Arie M. Dubnov and Laura Robson (eds.). Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism.

Abstract

During the 2014 Sydney Peace Prize ceremony, Indian author Arundhati Roy noted that “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” The history of the “silenced” and of the “unheard” is as old as the world. And yet it is mainly within the frame of the post–World War I international conferences that such silenced or unheard history appeared in all its evidence. Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism, a volume edited by Arie M. Dubnov and Laura Robson, provides, first and foremost, a convincing contribution to shed light on the post–World War I zeitgeist and in support of the empowerment of those who suffered the British Empire’s partitioning of Palestine, Ireland, and India—the three earliest and most prominent instances of partition. Overall, the book, which examines the background on why and how this “moment of partition” occurred, offers a convincing employment of transdisciplinary approaches, research tools, and analysis. Particularly credible is the way the editors and contributors shift research away from the prevailing geopolitical reductionism that is currently so central in most works on ethnoreligious dynamics in conflictual areas.