As I began reading Amanda Chisholm’s revealing book about the complex lives of the Nepali men who have become Gurkha security personnel and about the thinking women who are married to them, I thought of my father’s World War II photo albums. I paused in my reading and pulled out the albums, their bindings now crumbling, their dry onionskin page dividers crackling.

I turned the pages. The small black and white photographs were still intact. And there were Gurkha men looking back at me. They looked – or rather my father chose to take photos of them when they looked as my father wanted to remember them – stoic, determined, focused on their physical wartime tasks. The Gurkha men were short, compact, equipped with rifles, wearing their distinctive one-brim-up felt hats. They were carrying out tasks behind enemy lines in northern Burma. The year was 1943. In one photo, Gurkha men were standing at attention to greet a pith-helmeted senior British officer who had just flown in to fine-tune strategy. In another, Gurkhas were leading mules loaded with war-making supplies across an open field. In a third, Gurkha men were straining hard against ropes to drag an unmotored glider plane into position. Gliders were the innovative means by which the combined British, Australian and American unconventional units were secretly sending supplies ‘over the hump’ to allies in China.

As a young girl, the daughter of a World War II veteran, I absorbed my father’s admiring descriptions of the Gurkha men with whom he served. He told me of their loyalty and unflinching toughness. They were also, for him, honourable men. The Gurkhas became central figures in my father’s masculinised narrative of his war.

What Amanda Chisholm shows us here in these pages is that that admiration has become both a multigenerational asset and a burden for thousands of men from Nepal. It is a source of pride, yes. It is a militarised, racialised, masculinised ‘brand’ that is globally marketable, yes. But it is also a personal weight for a man to shoulder. Reading the chapters that follow, we come to understand that each individual, fallible Nepali man who gains entry into the Gurkhas must try to live up to the impossible expectations others have of a Gurkha.

When I think about what it is that seems so unrealistic (yes, that loaded term) in most formal analyses of international politics, what strikes me is how far their authors are willing to go in underestimating the amounts and varieties of power it takes to form and sustain any given set of relationships between states. This conclusion, of course, rings oddly. So many analysts, after all, profess to be interested chiefly in power – who has it, how they got it, what they try to do with it. Their profession notwithstanding, I believe that by concentrating so single-mindedly on what is referred to euphemistically as the ‘centre’, scores of analysts have produced a naive portrait of how international politics really (there's that tricky concept again) work.

No individual or social group finds themselves on the ‘margins’ of any web of relationships – a football league, an industry, an empire, a military alliance, a state – without some other individual or group having accumulated enough power to create the ‘centre’ somewhere else. Beyond its creation, too, there is the yearly and daily business of maintaining the margin where it currently is and the centre where it now is. It is harder for those at the alleged centre to hear the hopes, fears and explanations of those on the margins, not because of physical distance – the margin may be two blocks from the White House, four stops on the Paris metro from the Quai d'Orsay – but because it takes resources and access to be ‘heard’ when and where it matters.