Sarkar contributes to H-Diplo Roundtable
Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently contributed to a roundtable on H-Diplo as part of Nicholas Miller’s book, Stopping the Bomb. The roundtable was part of a review of Miller’s book, and apart from Sarkar, the other reviewers included Elizabeth Saunders (Georgetown), Matthew Fuhrmann (Texas A&M), Andrew Coe (Vanderbilt), and Julia MacDonald (Denver)
From the introduction of the review:
In praising the book’s theoretical approach, Jayita Sarkar notes that Miller walks a difficult line in making a “rationalist” argument that also “incorporates the role of domestic politics, bureaucratic drivers, and norms while highlighting, but not overdetermining, the influence of national and international security concerns.” Sarkar concludes that Miller pulls off this balancing act successfully, and “almost bridges the gap between constructivism and neoclassical realism in the literature on the politics of nuclear weapons, which in and of itself is no small feat.” On the empirical side, MacDonald praises the book’s empirical richness, noting in particular that “the qualitative chapters on the effectiveness of U.S. policies are persuasive, and the archival evidence documenting U.S. government behavior vis-à-vis France, Taiwan,Pakistan, and Iran is impressive.”
Sarkar approaches the domino question from the angle of the Cold War—when another version of domino theory became famous. She asks, “was the fear that nuclear dominoes generated in U.S. policymakers completely unrelated from the fear of Communist dominoes in the Cold War?” She also raises the important question of whether there was a “North-South dimension” given that “the Chinese and the Indian nuclear tests triggered such acute fears of nuclear dominoes in U.S. policymakers in ways which the British and the French nuclear tests, and Israel’s nuclear weapons capability never did.” Coe raises a very different Cold War-related critique, arguing that Miller “neglects” the role of the Soviet Union. He argues, based on co-authored work with Jane Vaynman, that the USSR and the United States “colluded” in the universal nonproliferation approach Miller identifies
Read full text here.
H-Diplo is a network for diplomatic history, international affairs, foreign policy, international relations, peacekeeping studies, nuclear history and policy studies, and transnational studies.
Jayita Sarkar is Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, where she is also the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She teaches diplomatic and political history at graduate and undergraduate levels. Professor Sarkar’s areas of research expertise are 20th century South Asia, history of U.S. foreign relations, politics of nuclear technologies, and connected partitions. Her book, Ploughshares & Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, (Forthcoming, Cornell University Press, 2022), examines the first forty years of India’s nuclear program through the prisms of geopolitics and technopolitics. Read more about Professor Sarkar on her faculty profile.