Book Review: Middle Power in the Middle East: Canada’s Foreign and Defence Policies in a Changing Region
| Author | Kim Richard Nossal |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020221123936 |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
International Journal
2022, Vol. 77(2) 378–386
© The Author(s) 2022
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Book Reviews
Thomas Juneau and Bessma Momani, eds.
Middle Power in the Middle East: Canada’s Foreign and Defence Policies in a Changing Region.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 266 pp. $85.00 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-1-4875-2844-7
Reviewed by: Kim Richard Nossal (nossalk@queensu.ca), Queen’s University, Kingston,
Ontario, Canada
DOI: 10.1177/00207020221123936
The Middle East has always played a paradoxical role in Canadian foreign and defence
policy. On the one hand, Canada’s geographical distance from the region and the
patterns of Canada’s political economy have meant that Canadian interests have only
rarely been directly affected by the conflicts that have riven the region over the last
eighty years. On the other hand, during this period Canadians have consistently been
drawn into the politics of the Middle East. That involvement has been driven by a range
of factors, including alliance politics, broader geostrategic considerations, human rights
and development assistance concerns, economic interests, and a growing web of
transnational linkages as migration to Canada from the region has increased over the
years. This collection recognizes that as a result the Middle East matters to Canadians,
many of whom expect their government to be actively engaged in the region, and
frequently frame their country’s role in the Middle East as that of a middle power.
Despite the title, however, this book—happily—is not about Canada as a middle
power. On the contrary: the “middle power”in the title appears to be little more than a
rhetorical artifice to permit a titular juxtaposition with the region being examined, and
an appeal to the way many Canadians continue to see their country’s role in world
affairs, rather than a theoretical frame for the examination of Canadian foreign policy in
the Middle East. For there is no attempt, by either the editors or any of the authors, to
frame the collection as a whole, or any of the individual chapters, explicitly within the
evolving contemporary scholarly debate on the thorny (and perpetually unresolved)
issue of how we might distinguish a middle power from any other kind of power in
global politics. The few references to Canada as a middle power in this collection
sidestep the scholarly debates and simply take the definition of middle power as a given
(with the result that a middle power is whatever the reader wishes it to be).
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