Volume 98, Issue 4, July 2022

This is the introduction to the special section on the ‘Feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics’. The guest editors argue that feminist International Relations scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that reckon more fully with colonial legacies.

This article examines the gendered effects of uranium mining and nuclear waste dumping on North American Indigenous women. It centres Indigenous women's resistance to nuclear production and their efforts to address nuclear waste in anti-colonial and socially and environmentally just ways.

Using Egypt as a case-study, this article demonstrates that early visualizations of the atomic age were fluid and ambivalent; nuclear symbols were not only masculine but also feminine. It shows that feminizing nuclear politics and nuclear images will not lead to disarmament, but rather reinforce the nuclearized world.

This article uses a feminist-Gandhian ethic to show alternatives to nuclearism. It argues that such an ethic could help move India beyond nuclear weapons and power. Doing so, the article also critically interrogates the binaries of West/non-West.

There is little explicitly gendered research on the Cuban Missile Crisis. This article fills the gap by comparing the masculine performances of Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy. It finds that the pursuit of masculinity led to approaches considered feminine, such as diplomacy and negotiation, being rejected.

A feminist study of Swedish nuclear history has the potential to disrupt the belief that disarmament is the policy of the weak. The article concludes that to reach a world free from nuclear weapons, it is crucial to challenge the power relations that contribute to a gendered and racialized nuclear order.

Exploring nuclear policy-making, this article finds that ‘gender-sensitive’ approaches focus on women's inclusion, as opposed to feminist policy analysis. It explores what this (dis)connections tells us about the structures of power in nuclear politics and the challenges of ‘gendering’ international security spaces.

This article argues that Pacific women's antinuclear poetry is a transformative mover of international discourse on nuclear imperialisms. The poems highlight tensions based on gender and class, and challenge what constitutes a valid political discourse.

International relations scholars frequently warn that the American political system has become too fractured to sustain a coherent grand strategy. By contrast, this article explains how the grand strategy of deep engagement retains robust bipartisan support.

When Australia breached its submarine contract with France in 2021 as it joined AUKUS, diplomatic relations quickly deteriorated. This article shows that the impact of this perceived act of betrayal went beyond bilateral relations to undermine trust in international society more broadly.

Do Chinese citizens care about foreign policies criticized by their government but unrelated to their daily lives? Based on a representative survey, it finds that citizens were indeed upset and called for harsh retaliation. These ‘hurt feelings’ were largely driven by nationalistic sentiment.

Zambia has an exceptionally high level of Chinese loan commitments. This article presents new data on Chinese loans, lenders and contractors in Zambia, and discusses the absence of top-down coordination by Beijing. It proves that Zambia is an extreme case of coordination problems in Chinese lending.

The article contributes to the proliferation literature, which has overlooked the development of missiles as an increasingly important element of contemporary nuclear hedging. Using Iran as a case-study, it suggests that states and international organizations should focus on nuclear-capable ballistic missiles—not only nuclear technology—when identifying potential nuclear proliferators.

By analysing Russia's engagements with Israel and Turkey in Syria, this article shows what can happen when an external great power interacts with local states. Russia has been able to ensure, sometimes though restrictive and punitive measures, that Turkey and Israel don't harm its interests in the region.

This article draws on fieldwork in Niger to study how Security Force Assistance (SFA) impacts Niger's security sector and compares this to global trends in security. It finds that these developments contribute to blurred borders and confusion regarding labour division in the security sector.

Colombia now has the most progressive legal framework for abortion in Latin America, but intense backlash persists. This is shaped by machismo, natalism, religion and histories of violence. In particular, the article explores how legacies of conflict continue to produce barriers to safe abortion care.