Banning the bomb, smashing the patriarchy

Bibliographic Data

ID9899602
AuthorsLaura Rose Brown (0000-0002-2637-1120, University of Leeds, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume98
Issue6
Pages2157-2158
Publication date2022-11-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-5850 • E-ISSN: 1468-2346
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ia/iiac205
OpenAlexW4308144601
LanguageEN
Citations received16

Ray Acheson's Banning the bomb, smashing the patriarchy is a striking contribution to the literature on nuclear politics. The book explores how and why states and civil society actors came together to prohibit nuclear weapons. Acheson contextualizes the process of negotiating the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in a longer historical trajectory of anti-nuclear activism and disarmament advocacy. The book speaks to the challenges of negotiating the TPNW, situating this in broader system issues. For example, Acheson documents the continued oppression of women under patriarchy, as well as the ongoing hierarchical approach to nuclear weapons governance that has been enshrined in various institutional architectures, such as the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In doing so, Acheson convincingly shows how the process of bringing the TPNW to life illustrates the real and tangible possibility of a human-centred ‘alternative approach’ to international relations (p. 258). The book offers a captivating account of how nuclear weapons are rooted in colonial, gendered and racial hierarchies. Acheson draws upon powerful vignettes of the violent and unequal nature of nuclear harms, contrasting this with the complacency of nuclear armed states and their leaders in engaging with these issues. From this perspective, nuclear weapons and the associated current international architecture are sustained not through critical reflection but instead through vested interests in the political economy of military expenditure. This backdrop forms the basis of the self-reinforcing and perpetuating ‘nuclear weapons complex’. Acheson presents the difficulties for activism in this space: how can stalling nuclear disarmament processes (such as the Conference on Disarmament and the 2010 NPT Review Conference 64-Point Action Plan) be challenged, when nuclear weapons states see critical responses as at odds with progress? The book goes on to demonstrate how the complacent and flawed logic of nuclear weapons states has been used creatively, by both civil society and non-nuclear weapon states, to deconstruct the legitimacy of the global nuclear order. These actors, Acheson explains, sought to expose how this order upholds patriarchal and unequal global hierarchies based on possession of weapons that ‘pervade thinking’ (p. 39)

Patriarchy · Political science · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US

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