Book Review: Poverty Narratives and Power Paradoxes in International Trade Negotiations and Beyond
| Author | Gonca Oguz Gok |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020221143293 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
and that takes seriously issues around race and settler colonialism. What is fascinating
is that even in the 21
st
century, unionism not only remains but exists across the political
spectrum. During Paul Martin’s government in the early 2000s, there was open
speculation in the press about Canada absorbing Turks and Caicos. The same idea was
advocated for in the right-wing Dorchester Review in 2014, and debated, two years
later, at the federal New Democratic Party’s policy convention. Hastings’s remarkable
and important book shows why it is that some Canadians still seek a place in the sun.
ORCID iD
Asa McKercher https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9452-3854
Amrita Narlikar
Poverty Narratives and Power Paradoxes in International Trade Negotiations and Beyond
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 537 pp. £24.99 (paper)
ISBN: 978-1-108-41556-9
Reviewed by: Gonca Oguz Gok (gonca.gok@marmara.edu.tr), Marmara University, Istanbul,
Turkey
DOI: 10.1177/00207020221143293
For thirty-two years, the United Nations Development Programme has been calculating
the Human Development Index. The index has declined globally for the last two years,
as more than 90 percent of countries experienced a decline.
1
“Poverty remains endemic
across the world and seems to be so in the foreseeable future”(2), Amrita Narlikar
writes in her recent book. Going beyond the traditional narrative, which usually as-
sociates poverty with powerlessness, Narlikar’s book focuses on the “use, overuse and
misuse of the power of the powerlessness”(18). She demonstrates how winning
narratives on poverty transformed powerlessness into a powerful “political tool and
formidable weapon in international negotiations”(1). She captures this with her in-
novative concept of life cycles of narratives, in which she traces “how narratives
emerge, acquire dominance, change, and possibly die”(18) through in-depth case
studies of international trade negotiations.
In the first life cycle of narratives, as documented in chapter 2, Narlikar traces the
achievements and limitations of the poverty narrative led by the Global South in the
post–Second World War multilateral trade order through the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade. In the second life cycle, in chapter 3, she questions how the poverty
narrative led by the coalition of developing countries gained new importance in trade
negotiations. To do that, Narlikar introduces the “voices”of multiple actors through
1. United Nations Development Programme, 2022.
Book Reviews 537
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