Description
This paper outlines a research project in which I seek to demonstrate the interdependence of the ‘global’ and ‘local’ elements of world nuclear politics. These two artificial categories have tended to be approached under the banners of different disciplines, too often bring treated as analytically separate. While conceptual precision is required when discussing ‘global nuclear order’, I argue here that the narrow scholarly understanding of its components and the tendency to treat it as a purely ‘international’ phenomenon, in isolation from ostensibly ‘local’ nuclear politics and geographies, are unnecessary. Detailed investigations which substantially develop William Walker’s seminal expositions of the concept are remain surprisingly few in number, and fewer still take seriously the idea that domestic political and cultural factors might contribute to nuclear ordering. Meanwhile, outside of the disciplinary confines of International Relations (IR), a number of historians, anthropologists, and geographers have conducted excellent studies into what will be referred to here, in knowingly inadequate shorthand, as the ‘local’ manifestations of nuclear politics. These works draw conclusions which are of clear significance to international nuclear politics, and global nuclear ordering specifically.
Some have bridged this divide with innovative and exciting work, notably Gabrielle Hecht and Itty Abraham; however, efforts to connect it specifically to the concept of global nuclear order are regrettably scarce. Here, I aim to ‘internationalize’ these crucial insights into so-called local nuclear technopolitics, with particular reference to South Africa as a detailed case-study. First, while advocating the retention of ‘global nuclear order’ as a primary organizing concept, I caution against privileging a fictitious global ‘level of analysis’ over all else by recognizing that nuclear order is also contingent on—and indeed comprised of—political processes usually understood through a narrow ‘domestic’ lens. Second, I argue that domestic politics, even when apparently unrelated to nuclear issues, is very often conditioned by normative and structural elements of global nuclear order. This can result in hybrid configurations of nuclear order which can influence public life in unexpected ways. Developing our understandings of global nuclear order in this way might have far-ranging implications for the study of nuclear politics: perhaps most importantly encouraging a shift away from an analytical focus on great-power hegemony and towards a more critical standpoint which is receptive to the many ways in which smaller and/or non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS) have shaped—but also been shaped by—the collective project of global nuclear order.
