The World in Canada, edited by David Carment and David Bercuson, sets out to determine whether Canada’s changing demographics are reflected in its foreign and security policy. This is a fair and interesting question: if who we are as a nation is changing, does it change how we act in the world? Oddly, the book’s subtitle is “Diaspora, Demography and Domestic Politics,” but it is the domestic politics of foreign policy that is under discussion, not changing domestic politics per se.
The problem is that how you frame the question and what assumptions underlie your framing and who you choose to have think about the question all determine whether you come up with a useful answer. Many of the contributors have written nuanced, careful chapters, but the way they are framed—primarily in the introduction and conclusion that pull them together—carries more than a whiff of bias and fear mongering.
What, first of all, is a diaspora, a word that is thrown...
Rima Berns-McGown teaches diaspora studies with the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, and is managing editor of International Journal, the Canadian academic quarterly of international politics. She is the author of Muslims in the Diaspora: The Somali Communities of London and Toronto (University of Toronto Press, 1999).
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