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AYSE ZARAKOL, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Pp. 285 $ 32.99 Paper
After Defeat is an exploration of state behavior in the international arena. More particularly, it is a look at how non-Western states conceptualize themselves and their place in the international society vis-à-vis Western states and, consequently, how they act in their relations with their Western counterparts.
In trying to establish the reasons behind the ways non-Western states define, internalize and negotiate their role in the international sphere, Zarakol focuses on the cases of Russia, Japan and Turkey. Despite their differences, all three countries are late-comers into an international society whose ground rules originated in the seventeenth century with the emergence of the Westphalian system. Zarakol maintains that the definition of these ground rules by the initial, "established" countries of the West significantly shaped, and still shapes, the foreign-policy choices and decisions available to these three non-Western countries.
At the center of Zarakol's analysis is the issue of how Russia, Japan and Turkey are driven by the goal of establishing their ontological security. This is a process that takes place according to the interpretations of these countries' political elites as to where they are in relation to the West and where they would like to be. All three countries are torn between the East and the West: They do not consider themselves to be "Eastern," yet deep inside they also know that they are not part of the "West."
Zarakol asserts that these states' situation is very much akin to that of an individual who has to deal with a stigma. The stigma-here, the sense of not belonging to the West-definitively and irretrievably "colours and therefore motivates every subsequent interaction" (p. 4) of these states in their dealings with the West. As she points out early in the her book, "to be torn between the East and the West as a state, as a society, as a nation, is to exist in the international system with the dilemmas that are faced by stigmatized individuals" (p. 7).
Theoretically, After Defeat exemplifies the sociological turn in the international-relations literature by incorporating Erving Goffman's stigma theory and Norbert Elis' "established-outsider" framework. Zarakol rightly takes issue with...