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Race, Inequality, and Colonialism in the New World Order

Review products

Razack Sherene H., Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 236 pages. $50.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.

Rajagopal Balakrishnan, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements, and Third World Resistance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 343 pages. $80.00 cloth; $36.20 paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Extract

In early 2004, as Americans viewed the photographs of beatings, humiliation, and abuse of the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib with horror, they were repeating the experiences of Canadians 10 years earlier. In 1994, Canadians saw photos and videotapes of cruelty and abuse by their peacekeepers toward the Somalis they had been sent to rescue. In 2004, Americans confronted the fact that U.S. soldiers were capable of the same forms of brutality and cruelty they had come to expect from other regimes. For Canadians, proud of their status as peacekeepers to the world, this experience was also deeply distressing. How did they make sense of their behavior? Reading this event through the lens of race, Sherene Razack in Dark Threats and White Knights argues that this was not an aberrant event, the product of a few “bad apples,” or a failure of oversight but an expression of the underlying dynamics of race and imperialism that shaped the peacekeeping project in the first place.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
© 2006 Law and Society Association.

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References

Taussig, Michael (1992) “Culture of Terror-Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture,” Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan PressGoogle Scholar
Zernike, Kate (2005) “Portraits Differ as Trial Opens in Prison Abuse,” New York Times 11 Jan. p. 1.Google Scholar