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The BRICS and Collective Financial Statecraft. By Cynthia Roberts, Leslie Elliott Armijo, and Saori N. Katada. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 288p. $99.00 cloth, $31.95 paper.

leaders. The book’s Epilogue situates the African sex worker-rights movement in a global perspective to show how it has aligned with other activists in the Global North and South. Unlike many popular and scholarly works about sex work that provide polarizing stories emphasizing sex workers’ victimization or agency, this book is a thoughtful, nuanced, and engaging intervention. While she does not shy away from discussing the many challenges sex workers face in Africa, the author also does not portray sex workers as victims of their circumstances. Instead, she presents rich descriptions of sex worker–rights organizations and firsperson narratives of sex workers as complex individuals who rationally negotiate—and resist—a complicated and dangerous sociolegal and economic terrain. In addition to providing a sophisticated and thoughtful characterization of sex workers, Mgbako notably does not treat Africa as a homogenous continent regarding sex workers’ conditions and activism. While her discussion of sex worker activism in different countries was uneven (there was more information about South Africa than many of the other countries, likely because it has the oldest and most developed movement), the reader will learn about the unique challenges and activism strategies for sex workers across the continent. But Mgbako is also clear that the conditions faced by sex workers here are not unique or exceptionally “African.” In fact, sex workers in the United States (and elsewhere) also routinely face police abuse, stigma, and physical violence, among other difficulties. From a scholarly perspective, the book is not rooted explicitly in a particular theoretical tradition (although Mgbako does note its contribution to African feminist scholarship). However, social movement scholars will find that its content could inform their theorizing about resource mobilization and organizing strategies, particularly within marginalized communities. Additionally, this book highlights the importance of intersectionality theory for the study of social movements by making clear that one cannot look at such movements in isolation. One shortcoming of Mgbako’s work is that it presumes readers to be familiar with the origins and influence of the current global antiprostitution movement, which has promulgated the notion that sex workers do not choose their work but are instead forced and defrauded into this (i.e., they are sex trafficked); in fact, the most comprehensive discussion of this argument did not come until Chapter 7. Given Mgbako’s position that African sex worker-rights activism directly opposes this conflation of sex work with sex trafficking, it would have been useful to learn more about the power of the contemporary antiprostitution/antitrafficking movement, which is very powerful and led in large part by U.S.-based activists, and how it has worked to influence sex work policy in the various African countries that the author studied more specifically. Altogether, To Live Freely in this World is an exciting, engaging, and timely book. On August 11, 2015, Amnesty International was another in a growing line of advocacy groups to oppose the criminalization of prostitution, and lawmakers, activists, and many sex workers across the globe responded quickly to express their support. With Mgbako’s work in mind, it will be interesting to see how African sex workers contribute to these discussions going forward.