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After the attack on an Army camp in Jammu and Kashmir’s Uri sector on 18 September 2016 by the militants in which twenty Indian soldiers lost their lives, the Government of India gave a call to scrap the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) of 1960 between India and Pakistan. This created ripples in both countries. For Pakistan the Indus River System (IRS) is a lifeline and without water from the rivers constituting the system, the country would lose its existence. In India many welcomed this decision while some questioned its rationality.

The editor of the volume under review, T.V. Paul, is James McGill Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. The book is rather dense and a difficult read, and consequently can only be recommended for the cognoscenti. Its 14 contributions are by well-chosen academics who attended a workshop with the theme ‘Globalisation and the Changing National Security State’ organized by the editor and his project team in late 2013.

At a time when doubling farmer’s income in the next five years has become the catch phrase, the policy emphasis is on the oft-beaten approach of boosting crop productivity, reducing the cost of cultivation, expanding the area under irrigation and providing a unified national agricultural market.

Years of feminist research have taught   us that gender is a significant component of our identity. The script of gender may be provided by social norms but gender remains integral to how a self experiences his or her identity, as well as to how others identify one. Masculinity and femininity, as two dominant forms in which one’s gender identity is manifested, are the object of study in the articles being reviewed here. Manuella Ciotti’s edited Unsettling the Archetypes: Femininities and Masculinities in Indian Politics is a collection of articles which examines the effect on gender identities of political struggles of non-elite groups in Indian society and they negotiate their gender identity when they struggle against their non-elite status.

I begin my review of Amina Jamal’s Jamaat-e-Islami Women in Pakistan: Vanguard of a New Modernity with a couple of questions which I consider pertinent: Do women’s multiple narratives reveal a capacity for alternative ways of negotiating the construction of conflictual identities? Does the assumption of agential roles by traditional women in a patriarchal culture cause an identity conflict crisis which can be resolved through a firm commitment to specific values and goals? Women, as evidenced by the work of constructive and rehabilitative work undertaken by political and social women activists in South Asia during both turbulent and peaceful times, have more or less power depending on their specific situation, and they can be relatively submissive in one situation and relatively assertive in another.

Let me begin by confessing I am not the most appropriate reviewer for this book. When I volunteered to review the book, I was certain that the book would be about transnational commercial surrogacy or biocapital, as Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s work brilliantly shows us, where finance capital is intermeshed with trade in body parts: ova, fertilized embryos, embryonic stem cells and cord blood, a global business running into trillions.