Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order

ISBN-13: 9780199855612 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 256 str.

Ryan M. Irwin

Opis

Writing more than one hundred years ago, African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois speculated that the great dilemma of the twentieth century would be the problem of "the color line." Nowhere was the dilemma of racial discrimination more entrenched-and more complex-than South Africa.

Gordian Knot examines South Africa's freedom struggle in the years surrounding African decolonization, using the global apartheid debate to explore the way new nation-states changed the international community during the mid-twentieth century. At the highpoint of decolonization, South Africa's problems shaped a transnational conversation about nationhood. Arguments about racial justice, which crested as Europe relinquished imperial control of Africa and the Caribbean, elided a deeper contest over the meaning of sovereignty, territoriality, and development.

Based on research in African, American, and European archives, Gordian Knot advances a bold new interpretation about African decolonization's relationship to American power. In so doing, it promises to shed light on U.S. foreign relations with the Third World and recast understandings of the fate of liberal internationalism after World War II.

Recenzje

an enrichment for transnational and global history studies ... I can only join others reviewers in their appreciation of the book and hope that it will continue to be received widely and will find its way into curricula of Global, African and International Studies.

O autorze

Ryan Irwin is the Associate Director of International Security Studies at Yale University. He teaches classes on foreign affairs and decolonization and coordinates programs related to Yale's international history program.