Vote neg for postcolonial feminist IR critique of the ‘global masculinity game’ of nuclear politics.

This leads us to the second puzzle: where are the more diverse lineages of contributions to this topic in feminist IR? More specifically, where are the perspectives of women of colour and/or from the global South—not as ‘native informants’ or voices under analysis, but as theorists and researchers of global nuclear politics? Why isn’t the work of Das, for instance, considered an appropriate starting-point for feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics in IR in the same way as that of Cohn? Or what about Teresia Teaiwa’s analysis of how the bikini swimsuit simultaneously sexualizes the generic female body and erases the specificity of the embodied experience of nuclear colonialism by Pacific Island women?13 The fact that such works are so rarely centred in feminist IR leads us to wonder whether developments in feminist approaches to foreign policy, diplomacy and WPS have encouraged a focus on ‘gender’ abstracted from other power relations, and/or the elevation of Eurocentric dialogues on international norms and politics. Further adding to the puzzle is that while postcolonial feminist IR scholarship on war, militarism and security has been growing for some time,14 nuclear politics have not featured much, beyond the work of Das and Teaiwa. Conversely, postcolonial IR scholarship on the ways in which nuclear diplomacy is shaped by colonial legacies and racialized hierarchies is now well established;15 but it leaves uninterrogated the ‘global masculinity game’ that ‘transnationalizes insecurity supposedly to protect the “homeland”’ and ensures ‘brutal expressions of hegemony through technological efficiency’.16 Thus, with a few notable exceptions, feminist and postcolonial IR have tended to talk past each other on the topic of global nuclear politics.17

In response, this article argues that feminist IR scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that take fuller account of the colonial matrix of power, its racialized underpinnings and its contemporary realignments. Coloniality, defined succinctly by Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh as a colonial matrix of power that is constitutive of modernity,18 has not yet become a substantial foundational starting-point for conversations in feminist IR, except as a specialism for some.19 If feminists are fully to understand its implications for global nuclear politics, critical conversations will have to take place across theoretical traditions and disciplines, as well as across geopolitical locations and experiences of different forms of colonialism. This will require the provincializing of western nuclear experiences and discourses, along with the development of location-sensitive, non-totalizing and non-hierarchical understandings of how coloniality has shaped and continues to shape the global nuclear order in gendered and racialized ways. The articles in the special section of this issue of International Affairs are an important step in this direction.