Book Review: Kalypso A Nicholaïdis, Berny Sèbe and Gabrielle Maas (eds), Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies
| Author | Helen O’Shea |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929916667030 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsInternational Relations |
Book Reviews 109
Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and
Colonial Legacies by Kalypso A Nicholaïdis,
Berny Sèbe and Gabrielle Maas (eds). London:
I. B. Tauris, 2015. 420pp., £17.99 (p/b), ISBN
9781784530518
The well-worn truism – that the presentness of
the past is all around us – has been publicly
resuscitated in light of a recent YouGov survey
conducted in mid-January 2016 (which found
that 43% of respondents thought that ‘generally
speaking’ the British Empire was a good thing)
and the ongoing debates around the Rhodes
Must Fall in Oxford campaign. Echoes of
Empire is a particularly timely contribution in
capturing how the present is continuously
informed by an often-inconvenient yet ubiqui-
tous past, and subsequently why its contesta-
tions are relevant. The range of this edited
collection – spanning history, literature, politi-
cal science and international relations – is testa-
ment to the vitality of the ever-expanding
historiography of territorial and transoceanic
imperial legacies and the fruitfulness of inter-
disciplinary approaches.
The introductory essay by its three editors
functions as a suitably thought-provoking segue
into the motivations behind the book’s incep-
tion and rationale. The book’s two overriding
objectives – to develop new interdisciplinary
avenues of investigation and to engage with
scholars from across the globe – are well exe-
cuted. With over 28 contributors spanning four
continents, the organisation of its chapters coa-
lesces around the book’s four main themes:
colonial echoes across time and space; ideol-
ogy, discourse and practice; the European
Union in a post-colonial world; and universal-
ism versus particularism.
Echoes of Empire is a bold, and ultimately
successful, attempt to provide a coherent collec-
tion of essays that tackle what is an ambitiously
large subject matter – the reverberations and
continuously shifting representations of
European and non-European empires. The work
is also generous enough to include contribu-
tions from independent and emergent scholars
such as Gabrielle Mass and Vinícius Rodrigues
Vieira, in addition to prominent experts in the
fields of international relations and politics such
as Elena Korosteleva and Emily Jones and the
wellestablished doyens of imperial history such
as John Darwin, John M MacKenzie and
Bernard Porter. Indeed, Darwin’s afterword
serves to remind us just how far the discipline
of imperial history has travelled (in the right
direction) over the last 40 years, to which
Echoes of Empire is testament.
Given the extensiveness of empire’s imprint,
much more remains to be discovered, a point
recently reinforced by the ‘Hanslope disclo-
sure’. For students and scholars alike, this book
is an impressive addition to a field of enquiry
with much momentum, much dynamism and
much to reveal about the imperial continuities
behind globalisation and the contemporary
global order for many years to come.
Helen O’Shea
(University of Dundee)
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929916667030
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International Organizations and the
Implementation of the Responsibility to
Protect: The Humanitarian Crisis in Syria
by Daniel Silander and Don Wallace (eds).
Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. 216pp., £85.00 (h/b),
ISBN 9781138891265
The book, well edited by Daniel Silander and
Don Wallace, primarily focuses on recognising
the commitment and responsibility of interna-
tional organisations (IOs) in the Responsibility to
Protect (R2P) paradigm. The book in general
aims to answer the question: ‘What formal
responsibility and actual capacity do international
organisations have to protect and prevent civil-
ians from systematic mass atrocities?’ (p. 3).
The book contains twelve chapters divided
into three parts. The first part, consisting of
chapters 1–3, focuses on the notion of R2P and
the role set out for IOs in terms of R2P and the
nature of failing states, Syria in particular. This
part addresses failing states as the black holes in
international politics that pose grave challenges
to international and human security. Chapter 3
specifically discusses the ongoing Syrian crisis.
The second part of the book (chapters 4–11)
emphasises the different IOs and their roles
and responsibility in implementing R2P with
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