Book Notes
| Author | Stein Tønnesson,Gregory Reichberg,Bernt A. Skåra,Åshild Kolås,Pavel Baev,Sven Gunnar Simonsen,Malcolm Lewthwaite |
| Published date | 01 July 2002 |
| Date | 01 July 2002 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0022343302039004008 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
503
Chulos, Chris J. & Timo Piirainen, eds,
2000. The Fall of an Empire, the Birth of a Nation.
Aldershot: Ashgate. 227 pp. ISBN 1855219026.
Finland has a large and strong group of scholars
within Russian studies, as this book testifies to;
all but one of the nine authors are associated with
Finnish research institutions. As a whole, this
collection purports to give ‘a comprehensive
picture of Russian national identity, its historical
formation, national self-understanding during
the Soviet era, and development of a new
national identity in the post-Soviet era’. All the
contributions certainly do fall within such a
framework. At the same time, there is already a
wide range of time and themes, and not all are
covered equally thoroughly. And while some
articles are fairly narrow case studies, others are
more general introductory articles. Into the latter
category falls, among others, Timo Vihavainen’s
good overview piece on how the Bolsheviks
coped with national sentiments, and Jeremy
Smith’s useful article on Russia’s minorities and
the Soviet legacy. Worth mentioning is also
Thomas Parland’s solid analysis of radical
Russian nationalism in the 1990s. Together with
Smith’s article, Timo Piirainen’s contribution
(with the same title as the book) brings the dis-
cussion up to the present day. While Piirainen’s
article is based on a limited material (30 inter-
views among St Petersburg schoolteachers), it
does provide a good glimpse into (ethnic) Rus-
sians’ self-perception. On the other hand,
Piirainen’s (and the book’s) indirect claim that
Russia is now – with a population 80% ethnic
Russian – a ‘nation-state’ is debatable. As for the
book as a whole, a very short (six pages) intro-
duction, and the absence of a conclusion or
index, reinforce the impression that editorial
ambition has not been of the highest order. SGS
Cowan, Jane K.; Marie-Bénédicte Dembour
& Richard A. Wilson, eds, 2001. Culture and
Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. 258 pp. ISBN
0521793394.
In much of the debate on the universality of
human rights, cultural difference has been posited
as a challenge to global standards. For those who
were led to believe that the choice was between
patronizing universalism and nihilistic relativism,
think again. The editors of this book argue that
one should rather see the tension between the
positions as part of a continuous process of nego-
tiating ever-changing and interrelated global and
local norms. Bringing together a number of
anthropological case studies where ‘culture’ and
‘rights’ are at stake, the contributions in the first
part of the book call for a reconsideration of the
opposition between universalism and relativism,
question the concepts of both ‘rights’ and
‘culture’, and argue that neither of the two
positions in itself does justice to empirical
realities. The second part of the book interrogates
another set of problems linked to the terms
‘culture’ and ‘rights’: the articulation of ethnic
and nationalist identities and related claims to
‘cultural rights’ on the basis of idealized and atem-
poral images of ‘culture’. Moreover, the papers
presented here illustrate how such ‘culturalist’
claims are encouraged by international legal
regimes, including the human rights regime. In
this sense, ‘rights’ may be seen as constitutive of
the very ‘cultures’ they are petitioned to protect.
Which in a sense brings the whole argument full
circle. ÅK
Dodds, Klaus & David Atkinson, eds, 2000.
Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical
Thought. London & New York: Routledge. 416
pp. ISBN 0415172497.
Ó Tuathail, Gearóid; Simon Dalby & Paul
Routledge, eds, 1998. The Geopolitics Reader.
London & New York: Routledge. x + 327 pp.
ISBN 041516271 (paperback).
© 2002 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 39, no. 4, 2002, pp. 503–508
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi)
[0022-3433(200207)39:4; 503–508; 026616]
BOOK
NOTES
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