Book Review: Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| Author | Mónica Judith Sánchez Flores |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663906066621 |
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Zumbansen, Peer (2001b) ‘Spiegelungen von Staat und Gesellschaft: Governance-
Erfahrungen in der Globalisierungsdebatte’, ARSP-Beiheft 79: 13–40.
Zumbansen, Peer (2002) ‘Piercing the Legal Veil: Commercial Arbitration and Trans-
national Law’, European Law Journal 8: 400–32.
Zumbansen, Peer (2006) ‘Transnational Law’, in Jan Smits (ed.) Encyclopedia of
Comparative Law. London: Edward Elgar.
PEER ZUMBANSEN
York University, Canada
DAVI NA COOPER, Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Differ-
ence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 246 pp., £17.99.
DOI: 10.1177/0964663906066621
In Challenging Diversity Davina Cooper is engaged in defining how to approach
equality in the contemporary developed world, where a politics of diversity has
complex manifestations. Cooper’s preoccupation with equality and the possibility of
furthering this value effectively in complex contemporary societies leads her to
criticize the way in which current academia argues about diversity politics. She illus-
trates theoretical limitations and deficiencies of this conceptual space by means of case
studies that disclose the complexities of engaging in a discussion about equality today
when dealing with minorities. Diversity politics theoretically lies at the confluence of
liberalism, multi-culturalism, communitarianism, post-structuralism, post-Marxism,
feminism, post-colonialism, and queer studies and she engages critically with what
these approaches have had to say on the political issues that her cases illustrate.
Although she concedes that there are important contributions from these theoretical
perspectives, Cooper wants to highlight that diversity politics is not very clear about
some of its key concepts and the changes it aspires to. She contends that discussions
about diversity ought to produce adequate analytical and normative accounts of the
complex issues raised by contemporary politics and social interaction. So she draws
on the politics of diversity and analyses its claims in order to tackle a set of debates
and questions about how to conceptualize equality at all in order to pursue it, how
social disadvantage can be characterized and related to structural inequality, what are
the politics of social norms, and how to protect and enhance ways of being and living
that do not conform to dominant normative principles. Her book proposes that a
closer observation of the effects of social relations may clarify how norms may
reinforce existing inequalities and how dominant norms may be transformed to
embed more radical or oppositional values. From a sociological stance, she proposes
a radical politics of inequality that having ‘deconstructed’ dominant normative prin-
ciples, values the construction of new social relations as a means to legitimize counter-
normative ways of life; not as abstract deontology, but as actual instances of lived
opposition to mainstream practices.
Cooper’s first case study concerns the conflict over the establishment of a symbolic
space that enabled orthodox Jews to carry on the Sabbath beyond their homes, called
the eruv, for the first time in downtown London through the 1990s. This shows how
public authority’s permission may be motivated by a progressive acceptance of
minority communities allowing them to use the public space in this particular manner,
but this concession is not without contradictions and dilemmas. She points at how
the concepts of identity, freedom, harm and private space are problematic when
contemplating opposition from neighbours who were not orthodox Jews and who
regarded the eruv as a transgression of public space in their residential area. Her
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