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Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Global Security Studies Année : 2016

Nuclear Weapons Scholarship as a Case of Self-Censorship in Security Studies

Résumé

Security studies scholarship on nuclear weapons is particularly prone to self-censorship. In this essay, I argue that this self-censorship is problematic. The vulnerability, secrecy, and limits to accountability created by nuclear weapons (Deudney 2007, 256–57; Born, Gill, and Hânggi 2010; Cohen 2010, 147) call for responsible scholarship vis-à-vis the general public. This need for renewed and expanded scholarly responsibility is especially pressing given current plans among nuclear-weapon states to “modernize” their nuclear arsenals, committing their citizens and children to live in nuclear-armed countries and, a fortiori, a nuclear armed world (Mecklin 2015). Despite this need, the existing reflexive literature in security studies—calling for greater scholarly responsibility (see Steele and Amoureux 2016; Waever 2015, 95–100)—has neither specifically focused on nuclear weapons nor explored the forms of self-censorship identified here as shaping a modality of responsibility. In making this case, I define self-censorship in nuclear weapons scholarship as unnecessary boundaries on scholarly discourse within security studies.

In this article, I identify three forms of self-censorship: an epistemological self-censorship that denies the normative foundations of nuclear studies; a rhetorically induced form of censorship that leads scholars to stay away from radical reorderings of the world (e.g., world government or the abolition of nuclear weapons) because of the joint rhetorical effects of the tropes of non-proliferation and deterrence; and, finally, a “presentist imaginal” form of self-censorship that leads scholars to obfuscate the implicit bets they make on their considered possible futures and their constitutive effects on the “present” they analyze. I do not claim that these are the only forms of self-censorship. I also leave aside the non-discursive structures of knowledge production and the institutional and political constraints on nuclear studies. However, as I show in the concluding section, these three forms of self-censorship result in an
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Dates et versions

hal-03459088 , version 1 (30-11-2021)

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Benoît Pelopidas. Nuclear Weapons Scholarship as a Case of Self-Censorship in Security Studies. Journal of Global Security Studies, 2016, 1 (4), pp.326 - 336. ⟨10.1093/jogss/ogw017⟩. ⟨hal-03459088⟩
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