This module introduces you to anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives on the global politics of nuclear weapons. We invite you first to engage with the question below on what it means to think critically about nuclear weapons through this lens.
Question:
What does it mean to decolonise nuclear studies and think critically in nuclear studies from an anti-colonial and anti-racist perspective?
Learning Activity
Ask students in pairs or threes to brainstorm “what does it mean to think critically about nuclear weapons from an anti-colonial and anti-racist perspective?” using post-its to capture and share keywords, phrases and ideas.
We then invite you to explore our three cases on ‘Bandung and disarmament’, ‘Israel, Iran and nuclear hegemony’, and ‘Pakistan and nuclear Orientalism’ that open up different ways of understanding the relationships between race, colonialism and nuclear weapons
Thinking critically about nuclear weapons, race, anti-colonialism and decolonisation embraces the following, and can be summed up as ‘democratising knowledge’:
Marginalised Knowledge
Marginalised Knowledge
Recovering marginalised, exploited or silenced knowledges of nuclear experiences, notably from people and communities that have suffered harms related to (colonial) nuclear experiences (engaging with the ‘nuclearity’ [Hecht] of states, societies, communities, organisations, people).
Hegemony and Power
Hegemony and Power
Identifying and challenging hegemonic understandings about nuclear weapons, nuclear technologies, nuclear experiences and nuclear exceptionalism in (Euro-Atlantic) nuclear discourse (especially ‘nuclearism’) and to resist its disciplinary authority.
Awareness of Complicity
Awareness of Complicity
Proceeding from a “recognition that antinuclear movements and pronuclear advocates are often partners in co-constituting prevailing nuclear discourses even as their political standpoints radically differ” (Abraham, 2016).
Foregrounding race, gender, and colonialism
Foregrounding race, gender, and colonialism
Centering the role of race, racism, colonialism, anti-colonialism, and decolonisation in how nuclearity and nuclearism have been encountered, understood, embraced, resisted, and co-opted and how these intersect with gender, class, religion, development, state formation, and ecology.
De-centering Western-centerism
De-centering Western-centerism
Centring non-Western/Northern elite agency in nuclear stories of norm-, law- institution- and world-making.
Methodological Pluralism
Methodological Pluralism
Methodologically recognising and challenging ‘imperial reason’ (Zondi, 2018) as the hegemonic epistemic framework in which methods are (often unacknowledged) political tools for producing particular types of ‘valid’ ‘universal’ knowledge and invalidating others.
Diversifying the "canon"
Diversifying the "canon"
Acknowledging the ‘nuclear studies archive’ as monocultural-Eurocentric and expanding/diversifying its canon (and as part of a wider process of decolonising the IR canon).
Praxis and Change
Praxis and Change
An embrace of praxis (as the unity of theory and practice in politics) and emancipatory change through critical scholarship and engagement with real people in real places to understand, address and minimise nuclear harms (Booth, 2008).
