Description
International Relations' studies of nuclear politics have traditionally focused on strategies of deterrence and arms control, the international diplomacy of non-proliferation and disarmament and how these practices create an international ‘nuclear order’. This work has been shaped by assumptions of the interstate as the location of nuclear politics, the prominence of nuclear armed states as the international actors, and the separation of nuclear weapons from ‘peaceful’ nuclear power.
This panel expands and challenges these traditional focuses and assumptions of IR by looking below, above and beyond the interstate. The papers on this panel examine how nuclear politics is practiced in specific places and illustrate how the nuclear is not an inherently exceptional realm but connected to other social and political issues. This panel presents an analytical shift by examining the key roles of subnational and extranational processes and actors in shaping nuclear spaces. The panel includes research on the creation of nuclear spaces and communities around the world, the situated politics of nuclear waste and impact of nuclear testing, and the role of actors who are often neglected in nuclear politics.
