The well-known analytical distinction drawn by Nancy Fraser between social movement struggles for recognition and those for redistribution is put to the test in this collection of essays drawn from a wide array of historical and case studies. In one sense, these are empirical studies that set out to confirm or to refute the analytical utility of distinguishing between economic and cultural injustice. If that premise alone bound the collection, it would be of limited interest. In another more expansive sense, these essays treat social movements as struggles for power and voice in political contexts, struggles that take shape in an always changing political landscape. Their strategies are determined more within the exigencies of politics than by fixed identities or visions of justice. The essays take a kind of political turn away from analytical and normative concerns that drive a great deal of the literature on social movements. It is perhaps overstating it a bit, but only a bit, to say that these essays disclose the fact that both recognition and redistribution are consequences of successful social movements, rather than their starting points. To be successful, social movements must act like any other collectivity by gaining power before they can secure justice.

Even Fraser concedes that the distinction is purely analytic and does not correspond to different types of social movements or strictly different forms of injustice. Recognition Struggles and Social Movements opens with a new essay by Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition: Overcoming Displacement and Reification in Cultural Politics,” where she reasserts her more general claim that recognition struggles are displacing struggles for redistribution; that is, cultural politics is displacing class politics. In addition to “the problem of displacement,” Fraser is concerned that recognition movements devolve into identity-based movements, becoming separatist and asserting identity rather than struggling against injustice, a condition she calls “the problem of reification.” At stake in Fraser's distinction between recognition and redistribution is the credibility of cultural politics and the visibility of economic injustice. Her general claim does not fare well and her concerns are decisively supplanted in the essays that follow.

Yet it is by grappling with Fraser's analytical framework that these essays make their contribution to an understanding of the obstacles to what Fraser calls “parity of participation” (p. 30) and their possible remedy. It is impossible to improve upon the characterization of the essays given by Anne Phillips in her own review: “This is a profoundly democratic vision, and it is in my view democracy (rather than what Charles Taylor has theorized as the loss of more secure and unquestioned forms of identity) that fuels the struggles for recognition explored in this book…. Struggles for recognition are and have been very much struggles for political voice” (p. 265). Hence the landscape of struggle is not so much social as political. One question left unanswered in the volume is why we persist in referring to social movements and how they are distinct from political movements. How is social justice distinct from political justice? The priority evinced in these chapters is clearly political justice, or equal participation. These questions become acute after reading essays (Julia Szalai, Fiona Williams, Barbara Hobson) about the trials of multilevel political engagement on the international, national, and local levels made more complicated by the rapid growth of mediating organizations and nongovernment organizations.

The essays follow Fraser beyond identity politics and the incorrigible dichotomy between struggles for “equality versus difference,” not by focusing on “women” or the differences between them but by situating social movements in the struggle for power. Recognition without power, in the example of the Roma in Hungary developed by Szalai, is not worth much and can make for even greater injustice. Redistribution, more obviously, will never be won without power, without having one's voice recognized as legitimate, as in the case study of mothers against drugs in Spain by Celia Valiente. The way political life confounds analytical distinctions is clearest in the essays by Marilyn Lake on Australian Aboriginal narratives and Diane Sainsbury on women's suffrage in Oklahoma, where competition and intersection between various groups struggling for recognition and redistribution are decisive factors in their success or failure. In their essay on abortion politics in Germany and the United States, Myra Marx Ferree and William A. Gamson compare different power struggles over abortion and the consequences for women's autonomy.

Fraser's concerns about displacement and reification are most directly challenged first by Sainsbury's demonstration that recognition struggles are not new phenomena and that recognition is not a clear-cut remedy for the exclusion or misrecognition of groups. She suggests that recognition struggles have a long history, rather than characterize a distinctive feature of social movements in the present. Moreover, she demonstrates the impossibility of analytically accounting for various differences of race, class, and gender in one breath, and at the same time she demonstrates the perils of ignoring how the conflicts engendered by those differences confound or enable struggles for recognition. Don Kulick and Charles H. Klein suggest that for a genuinely transformative democratic politics, misrecognition can be a political tool for destabilizing group differences that do harm. (There are resonances here of Judith Butler's argument in Excitable Speech [1997].) In the micropolitics of the travesti in Brazil, they find a case for refusing to affirm group differences by demanding proper recognition so as to transform the markers of difference. Whereas Fraser treats misrecognition as social subordination, Kulick and Klein treat it in strictly political terms as an impediment to full citizenship.

Overall, individual essays (though not all) will be of interest to scholars and students of social movement politics. As a whole, the volume will be of interest to those grappling with the analytical conundrums that confound analysis of multicultural and feminist politics.