Book Review: Unsettling the Great White North
| Author | Shelby A. E. McPhee |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020221146136 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
citizens”in a “universal community,”as Peou more than ably demonstrates, is im-
practical in reality. As he writes, “The world is not marching steadily or irreversibly
toward Kantian democracy”(374).
In its place, Peou concludes instead with a clarion call for a theory of “democratic
realism,”proposing that the global system would perform more effectively if states
within each region worked towards building a pluralistic regional community, or what
Peou terms a “region-based global community”(384). As Andy Knight writes in his
foreword to the book, “[O]ne cannot ignore the importance of material conditions and
the role of dominant powers in the shaping of the world under consideration”(xii).
Returning to the introduction, Peou writes: “In short, there is now an urgent need for
students of global politics to better understand the growing challenges to human
survival, think critically about the different ways of addressing them, and realistically
envision the possibility of building a better world for all humanity”(xxxvii). However,
he cautions that this can only occur through dialogue, debate, and discussion. Not
reading this book is to exclude oneself from an important intellec tual work, exploring a
defining moment in the modern global system, and proffering a way forward to achieve
a more democratic future for all.
Funk´
e Aladejebi and Michele Johnson.
Unsettling the Great White North.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 533 pp. $34.95 (paper).
ISBN: 978-1-487-52917-8
Reviewed by: Shelby A. E. McPhee (mcphes5@mcmaster.ca), McMaster University
DOI: 10.1177/00207020221146136
Jermaine Carby, Andrew Loku, and Abidirahman Abdi represent just a small few of the
Black people who have died during encounters with the police in Canada. Additionally,
Jamal Boyce, Jordan Afolabi, and even this author, are representative of many cases
where Black students have been heavily surveilled, followed, photographed, or de-
tained by police on university campuses because they were seen as threats, hostile and
violent criminals. Regardless of the spaces or places where these incidents take place, or
the context that gives rise to these acts of anti-Black violence, it remains true that they
do not exist in silos and instead are part of a broader and deeper racial problem within
Canada and the global network of white supremacy. In a country whose identity rests on
a benign whiteness of sorts, multiculturalism, and racial and religious diversity, these
instances of unfortunate death and extreme aggression against people of African
descent in Canada bring to the fore a deeply embedded anti-Blackness within Canada.
This revelation of anti-Blackness then shatters the image of Canada as free of racial
antagonism and aggression and forces a racial reckoning with the nation-state’s truth of
Book Reviews 533
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