Civilizational Discourses in Weapons Control

Reviews / Votes

"Ritu Mathur is an important young scholar offering a vibrant and original postcolonial critique of the stale discourse of international security and arms control that has become ingrown in the West. She offers the fresh perspective on nuclear weapons policy that we so badly need at this moment when the existing nuclear order is crumbling. Her writing reminds us that not only white male voices should be heard on nuclear weapons. Her work is intellectually innovative and important and, if policy-makers will pay attention, practically relevant."

- Hugh Gusterson, Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, George Washington University, USA

"This is an essential book for every student of arms control and disarmament. Ritu Mathur shows why arms control was in decline long before populist strongmen shoved it in the grave. Deploying sly civility and mimesis, Mathur offers the most persuasive explanation for the failure of arms control to globalize. She explains why advocates could not see the limits of its appeal or the limits of it future. If disarmament is to recover its future, it starts here."

Aaron Karp , Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Political Science and Geography, Old Dominion University, USA

"The question of who is considered sufficiently civilized to wield nuclear weapons fundamentally shapes the diplomacy of arms control and disarmament. Yet only a very few scholars have sought to explore just how. In this carefully crafted intervention, Ritu Mathur shows us how historical geographies of race and civilization determine the standards of nuclear civilization. She uncovers the hidden histories of empire and colonial discourse that lie behind the policy science of arms control. In doing so, she shows us what a decolonized debate over nuclear weapons might look like."

T arak Barkawi , Professor, London School of Economics, UK

"This important new book makes an original contribution on the social technologies of nuclear governance and the unequal worlds they make and by which they are in turn made. Bringing postcolonial insights and decolonial sensibilities to incisive analysis of the architecture of nuclear weapons management, it not only deepens our understanding of the prevailing nuclear order but demands too that we think beyond extant debates around the control and spread of nuclear arms. In so doing, it raises new possibilities for reading against the grain of civilizational narratives congenitally entangled with dominant nuclear discourses and thereby to imagine a fuller range of possibilities toward a world less imperiled by both."

J. Marshall Beier , Professor of Political Science, McMaster University, Canada