Description
There has been a flurry of interdisciplinary works in International Relations that combine psychological and constructivist theories to argue how persuasion and rhetoric effect social change and decision making in global politics. However, the field of nuclear scholarship has largely ignored this area of research in particularly building onto ideational concepts of identities, norms, and cognition of stigmatised actors in nuclear governance. Existing literature often treat non-complaint reasoning of stigmatised states operating in crisis to legitimise deviance, assume that these states employ a relatively restricted understanding of non-compliant behavioural logics, and construct the notion of deviant political outcomes to be relatively static and non-evolving. In bridging this research gap, my paper asks: How are stigmatised states able to justify non-compliance while simultaneously stressing on their compliant behaviour with hegemonic powers in nuclear governance? In answering this question, the paper argues that to make this apparent incongruence more socially presentable, stigmatised states often connect deviant performances to a previous act of compliance to enter into normative discussions with hegemonic powers. Hence, this paper contributes to the field of International Security Studies by stressing on the fluidity of identities and discourse in nuclear governance.
