Gabrielle Hecht on Nuclear Ontologies, De-provincializing the Cold War, and Postcolonial Technopolitics
Nuclear power has formed a centerpiece of Cold-War IR theorizing. Yet besides the ways in which its destructive capacity invalidates or alters the way we should understand questions of war and peace, there are different powers at play in the roles the nuclear assumes in global politics. Through careful investigations of alternative sites and spaces of nuclear politics, Gabrielle Hecht has uncovered some of the unexpected ways in which what one can call the ‘nuclear condition’ affects politics across the globe. In this Talk, Hecht, amongst others, explores what it means to ‘be nuclear’; explains how we need to deprovincialize the Cold War to fully grasp its significance in global politics; and challenges us to explore technopolitics outside of the comfortable context of OECD-countries.