In 1965 the white minority government of Rhodesia (after 1980 Zimbabwe) issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, rather than negotiate a transition to majority rule. In doing so, Rhodesia became the exception, if not anathema, to the policies and practices of the end of empire. In Unpopular Sovereignty, Luise White shows that the exception that was Rhodesian independence did not, in fact, make the state that different from new nations elsewhere in Africa: indeed, this history of Rhodesian political practices reveals some of the commonalities of mid-twentieth-century thinking about place and race and how much government should link the two.  

White locates Rhodesia’s independence in the era of decolonization in Africa, a time of great intellectual ferment in ideas about race, citizenship, and freedom. She shows that racists and reactionaries were just as concerned with questions of sovereignty and legitimacy as African nationalists were and took special care to design voter qualifications that could preserve their version of legal statecraft. Examining how the Rhodesian state managed its own governance and electoral politics, she casts an oblique and revealing light by which to rethink the narratives of decolonization.

Examines identity politics in the context of international relations.

The field of international relations has recently witnessed a tremendous growth of interest in the theme of identity and its formation, construction, and deconstruction. In Uses of the Other, Iver B. Neumann demonstrates how thinking about identity in terms of the self and other may prove highly useful in the study of world politics.

Neumann begins by tracing the four different paths along which this thinking has developed during this century-ethnographic, psychological, Continental philosophical, and “Eastern excursion”-and he shows how these blended at the margins of the discipline of international relations at the end of the 1980s. There follow several incisive readings of European identity formations on the all-European, regional, and national levels. The theme that draws these readings together is how “the East” is used as a sign of otherness at all three levels. Whereas previous studies framed this process as part of colonial and postcolonial developments, this book suggests that “Easternness” is also present as a marker in contemporary discourses about Russia, Turkey, Central Europe, and Bashkortostan, among others. Situating his work in contemporary critical debates, Neumann argues that, while the self/other perspective is always of relevance, it is now more in need of being used as a perspective on specific sequences of identity formation than of further embellishment.ISBN: 0-8166-3082-8 Cloth $49.95xxISBN: 0-8166-3083-6 Paper $19.95x248 Pages 5-7/8x9 NovemberBorderlines Series, Volume 9Translation inquiries: