Description
In studying global change and identity transformation in international politics, scholars have increasingly turned to research on norms as a social construction of behaviour regulation and identity management. This has led to a conceptualisation of stigma as attached to identities of global actors who refuse to follow normatively shared expectations of social conduct. However, the field of nuclear politics has largely ignored this research to particularly identify how non-compliant states manage their stigmatised identities ― after engaging in acts of nuclear deviance against hegemonic norms. By combining and building onto the existing literature of International Political Sociology, constructivist approaches in International Relations, and nuclear governance, this paper asks the question: How do stigmatised states justify and normalise nuclear non-compliance with dominant powers in the international system? In answering this research question, the paper first argues that stigma should be understood not as an attribute or a process, but rather a position of relational power dynamics that recalcitrant states occupy in contesting dominant norms. Secondly, it conceptualises a new category of stigma management as stigma redaction, whereby non-compliant nuclear states occasionally engage in corrective conduct to prevent its identity of being permanently cemented as rogue by dominant powers. Furthering our understanding of how we perceive sociological deviance in international politics through an interdisciplinary lens, this work makes an epistemological and ontological contribution in the field of International Security.
Keywords: Identity, Norms, Nuclear, Social, Stigma
