous celebrations of the local. The former inadvertently ally feminists with those 'male-dominated national elites' who fear an increasing sense of 'powerlessness' due to one process, globalization, which they thought they had averted by instituting another process, decolonization (pp. 201-2). Such nostalgia overlooks the 'mismanagement, greed, incompetence, and policy changes' that the national state has perpetrated (p. 203). Celebrants of the local, on the other hand, tend to neglect the powerful impact of national policy on localities. For women, especially, the local environment may be imbued, also, with all sorts of patriarchal constraints that prohibit action on their own behalf. As Rai notes: The local is as fractured a space as the national or the global. It has its own hierarchy of power in operation, with the resources to defend existing relations of power, and to suppress dissent. It is also therefore the space where democratic struggles need to be organized; it is not itself a means of democratizing life.
(p. 210) Herein lies the greatest contribution of this book. In recognizing the complexity of development -its interstitial condition, so to speak, between the global, the national and the local, as well as its enactment in both masculinized and feminized spheres of life, not to mention the identities that go with them -Rai highlights the need for conceptual and practical flexibility. Conceptual flexibility will help us traverse those levels of analysis previously held separate and not so equal. In this way, we see development as it is: a full, contentious spectrum, rather than neat categories of liberalism vs postdevelopmentalism, localism vs globalism or masculinism vs feminism. Practical flexibility will help us implement the strategies needed to realize these conceptual departures. Rai, though, offers no absolutisms other than to exhort us to continue the politics of feminist work. She challenges us to think ahead, innovatively and transformatively. And that is precisely what we need to envision a development program suited to the needs and demands of tomorrow's world. In this study, Brooke Ackerly assesses the shortcomings of contemporary deliberative democratic theory, relativism and essentialism for directing the practice of social criticism in the real, imperfect world. Ackerly examines why western theoretical understanding of how democracy is defined and developed fails to consider the theoretical implications arising from 'Third World' feminist activism.
At the outset, discussion of the historical context of the term 'Third World' gives little flavour of feminist dialogues on mis/uses of 'development' terminology. That the author uses this term 'to refer to those seeking a third way, an empowered way, for women and for the socio-economic development of their countries' (p. 16) perhaps leaves too much room for misunderstanding. However, Ackerly's key argument is a convincing one: feminist social criti-cism, which includes 'Third World' feminist activism, moves beyond the stalemate between anti-relativist and anti-essentialist feminist theory. In so doing, feminist critics have achieved in practice what other theorists do only incompletely in theory. Feminist social criticism is political theory. Ackerly recognizes that: '[e]veryday people walking in an everyday place, undocumented by reporters is not what people commonly think of when they picture social critics or activists' (p. 5). But the women in her illustrations, active in their social criticism, offer by example a model appropriate for those otherwise silenced by the values, practices and norms of their daily lives. Such critics may not be able to effect social change but their criticism is one way to counter, mitigate or undermine power inequalities. To move beyond critical effort to effect social change is a matter of politics.
In assessing the focus of deliberative theorists on informed and inclusive participation, Ackerly proposes that issues of quality and equality of participation are marginalized. As not everyone is able equally to participate in collective deliberations, 'we must be inventive in our efforts to seek their contributions to our discussion' (p. 36). Feminist theorists have not only criticized democratic theorists' arguments but proposed more appropriate methods for 'theorising inclusively about inclusive political processes' (p. 37). Those who Ackerly terms 'Third World' feminists have been offering social criticism with theoretical importance for deliberative democratic theorists, making apparent both visible and invisible histories of domination and oppression. Ackerly is not proposing that social criticism is more effective in generating social change than deliberative engagement or institutional reform. However, there is no need to wait on constitutional reforms, as people have been bringing about social change without such reforms and doing so inclusively. The challenge, then, is to improve the quality and the equality of participation in public decision-making. 'Third World' feminist social criticism is viewed as complementing deliberative democratic theory by providing means for improving both quality and equality of public participation -using deliberation to achieve social change and challenging the terms of 'reasonable argument' .
In highlighting how 'Third World' feminist social criticism makes political theory more informed and inclusive, Ackerly considers a range of grassroots activism. For example, a rather densely packed analysis of the work of the Self-Employed Women's Association in Gujarat is used to counter Martha Nussbaum's evaluation of a Bangladeshi literacy programme. While Nussbaum views autonomy in terms of decreasing women's dependence on their husbands, Ackerly argues that for Bangladeshi women, a more effective route is increasing husbands' dependence on their wives. This example is given to reveal 'a methodological flaw in Nussbaum's framework of social criticism that allows a critic to ignore the particularities of a society' (p. 109).
A wide variety of feminist social critique literature is covered by Ackerly, including much widely read and innovative work from the writings of Black feminist thinkers. Yet, although Ackerly 'gives credit for developing this theory of Third World feminist social criticism to those who have authored it', I remain unclear as to the trajectory of her in/exclusions -'while appreciating their individual contributions to Third World feminist social criticism, I have also encouraged us to learn from them' (p. 176). This book has much merit in elaborating the linkages in feminist praxis from perspectives of women working towards change. However, until the 'us' and 'them' are more clearly articulated the room for misunderstanding continues. This collection contains a fascinating set of analyses of women's movements and feminists located on the broad left-right political spectrum. It is also an analysis of two very diverse political contexts for feminism in the Latin American region: Central America and the Southern Cone. There are dramatic differences here in terms of national settings, feminist debates and periods of development of the left and right, but there are also evident similarities in terms of patriarchal cultures and authoritarian dynamics. However, in my view the most substantial contribution of the book is its analysis of the complex and ambivalent forgings of female citizenships in Latin America.

Chris Corrin
The book assesses, via ten chapters and an excellent introduction, women's movements of the right and feminist movements with clear ties to left-wing projects -all in the context of dictatorships or transitions to democracy. The countries considered are three Central American countries (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala), and three countries of the Southern Cone (Brazil, Argentina, Chile), all of which experienced severe dictatorships at different historical moments. The book offers four angles or categories to analyse the dynamics of women's and feminist movements: Feminism, Autonomy, Coalition Building (across political lines) and Maternalism.
Coalitions can include both feminists and women of the right. Victoria Gonzáles calls the two 'radical', not for their ideological positions and policies, nor for the transformations that they wish to make, nor only for wishing to carry out such changes with armed groups, but for daring to escape the existing situation. They make space for new interactions and new processes that open up new dimensions of citizenship. What is innovative here is the analysis of these dimensions in women's movements of the right. The book shows how feminine symbols like maternity are used by social institutions to support and reproduce a discourse and an orientation that emphasizes the more passive and traditional aspects of female identity. Motherhood is, however, a welcome and unquestioned role in most parts of society, on the basis of which one can shape political action of the right or left. Between feminists and right-wing women there may be a coincidence in the use of the maternal, but not in the longer-term perspectives that animate these interventions. Accepting the role without question, or accepting it within a discourse of rights (enlarging its possibilities with more active forms of citizenship construction) -that is the crucial difference.
These are not the only convergences among women of the right and left: at different moments women of the right have also generated movements. They have experienced processes of intense voluntary activity, of enthusiastic militancy, and they have been exposed to understandings other than the traditional. Do such convergences create a terrain for coalition building? Under what circumstances? There is undoubtedly common terrain in the cases examined. However, the themes highlighted here all remain positioned within the societies' existing frames of reference. Thus struggles focus on domestic violence, easing the burdens of motherhood, enforcing responsible fatherhood or demanding recognition for the roles of wives and mothers. Such themes and roles can bring women closer to the situation of victims than of citizens and they can weaken the consciousness that women are the subjects of rights.
Yet there are also dimensions that increase awareness that women are the subjects of rights. Particularly important here is the open or concealed struggle of women, within their own political or social organizations, against exclusion and for recognition, and in confrontation with the state. The strategy of women's quotas has proved key in confronting and breaking through an almost unquestioned male political monopoly. And this has interesting sideeffects, in so far as the eye becomes accustomed to seeing women where previously there were only men. However, quotas do not necessarily unite women around shared interests.
Further, this democratic game has limits. It is clear in the book that sexual, economic and social rights are, generally, excluded. Most importantly, the construction and expansion of citizenship is not necessarily related to the construction and expansion of democracy. Female Pinochestistas became citizens in multiple ways, but in an obviously clientelist manner. Similarly, Nicaraguan feminists of the early part of the last century turned to the right, leading to a lumpen feminine presence that made it easy for the dictatorship to promote limited women's rights in exchange for women's votes and political support. As indicated by Victoria Gonzáles, this was done through a maternalist discourse. Women undoubtedly gained basic rights in exchange for support to the dictatorship, but how much did they win? Is it possible to fight for women's rights in the margins of democracy?
Speaking from personal experience, I think it is very difficult. Alberto Fujimori's authoritarian-dictatorial government in Peru, 1990-2000, was the most historically advanced of its kind in institutionalizing women's position, in legislating civic recognition and in making women visible in positions of power (that is, authoritarian women of unconditional loyalty to the president).
At the same time, Fujimori implemented an instrumental and clientalist policy towards poor women in particular. Thus an expansion of formal, political female citizenship from above does not necessarily bring with it an extension of economic rights, and even less an extension of democratic processes. It can instead provide a social base for all manner of authoritarianisms.
A model of modernization without democracy is possible. In a democratic context, civil society-state interaction tends to legitimize the range of actors involved in public debate. Interaction between civil society and the state in authoritarian contexts tends rather to legitimate elites, irretrievably weakening other actors and failing to modify the meaning of state action. This produces a dynamic conservatism: something is modified in order that everything remains the same. That is the dangerous ambivalence of much of the women's civil society activism highlighted by this book.

Virginia Vargas Centro Flora Tristan, Peru
Paul The authors of this book have an ambitiously inclusive thesis about anglophone popular culture. In the past, they say, it was misogynistic and androcentric. However, there has been a change, such that it is now gynocentric and misandric, i.e. patterned with narratives and images that teach contempt for men (p. 5). Intriguingly this change is now said to be 'so deeply embedded' that 'few people -including men -even recognize it', and that those who do, do not perceive it as a 'pervasive problem' (p. xii). By the 1990s, it is claimed, 'androcentrism was increasingly being replaced by gynocentrism in popular culture', so now 'public discourse assumes that the world revolves around women' (p. 5). Readers of International Feminist Journal of Politics will probably want to pinch themselves at this point to make sure that they are awake, or possibly to pinch the authors to check whether they are.
The content of the book consists of interpretive readings of film, television (especially sitcoms and chat shows) and other media that create and transmit 'popular culture', organized thematically as: Laughing at Men, Looking Down on Men, Bypassing Men, Blaming Men, Dehumanizing Men, Demonizing Men, with appendices on 'Quasi-Misandric Movies' and 'The Misandric Week on Television' . Given the authorial selection criteria and relentless methodology of accumulating positives, these chapters become hard work after a while. It is a relief to find that they rate Some Like It Hot (pp. 34-5) as a wonderful gender text -apart from what they found in it that fits their search for misandry.
The methodology of the study is frankly parasitic on feminist work since the 1970s, and is a perverse mirror image. That is, feminist studies of images and films that marginalize, exclude, denigrate and demonize women are simply inverted methodologically to show that popular culture has always laughed at men, as men, and continues to do so. Does this 'discovery', then, support the authors' sweeping claims about the current state of play regarding the relative situations of men and women in society, the economy, politics, the home? The authors' expertise is in journalism and religious studies, which ought in principle to be no bar to an acquaintance with the hard statistical facts (money, violence, power, etc.) that feminists have gathered (and that need no repeating here) to demonstrate the disadvantages that women suffer relative to men, counter-instances and cross-cutting criteria notwithstanding.
Methodologically, the authors finesse these crucial matters by claiming that they are making a moral argument. That is, whatever the differing material circumstances of women with respect to men, this gives no moral licence to gynocentricism such that misandry becomes the norm -indeed a normalized and unnoticed feature of contemporary male subjectivity. The authors claim that men are now so victimized that they have internalized their own inferiority (p. 50). Reversing the immorality of misandry, as with misogyny, is thus said to be 'inherently good ' (p. 19). This perspective takes little note of the politics of making moral arguments and scoring moral points. Evidently for the authors there is a realm of good and evil conveniently isolated from the messy power struggles that constitute the rest of life.
They do comment briefly on the politics of humour and mockery, through which individuals are stereotyped and groups are ridiculed. They note that the stereotypes and groups change over time, but do not really explore the conceptual question as to where humour leaves off and oppression begins, or indeed whether humour ultimately requires a binary with an 'Other' (p. 48). Rather they produce an inherently self-contradictory moralism that both confirms and denies the gender binary: 'To say that women have no need for men . . . is to deny a fundamental moral claim that all human beings have on others' (p. 107). If we were all humans/others, rather than men and women, then perhaps this moral position would fly. But we're not, and it doesn't. Global Sex is a unique and valuable book. Addressing the relationships between globalization and sexuality, it provides an original, accessible and lively introduction to its field that will be appreciated by students and -Book reviews academics worldwide. I know of no better general introduction to contemporary debates over sexuality in an international and global perspective.

Terrell Carver
The orientation of Global Sex is interdisciplinary and open to the general reader. However, the text has clear relevance for readers of the International Feminist Journal of Politics, addressing themes of power, inequality and the interplay between social and political movements and political institutions (both national and international). The author cites and engages with feminist work throughout, and states in the preface that 'my reading about the politics of gender inequality, reproductive health, and violence against women has made me a more committed supporter of feminism' (p. xii).
Dennis Altman is well placed to undertake the vital task of analysing global debates over sexuality. Since publishing the seminal text of the gay liberation movement, Homosexual Oppression and Liberation, in 1971, he has sought to analyse sexuality in an international perspective -particularly with respect to the development of the lesbian and gay movement and responses to AIDS. Utilization of comparative cross-national perspectives and examples has been a hallmark of his work. An Australian consciousness of the inward-looking tendencies of American and British academics seems to have spurred him to attend to a variety of states in both the 'developed' and 'developing' worlds. As sexuality emerges as a field of study for International Relations, new scholars in this area should attend to Altman's body of work, which examined social movements contesting sexuality in an international perspective long before IR expanded its horizons to address such themes.
Global Sex begins by briefly introducing key concepts and debates in a manner which will be helpful to readers new to the fields in question. Chapter One opens by touching upon the emergence of sexuality as a topic for social science and politics, and problematizes terms such as 'development', 'traditional', 'modern' and 'western' . Chapter Two cleverly contrasts Bangkok in 2000 with Vienna in 1900 as a means to question the novelty of globalization with respect to sexuality. Altman adopts David Held's understanding of globalization as the 'intensification of patterns of interconnectedness' (p. 15), but does not enter into a lengthy analysis of competing definitions, preferring to allow his understanding of contemporary developments to emerge through the text as a whole, though the tendency is to emphasize the ascendance of US culture and greater global cultural homogeneity (pp. 29-33).
The central chapters address a succession of substantive themes, including reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, sexual identities, prostitution, pornography and the Internet. Developments in each field are surveyed in an engaging manner, with numerous useful references, and key debates are identified at each point. A minor criticism is that some of the chapter titles and subheadings could have been improved to provide clearer guidance to readers wishing to dip into the book on specific topics.
Of particular interest to many readers of this journal is Chapter Eight, 'Sexual Politics and International Relations' . This begins by briefly surveying the international organizations, international human rights conventions and international non-governmental organizations that addressed the regulation of sexuality in the past century, thus providing an introduction to the relevance of sexuality to some of the central themes of IR. Unsurprisingly, Altman endorses the universal individualist principles underpinning human rights and rejects opposing claims invoking collective cultural traditions. The second half of the chapter engages directly with existing attempts in the IR literature to address gender and sexuality. Unfortunately, Altman's proposals to advance the understanding of masculinity in IR remain underdeveloped, particularly his comments on the utility of psychoanalysis. In general this section could have engaged in greater depth with existing IR literature on sexuality and reveals the continuing scope for work in this area.
What is undeniable, however, is that few commentators can match Altman's easy reference to an abundance of diverse social contexts worldwide. His consciousness of being one of 'the privileged elite whose lives are being enriched by the processes of globalization' (p. 164) is utilized to produce a book which illuminates hard and complex choices about engagements between cultures. This is a book that addresses a vital area of study and deserves a wide readership.
Environmental Culture is published as part of Routledge's 'Environmental Philosophies' series, the remit of which is to explore environmentalism critically and with clarity. Plumwood fulfils these criteria admirably, explaining complex theories comprehensively and logically, and relating philosophical predicaments to personal, real-life events. This is a dense book but one illuminated by the passion and commitment of the author. In a nutshell, Environmental Culture provides an analysis of the irrationality and reductiveness of contemporary cultural tools -scientific rationalism, politics, ethics, economics and spirituality -when considering the relationship of humanity and nature. The dismissal in dominant discourses of the dependence of human society upon nature is suicidal, argues Plumwood, requiring radical rethinking. Her own effort at such rethinking leads Plumwood to draw heavily on feminist ideas, which means there is considerable overlap with her earlier (excellent) book, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1997).
The premise of Plumwood's argument is that human life needs to be understood as located within a material, spiritual and ethical context. We need to find ways of interacting and communicating with the whole, enveloping environment. To do so involves breaking free of given ideas of reason and of appropriate behaviour: 'Reason has been captured by power and made an instrument of oppression; it must be remade as a tool for liberation ' (p. 14). This necessitates a conceptual framework that is open to the inherent subjectivity of non-human nature and to the potential for mutual life-enhancing properties of exchange: 'a place where minds can stretch and free themselves, pirouette and leap, where ten million flowers can bloom' (p. 223). Such a framework would not only allow us to recognize our ecological embeddedness; it would simultaneously allow us to relate to non-humans ethically. To use one of Plumwood's examples, consider the plight of Fairy Penguins, whose bodies have been washed up onto the beaches of Tasmania. The rational science of fish-farming within the context of the global market is implicated in their deaths. The penguins died of starvation because the Australian government lifted quarantine restrictions on fish, allowing salmon fish farms along the western coast of Australia to buy in cheaper South African pilchards. These brought diseases with them that wiped out the indigenous stocks of pilchards, the penguins' main food source and a basic link in the oceanic food web. The logic of the globalized market denies the ecological and ethical interrelatedness of salmon consumers around the world and a rare breed of penguins in Tasmania. Ignorance is made acceptable; distance permits oblivion; cultural systems obscure culpability in this one instance of killing.
Plumwood suggests that we perceive the world in terms of dialogical relationships based on mutual subjectivity and openness to communication, which would allow us to see relations of interdependence. We could then question and refute the systems of rationality, which currently govern our cultural tools and organization of relationships and which lead to the subordination and objectification of other animals. Breaking the dualisms of subject/object, reason/nature, mind/body, human/non-human, etc., requires engaging with the world: recognizing the fallacy of self-enclosed humancentredness; locating humanity in ecological context; and self-critically constructing anew an ethical framework for just relations with animals.
Maybe it is because I am so familiar with Plumwood's argument, and in agreement with it, that I question her need to reiterate and re-emphasize it so frequently. The book could have been much shorter without this repetition. I also feel that there is a tension between her discussion of the literature of the field, which assumes a certain degree of prior critical knowledge and ease with relevant debates, and her rather commanding and unrelenting style of writing. Wonderful snapshots of domestic analogies to illustrate her points, however, mitigate this authorial tone.
That aside, this is an excellent book, which I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone interested in environmental debate, political philosophy and feminist analysis. Alternatively, read it for the sensual and enchanting descriptions of Australian bush life, which awaken the senses to the wonder of non-human life and remind us of the limited sphere of human culture. It is important to note at the outset that Dalby's Environmental Security is not an intentionally feminist text. However, it is my view that this book has a contribution to make not only to the environmental security literature but also to feminist concerns. The author aims to bring geopolitical discourses into environmental security and critical security studies. He asserts that the 'theme of identity and the critique of security as a metaphysics of domination and geopolitical containment offers a more appropriate interpretative schema to link the environment with security' (p. xxix). I am inclined to agree and suggest that writers such as Dalby are developing the environmental security literature into a potentially fertile and sympathetic domain for feminist scholars. Dalby situates his argument in the wider contexts of security studies, the roots of environmental security thinking and finally environmental security literature itself. For Dalby, it was the neo-Malthusian themes of Robert Kaplan's 'The Coming Anarchy' article of 1994 that led to the popularization of environmental approaches to security thinking, and he provides a critique of Kaplan's influential notion of violent external others threatening the security of the North. Kaplan's work is seen as presenting 'a bifurcated world' (p. 33) that neglects the responsibility of the North, a neglect that threads through the environmental security literature as Dalby reviews it here.

Susan Board
The challenge to the geopolitical premises of environmental security gets under way at the mid-point of the book. Here Dalby points out that the North causes most of the world's pollution and has the greatest access to technologies and resources that may deal with it. The history of colonization has left patterns of world resource flows that are irrefutably linked to the political instability of developing states. These are 'not common vulnerabilities' (p. 68) and the North has not behaved in an environmentally responsible manner. It is impossible to deny the interconnectedness of the world under one biosphere and the need for the notion of environmental security to be addressed at a biospheric level. Yet equally, the 'focus of environmental security needs to be the dispossession of less powerful peoples' (p. 81). Further, because it considers environmental security analysis in terms of individual identity, Dalby's work can be seen to point to ways in which environmental security understood as human security might better address women's security concerns.
In the environmental security literature, population movements and human impacts upon ecology are seen as elements of instability for states that can lead to conflict. Dalby shows that it is the dominance of state boundaries in security discourse that produces such conclusions. Further, he argues that the potential for resource scarcity to cause conflicts, part of the 'degradationconflict' thesis, is undertheorized and reliant on 'cultural constructions of nature as external' (p. 99). There are some parallels, but also still quite brief encounters, with existing feminist research here. Dalby utilizes broader notions of structural or indirect violence to recognize the many ways in which women and children remain the greatest victims of environmental insecurity.
Questions regarding the significance of international resource flows and their indirect impacts are then deconstructed at greater length. Prior research in this area has tended to focus on regulations, whereas Dalby concentrates on ecopolitical changes. The concepts of 'ecological shadows' (p. 104) and 'ecological footprints' (p. 107) are utilized to show how the dominating discourse of the North has disguised its global responsibility, but also to emphasize the significance of environmental crisis for a discipline still thinking in terms of inter-state conflict: for the 'total human footprint is already larger than the ecological parameters of the system' (p. 110). Not all of Dalby's most informative work bringing ecological dimensions into environmental security studies is included here, and perhaps should have been.
The author does not directly engage with feminist perspectives, but the text is often sympathetic to feminist concerns and draws on several relevant themes. Dalby's examination of the invisible suffering of certain peoples indigenous to the North, and their alternative understandings of nature, helps to deconstruct the notion of a unitary North. This points to a useful framework for both woman-centred analysis in this area and for an examination of the differing experiences of different women in environmental security terms. Dalby's concluding comments assert that the 'problem of the domination of nature and the geography of the colonial project of modernity are the same' (p. 161). So what is most highlighted for feminist scholars by Dalby is the potential limitations of an analysis which draws solely upon ecofeminism to reconstruct environmental security discourse. A geopolitical and feminist approach -geo-feminist if you like -could offer a more productive way forward.

Victoria Taylor
Keele University, UK