Book Review: The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada: Development Programs and Democracy, 1964–1979
DOI | 10.1177/00207020211043936 |
Published date | 01 September 2021 |
Date | 01 September 2021 |
Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
IR, new approaches such as gender, environmental, critical, and Indigenous studies, et
cetera, will gradually become part of the discipline. The book highlights two major
points about the identity crisis of CFP. First is a gap between generations, clearly
identified by authors in the book. Politics as the preserve of the state has exploded and
foreign policy can no longer be studied, as it was for a long time, exclusively from a
state or diplomatic perspective. The challenge for new critical scholars, both in poli tics
and in history, is to anchor these new approaches to a dynamic and connected dis-
cipline. It is distressing that prime ministers no longer consult foreign policy experts,
and that politicians often have no training in politics or political history. On the other
hand, the traditional (“mainstream”) foundations of foreign policy (state, chronol ogical,
political, and theoretical history) are still necessary for students and scholars alike. It is
a question of balance. The second interesting point raised by the book is the difficulty
faced by certain groups, marginalized or less professionally visible, in their sociali-
zation and networking process within the discipline. The case of Francophone re-
searchers could have been raised here. A parallel Francophone network in IR and CFP
has developed in Quebec. How do they view this crisis?
This thought-provoking book addresses many issues and questions, and is a very
good starting point for students and the curious who want to understand why the
diversity of approaches in Canadian foreign policy is both necessary and difficult
within the discipline.
ORCID iD
Magali Deleuze https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0181-2011
Will Langford
The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada: Development Programs and Democracy, 1964–1979,
Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. 472 pp. $39.95 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-22800-397-7
Reviewed by: Jill Campbell-Miller, (jill.campbell-miller@smu.ca), Saint Mary's University
Since the early 2000s, development has been a subject of increasing interest for North
American and European historians though major scholars in the field have tended to
focus on the top–down forms of development.
1
Many also tend to examine the ways in
which the Global North has acted upon the Global South with an emphasis on East–
1. Though it is quickly becoming dated, an excellent overview of this historiography is contained in Joseph
Morgan Hodge’s two-part survey, “Writing the history of development (Part 1: The first wave),”Hu-
manity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no. 3 (2015):
429–463, and Hodge, “Writing the history of development (Part 2: Longer, deeper,wider),”Humanity 7,
no. 1 (2016): 125–174.
486 International Journal 76(3)
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