“Nuclear Apartheid” as Political Position: Race as a Postcolonial Resource?

Abstract

Shampa Biswas (*) Reflecting on colonial traces that remain in current conduct and study of global politics, Roxanne Doty expresses her frustrations with the very definition of field of international relations, whose central problems and categories have been framed in such a way as to preclude investigation into categories such as 'race.' (1) While scholars of international political economy have brought considerable attention to questions of global material inequalities and culturalist/constructivist approaches have highlighted issues of discursive and representational power, category of race still continues to be conspicuous by its absence from field. However, this absence is less curious in subfield of security studies, which remains perhaps one of most enduring bastions of neorealism. When questions of (couched as peace) continue to be privileged over questions of justice, as is case in much of mainstream security studies, there is little epistemic space to raise question of ra ce. But even new critical turn in security studies, which has done much to unsettle epistemological and ontological presuppositions in dominant security thinking, has failed to raise question of race as an explicit category of analysis. India's decision to nuclearize in May 1998 propelled it into international limelight, and along with reprimands, resolutions, and statements that were rapidly issued by international bodies like U.N. General Assembly and Conference on Disarmament, regional bodies like Non-Aligned Movement and European Union, governments from both North and South, and many nongovernmental groups and organizations, all kinds of issues began to be raised with respect to India's motivations, intelligibility of such a decision, consequences of this act for regional and global security, and so on. Little attention, however, journalistic or scholarly, was paid to use by government of a significant racial signifier--nuclear apartheid--to justify and defend its actions. Simply put, nuclear-apartheid position quite starkly and compellingly points to material inequities in distribution of global nuclear resources--inequities that are written into, institutionalized, an d legitimized through some of major arms-control treaties, creating an elite club of nuclear haves with exclusive rights to maintain nuclear arsenals that are to be denied to vast majority of nuclear have-nots. What insights might we gain, as scholars of international relations, from interrogating invocation of race through deployment of nuclear-apartheid position? My attempt in this article is to draw out dynamics of two processes of racialization through a critical scrutiny of nuclear-apartheid position--both processes participating simultaneously in co-constructing racialized domestic and international hierarchic orders. In other words, I will argue that nuclear-apartheid position, articulated in voice of government, simultaneously performs a dual role: At same time that it points to a series of racial exclusions in contemporary global order, it also masks, and hence constitutes an Indian nation through another series of racialized exclusions. I argue that both these dynamics need to be understood simultaneously in order to grasp force and effect of deploying this position. I will briefly explain. It is clear that concept of apartheid draws its enunciative force from category of race, and I will argue that deployment of nuclear-apartheid position by government points to a racially institutionalized global hierarchy. In other words, scrutinizing nuclear-apartheid position means at very least taking seriously manner in which deployment of such a racial signifier by government is able to unsettle a certain taken-for-granted terrain in conduct of international relations and in writing of discipline. …