Imagining Disarmament, Enchanting International Relations [1st ed.] 978-3-030-17715-7;978-3-030-17716-4

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xx
Act 1. Shahrazad: Disarming Charm (Matthew Breay Bolton)....Pages 1-19
Act 2. Quixote: Tilting at Landmines (Matthew Breay Bolton)....Pages 21-52
Act 3. Lysistrata: Meaningful Human Control (Matthew Breay Bolton)....Pages 53-84
Act 4. Caliban and the Nuclear Ban (Matthew Breay Bolton)....Pages 85-119
Back Matter ....Pages 121-133

Citation preview

Imagining Disarmament, Enchanting International Relations Matthew Breay Bolton

Imagining Disarmament, Enchanting International Relations

Matthew Breay Bolton

Imagining Disarmament, Enchanting International Relations

Matthew Breay Bolton Department of Political Science Pace University New York, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-17715-7    ISBN 978-3-030-17716-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17716-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Emily, storyteller

Telling Disarming Stories: Foreword

Those who tell new stories are often unwelcome in the assemblies of officials who negotiate the shape of our international politics. If they are allowed in the room at all, the newcomers are told to sit at the back, made to wear “appropriate” clothing and, if given the chance to speak, are kept within a strict time limit. As a result, conversations about technologies that can kill thousands, even millions, of people are kept to a small, chummy circle. The largely male, white and Western managers of our global security architecture convey the impression that the world’s problems are either under their control or beyond anybody’s control. But far from unassailable, the status quo is actually fragile, riven with contradictions. The exclusivity of political discussions on issues like nuclear weapons betrays the anxiety and vulnerability of those in charge. They are desperate to prevent disruption of diplomacy’s complacent humdrum, desperate to protect their privilege. Because the arrival of new voices— from survivors, women, doctors, youth, indigenous people, retirees, activists, artists, people from the Global South—can be profoundly transformative. In the years since I joined the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) as its executive director, I have been inspired by the dedication of our global network of advocates, who, in 2017, successfully persuaded 122 governments to adopt a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons at the United Nations. As part of ICAN’s Positive Obligations team, Matthew Bolton played a crucial role ensuring the treaty included provisions on assistance to victims of nuclear weapons use and testing and remediation of contaminated environments. Key to ICAN’s success was vii

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TELLING DISARMING STORIES: FOREWORD

insisting that negotiations on nuclear disarmament must be inclusive of all states, particularly those which have rejected nuclear arsenals, as well as civil society and those people most affected by nuclear devastation—the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the communities exposed to nuclear testing. Later that year, ICAN was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for our “work to draw attention to the catastrophic consequences” of nuclear weapons and our “ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-­ based prohibition of such weapons.” As Matthew narrates in this book, ICAN and other global advocacy campaigns on landmines, cluster munitions and the arms trade have succeeded at radically changing the global policy discourse around indiscriminate weapons. What we have been told was impossible by diplomats, soldiers, policy wonks and defense intellectuals, has often turned out to be quite possible. Military forces’ supposed legitimacy relies on their claim to use violence with proportionality, discrimination and a sense of humanity. By calling on governments to account for the devastating humanitarian, human rights and environmental harm of their arsenals, campaigners have made some of society’s most violent institutions accept lifesaving limits. Achieving such changes is not easy. It takes unglamorous legwork and organizing—calling hundreds of people, sitting in long meetings, arguing about strategy and raising funds. It requires us to confront our own complicity in the systems we seek to change, from where we invest our money to the language we use. Those privileged by gender, race, class and citizenship must step aside and create space for those whose stories are too often ignored. Ultimately, it requires a determined commitment to struggle for what is right in the face of denial and stonewalling. In a time of growing cynicism about the possibilities of coexistence, Matthew’s book challenges us to speak anew the enthralling tales of peace. He wants us to look beyond the narrow bounds of nationalism to work with those around the world who seek a more just and humane future. He calls us to act in solidarity with those most bruised by violence. In ICAN’s successful pursuit of a ban on the most inhumane weapons, I have seen what regular people can do together when we dream seemingly impossible dreams of a better world, share them with others and fight to bring them into being. Geneva, Switzerland

Beatrice Fihn

Cast of Characters: Preface

Each night, to save her own life, Shahrazad spins a web of enthralling tales around her murderous husband, the king. She is spared by her discursive skill, persuading an arbitrary ruler to stay her execution. This ancient story, from the 1001 Nights, is a potent metaphor for disarmament advocacy, which seeks to persuade violent people to moderate their behavior. Activists and diplomats seeking limits on technologies of violence—from landmines to nuclear bombs—have intuited that weapons are artifacts embedded in mythology and mystique. It is not coincidental that weapons are dubbed Reaper, Taranis or Poseidon. Arsenals do discursive and symbolic work beyond the physical violence they deploy. Arms are props in a theater of war that casts the world as filled with monsters, from whom we must seek protection by relying on military heroism. We, the public, are lulled with reassurances that everything is under control and any attempt to disrupt our reliance on killing machines would be “unrealistic.” But the successful campaigns that banned landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons have imagined that other worlds are possible. They tell humanizing stories of those affected by weapons and those who heal them. They draw on religious and mythic texts to prophesy and condemn harm. They aim to stay our collective execution. This book engages with emerging theories of international relations (IR) that explore the role of meaning, discourse and imagination in global political change. Each chapter reflects on an aspect of contemporary disarmament activism through encounter with an analogous story from literary tradition. Throughout, the book advocates an approach to IR that is ix

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CAST OF CHARACTERS: PREFACE

humanistic and humane, alive to affect and dreaming. In doing so, it ­challenges readers to pursue disarmament’s quixotic “impossible dream.” Traditional IR has focused on the role of “hard power”—military and economic might—as the driver of change in the global system. However, scholars and practitioners of disarmament, arms control and non-­ proliferation—a rather positivistic and utilitarian community—are increasingly realizing the role of narrative and imagination in shaping what is seen as possible. Therefore, this volume aims to provoke consideration of the implications of the “discursive turn” in social science on the global politics of arms control. In doing so, it draws on ethnographic fieldwork in communities affected by weapons, as well as participant observation in disarmament advocacy at the United Nations. In “Act 1. Shahrazad: Disarming Charm”, Shahrazad, convenor of the 1001 Nights, opens the book, helping the reader to explore the role of the beguiling story in global politics. Over the last 20 years, progressive non-­ governmental organizations (NGOs), academics and activists have offered an alternative narrative to militarism, one that frames weapons themselves as threatening our security. Their advocacy has successfully persuaded violent people to accept limits on technologies of killing. The chapter reviews the literature on discursive power in IR and outlines the book’s theoretical and methodological approach. Given the scale of global weapons stockpiles, it may seem deluded for unarmed civilians to confront the military. However, disarmament campaigns disrupt how we perceive specific weapons, transforming them from “protectors” into “monsters” that are mala in se—“evil in themselves.” They do this through the “magic” of symbolic interventions and performance. To understand these ritual dimensions of disarmament, in “Act 2. Quixote: Tilting at Landmines” I draw on themes in Cervantes’ Don Quixote to frame a discussion about seemingly “hopeless quests.” The Knight of the Sorrowful Figure was dismayed by modern weapons’ degradation of chivalrous conduct in war. Similarly, campaigners’ “tilting at landmines” challenges the notion that the development of weapons technology is an inevitable force beyond human control. Reading Don Quixote in the minefields offers us insight into revolt against depersonalized killing. It shows the transformative potential of “magical thinking” and absurd gestures, which undermine the rationalist assumptions of IR.

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The causes of the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece have long obsessed IR scholars, who tell undergraduates that Thucydides’ proto-­ realist History is the definitive ancient  account. But not everyone in Athens agreed with Thucydides’ bleak view that fear of the Other inevitably leads to violence. “Act 3. Lysistrata: Meaningful Human Control” reflects on Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, in which the title character intuits that the war between Athens and Sparta has roots in political processes that divide people along gender and cultural lines. Lysistrata organizes women from all over Greece to occupy public spaces and refuse to have sex with men until they end the war. I use the themes in Lysistrata to illuminate the role of protest, economic divestment and social non-cooperation in disarmament campaigns, including on killer robots and nuclear weapons. In doing so, the chapter draws on the insights of feminist IR theory and the story of women’s occupation of the Greenham Common nuclear weapons base. The humanitarian discourse used to ban indiscriminate weapons has colonial undertones, suggesting that “civilized nations” abstain from “barbaric” ways of killing. This same “standard of civilization” language was used to justify conducting Pacific nuclear testing in indigenous communities. Portraying Pacific peoples as “primitive” and nuclear weapons as evidence of a country’s “civilization,” colonialism and nuclear testing were intricately intertwined. The final chapter, Act 4. Caliban and the Nuclear Ban, uses Shakespeare’s The Tempest to demonstrate how a demeaning “tropical island imaginary” shaped colonizers’ interactions with Pacific peoples. But in the character of Caliban, one sees possibilities of “talking back” to the oppressor. By the end of the play, Caliban is free and Prospero resolves to destroy his magical staff. In pursuing nuclear disarmament, Pacific intellectuals, diplomats and advocates have flipped the “standard of civilization” script. The chapter questions the territorialist assumptions of IR, exploring the contributions of post-colonial theory. In lieu of a traditional conclusion, the book closes with an attempt to engage directly with the creative process of storytelling. Even though I have been trained to write social science rather than works of imagination, in the process of writing this book, I have learned that I need to take art seriously. It is not an indulgence to speak one’s dreams. To hide behind the pretense of science can sometimes be cowardice. I therefore offer a brief reimagining of the Sphinx, wondering how the myth would have

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Cast of Characters: Preface

turned out differently if Orpheus—the artist—had confronted her atrocious riddle, rather than Oedipus, the hubristic politician. If obliquely expressed, my intent is to call for a re-enchantment of IR theory and practice, an engagement with story, song, ritual and collective action. For this is how those of us who are unarmed can find agency in global politics. Rockaway Beach, New York, USA

Matthew Breay Bolton

Crew: Acknowledgments

An author never works alone. This book would not exist without the support and assistance of many people. But any inaccuracies, ill-advised choices or poor turns of phrase are my responsibility alone. I must first thank Anca Pusca and Katelyn Zingg, editors at Palgrave Macmillan, for believing in this project and shepherding me through it. Conversations about killer robots with Peter Asaro and Charli Carpenter planted the nascent idea of a book on the intersections between disarmament politics and mythology. Co-teaching “Us and Them in Literature and Politics” with Sarah Blackwood opened my eyes to the many insights of post-colonial and feminist literary criticism; from Catherine Zimmer I learned much about the intersections of politics and aesthetics. Reading Kathleen Sullivan’s excellent Ph.D. thesis on Frankenstein and plutonium further sparked my imagination. Antoine Bousquet kindly invited me to share the Quixote chapter on a panel at the International Studies Association, which spurred me to keep writing. Ray Acheson and Allison Pytlak at Reaching Critical Will allowed me to float the ideas behind the Lysistrata and Caliban chapters in short newsletter columns. The research in this book received generous support from the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung’s New York Office (thanks particularly to Volker Lehmann), the Wilson Center for Social Entrepreneurship (thank you Rebecca Tekula, Archana Shah and Adrian Rivero) and Pace University’s Scholarly Research Committee (chaired by Zafir Buraei). I have often relied on the institutional support of my colleagues at Pace University, particularly Aileen Cardona, Sally Dickerson, Nira Herrmann, Kiku Huckle, Amy Freedman, xiii

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CREW: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jessica Lavariega-Monforti, Meghana Nayak, Linda Quest, Joe Ryan and Al Ward. My student research assistants helped with reviewing scholarly literature, tracking down details and talking through conceptual issues: Caitlin Boley, Katelyn James, Cayman Mitchell, Cassandra Stimpson and Sydney Tisch. Thank you John Kavanaugh for listening. I am inspired daily by the audacity of the disarmament campaigners I have worked alongside and who open up to me about their hopes and dreams. It would be impossible to name them all here (so sorry!), but I must express particular gratitude to Jeff Abramson, Martin Butcher, Nerina Cevra, Zoya Craig, Hector Guerra, Anna Macdonald, Linnet Nyagu and Raluca Muresan in the Control Arms network; Juergen Altmann, Denise Garcia, Steve Goose, Noel Sharkey, Miriam Struyk, Lucy Suchman and Mary Wareham in the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots; Dan Plesch and Kevin Miletic at SCRAP; and Richard Lennane at Wildfire. Within ICAN, thanks must go to Maya Brehm, Beatrice Fihn, Dimity Hawkins, Daniel Hogsta, Stuart Maslen, Richard Moyes, Grethe Østern, Susi Snyder and Tim Wright; I want to particularly single out Rebecca Johnson for sharing with me her stories of Greenham. Working with ICAN’s Positive Obligations team—Anna Crowe, Bonnie Docherty, Paul Hannon, Erin Hunt, Anna Ikeda, Elizabeth Minor, Hayley Ramsey-Jones, Brooke Takala and Doug Weir—has been one of the most professionally satisfying experiences of my life. Go PosObs! I must salute too those working in the UN system, who maintain a commitment to a more peaceful, multilateral world under intense pressure, including John Borrie, Hugh Griffiths, Chris King, Tak Mashiko, Nathalie Prevost and Michael Spies. I could not have conducted the original fieldwork for this book without considerable support from those on the ground or who introduced me to their friends and colleagues. Particular thanks go to Paul Ah Poy, Ratitia Bebe, Mick Broderick, Vanessa Griffen, Matthew Hovell, Robert Jacobs, Denise Coghlin, Nic Maclellan, Bill Morse, Vijay Naidu, Claire Slatter, Sandra Tarte, Mikarite Temari, Taabwi Teatata, Teeua Tetua and Oeum Yon. However, I am most indebted to Emily: muse, thinker, raconteur, campaigner, fellow sojourner and my great love.

Contents

Act 1. Shahrazad: Disarming Charm  1 Act 2. Quixote: Tilting at Landmines 21 Act 3. Lysistrata: Meaningful Human Control 53 Act 4. Caliban and the Nuclear Ban 85 Epilogue: Orpheus Meets the Sphinx121 Index125

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About the Authors

Matthew  Breay  Bolton  is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Disarmament Institute at Pace University, New York City, USA. Since 2014 he has worked on the UN advocacy of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Beatrice  Fihn  is Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Together with Hiroshima survivor, Setsuko Thurlow, she accepted the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for ICAN.  She has a Masters in Law from the University of London and a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Stockholm University.

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Acronyms

ACBL AEC AFSC AI ANT ATT CCW

Afghan Campaign to Ban Landmines United States Atomic Energy Commission American Friends Service Committee Artificial intelligence Actor-Network Theory 2013 Arms Trade Treaty 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects CD United Nations Conference on Disarmament CTBT 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty DDR Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration ICAN International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons ICBL International Campaign to Ban Landmines INF 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty IR International relations LGBTQA Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer and Asexual NFIP Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement NGO Non-governmental Organization NPT 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty OEWG Open-Ended Working Group (used in relation to the 2016 United Nations Open-ended Working Group taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations) P5 Permanent five members of the UN Security Council RCW Reaching Critical Will, the disarmament project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom SALW Small arms and light weapons xix

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ACRONYMS

SIDS SOP SPNFZ

Small island developing states Standard operating procedure (used in relation to demining) South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, established by the 1985 Treaty of Rarotonga TPNW 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund USP University of the South Pacific WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom WMD Weapons of mass destruction WWII World War II

Act 1. Shahrazad: Disarming Charm

Abstract  Each night, to save her own life, Shahrazad is spared by her discursive skill, able to persuading a murderous ruler to stay her arbitrary execution. This ancient story, from the 1001 Nights, is a potent metaphor for disarmament advocacy, which seeks to persuade violent people to moderate their behavior. Traditional international relations (IR) scholarship has focused on the role of “hard power”—military and economic might—as the driver of change in the global system. However, academics and practitioners are increasingly realizing the role of narrative, stories and imagination in shaping what is seen as possible. In demonstrating the power of disarmament activists’ persuasion, this chapter highlights and reviews the insights of the “discursive turn” for IR. Keywords  Disarmament • International relations • Imagination • 1001 Nights • Discourse • Narrative • Mythology Let me be open with you from the beginning. Through telling stories of international relations (IR) in a strange and unfamiliar way, I seek to enchant you, the reader. I want to embolden your imagination and persuade you of the possibility of disarmament. I draw my inspiration from the disarming charm of Shahrazad, beguiling narrator of the 1001 Nights, that ancient and cosmopolitan collection of tales from Arabic, Indian and Persian traditions. In the prologue of The © The Author(s) 2020 M. B. Bolton, Imagining Disarmament, Enchanting International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17716-4_1

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Arabian Nights (as the text is sometimes called here in the so-called West), we find the framing narrative that envelops all of the shorter stories nesting within its pages. We are introduced to Shahrayar, the “invincible, energetic, and implacable” king of “India and Indochina” (Haddawy, 1990, p. 3). But we learn that Shahrayar’s power over his subjects has limits. One day, Shahrayar embarks on a hunt, leaving his brother, Shahzaman, behind at the palace. As Shahrayar heads for the wilderness, Shahzaman looks out the window and is shocked to see his brother’s wife, 10 light-skinned “slave-girls” and 11 cross-dressing, enslaved black men all making love in the palace gardens. Shahzaman is alarmed that despite their low station, women, slaves and people with darker skin all have agency, even “though my brother is king and master of the whole world” (p. 4). When Shahrayar learns from his brother of the queen’s orgiastic exertions, “his blood boiled” (p. 7). He orders his vizier to execute her and killed all his concubines himself. Stirred to a misogynistic rage by his sense of impotence, he vows to “save himself from the wickedness and cunning of women.” He swears that everyday hence he will marry a woman “for one night only,” ordering his vizier to kill her the next day before finding him someone new: He continued to do this until all the girls perished, their mothers mourned, and there arose a clamor among the fathers and mothers, who called the plague upon his head, complained to the Creator of the heavens, and called for help on Him who hears and answers prayers. (p. 11)

Enter Shahrazad, eldest daughter of the vizier. “[I]ntelligent, knowledgeable, wise and refined,” Shahrazad “knew poetry by heart,” had studied history, literature, philosophy and medicine and “was acquainted with the sayings … of sages and kings” (p.  11). Unlike her father, who has convinced himself that he “cannot disobey” the king, Shahrazad has a plan. To the vizier’s distress, she insists he allow her to marry Shahrayar, so she can “succeed in saving the people or perish and die like the rest” (p. 11). Her father tries to dissuade her, insisting that women should obey men, but Shahrazad ups the ante: “if you don’t take me to King Shahrayar, I shall go to him by myself and tell him you have refused to give me to one like him” (p. 15). After conspiring with her sister, Dinarzad, Shahrazad marries the king. Shahrayar takes her to his bed and as he begins to “fondle her,” he is surprised when she begins to weep. Baffled, the king asks her “Why are you

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crying?” She tells him that before she dies in the morning she wants to say goodbye to her sister. Shahrayar sends for Dinarzad and allows her to “sleep under the bed.” Excruciatingly, Dinarzad waits until the king has “satisfied himself with her sister.” Then she clears her throat and pipes up from beneath the mattress: “Sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us one of your lovely little tales.” Obtaining the king’s permission, Shahrazad instructs him: “Listen” (p. 16). She spins a tale about a merchant who bargains with a murderous demon for a stay of execution, but dawn breaks before Shahrazad can conclude her story. She falls silent, leaving the king “burning with curiosity to hear the rest” (p. 18). Dinarzad exclaims “What a strange and lovely story!” but Shahrazad demures: “What is this compared with what I shall tell you tomorrow night if the king spares me and lets me live? It will be even better and more entertaining.” The king takes the bait, deciding to “spare her until I hear the rest of the story; then I will have to put her to death” (p. 18). The next night, and for many nights after that, Dinarzad is permitted to continue sleeping under the royal bed, and since it would be beneath the dignity of the king to beg, each night she turns to her sister and asks her: “tell us one of your lovely little tales” (p.  20). Shahrazad draws out her stories; each character themselves tells long yarns of magical objects, enchanted cities, epic sojourns and legendary romance. Reading the Nights feels like peeling back narratives to find infinite layers of story tucked inside each other. Each morning, Shahrazad teases the king with the pleasures yet to come: “tomorrow night … will be even better … more wonderful, delightful, entertaining, and delectable if the kings spares me and lets me live” (p.  21). Following the 21st night, Shahrayar is so enthralled by his wife’s gifts he decides he is “willing to postpone her execution even for a month” (p. 55). Only four nights later, in “amazement, pain and sorrow” at the plight of Shahrazad’s characters, the king is willing to extend her life “even for two months” (p.  62). As each tale seamlessly merges into another, we dare to hope that our narrator, through her enrapturing art, is slowly teaching the king’s shriveled, psychopathic heart a modicum of humanity. Her characters slip hints of an alternative way to govern:        Behold a peaceful city, free from fear,        Whose wonders make it a gorgeous heaven appear. (p. 94)

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The original text ends abruptly, after the 271st night, tempting endless scribes, translators, hucksters and storytellers to add their own tales (including that of Aladdin), hoping to complete the remaining 730 nights. Husain Haddawy, the Nights’ authoritative translator into English, is unimpressed by these imposters but cannot help appending his own postscript: “Tradition has it that in the course of time Shahrazad bore Shahrayar three children and that, having learned to trust and love her, he spared her life and kept her as his queen” (p. 427). Today’s gender politics rightly lead us to suspect the claim that a woman can love a violent, damaged man into gentleness. I could not help but cringe at Shahrazad’s exclamation in the BBC TV version: “If I can make him listen to my stories, maybe he’ll change” (Barnes, 2000, Episode 1, 41:19). But there is a grim  humility to the original, truncated text. It offers not a utopian vision of “happily ever after” but rather the possibility that through discursive skill we can stay executions one night at a time. This is the role I believe disarmament campaigners can play in global politics. We cannot promise a world free of all strife. But perhaps we can persuade violent people to give us respite, to reduce their arsenals a little at a time, to renounce particularly odious weapons. We do this by flattering their sense of honor, enthralling them with our art and weaving them into a fabric of norms and commitments. From Shahrazad we learn that the storyteller can move people, she has—we have—agency. But it is a cyclical task and often a dangerous one. Like Haddawy, my encounter with Shahrazad tempts me to add my own tales, from more recent times. And so, before attending to the more serious scholarly tasks of reviewing the literature and the book’s theoretical approach, I offer you three anecdotes. At their core they are true, though they are stylized here in honor of the great storyteller herself.1

The 1002nd Night: The Story of the Princess and the Hibakusha When it was night and Shahrazad was in bed with the king—now a constitutional monarch constrained by the rule of law, a vigorous civil society and international norms—Dinarzad said to her sister, “Please, if you are not sleepy, tell us one of your lovely little tales to while away the night. Maybe you  I adapt the wording of the framing text (in italics) here from Haddawy’s (1990) translation. 1

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could provide the reader of this book a real world example of what the author is trying to get at.” The king muttered, “This seems like a didactic tangent from the normal fare of demons and enchanted parrots but I will allow it.” Shahrazad replied, “As you wish.” Trumpets sounded and the Norwegian royal family proceeded into Oslo’s resplendent City Hall. Despite his political objections to monarchy, the author of this book could not help feeling thrilled to be graced by their presence. It felt incongruent to see the ragtag band of activists who made up the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) dressed in their finery, surrounded by such glitz. A couple months earlier, ICAN learned they were recipients of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for leading a global advocacy effort resulting in 122 governments adopting a treaty banning nuclear weapons at the United Nations. Now they were here in Norway’s frozen capital to receive their award. At the party later that night, ICAN activists shared anecdotes about their day. John Legend looked so hot when he sang us “Redemption Song”! Someone wore a dress to the banquet in the shape of a peace crane! Wasn’t the breakfast buffet at the Grand Hotel delicious! But one particular story kept making the rounds, told with faces of awe and wonder: “We made the Princess cry!” In the Nobel ceremony, Setsuko Thurlow, a Hiroshima survivor, had received the medal on behalf of the campaign, along with ICAN’s executive director Beatrice Fihn. “I speak as a member of the family of hibakusha—those of us who, by some miraculous chance, survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said Thurlow in the Nobel Lecture. She narrated the “utter, unimaginable devastation” of that day in August 1945, when many of her schoolmates “burned to death alive.” Processions of ghostly figures shuffled by. Grotesquely wounded people, they were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing. Flesh and skin hung from their bones. Some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands. Some with their bellies burst open, their intestines hanging out. The foul stench of burnt human flesh filled the air. (Thurlow, 2017)

“Each person had a name,” said Thurlow, her voice catching. “Each person was loved by someone.” One of the TV camera operators focused

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on the face of Crown Princess Mette-Marit, stricken by Thurlow’s story (Nobel Prize, 2017, 1:16:19, 1:17:37). “Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain,” intoned Thurlow. At one moment, the Princess reaches up to her face and appears to brush away a tear (1:21:32). When Thurlow insists “we must not tolerate this insanity any longer!,” the Princess joins the applause, appearing deeply moved (1:22:14). But, then Thurlow called on “all responsible leaders” to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), saying that “history will judge harshly those who reject it.” In particular she calls out the “accomplices” of the nuclear-armed states—NATO states like Norway, which seek security “under the so-called ‘nuclear umbrella.’” Thurlow instructed them to “Listen to our testimony. Heed our warning. … You are each an integral part of a system of violence that is endangering humankind. Let us all be alert to the banality of evil” (Thurlow, 2017). Sensing the drama unfolding, the camera operators switched to show the irritated reaction of Norway’s conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg, whose government has refused to sign the treaty (1:26:34; 1:28:23). The contrast between the Princess’ and prime minister’s reactions was undeniable and demonstrated the cracks in Norway’s elite consensus—the tensions between its humanitarian image and its complicity in nuclear deterrence. As Thurlow finished her speech, the camera switched back to the Princess, who is taking her purse out of her lap, readying to join the expected standing ovation (1:30:39). Later, at the party that evening, the author of this book, who is sometimes wont to turn social conversations into what he thinks are “teachable moments,” actually said to someone, “It reminds me of Shahrazad!” He proceeded to relate how the role of disarmament campaigns is to touch the sentiment of people in power, like the Crown Princess. He then told his fellow celebrating campaigners the story of how Afghan deminers had persuaded the Taliban to forswear landmines. But morning overtook Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence. As the day dawned and it was light, her sister Dinarzad said, “What a strange and wonderful story! I hope the reader understood the linkage you were making between narrative, affect and persuading those with power to limit arbitrary violence.” Shahrazad replied, “Tomorrow night I shall tell something even stranger and more wonderful than this.”

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The 1003rd Night: The Tale of the Deminers and the Self-Proclaimed Emir The following night, Dinarzad said to her sister Shahrazad, “Please, sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us one of your little tales. I think some of the readers are skeptical and think that only leaders in democratic, constitutional systems can be influenced by discourse and persuasion. Maybe you could offer another example?” Shahrazad replied, “With the greatest pleasure.” At the party after the Nobel ceremony, the author told his friends that after decades of war Afghanistan is one of the most landmine-affected countries in the world. The vast majority of causalities are civilians; mines block roads, keep farmers from their fields and prevent the return of displaced people. After some difficult false starts, in the early 1990s the UN, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Afghan organizations started humanitarian efforts to deal with landmines. For a time, demining organizations were among the largest providers of formal employment in Afghanistan. Afghan people—even armed groups—generally respected the deminers because they were seen as risking their lives to save people. They were described as fighting a kind of nonviolent jihad against the enemies of all people. In 1994, the Taliban, a new militant religious movement of students educated in fundamentalist schools in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, swept into Afghanistan. They captured much of the territory in the south of the country, including Kabul in 1997. Under the self-styled “Emir” Mullah Mohammed Omar, they claimed to be Afghanistan’s sovereign government. The Taliban’s regime of terror brutalized Afghans who did not follow their extreme interpretations of Islamic law and invited Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to establish themselves in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, also in 1997, 122 countries gathered in Ottawa, Canada, to sign the Antipersonnel Landmine Ban Treaty. The agreement was the culmination of an unprecedented global mobilization to address the humanitarian impact of mines. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which along with its coordinator Jody Williams, was awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, had successfully amplified the stories of survivors and affected communities in the global news media. The new treaty categorically banned antipersonnel landmines and obligated governments to clear minefields, assist victims and provide lifesaving risk education.

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The treaty had its skeptics. It was one of the first major international disarmament treaties negotiated without the world’s major military powers, including the US, Russia and China. Critics suggested the treaty would have little impact on armed groups like the Taliban, which seemed impervious to international normative pressure. However, the Afghan Campaign to Ban Landmines (ACBL) and the UN were not so quick to give up. Working with local Islamic leaders, they highlighted religious injunctions to protect civilians and the stories of landmine survivors. By 1998, they had persuaded the Taliban leadership that victim-activated antipersonnel landmines were inherently indiscriminate, “un-Islamic and anti-human.” Until they were removed from power by the US in 2001, the Taliban appears to have complied with their commitment not to use mines and offered some support for the work of deminers (ACBL, 1998, 2000; Mansfield, 2015, p.  145; Moser-­ Puangsuwan, 2008, p. 168). Their commitment has eroded since then, as Taliban forces began using mines and improvised explosive devices, against the US military and its allies. However, in an indicator of the limping persistence of the norm, Taliban spokesmen often claim only to use command-­ detonated, not victim-activated, devices. Even though the US, Russia and China still refuse to sign the landmine ban treaty, they have slowly aligned themselves with its norms, passing export bans or moratoria. But dawn broke, and morning overtook Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence. Then her sister said, “What an amazing story!” Shahrazad replied, “What is this compared with what I shall tell you tomorrow night, if the king continues to honor the right to free speech!”

The 1004th Night: The Story of the Explosive Tricksters and Traveling Players The following night Dinarzad said to her sister Shahrazad, “I think that some scholars might think your stories of princesses and self-proclaimed emirs have little bearing on ordinary people’s lives. Please sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us another of your lovely little tales to while away the night.” The king added, “Let it be about what relevance all this has to my subjects.” Shahrazad replied, “Very well, with the greatest pleasure.” The landmine, sporting a tuft of hair and angry eyebrows, gloated to the gathered children of his cunning ability to hide in the forest. His ­sinister sidekick, an unexploded grenade, snickered as a gigantic mouse,

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and his rabbit friend gamboled toward them. The children gasped in warning and the rodents stopped in their tracks. They called for help, summoning a deminer to come rescue them. The mines and other explosive remnants of war were then put on trial, with the children serving as the jury. The explosive tricksters were found guilty of endangering people and animals. This puppet show, encountered by the author of this book in Bosnia, was funded by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as part of its effort to support the landmine ban treaty’s risk education provisions. It is unlikely that diplomats had foam animals in mind when they negotiated the agreement. But risk education specialists found that early mine awareness efforts—adapted from military briefings—tended to frighten kids. Barraged by gruesome images of landmine victims, children would shut down rather than remember the messages that could save their lives. As a result, UNICEF worked with the Genesis Project, a local NGO, to recruit artists, actors and teachers. The puppet shows proved so popular and effective that the talking animals and anthropomorphic mines became an educational TV show in Bosnia. Evaluations showed that students better retained information about landmines—and were able to apply it in dangerous situations—if they learned through story, song and performance. But dawn broke, and morning overtook Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence. Then her sister said, “What an amazing story!” Shahrazad replied, “Perhaps it is time for me to hand back to the author and let him move on from illustrative anecdotes to offer a literature review and theoretical framework!”

Weapons and the Global Politics of Imagination I will admit it. What I have done so far is an old trick. People have long used ancient tales as analogies to contemporary situations to offer insight, spur imagination and demonstrate continuities between times and places. Indeed, every weekend, preachers around the world offer biblical exegesis to their congregants, finding nuggets of wisdom for today in millennia-old texts. In a review of the literature on the intersections between popular culture and IR, Grayson, Davies, and Philpott (2009, pp.  156–157) observed that much IR scholarship remains in this mode of “identifying allegories and metaphors.” Academics turn to books, movies, TV and drama for a handy analogy to advance their argument, a compelling image to illustrate a key point or a pithy epithet to elevate an article. As social scientists—not humanists—they use culture to make a point.

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There is nothing wrong with this per se. At many points in this book, I will use the stories I have chosen to help draw attention to elements of the drama of disarmament, which so often mirror stories we have long told. But the humanities are not only there to be instrumentalized by empiricists seeking to seem “cultured.” The 1001 Nights offers more than analogies for our time. It expresses a particular worldview, an ontological conception of society as a fabric of overlapping discourses. Reading Shahrazad tell tales of characters who themselves tell tales of characters who tell tales, one glimpses a universe that is stories all the way down. Society, for Shahrazad, is narrative. We relate to each other as characters in each other’s preconceived stories of how a person of our nationality, race, class and gender will act. We can sometimes break out of these clichéd tales by hearing people tell new stories, or old ones in surprising ways. Story shapes action. It sparks our imagination. It lulls us into complacency. We identify with heroes, long for the antagonist’s demise. And in retelling myth, we engage in efforts to reshape the politics of how society sees us, others and the systems that govern our lives. Rather than culture and politics being “separate domains,” Grayson et al. argue, it is the “production and circulation” of culture that, in part, “makes world politics what it currently is” (2009, pp. 155, 157, emphasis in original). For example, in an April 2018 UN Security Council debate about the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK, the British and Russian representatives traded barbed comments rich with literary allusions. The UK Ambassador Karen Pierce compared her Russian counterpart, Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, to Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis Professor Moriarty. Nebenzia read a passage from Alice in Wonderland, in which the Queen has an absurd standard of evidence. Pierce shot back that she recalled a quote from Alice saying, “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” suggesting it characterizes “my Russian colleague best.” The journalists reporting on the meeting seemed to raise their collective eyebrows, portraying the lit-crit tangents as an oddity (Nichols, 2018). But my experience of diplomatic discussions is that they commonly veer into art and culture. In one UN meeting, I observed a delegate finish her intervention on gender and disarmament with a flourish from Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.” In the following speeches, diplomats seemed compelled to reference the song, or other corners of Marley’s discography. While this injected some humor into the meeting, the diplomats’ gesture to culture did not seem entirely frivolous. It is part of the

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diplomatic self-­conception to be charming, attuned to wit, able to lighten grave conversations and make them pleasurable. And human language, through which political negotiations necessarily take place, relies on words, phrases, idioms and fragmentary images that are inevitably drawn from artistic expression. As Percy Shelley (2009) put it, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—they generate the images and narratives that structure the very boundaries of what political leaders think is possible and give them the language with which to discuss, cajole and decree (p’Bitek, 1986). It is “in the cultural imaginary,” Grayson et al. assert, “that significant political battles are fought” (2009, p. 157); it is an “important site where power, ideology and identity are constituted, produced and/or materialized” (pp. 155–156). Shelley’s insight—that poetry and governance are intertwined—also helps us to look critically at perceptions that art is somehow a separate (perhaps purer) domain from that of politics. I started this chapter by referencing Shahrazad’s charm to suggest art can overcome violence. In the Epilogue of this book, I return to this notion, drawing on the Orpheus myth. Similarly, Arundhati Roy (1998) condemned her government’s nuclear tests as “the end of imagination” in India, a turn from the politics of emancipation to that of the Bomb. But Shahrazad herself relates the tale of The Secret of Secrets, a tome whose pages are poisoned by a sage to take revenge on a king who is too eager to possess knowledge (pp.  46–47). Imagination is not always innocent; books and narratives can be weaponized. Reading Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid, one gets the sense that art and war often co-create each other. Reflecting on the siege of Sarajevo, Herscher (2008, p. 39) wrote, “Culture and violence … cannot stand as simply unmediated oppositions”; rather, heritage, art and culture “should be understood to advance and legitimate violence as much as to resist or disregard it.” Seeking a deeper appreciation of the intersections between politics and culture, there is a growing literature in political science that explores the insights of the broader “discursive turn” in social sciences and humanities (Davies & Davies, 2007; Jameson, 1998). Drawing on post-structuralist and critical theory, the discursive turn challenges mechanistic notions of power as “something that is divided between those who have it and hold it exclusively, and those who do not have it and are subject to it” (Foucault, 2003, p. 29). Instead, power “reaches into the very grain of individuals” and their “everyday lives” (p. 29). Power functions through discourse, the “flow, exchange and regulation of signs, symbols and other representations”

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that “mediate and often dominate” social relationships. Discourse establishes “what can be said and who can say it with authority,” regarding the scope of possible action, notions of “Others” and the nature of risks (Der Derian, 2008, p. 71). Power is thus not only the ability to hurt or compensate, but also the ability to generate affect—feelings, desire and fear— through narrative, ritual and symbol (Paolini, 1993). Discourses are never thoroughly consistent; they have contradictions and rely on crucial silences. As a result, even the most seemingly unassailable social system is inherently unstable, open to disruption. Within the study of nationalism, scholars like Benedict Anderson (1991) have shown how everyday cultural production—in newspapers, novels and classroom studies—helps to constitute the ethno-linguistic “imagined communities” that also define political boundaries. Feminist theorists have demonstrated that the myths that undergird patriarchy and heteronormativity are enacted in people’s everyday performance of gender roles, feminizing those subjected to domination and legitimating the mobilization of militarized masculinities (e.g. Cohn, 1987; Eichler, 2014). Similarly, post-colonial thinkers have shown the ongoing salience of imperial narratives in guiding how political leaders frame, define, understand and act on people perceived as “Other” (e.g. Said, 2012). However, Berit Bliesmann de Guevara (2016) argues that these important developments have been overlooked by mainstream IR scholarship. In particular, “The study of myth has been a desideratum in academic explorations of international politics” (p. 15). Indeed, the word myth has generally been used in IR in its colloquial sense of something that is not true (p. 16). By contrast, Bliesmann de Guevara advocates for an approach to IR “focussing on the ideological, naturalising, depoliticising, and the constitutive, meaning-making, and legitimising functions of myth,” which can “offer substantial contributions to the cultural side of international politics, the reproduction and contestation of the international sociopolitical order, and the academic knowledge produced about it” (p.  16). Mythological narratives order scattered events, people, ideas and things and place them within an ordered universe and plot. Navigating global politics involves attempts to characterize the self and others and place these actors within a story of what the world itself is, where it has come from and where it is going (pp. 18–20). Several scholars of the role of weapons in society have been particularly attuned to these discursive dynamics. Richard Price (1995) showed how the emergence of the chemical weapons taboo is intricately entwined with how

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people in late modern states have come to perceive themselves. To reject chemical weapons is to place oneself on the “right side” of a claimed teleological civilization of warfare. Hugh Gusterson’s Nuclear Rites (1998) observed among US nuclear scientists a curious insistence on the safety of their testing program, seemingly contrary to their empirical training. Gusterson argued that this denial enabled scientists to feel part of an elaborate rite of passage, rebirth and renewal—a kind of dream sequence rather than a destructive enterprise. Contrary to the claims of policymakers that nuclear deterrence is founded on rational analysis, Gusterson showed that myth and ritual were foundational to the nuclear weapons complex. Similarly, Shampa Biswas (2014) argues that nuclear proliferation is driven by desire for dominance that is cultivated by colonial and post-colonial narratives shaping how government officials understand their place in the world. Lest one think that the devastation of weapons of mass destruction uniquely generates cultural imagining, the ethnographic accounts in Neil Whitehead and Sverker Finnstrom’s (2013) edited volume recount how everyday experience of contemporary warfare is interlaced with mythos and magical practices. In the field of political geography, Graham (2016), Weizman (2012) and Virilio (1997) have shown how the buildings and urban space can become enrolled in war and repression, challenging the notion that architecture is a domain separate from political conflict. A 2017 special issue of Critical Studies on Security titled “Becoming Weapon” drew many of these strands together (Bousquet, Grove, & Shah, 2017). It demonstrated, through a series of cases studies, the political, economic and social processes by which the knowledge, practices, technologies and artifacts of culture are transformed into weapons (and vice versa). They suggest that one cannot study the politics of weapons apart from the systems of meaning that surround them. However, the title of the special issue is revealing; it focuses almost exclusively on weaponization. An occupational hazard of critical theorists studying the global politics of weapons is the adoption of a grim pessimism that, to me, feels disempowered and fatalistic. The political and discursive processes of disarmament—of becoming un-weapon, if you will—have generated much less interest from IR scholars, even those in the critical tradition. Nevertheless, there are a few people who have engaged earnestly with the role of imagination in global disarmament politics. Gusterson’s Nuclear Rites (1998) also analyzed the subjectivity of anti-nuclear activists, exploring, in particular, the role of dreams and nightmares (pp. 167, 197–199). Emily Welty (2016) argues that IR scholars’ secular assumptions prevent

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them from seeing the role of religious beliefs and practices in shaping advocacy and diplomacy on nuclear weapons. With Elizabeth Minor, I have written about ICAN’s self-consciously discursive strategy, in which campaigners aimed to change the meaning of nuclear weapons, drawing on their familiarity with the “discursive turn” (Bolton & Minor, 2016). Charli Carpenter (2016) argues that the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has been simultaneously empowered and limited by science fiction tropes about technologies out of control. Movies like The Terminator have facilitated journalists’ imagination of the dangers of autonomous weapons systems but have also made it more difficult for campaigners to focus media conversation on serious philosophical, legal and ethical concerns. Science fiction is not only the backdrop of international conversations about military robotics, it has actually played constitutive role, shaping how policymakers think about the problem and the options open to them. Similarly, Mathur (2016, 2018), Stavrianakis (2019), Cooper (2018), Das (2017) and Biswas (2014) have all highlighted the role of colonial meta-­narratives in humanitarian disarmament processes, which rely on the “standard of civilization” trope, pitting “barbarous” practices against a heroic, more humane way of war. Reproducing this story gives advocacy groups a powerfully seductive narrative, but may stigmatize people from conflict zones as somehow less civilized.

Approach of this Book This book aims to contribute to the growing understanding of the role of discourse in disarmament processes and IR more generally. It has two primary goals. Firstly, I wish to demonstrate possibilities for disarmament in global politics, arguing that it is neither naïve to pursue it nor misguided to study it. Violent people sometimes accept limits on the methods, means and scope of killing. Secondly, I argue that the discipline of IR needs an expanded understanding of agency. The 1001 Nights challenges us to recognize that even kings cannot control everything. Women, slaves, tricksters, religious minorities, merchants, sages—even donkeys, enchanted vessels, genies and poisoned books—all have the capacity to surprise powerful but complacent men. Similarly, traditional IR’s fixation on the military power of large states has limited its capacity to understand how agency can come from unexpected places. I will show how diplomats of “small” states and from the Global South, activists and advocates in civil society, women,

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indigenous people and survivors of violence can and do influence global policymaking on weapons. In offering a kind of “reenchantment” of IR, I will further show that agency in global politics is not limited to people. Non-human entities also exert power in the international system. Many years after the person who laid a landmine has left the battlefield, it can explode into the present day, devastating a family and jolting someone into a life of advocacy. The air currents flowing around us carry radioactive particles from atmospheric nuclear tests decades ago, transgressing national boundaries and spurring states to pursue nuclear disarmament treaties. Works of imagination—literature, theater, mythology, objects of art—move our emotions, shape our behavior and suggest new possibilities even if we never meet the people who created them. Norms, laws, rituals and practices simultaneously constrain and prompt action. In analyzing the role of non-human agency, I hope to contribute to the development of a post-structuralist theory of disarmament that is accessible and comprehensible. Throughout this book, I will speak directly to you, the reader. I will not hide behind an abstract authorial third person. I am engaged in disarmament efforts and cannot pretend to be a disinterested observer. I draw on the 15 years I have spent researching the politics of landmine clearance and disarmament campaigns (e.g. Bolton, 2010, 2015; Bolton & James, 2014; Bolton & Minor, 2016; Bolton & Mitchell, 2014; Bolton, Sakamoto, & Griffiths, 2012). I have conducted archival research in New York, London, Geneva and Oslo and field research in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Cambodia, Fiji, Kenya, Kiribati, Laos, Sudan, South Sudan, Thailand, Uganda and Vietnam. I have also engaged in participant observation of disarmament advocacy efforts on landmines, cluster munitions, guns, the arms trade, killer robots and nuclear weapons at the UN in both New York and Geneva. What I lose in objectivity, I hope the reader will gain from the insider (“emic”) insight gained from my embeddedness in the situations I describe. Each following chapter engages with one theoretical idea, one literary story and examples drawn from recent history, my experience in disarmament campaigning and/or my field work in places affected by weapons. Each explores how a specific corner of the conversation in post-­structuralist IR relates to disarmament politics. This chapter has provided a brief introduction to the “discursive turn” in the social science. In “Act 2. Quixote: Tilting at Landmines”, framed around the story of Don Quixote, shows how post-positivist theory enables us to see the role of ritual and

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magical thinking in politics. “Act 3. Lysistrata: Meaningful Human Control”, on Lysistrata, explores the contributions of feminist thinking to collective action for peace, and “Act 4. Caliban and the Nuclear Ban”, on Caliban, engages with post-colonial efforts to reimagine and decolonize oppressive narratives. Finally, in the Epilogue, I try to shift my subject position from critic of myth to storyteller, through composing a mashup of the Riddle of the Sphinx and Orpheus tales. I offer no pretense to a generalizable theorem, but instead provide reflections on the multivariant roles of meaning, discourse and narrative in the international politics of weapons. I have not chosen the particular myths of Shahrazad, Quixote, Lysistrata, Caliban and Orpheus through some formalized system. They may not be the most important or broadly told stories in the disarmament community. Rather I have chosen them because these are the stories I have encountered in my work, which have moved me or offered me insight into the everyday life of disarmament policymaking. The choice of stories admittedly does not step far from the traditional Western canon, even with the 1001 Nights. However, I want to show that in being somewhat familiar, these narratives have the space to be reinterpreted in new and surprising ways. Even when disarmament campaigners may not be aware of the specific stories, mythological narratives resonate throughout culture (in both fine art and pop culture) and so affect how campaigners and diplomats see themselves and what they do. Enacting and re-enacting these myths give campaigners a kind of “script” to follow as they do work that is both performative and productive. This short book is intended as a provocation, a challenge to take myth, magic and disarmament seriously in IR. At the intersection between social science and storytelling, I therefore use ethnographic anecdotes not as formalized case studies, but rather yarns spun to engage with you, the reader. Any rhetorical mischievousness or sleights of hand are intended not to overstate my argument but to prod others to engage with it. In short, I aim to tell a disarming tale.

References ACBL. (1998). Annual Report 1998. Retrieved from http://www.afghandata. org:8080/xmlui/handle/azu/7338 ACBL. (2000). Annual Report 2000. Retrieved from http://www.afghandata. org:8080/xmlui/handle/azu/7339 Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities (Rev. ed.). New York: Verso.

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Barnes, P. (2000). The Arabian Nights. Part 1. London: BBC. Biswas, S. (2014). Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bliesmann de Guevara, B. (2016). Myth in International Politics: Ideological Delusion and Necessary Fiction. In B. Bliesmann de Guevara (Ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics: Interpretive Approaches to the Study of IR (pp. 15–46). New York: Springer. Bolton, M. (2010). Foreign Aid and Landmine Clearance: Governance, Politics and Security in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Sudan. London: I.B. Tauris. Bolton, M. (2015). From Minefields to Minespace: An Archeology of the Changing Architecture of Autonomous Killing in US Army Field Manuals on Landmines, Booby Traps and IEDs. Political Geography, 46, 41–53. Bolton, M., & James, K. (2014). Nascent Spirit of New York or Ghost of Arms Control Past?: The Normative Implications of the Arms Trade Treaty for Global Policymaking. Global Policy, 5(4), 439–452. Bolton, M., & Minor, E. (2016). The Discursive Turn Arrives in Turtle Bay: The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons’ Operationalization of Critical IR Theories. Global Policy, 7(3), 386–395. Bolton, M., & Mitchell, C. (2014, August). The Peloponnesian War and Killer Robots: Norms of Protection in Security Policy. e-International Relations. Retrieved February 18, 2017, from http://www.e-ir.info/2014/08/29/thepeloponnesian-war-and-killer-robots-norms-of-protection-in-security-policy/ Bolton, M., Sakamoto, E., & Griffiths, H. (2012, February). Globalization and the Kalashnikov: Public-Private Networks in the Proliferation and Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons. Global Policy, 3(3), 303–313. Bousquet, A., Grove, J., & Shah, N. (2017). Becoming Weapon: An Opening Call to Arms. Critical Studies on Security, 5(1), 1–8. Carpenter, C. (2016). Rethinking the Political/-Science-/Fiction Nexus: Global Policy Making and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Perspectives on Politics, 14(1), 53–69. Cohn, C. (1987). Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals. Signs, 12(4), 687–718. Cooper, N. (2018). Race, Sovereignty, and Free Trade: Arms Trade Regulation and Humanitarian Arms Control in the Age of Empire. Journal of Global Security Studies, 3(4), 444–462. Das, R. (2017). A Post-colonial Analysis of India–United States Nuclear Security: Orientalism, Discourse, and Identity in International Relations. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 52(6), 741–759. Davies, B., & Davies, C. (2007). Having and Being Had By, “Experience”: Or, “Experience” in the Social Sciences After the Discursive/Poststructuralist Turn. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(8), 1139–1159. Der Derian, J. (2008). Critical Encounters in International Relations. International Social Science Journal, 59(191), 69–73.

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Eichler, M. (2014). Militarized Masculinities in International Relations. Brown Journal of World Affairs, 21(1), 81–94. Foucault, M. (2003). “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. New York: Macmillan. Graham, S. (2016). Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers. New York: Verso. Grayson, K., Davies, M., & Philpott, S. (2009). Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture-World Politics Continuum. Politics, 29(3), 156–157. Gusterson, H. (1998). Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haddawy, H. (1990). The Arabian Nights. New York: W.W. Norton. Herscher, A. (2008). Warchitectural Theory. Journal of Architectural Education, 61(3), 35–43. Jameson, F. (1998). The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. Mansfield, I. (2015). Stepping into a Minefield: A Life Dedicated to Landmine Clearance around the World. Newport: Big Sky Publishing. Mathur, R. (2016). Sly Civility and the Paradox of Equality/Inequality in the Nuclear Order: A Post-Colonial Critique. Critical Studies on Security, 1(4), 57–72. Mathur, R. (2018). Techno-Racial Dynamics of Denial & Difference in Weapons Control. Asian Journal of Political Science, 26(3), 297–313. Moser-Puangsuwan, Y. (2008). Outside the Treaty Not the Norm: Nonstate Armed Groups and the Landmine Ban. In J.  Williams, S.  D. Goose, & M.  Wareham (Eds.), Banning Landmines: Disarmament, Citizen Diplomacy and Human Security. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Nichols, M. (2018). ‘You’ll Be Sorry,’ Russia Tells Britain at U.N. Nerve Agent Attack Meeting. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/ us-britain-russia-salisbury-un/youll-be-sorry-russia-tells-britain-at-u-n-nerveagent-attack-meeting-idUSKCN1HC2M2?utm_source=applenews Nobel Prize. (2017). 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony. Retrieved from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1daV8n6fTY Paolini, A. J. (1993). Foucault, Realism and the Power Discourse in International Relations. Australian Journal of Political Science, 28(1), 98–117. p’Bitek, O. (1986). Artist the Ruler: Essays on Art, Culture and Values. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, Ltd. Price, R. (1995). A Genealogy of the Chemical Weapons Taboo. International Organization, 49(1), 73–103. Roy, A. (1998). The End of Imagination. The Guardian. Retrieved from https:// ratical.org/ratville/nukes/endOfImagine.html Said, E. (2012). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Shelley, P.  B. (2009). A Defence of Poetry. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry

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Stavrianakis, A. (2019). Controlling Weapons Circulation in a Postcolonial Militarized World. Review of International Studies, 45(1), 57–76. Thurlow, S. (2017). International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—Nobel Lecture (English). Retrieved from https://www.nobelprize. org/prizes/peace/2017/ican/26041-international-campaign-to-abolishnuclear-weapons-ican-nobel-lecture-2017/ Virilio, P. (1997). Bunker Archaeology. New Haven, CT: Princeton Architectural Press. Weizman, E. (2012). Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. New York: Verso. Welty, E. (2016). The Theological Landscape of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: The Catholic Church, the World Council of Churches and the Bomb. Global Policy, 7(3), 396–404. Whitehead, N., & Finnstrom, S. (Eds.). (2013). Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Act 2. Quixote: Tilting at Landmines

Abstract  Given the scale of global weapons stockpiles, unarmed disarmament campaigners may seem deluded. However, advocacy campaigns disrupt how we perceive specific weapons, transforming them from “protectors” into “monsters” that are mala in se—“evil in themselves.” They do this through the “magic” of symbolic interventions and performance. To understand this ritual dimension of disarmament, this chapter draws on themes in Cervantes’ Don Quixote to frame a discussion about seemingly “hopeless quests.” Reading Don Quixote in the minefields offers insight into revolt against depersonalized killing. It shows the transformative potential of “magical thinking” and absurd gesture, which undermines the rationalist assumptions of international relations (IR) scholarship. Keywords  Disarmament • International relations • Magic • Landmines • Nuclear weapons • Cervantes • Actor-Network Theory As he unbuttoned his black workshirt, the deminer showed me sacred text on his chest, inscribed when he was in the Vietnamese-backed Cambodian army during the 1980s civil war. Many people, fighting on all sides, he told me, had similar tattoos, received from elders in order to ward off evil and protect them from bullets (c.f. Toynton, 2012). I asked him if deminers also got similar tattoos to protect them from landmines and he said © The Author(s) 2020 M. B. Bolton, Imagining Disarmament, Enchanting International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17716-4_2

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that it was less common, though some did. The tattoos were associated with the older generation and younger people were less interested. Earlier, I had asked his colleague—a white American—whether his Cambodian co-workers engaged in any ritual or spiritual practices associated with their work. The American had seemed rather skeptical; his own tattoo, he informed me, was for decorative, not uncanny, purposes. Nevertheless, the Cambodian deminer told me that sometimes he would drink a ritual mixture of ox blood and wine before entering the minefield. If there was a wat nearby, the deminers might make offerings and pray for protection or ask monks to come bless them and the land. He said there was concern that the minefield might be haunted by dangerous spirits, particularly if someone had died there. Abandoned buildings were particularly worrying. But when I asked him whether there were any specific rituals required before a demolition (blowing up landmines that had been discovered during the day’s work), he said, “We just follow the SOPs”—standard operating procedures. I was surprised at his sudden shift from the spiritual realm to the discourse of bureaucratic technocracy, since I had been reading about traditional Southeast Asian practices of appeasing the land spirits when one has disturbed the earth (e.g. Beban & Work, 2014; Fox, 2002). Two days later, I had a remarkably similar encounter. Speaking to the English director of another humanitarian demining organization about what I had learned regarding Cambodian deminers’ spiritual practices, he scoffed: “I suspect [our employees] don’t have time for that.” But he was sufficiently intrigued to call on one of his agency’s local managers. The manager told me that back when he was a field coordinator, he would lead prayers for the team and leave offerings of fruit and rice wine for the land spirits at the edge of the minefield. He confirmed that the tattoos popular among soldiers in the 1980s were rarer these days, but that many deminers wore a protective “magic belt” strung with “a piece of metal that someone from the pagoda has spoken holy words into.” He shrugged, saying, “we don’t know if it works, but we do it just in case.” I asked him if there was any specific ritual for demolitions and he shook his head: “we know that the SOPs work.” I was suddenly aware of where we were—in the agency’s data processing room, where young Cambodian tech specialists were tabulating data on their country’s landmine problem, generating GIS maps on state-of-the-art computers. As I rode a remorque back into town, I was struck by the parallels between these two encounters. Firstly, the skepticism of both the American and British  heirs of the European disenchantment, who described

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Cambodians as “superstitious” and framed rituals in terms of their lack of instrumental rationality. Secondly, Cambodians’ description of demining as a set of practices thoroughly imbued with the magical and spiritual. And thirdly,  the reliance of local demining professionals on techno-scientific procedures when they knew such methods would produce a safe demolition. I was reminded of the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski’s meditations on the relationship between science and magic. Contrary to colonial condescension, he found that supposedly “primitive” people of the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific were equally capable as Europeans “of exact observations, of sound generalizations and of logical reasoning,” that is, “knowledge of an essentially scientific character” (Malinowski, 1979, p. 38). They had developed and transmitted a body of carefully verified navigation techniques, for example, rooted in rigorous empiricism (Malinowski, 1948, pp. 13–14). However, no matter how great the sailor’s technical skill, it will never offer complete guarantee of safe arrival: Man [sic], engaged in a series of practical activities, comes to a gap; the hunter is disappointed by his quarry, the sailor misses propitious winds. … Forsaken by his knowledge, baffled by his past experience and by his technical skill, he realises his impotence. Yet his desire grips him only the more strongly; his anxiety, his fears and hopes induce a tension … which drives him to some sort of activity. (Malinowski, 1948, pp. 59–60)

This activity, the realm of magical thinking and ritual, appears when scientific knowledge fails to guarantee outcomes. In “Lagoon fishing, where man can rely completely upon his knowledge and skill,” Malinowski found “magic does not exist.” But when Trobriand Islanders set sail for “open-sea fishing, full of danger and uncertainty, there is extensive magical ritual to secure safety and good results” (1948, p. 14). Another early social theorist of magic, Marcel Mauss, argued that magical practices “are eminently effective; they are creative; they do things” (2001, pp. 23–34). In fact, they are often the avant-garde of scientific technique and technology, as practices that start out as magical arts come to be recognized as verifiably and reliably effective. Mauss points out that in medicine and chemistry, magical rituals, potions and concoctions later were refined into scientific knowledge. As a result, Mauss suggests that in everyday life, science, religion and magic are thoroughly entwined with each other. But Mauss also indicates that the accidental efficacy of many magical practices (and subsequent codification into science) is not the point of his argument

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that magic works. Magic has “a special kind of effectiveness quite different from their mechanical effectiveness” (p. 25); it “translates ideas” (p. 75). Magical practices are intersubjective “social facts” (p.  11) that create a “change of state” (p. 75), a shift in our relationships to ourselves, other people, objects and the cosmos. In one of his most commonly quoted maxims, “if magic is to exist, society has to be present” (p. 156). In this vein, anthropologist Mary Douglas describes magic as an attempt to “transform the path of events by symbolic enactment,” which “provides a focusing mechanism. … The marked off time or place alerts a special kind of expectancy” (2002, p. 107). Magic thus has practical benefits; in fact, it may aid, rather than detract, from the technical performance of a skilled practitioner by transforming a moment of danger into one of opportunity. “Magic is less irrational than we think,” wrote Sjaak van der Geest about the persistence of magical ritual in modern medicine. “People are continuously confronted with the boundaries of their ability to bring about facts. In their uncertainty … they add words, gestures, substances to increase the chance of success. … Magic [is] the use of symbols to control forces in nature … [it] is the ritualisation of hope” (2005, pp. 137–138. Emphasis mine). Though religion also involves ritual and hope, Malinowski distinguishes it from magic by focusing on the “practical utilitarian value” of magic rituals, words and practices, which are used as “means to an end” (Malinowski, 1979, p.  40). Magic aims to control risk and uncertainty, rather than express devotion or lead to moral and ethical development. Like technical science, magic is instrumental—it takes over where science has no credible answers.1 Therefore, deminers’ mindfulness, as they prod the ground for explosives, may be brought into focus by a ritual call for protection. Magic may enhance their ability to face the anxious work of uncovering Cambodia’s buried violence. Speaking with experienced deminers, I came to appreciate their fluid metis. They seemed comfortable switching between spiritual appeal and unsentimental procedure as circumstances required. I began to wonder whether—rather than dismissing their beliefs as exotic oddities—those of us working on disarmament at the global policy level could learn from them. While our work is far less dangerous than those out in the mine1  It is worth noting that more recent scholars have blurred the firm lines Malinowski draws between science, religion and magic. They point out that the history of writing about magic has been troubled by both theologians’ and social scientists’ occupational incentive to define themselves in opposition to it. Nevertheless, I use Malinowski’s rough ideal types as helpful models and schema, acknowledging them as such.

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fields, we too engage in the absurdly optimistic task of limiting the impact of violent technologies. Disarmament advocates project ontological power, transforming weapons symbolically from artifacts of defense into totems of inhumanity. For instance, activists  successfully cursed antipersonnel landmines. Once considered legitimate weapons of war, stockpiled in tens of millions, they were transformed into monsters and, in the 1997 ban treaty, legally defined as mala in se, “evil in themselves.” Under the spell of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), the multitude of bad seeds strewn under deadly gardens—once claiming 20,000 victims a year—is disappearing in a thousand demolishing flashes. In Mozambique, once one of the world’s most mined countries, landmines have almost faded from existence altogether. Disarmament campaigners have sought to repeat this trick—with varying success—on small arms and light weapons (SALW), cluster munitions, the arms trade, “killer robots” and nuclear weapons. This chapter thus aims to de-provincialize the role of magic in the minefields, pivoting from my ethnographic anecdote about the supernatural beliefs of “non-European Others”, to reflect on the role of magical thinking and ritual in disarmament processes more broadly. I want to defamiliarize policymaking processes that are depicted as rational and bureaucratic and re-enchant the arena of global political advocacy and multilateral diplomacy. Malinowski asks us to be alert to patterns of magical thinking in contemporary life: “Wherever there is danger, uncertainty, great incidence of chance and accident, even in entirely modern forms of enterprise, magic crops up” (1979, p. 40). Given the stakes in international discussions of weapons, I want to see whether we can find the magic he predicted. To help with this task, I will turn to the classic text in the European tradition on the uncertain relationships between the realm of enchantment and empirically verified “reality”: Miguel Cervantes’ Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha. Reading Don Quixote in the minefields (and UN conference rooms) offers us insight into the need for absurd revolt against depersonalized killing. I first review the literature, showing how innovative scholars are challenging international relations’ (IR) hegemonic disenchantment, drawing on fields with more experience analyzing the magical, mythical and spiritual. I also outline the chapter’s theoretical framing, rooted in Actor-­ Network Theory (ANT). This is followed by an exegesis of Don Quixote, which I argue offers useful insights for re-enchanting IR’s study of war. I then trace contestations over magical discourse in scholarly and policy dis-

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cussions on weapons, as both militarists and disarmers try to frame each other as the peddlers of an “impossible dream,” whether geopolitical stability or global peace. I offer examples from recent disarmament campaigns to illustrate the kind of myths, practices and magical thinking that advocates use to ritualize their hope of a world without war. I conclude the chapter with reflections on enchanting and disarming the IR discipline.

The Magic of Global Politics Though IR scholarship is infused with a militant rationalism, much of its foundational canon was less dismissive of the spiritual world. Thucydides reports straightforwardly the answers given by the Oracle at Delphi to combatants in The History of the Peloponnesian War. Hobbes’ Leviathan includes the chapter “Of Miracles, and their Use” (he is skeptical, particularly of magicians, but allows that God occasionally performs “wonders”). Nevertheless, as with other social sciences, IR’s legitimation as a modern discipline relied on claiming to replicate for global politics the reliability and verifiability of the physical sciences (Kahler, 1998). International affairs “is governed by objective laws,” professed Hans J.  Morganthau, which are “impervious to our preferences.” They can be discovered through “rational theory” that distinguishes between “evidence” and “wishful thinking” and fights policymakers’ tendencies to replace “experience with superstition” (1993, p. 4). Marxist IR’s materialism was rooted in its own, similar, demands for an end to sentimental “false consciousness.” Magic and religion were opiates, not catalysts of liberation. Even many liberal thinkers—so often accused of “idealism”—have rooted their scholarship in a positivist worldview (Kahler, 1998). Despite the assertion by many anthropologists and sociologists that magic plays a crucial function in human societies, one finds almost no mention of the word—except occasionally in disparagement—in IR’s core modern texts, whether realist (no mention: Carr, 1981; Kissinger, 1994; Waltz, 1979; one use of the word, in disdain: Mearshimer, 2001), Marxist (Wallerstein, 2004: no mention), liberal (no mention: Doyle, 2012; Keohane, 2005), feminist (Cohn, 2013: no mention; Enloe, 2014: once, in a citation) or constructivist (no mention: Finnemore, 1996; Wendt, 1999). In fact, one of the only comprehensive reflections on the implications of IR theory for the uncanny realm is a parody: Daniel Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and Zombies (2014). As Jessica Auchter puts it, matter-of-factly, “Ghosts are often considered beyond the realm of

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legitimate exploration for social scientists” (2014, p. 3). Given IR’s silence about magic, one could be forgiven for wondering whether this actually betrays uneasy magical thinking. It is as if mentioning the forbidden word would break a taboo and IR’s reputation as a science would come under threat (perhaps from marauding economists!). However, outside of IR, the binary opposition of science and non-science has long come under scrutiny from the field of science and technology studies. The boundary between science and alternative systems of knowing is one that is constantly negotiated and contested (e.g. Dryzek, 1986; Gieryn, 1983; Hackett, Amsterdamska, Lynch, & Wajcman, 2007; Hess, 1995). The undeniable role of religion in the “New Wars” of the 1990s and the terrorist attacks on 9/11—as well as numerous efforts to build peace— has forced IR theorists to consider more seriously the roles of religion, culture and meaning in shaping global political behavior (e.g. Abu Nimer, Welty, & Khoury, 2007; Appleby, 1999; Fox & Sandler, 2004; Johnston & Sampson, 1995; Mandaville & Williams, 2015). Post-colonial thinkers have challenged IR to see how its claims to superior knowledge are rooted in a contingent and Eurocentric worldview. Post-structuralists have encouraged the discipline to consider the global circuits of discursive, affective and ontological power (e.g. Der Derian & Shapiro, 1989; Edkins, 1999; Seth, 2013). In doing so, they highlight how acts of imagination and cultural performance can call into being new political identities, reproduce existing political arrangements or cultivate forms of resistance (e.g. Bleiker, 2001; Bolton & Minor, 2016; Campbell, 1998; Jackson, 2015). Out on the edges and frontiers of IR—in the contact zone with anthropology, sociology, religious studies, development studies, philosophy and political geography—several scholars have begun to take seriously the intersections between magic and global politics (e.g. Allen, 2015; Allen & Reid, 2015; Auchter, 2014; Bennett, 2001; Hutchinson, 1996; James, 2012; Rodlach, 2006; Taussig, 1987). I’m aware of the pitfalls here. When political leaders claim an ability to summon into being “alternative facts,” it is not a time for reckless abandonment of science. The world of demining has had to defend itself from too many hucksters offering pseudoscientific shortcuts to its tedium. (One such con man, James McCormick, was sent to prison for hood-winking governments into buying his fake bomb detectors (BBC, 2013).) Nevertheless, I want to trouble IR’s complacent and settled rationalism, opening it to conversations with other disciplines that have established methods for researching systematically the connections between global politics and the “supernatural” realm of magic, spirits, myth and ritual.

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For the trepidatious, it is perhaps helpful to have a psychopomp or two who can guide us into the underworld that is the social science of magic, where few IR professors apparently dare to tread. The work of Diana Espirito Santo and Ruy Blanes is a useful place to start. The introductory review essay in their edited volume, The Social Life of Spirits (2014), points out that social science has long studied “entities whose existence we routinely take for granted … but that are as empirically invisible as ghosts.” This includes the state, culture, norms, the market, indeed, “most of the things that affect us as human beings” (pp.  1, 3). Espirito Santo and Blanes draw on anthropology and sociology, but particularly Actor-­ Network Theory (ANT), to offer methodological guidance on researching “intangible domains” (p. 1). ANT theorists argue that humans are not the only agents in society. Artifacts, architectures, ecosystems, infrastructures, technologies, art objects, ideas and discourses can influence people’s movement, behavior, identity and language, whether or not their creators are nearby or even alive. As such, these “actants” can be said to have limited independent agency and form dynamic networks of power relations with other human, natural, social and technical actants (Latour, 2007; Law, 1991; Law & Hassard, 1999. For applications of ANT to IR, see Salter (2015, 2016)). Espirito Santo and Blanes suggest that social scientists should treat intangible agents like magical beings, specters, spirits, visions, dreams, possessions and fetishes just as they would other actants (pp. 13–18). If some people act as if ghosts are real, human behavior is affected by them, making them a kind of social fact—no less real, they contend, than fiat currency (c.f. Evans-Pritchard, 1976). Magic “works” then, because the intangible actant has an impact on the “real world.” The practice of magic—mediated through human bodies’ performance, possession, utterance and symbolic intervention—can reshape social relations. Espirito Santo and Blanes are interested less in whether “intangibles” are “real” in a material sense, than how they “become true and evident in any given community” and how they produce “ontological effects” (pp.  6–7). Magical and spiritual entities in many societies function to represent the “uncanny.” These traces of Otherness are present due to their conspicuous absence in the dominant culture, exercising “peculiar power for evoking anxieties, nostalgia and curiosity” (p. 11). This recalls Jacques Derrida’s notion of “hauntology,” in which history is haunted by the ­present-­absence of repressed possibilities (Derrida, 1994; see also Auchter, 2014; Buse & Scott, 1999; Fisher, 2014; Taussig, 1997).

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To put this in terms more relatable to IR scholars, magic functions to project power. Its particular function is ontological, serving to unsettle, haunt and transform social relations, identities, certainties. Short-circuiting normal apparatuses of rule as a kind of Deleuzian “line of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3), magic generates affect, reshaping relationships to Others—people, objects, even minefields. One of the best applications of this approach to the study of global politics is Neil Whitehead and Sverker Finnstrom’s edited volume Virtual War and Magical Death, which called attention to the magical dimensions of contemporary warfare, with its “Occult unseen enemies,” remote projections of unmanned violence, technophilia and “visionary prophecies of crisis and social breakdown” (2013, p. 5). In their introduction, Whitehead and Finnstrom argued that killing one’s enemies through secretive and hidden methods, such as high-­ altitude bombing, covert operations (‘black ops’) that shape-shift the identities of killers, or the simple darkness of night, perfectly reproduce the imaginative worlds and subjective experience manifested in forms of witchcraft, magic and assault sorcery known from the anthropological literature. … Sorcery is not just analogous with virtual war, it is continuous with it—it even ‘is’ it. (p. 2)

Later in the volume, Finnstrom argues that it is impossible to write about the Lord’s Resistance Army’s impact on Ugandan life without a discussion of “violent magic,” which he argues is “produced not by the often claimed primitives of Africa but in the placement of global forces on the African scene” (Finnstrom, 2013, p. 112. See also his reflections on the “magic of international relations”: Finnstrom, 2012). Other chapters examine soothsayer-like attempts by the US military to “forecast” the moves of Iraqi and Afghan insurgents (Gonzalez, 2013) and the relationship between the global diamond trade and witchcraft-related violence among miners in Tanzania (Stroeken, 2013). In these times and spaces of tremendous anxiety, David Keen finds what he calls “a return to magical thinking: the belief and hope that we can re-­ order the world to our liking by mere force of will” (2006, p. 97). In the face of “elusive, intangible and terrifying” risks—economic uncertainty, spectacular violence, pandemic disease and disruptive technological change—we are “seeking accessible and identifiable targets” (p. 87), even if they have nothing to do with our source of suffering. “Enmity,” he writes, “can be quickly displaced onto those who are close at hand, vulnerable and

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‘available’ for victimization” (p.  95). Turning to the work of Hannah Arendt (e.g. 1951), Keen describes the process of enemy identification, in which “even if the choice is arbitrary … [it] seems to offer the cognitive satisfaction of certainty in uncertain times” (p. 89). He likens the hunt for terrorists—who are “all the more threatening because [they] cannot be identified, separated out and labelled” (p. 89)—to a “witch-­hunt,” in which we “search for someone ‘evil’ … who can be blamed” and whose “removal will produce a safer world” (p. 98). This activity is actually self-justifying, through the process of what Arendt called “action-as-­propaganda” (Arendt, 1951, p.  363). “[D]enigrating” and “attacking” people can “generate (spurious) legitimacy” through a kind of magical tautology: those who are criminals deserve punishment; therefore those who are being punished are criminals (Keen, 2006, p. 100; see also Cohen, 2001). By reducing people to abject conditions, the “distorted and propagandistic image of them”—as diseased or seemingly subhuman—can seemingly “come true” (p.  132). And, once captured, the suspected terrorist is made to confess through torture, in order to “provide the world with proof” (p. 100). Other scholars have seen more positive possibilities in global politics’ magical turn. Coker (2004) finds an opportunity to rehumanize the practice of warfare, which had been disenchanted by mechanized slaughter. Gabriella Coleman’s (2015) analysis of the political hacker network Anonymous offers appreciation for those possessed by the disruptive spirit of fun—“the lulz.” She describes the emergence of the trickster figure in global politics in the magical troll projected through the Internet. Beban and Work (2014) narrate what could be described as the advocacy efforts of a tree spirit Yeah Tape, whose possession of a woman in front of bulldozers about to appropriate forest land in Cambodia led to a campaign in which the spirit worked with monks and non-governmental organization (NGO) representatives to contest global corporate enclosure of community land. Beban and Work argue that it was important to write their account—in a peer-reviewed social science journal—“as people tell it … recounting, rather than rationalizing events in which non-human forces act as agents in their own rights” (p. 596). IR can therefore learn something from social scientists who take seriously the role of magic in global politics. Aiming to transform contexts and people through “craft,” magical practices may function as an exercise and projection of ontological power. As a result, IR scholars must pay more attention to the ways diplomats, soldiers, businesspeople and activists use imagination, fetish objects, utterances, textual interventions, symbolic representation, ritual and performance.

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Tilting at Landmines In researching landmine clearance in Southeast Asia, I have tried to familiarize myself with the voluminous political literature on the Indochinese Wars (what Americans call the “Vietnam War”). I find it intriguing that despite the role of magic and the spiritual realm in local cultures, one will search in vain for a serious consideration of it in the work of political science and IR scholars studying the wars. What makes this absence all the more striking is that one will find magic thoroughly entwined with realism in the literary depictions of those who saw the wars up close (e.g. Coppola, 1979; Herr, 1968; Ninh, 1998). In Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1975), the wars’ absurdities are represented in a US Army squad’s mind-­ bending quest from Vietnam, through Cambodia and countries of East and Western blocs, all the way to Paris. In Cacciato, everything is uncertain and shifting. The ground erupts in landmine blasts—“poof ” (p. 259)—or implodes into subterranean tunnels. Even the reliability of the narrator is questionable as he desperately struggles to control a “Russian-roulette quality of precarious existence” (Herzog, 1983, p. 88; see also Raymond, 1983). But the story almost howls with the intensity of the desire to escape—it enables the American reader to fantasize about the radical act of simply walking away, exiting the political minefield we created for ourselves in Southeast Asia with all the technological wizardry of forest-­vanishing potions. Cacciato’s magical realism captured something IR’s realism (and other schools) could not: the phantasmagoric dimension of the wars, their black magic subterfuge and the ritual bargaining of those fighting. In writing Cacciato, O’Brien was clearly inspired by the work of a fellow disillusioned soldier four centuries his elder: Miguel Cervantes. I too have found that reading Don Quixote in the Southeast Asian minefields voices insight I have found lacking in the core texts of my discipline. Since IR is so far behind other social sciences in its understanding of magic, I think it is worth going back to one of the first texts in the European tradition to really wrestle with the meaning of magic in the modern world. In Cervantes’ tale—considered one of the first and greatest modern novels— Don Quixote, an eccentric country gentleman, is so overcome by reading tales of chivalry and adventure that he sets off on a quest. He longs to be a noble knight, saving the world from wrongdoing, violence and suffering: “My intentions are always directed to virtuous ends—to do good to all, and injury to none,” he tells us (de Cervantes, 1969, p.  305). But Quixote’s inflated sense of mission is buffeted by the treacherous reality of

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Counterreformation Spain. Characters’ prejudices and misconceptions prevent them from seeing what is plainly visible. But appearances also deceive, as people under threat from inquisitorial power avoid detection, through disguise, cross-dressing and trickery. As he sojourns, Don Quixote navigates simmering conflicts—a veritable minefield of deception—but struggles to grasp this complexity. Instead he is confounded when reality fails to meet his expectations of a simple world of good and evil. “Heaven help me!,” he cries, “in this world there is nothing but plots and counter-­ plots, mines and counter-mines!” (p. 296). Quixote does not dwell on his confusion, instead leaping to deluded conclusions to explain the gap between the world as it is and the mythic one he desires. He lashes out at windmills, convinced they are giants and fights puppets and pigs, believing they are his enemies magically transformed. He makes sweeping denouncements against people he barely knows, calling them “treacherous scoundrels” or members of a “Diabolical and monstrous race!” who must “prepare for … the just chastisement of your wicked deeds” (p. 31). Sometimes, when his misperceptions are of people, they resist. “Signor cavalier, we are neither diabolical nor monstrous, but monks of the Benedictine order, travelling on our own business,” protest one among many groups of people the Man of the Mancha maligns (p. 31). But in his inflated self-importance, he either ignores their protestations or blames his blundering misunderstandings on the work of evil enchanters. In this, the story warns us of the dangers of magical thinking as a source of prejudice and violence—Keen’s witch-hunt. Toward the end of the novel, several characters, having read accounts of him, start to manipulate Quixote. Elites like the Duke and Duchess lure him with fine food, accommodation and the promise of adventure, abusing his gullibility for their own entertainment. They spin tall tales about the capabilities of the astonishing gadgets and technologies in their castle that dazzle Quixote’s desire for a world of magic and mystery: a supposed metal “talking head” and an exploding wooden horse named Clavileño they claim can fly. We, the readers, are stunned by the unending buffoonery of the Man of the Mancha. But Cervantes is more than just a comedian taking cheap shots at the fool. After the umpteenth beating and humiliation, after causing so many untended embarrassments, we begin to wonder why Quixote continues to charge forth into new adventures. Why does he keep coming back for more? In one sense, he is driven by an extravagant sense of self that makes him feel guilty for not intervening in other people’s problems. He genuinely believes that by luxuriating too long in the Duke and

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Duchess’ hospitality, he is depriving the world of his aid. But Don Quixote also has genuine grievances that prompt us to empathize with his confusion and passion for justice. Literary critics suggest that Quixote attacks the windmill because he fears that industrialization is transforming a way of life he holds dear. He is horrified that “damned machines” like guns and artillery can “take the life of a valiant knight” without him “knowing how it comes, or from where” (de Cervantes, 2003, pp. 332–333). Faced with the crushing brutality of modern life, Albert Camus (1991) has suggested that people have three basic options. The first is to delude ourselves—what Camus, perhaps uncharitably, calls “hope.” We place our faith in a magical system that will make everything turn out well in the end. Don Quixote was enchanted by chivalry. Deminers depend on everyday superstitions to brave the explosive devices they confront. They speak of talismans, the fetish of a favored piece of equipment, a comforting ritual. They transfer their fears to an object, enabling them to face mortality and delude themselves long enough to hold their hands steady and dig an instrument of death out of the earth. In today’s international arena, our delusions may include “smart landmines,” “surgical strikes,” “ethical robotic weapons,” as well as the panaceas of privatization, globalization and civil society. These fantasies can only last so long, however. They struggle against the overwhelming evidence rushing against them. Disenchantment brings despair, as we face the frightening possibility that life may not have a clear purpose. We are vulnerable to latch onto whatever magic solution is next peddled to us. Each new delusion binds us in its thrall until the dissonance with reality grows untenable, plunging us into crisis. Is it even possible to live free of delusion, or to be less judgmental, magic? Can we bear a soulless, violent world? Camus says that in the unflinching face of human suffering, thoughtful  people have to answer seriously why we should continue to live. His terrifying second option is thus suicide. In a symbolic way, it is this path that Cervantes takes when he kills off Don Quixote at the end of his book. Once Quixote realizes he has dedicated his life to delusion, he can no longer live—he cannot imagine survival outside of his fantasies. While few of us commit suicide, there is a spiritual suicide in the apathy of despair. So many of us resign ourselves to fatalistic passivity. Why bother fighting against landmines when there is always someone willing to manufacture new ones? What is the point of a disarmament treaty when someone will figure out the loopholes or invent some new way to maim people?

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But while Cervantes committed literary suicide—killing the part of himself that was Quixote—he did not commit actual suicide. Instead, he wrote a novel; he created art. Our reaction to the gap between our broken reality and that impossible dream need not be despair. In the interplay between longing and banal fact is the place of creativity. This is Camus’ preferred third option—“artistic revolt.” Camus (1991) directs our attention away from the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance to another literary character: Sisyphus. Condemned by the gods to what Homer (n.d.) called his “endless task”—rolling a stone up a mountain, only to have it roll back down and start again—at first glance Sisyphus seems like the ultimate symbol of resignation. Camus, however, instructs us to “imagine Sisyphus happy” (p. 121). He means we are to interpret Sisyphus as a performance artist, who has transformed his fate of drudgery into something symbolic, a protest perfected in repetition. Reading Camus onto Cervantes means we cannot just laugh at Don Quixote. He does not understand the wider social, economic and political forces that put machines in front of him—they might as well be magic—and so he wrestles with the windmill instead. He cannot grapple with the vague abstraction of “modernity” itself but he can tilt—medieval English for “joust”—at its manifestations. In doing so, his futile endeavor becomes a symbol—a work of art that has inspired others to push back against the dehumanizing juggernaut of technology. In essence, by treating the windmill as a monstrous giant, Quixote performs an act of magic—the windmill is a monster. Defeating it can be a symbolic and powerful act of protest. And as an object, the windmill is a more appropriate focus for his displaced anger than the people he scapegoats elsewhere in the story. Indeed, in his General Theory of Magic, Marcel Mauss observed that at the heart of many magical practices is a “formula” in which “the essence” of a phenomenon, object or being “is found in a piece of it” (p 80). Performing magic on the part can change a person’s power relations to the whole. Reflecting on Quixote allows us to consider the Antipersonnel Landmine Ban Treaty not as an absurdly inadequate response to the horrors of war. Rather, it represents campaigners’ and diplomats’ effort to tilt at landmines—the treaty and similar weapons bans are collectively authored works of art. By sending “thin strands of international law over … military powers and arms producers,” disarmament activists are knitting the social fabric of the international system, weaving a new global tapestry of nonviolent social obligations to guide our interactions and conflicts (Siebert, 2013).

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Disarmament and the Impossible Dream Almost all governments in the world—including all five permanent members of the UN Security Council—legally committed in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, “to pursue negotiations in good faith … on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control” (Article 6). There are several states that have no military forces or arsenals—notably Costa Rica—and the arsenals of many countries are small enough to pose no significant threat to global peace and security. Nevertheless, those of us who campaign for global disarmament are used to being accused of chasing an impossible dream. To continue to ask the major military powers to limit their violence is framed discursively by the dominant voices of IR as magical thinking, even a delusion (Bolton, 2016; Cooper, 2006; Rydell, 2009). However, security establishments have a penchant for naming weapons systems after gods and mythical beings: Titan, Poseidon, Skybolt, Pegasus, Reaper, Taranis. Numerous commentators have pointed out that strains of magical thinking and practices persist among weapons developers, military officials and theorists of strategy (Biswas, 2014; Mojtabai, 1986; Welty, 2016). Faced with the awesome power of the Bomb, many have felt struck by a sense of mysterium, tremendum et fascinans. Despite being a pacifist, I am embarrassed to admit that watching an American Blackhawk helicopter take off in front of me at Baghdad airport in 2003 was an awe-inspiring event. I was struck by its bristling lethality and watched, open-mouthed, as it lifted from the ground as if by levitational magic. A shiver went down my spine as I saw how, through the mediation of the pilot’s helmet, the gun turret rotated, following his gaze. I felt I was in the presence of a dragon. In Hugh Gusterson’s (1998) ethnography of Livermore National Laboratory, he observed how nuclear tests and access to secret knowledge functioned as rites of initiation, belonging and renewal for weapons scientists, buttressing their faith in the deterrence mystique. Gusterson noticed the “striking” use of “explicitly sacred language” to describe testing by scientists who prided themselves on their hard-nosed empiricism (p. 161). He was struck by the “superabundance of birth metaphors [and] fertility images” in their discourse (p.  161), in which “each nuclear explosion might symbolize … the fertility of the scientific imagination” and, through deterrence, “the guarantee of further life” (p. 164). These ideas also functioned to represent the development of weapons technology as an inevi-

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table, supernatural force beyond human control. Reminiscent of Arendt’s action-as-propaganda, Gusterson draws out the scientists’ self-justifying thought processes, in which “Each time a nuclear test is successful … the scientists’ faith in human control over nuclear technology”—and thus “the entire regime of deterrence”—is “further reinforced” (p. 161). Anne Harrington de Santana (2009) argues that nuclear weapons are fetishized. Like money, she writes, “nuclear weapons are the embodiment of power” in the international system. This means “the power of nuclear weapons is not reducible to their explosive capability.” Rather, “the physical form of the fetish object is valuable because it serves as a carrier of social value.” In other words, “Nuclear weapons are powerful because we treat them as powerful”—a kind of mystical paradox (p. 327). In her biography of the deterrence theorist Herman Kahn, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi (2005) suggests that in the impenetrable mysteries of nuclear politics—where the “unknown unknowns” and suppositions about one’s enemies abound—our “fears find corroborative form in the inscrutable flotsam blown this way and that by the world” (p. 3). This led deterrence theorists into a universe of “hypothetical models, some of which are quite firm but others merely speculative and untestable” (p. 8). The world of nuclear strategy, one of “games and forecasts, the fantastic imagery of threat assessment, or science as comic metaphysics” thus “ultimately turns on faith,” a “Pascal’s wager” of which Herman Kahn was its “merry devotee” (pp. 9, 315). As Adler (1992) has shown, these ideas about deterrence then become part of social reality, such as when arms control experts founded the entire structure of the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty on their consensus that deterrence works. Other commentators have found similar discourses surrounding guns (Springwood, 2014), drones (Kampmark, 2015; Sauer & Schornig, 2012) and torture (Holmes, 2006). Political leaders seem to have a persistent faith in the potential of violence, even though militarism often fails to produce more positive outcomes than nonviolent alternatives (e.g. Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011). This magical thinking is used by many disarmament campaigners, arms controllers and critics of the security establishment to claim they are more realistic that the neo-realists. For example, a report on the 2014 Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons noted the discrepancy in international law between the permissiveness allowed nuclear weapons and the bans on chemical and biological weapons. “It is not because nuclear weapons have some sort of inherent, magical value

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that other WMD do not have,” asserted the author, an activist associated with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Rather the special status of nuclear weapons “has much more to do with the way nuclear weapons are positioned within the political-military-­ academic industrial nexus. Any ‘magic’ these weapons are perceived to possess has been falsely granted to them by those who benefit from them materially or politically. But like all magic, the illusion can be unmasked and its power taken away” (Acheson, 2014, p. 4). This theme was later echoed in an online video produced for ICAN, which asserted “These are not magical weapons” (Sharkey, 2014). Aaron Karp (2006) urges campaigners working on SALW not to become enthralled with the absurd vision embodied in Carl Fredrik Reutersward’s knotted gun sculpture Non-­Violence, which stands outside UN headquarters in New York (and has been replicated in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, among other places). “Compared to the ideal, to the dream of liberating humanity of the trauma of war and crime, any concrete policy has to look paltry,” he chides (p. 21), advising advocates to pursue “Real Goals for a Real World” (p.  23). Similarly, Robert Muggah (2005) warns development agencies against treating disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programs in conflicted contexts as a “magic bullet,” instead arguing that a “weary” embrace of their “limitations is absolutely crucial if their full potential is to be realized” (p. 239). Anxious about being portrayed as naïve, disarmament campaigners since the end of the Cold War have thus often embraced a pragmatic and empiricist approach, cataloguing the “real effects” of weapons and focusing their political advocacy on limiting the use of weapons that cause a pattern of documentable superfluous harm. The “humanitarian disarmament” community largely adopts an insider strategy, aiming to adjust laws and policy, rather than achieve the broad-based cultural change championed by the traditional peace movement (Bolton & Minor, 2016). Their approach has had considerable success, leading to the bans on landmines (1997), cluster munitions (2008) and nuclear weapons (2017), as well as the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty and emergent policy deliberations on killer robots and the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. The development of new law and policy has contributed to billions of dollars of investment in landmine, cluster munition and unexploded ordnance clearance; improvements in stockpile management and the destruction of thousands of surplus guns; and assistance to survivors and risk education programs (Borrie, 2009; Carpenter, 2014; Cooper, 2011; Garcia, 2011; Rutherford,

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2011). The number of people injured or killed by landmines dropped from some 9000 a year in 1999 to less than 4000 in 2013 (though the numbers climbed back to almost 7300 in 2017, largely due to the wars in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen) (ICBL, 2018). Not everyone is impressed, however. Humanitarian disarmament is critiqued from the left as being a deluded enterprise, fixated on stigmatizing particular forms and objects of violence, while leaving the larger systems of militarism unchallenged. A Gramscian reading suggests that states negotiate and accept new humanitarian restrictions on war in a performance that legitimizes their hegemony and monopoly of violence. Humanitarian disarmament discourse draws on tropes and discourses that harken back to the “standard of civilization,” justifying discipline of those practices of war—and thus the people who use them—deemed “barbaric.” By fetishizing particular weapons as “Other”—mala in se—humanitarian disarmament advocates risk implicitly legitimating the slaughter endemic in “normal” war, caused by “conventional” weapons (e.g. Cooper, 2011; Latham, 2000; Mathur, 2011; Rockel & Halpern, 2009; Stavrianakis, 2011, 2012). While sympathetic to this critique, I am not entirely convinced. Like Quixote, I think there is value in a symbolic joust with a synecdoche. Banning the Bomb can be an act of revolt against the entirety of the political, economic, social and theological complex that produced it. I do not know how to fight the mysterious global flows of violent accumulation— hollowed-out, neoliberal governance provides few stable targets for opprobrium (c.f. Bauman, 2000). So why not seize upon its physical manifestations—those objects that embody our horror—to dramatize the scandal of mass-produced killing? In doing so, though, we who campaign on weapons must admit that there may be no positivist higher ground. Indeed, Whitehead and Finnstrom argue that weapons are magical, “in the sense that magic works as a dehumanizing device …, whereby the enemies’ humanity is replaced with a stereotypical and mechanical otherness” (p.  9). Ending the power of the landmine—of the Bomb, of the drone, of the gun—requires a recognition of, engagement with and transformation of its magic. As Mauss put it, “all magical representations take the form of judgements” (2001, p. 150), in this case, producing taboos that constrain the violence of major military powers (c.f. Sauer, 2015). Taboos and magical “prohibitions,” according to Mauss, establish deeply rooted beliefs that there will be “automatic sanctions” of violators—they are a remote projection of normative power (2001, p.  157). Of course

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these taboos are the result of a social and political process, “imposing those prohibitions and sustaining attitudes of repugnance behind which magic shelters” (p. 159). If we can see the fetishizing of weapons (by both their users and detractors) as a social and political phenomenon, not as a flaw to judge, we can analyze their functions and  shape them through discursive, symbolic and affective representations. Gusterson found that many anti-nuclear activists in the 1980s were haunted by nightmares about nuclear war. Their deep anxieties had been repressed by a dominant culture that claimed nuclear weapons were a source of protection rather than insecurity. As one nuclear scientist told Gusterson, “It’s not rational to have nightmares about nuclear weapons. There’s nothing you can do about them” (1998, p.  197). But activists found in the movement a place to confess to each other their troubled dreams, generating validation and intimacy (pp.  167, 197). No longer silenced, they felt compelled to share their nightmares with the public through an “elaborate social technology” (p. 203) of ritual and feverish works of representation. Gusterson offers the example of protestors painting “shadows on the sidewalks of Livermore”—the site of one of America’s most important weapons laboratories. The shadows were intended to represent those “burned into buildings and sidewalks by the extraordinary heat” of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. “The shadows were symbols, arrested somewhere between a presence and an absence, designed to make real the already destroyed but no longer visible bodies of the bomb’s first victims” and unsettle the conscience of Livermore scientists (p. 198). According to Gusterson, “In purveying these images of death and terror,” activists tried to “make real to others what is real to so many of them” (p. 198): a vision of the “all-too-possible extinction of self and society” (p. 199). Gusterson describes these as “transformative moments, which clearly have the intensity of conversion experiences for some core activists … [leading] people to dramatically reorganize their priorities” (p. 202). It appears that US President Ronald Reagan’s views of nuclear weapons were changed by watching the 1983 apocalyptic film The Day After (Stover, 2018). Despite having been a champion of the arms race, he was horrified by the movie’s depiction of nuclear war. This seemed to convince him of the need for the “deterrent” of missile defense. But it also made him incredulous of Pentagon officials who “claimed a nuclear war was ‘winnable’” (Reagan, 1990, p. 586). By January 1984, he was delivering a speech narrating his own “dream,” of seeing “the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth” (Reagan, 1984).

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While it is tempting to be cynical about this, Wittner argues that Reagan’s vision was “sincere and meant to be taken seriously by an anxious public” (2009, p. 174). It led him to be much more open to arms control negotiations on the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with the Soviet Union. Farther from the center of power and much more skeptical of deterrence and arms control, Gusterson observed the transformative power of disciplined ritualized civil disobedience among activists. Engaging with “fear, pain and ritualized transgression … produce[d] an often transcendent moment in which activists experience[d] themselves as a community of truth separate from other communities” (p. 215). Some of the most prominent examples include the Plowshares actions, started in the 1980s by radical Catholics, which continue to this day. In an upended and Quixotic sacrament, more properly described as religious rather than magical, activists break into restricted facilities and ritually destroy nuclear weapons by hammering at missiles, bombs or planes, painting slogans and pouring their own blood over the weapon. In doing so, they symbolically pollute a mechanical, anti-human object with the flow of life itself (Nepstad, 2008; Zak, 2016).

Haunting Turtle Bay Gusterson analyzed the role of these ritualized religious and magical practices among the anti-nuclear movement as an outsider phenomenon, with activists seeking to pressure political change through teach-ins, street protest and artistic representation. But in the years since his fieldwork, humanitarian disarmament advocates have brought their rituals into the rooms of global policymaking on weapons. For example, Gusterson describes a popular teach-in stunt of the 1980s anti-nuclear movement, in which, holding a ball bearing or BB, the speaker would tell the audience it represented the entire explosive power expended in World War II (including both conventional and atomic bombs). Asking the audience to close their eyes, the speaker would then pour 5000 ball bearings “slowly and loudly” into a bucket to represent the estimated explosive power of a nuclear war. His description is striking: “the cacophonous noise of the BBs against metal can be excruciating since the relentless stream continues, like hammer blows to the senses, far beyond the point where most people expect it to stop until the mind starts to say, ‘Surely now is enough, surely now is enough.’ I have seen this technique bring people to tears” (p. 199).

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Twenty years after the publication of his book, I saw this spell-bounding ritual performed at a side event during the 2016 session of the UN General Assembly First Committee (Disarmament and International Security). My experience was similar to Gusterson’s. The unrelenting staccato generated tremendous anxiety in me, heightened by the presence of hibakusha (survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) who were seated under photographs of their wounded bodies in 1945. Students of mine, who were in the room, also felt deeply moved. They talked about the event numerous times over the rest of the semester and beyond. In observing disarmament and arms control negotiations and advocacy conferences at the UN in the last seven years, I have observed many practices and patterns of thought that social scientists would identify as resembling magic. There is a faith in certain formulas of action, like producing a human rights dossier, writing press releases, sending tweets into the ether, convening side events and incanting buzzwords that resemble a kind of spell—a recipe that must be performed in order for a policy proposal to be considered seriously by policymakers (and other advocates). These can become codified as “best practices” that are transmitted from one generation of activists to another, through mentoring, publications and meetings (see Kamens (2013) on best practices as magical thinking in another context). Disarmament campaign leaders often hold information tightly, occluding their strategy and plans. There is the tragically wistful practice of leaving reports and leaflets on the table outside the door of Conference Room IV (where the General Assembly’s First Committee usually meets), hoping their votive offering will be pleasing to the spirits of the diplomatic corps. Or the sticking of campaign logos on computers, walls, documents and clothing to indicate the presence of moral actors who may be watching (c.f. Wittner (2009, p. 60) on the “eerie symbol” of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, now often called the “peace symbol”). Diplomats and military officials often draw on gendered tropes of hysteria and witchcraft in dismissing the concerns of civil society, such as when a Belarusian delegate to the Conference on Disarmament (CD) mused, bizarrely, that increased transparency would result in “topless ladies screaming from the public gallery throwing bottles of mayonnaise” (Charbonneau, 2015). In policy conversations about killer robots, I have observed a tendency to anthropomorphize and mythologize robotic weapons, with advocates, policymakers and reporters referring to Frankenstein’s monster or Terminator. I have heard delegates and activists

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expressing ambivalent awe about some of the computer scientists involved in the campaign, describing them as “mad scientists” or, in one case, “the High Priest of Robotics.” And the condemning, naming and shaming by civil society activists function as attempted curses—aiming to cast certain diplomats and states as pariahs or scapegoats for failing to progress toward more just and humane world. Anthony Burke has described disarmament as the “ghostly subject of a vast, coerced silence” in both the practice and study of international politics (2016, p. 2). A key function of disarmament magic, it seems, is the haunting of the global policy arena. I have even heard campaigners use such language of “haunting and taunting” to describe the practice of hanging around the lobbies of UN buildings, seeking to buttonhole diplomats (e.g. Jasmin Nario Galace in @ICANAustralia, 2017). In tweeting about diplomatic proceedings, activists project a disembodied cloud of witnesses—both in the room and beyond. Many have an unsettled anonymity, like Mac the Advo-cat, a kitten who tweets snarky commentary on the “humans” who fail to meet their disarmament and landmine clearance obligations. To counter the hyper-rationalist state security discourse, activists invoke the spirit of casualties to unnerve policymakers—calling into the room the unseen and unheard, reviving expired souls and deploying them to haunt euphemistic conversations with what is horrifyingly absent from them. A stunt by the combative NGO Wildfire during the February 2016 Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) meeting on nuclear weapons at the UN in Geneva offers an illustration. In the main foyer Wildfire exhibited inane and obfuscating quotations from political leaders of nuclear alliance states (Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Netherlands) next to horrific images of victims of the atomic bombings in Japan. Among the posters stood the uncanny statue of a massive weasel—eyes glowing blue— holding a nuclear bomb. Wildfire was intent on rebranding (cursing?) the nuclear alliance states as “weasels” for their vocal support for nuclear disarmament while surreptitiously enabling US nuclear planning and ­deployment. Despite having been approved by the UN before being displayed, the “exhibition was removed at the request of several delegations to the OEWG” (Wildfire, 2016). Wildfire’s advent on the disarmament scene came as quite a shock to multilateral policymakers. It initially appeared as an anonymous blog pillorying the self-righteous clichés of disarmament diplomacy. Wildfire’s cryptic first post—whose white text revealed itself slowly, line by line, against a black background—augured its taboo-­breaking intent:

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     No more commissions      No more pontificating windbags      No more paper cranes      No more NPT treadmill       No more whining, wishing and waiting      Change the game

The occluded identity generated much of the excitement; it was as if there was a sarcastic specter haunting nuclear policy talks, rounding on anyone displaying asinine moral cowardice. Mauss observed that much of the charismatic power of magic derives from its esoteric and secretive transgression of social norms (2001, pp. 28–29). The identity of Wildfire was eventually revealed as Richard Lennane, a respected former diplomat who had served in Australia’s foreign service and the UN.  For another three years, Lennane (identifying himself as Wildfire’s “Chief Inflammatory Officer”) embodied the spirit of the trickster, blithely violating the norms of diplomatic decorum, directly calling attention to the terrifying implications of policymakers’ calm, measured platitudes. While Lennane’s place among civil society advocates at the UN was a source of much controversy, one could argue that Wildfire helped open political space for more moderate NGOs to push successfully for a UN-mandated negotiation conference on a nuclear weapons ban treaty in 2017 (Bolton & Minor, 2016). While the humanitarian disarmament community as a whole has become less confrontational over time, perhaps as a result of its successes, Wildfire evoked the spirit of its beginning in the landmine ban campaign. For example, at the Oslo conference to negotiate the Antipersonnel Landmine Ban Treaty, campaigners laid a mock minefield outside the building, forcing diplomats to navigate through it to get in the door: “Its hidden sensors, if stepped on, would trigger the sounds of landmine blasts” (Williams, 2013, p.  218). According to former ICBL coordinator Jody Williams, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize, those diplomats “who supported a total ban … enthusiastically ventured across.” But others became uncharacteristically nervous, even going “so far as to sneak into the hall through a back entrance” (p. 218). Calling them on their claim of calm rationality, the phantom minefield demonstrated that officials were also capable of “emotional” and “magical thinking,” the epithets they directed at activists. It revealed the tremendous fear of nonviolent action that, among those who defend the indefensible, lies hidden under the veneer of disdain. Their dismissal of activists may be rooted in an underlying anxiety that

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disarming magic might work—just as their subconsciousness worries the spectral landmines below them might turn out to be real. It is a telling displacement that in chiding Princess Diana for calling for the landmine ban, British government officials described her a “loose cannon” (in Williams, 2013, p.  216)—she was the cannon for speaking out against weapons, not the actual artillery in the government’s own arsenal. In her memoir, Williams recalled having a European diplomat tell her that in the run up to international meetings on landmines, “I’d start appearing in his nightmares. I thought it a strange admission. Maybe he thought if he said it out loud to me directly, I’d be exorcised at least from his dream world” (2013, p. 202). As I read this passage, I began to wonder if the Impossible Dream of the disarmament activist becomes possible when it generates nightmares among those who benefit from complacent acquiescence with the status quo. When the Dream  unnerves them, stirs them, it has the potential to awaken the world to genuine new taboos, new norms, new possibilities, that only recently seemed like magical illusions.

Enchanting Disarmament According to Mauss, “People’s habits are continually disturbed by things which trouble the calm ordering of life: drought, wealth, illness, war, meteors, stones with special shapes, abnormal individuals” and perhaps we can add, weapons with particularly horrifying effects (2001, p. 171). “At each shock, at each perception of the unusual, society hesitates, searches, waits,” he writes (p. 171). In this indeterminacy, this place of ambivalence—such as the conflicted feeling when a machine you are told exists to protect you demonstrates its capacity to destroy all you hold dear—our sense of disturbance turns to magical “expectations.” In the conclusion of his book, Mauss asserts that magic is “effective, because the expectations engender and pursue a hallucinatory reality,” in which the “magical formulas” express our most “tenacious illusions” and “hopes” (p.  171). In this enacted dreaming, when we “deliberately confront the anomaly and create a new pattern of reality,” we begin, says Mary Douglas, “positively re-ordering our environment” (Douglas, 2002, p. 3, 48). This “creative movement” (Douglas, 2002, p. 3) can be potentially revolutionary, as we engage a wish to reorder our socio-political universe. As the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber put it “spectral zones are always the fulcrum of the moral imagination, a kind of creative reservoir, too, of potentially revolutionary change. It’s precisely from these invisible spaces—invisible, most of all, to

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power, whence the potential for insurrection, and the extraordinary social creativity that seems to emerge out of nowhere in revolutionary moments, actually comes” (2004, p. 34). Such moments can, of course, be destructive, in the form of witch-hunts or rabid denialism. But science too—and religion—have been complicit in tremendous destruction. Some disarmament policy professionals have recoiled from my ideas in this chapter. They feel I am trivializing their work—suggesting that it is easy, “like magic.” But the social science literature on magic, starting from Mauss and Malinowski, shows that magic is a kind of craft or labor—of ritual, performance and speech—that can be hard work. It is productive (or destructive) like all kinds of labor. I suspect that their deeper fear derives from the comprehensive discursive campaign against a more sophisticated understanding of magic, depicting it as heretical, superstitious, feminized and racialized. But in a time of remote violence, disarmament magic can function as the remote projection of normative power. Through its enchanting charm, conjuring the spirits of casualties and haunting social media, it lays nonviolent mines and nightmares in the conscience of those who defend and deploy technologies of violence. Through the exercise of ontological power—changing the discursive, symbolic and normative framing of violent technology—disarmament activists can curse landmines as mala in se and literally make them disappear. This suggests IR scholars should be more effective at examining how the magical practices of diplomats, NGO workers, soldiers and international business people affect global politics. It should also lead us to question “realistic” advice that advocates and policymakers should pursue “incremental changes that leave the parameters of an issue untouched” (Stavrianakis, 2012, p. 233). Instead, as Stavrianakis writes, disarmament activists should demand “transgressive change that fundamentally alters the social landscape as well as generates concrete improvements.” Magical thinking and practices help bridge the gap between our anxieties—whether in the minefield or a world haunted by the possibility of nuclear devastation—and our dreams of a peaceful world. They can also surface the ambivalence of those who benefit from a militarized status quo. In the words of the musical Man of La Mancha, When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. … Too much sanity may be madness—and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be! (Wasserman, 1972)

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Douglas, M. (2002). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge Classics ed.). New York: Routledge Classics. Doyle, M. W. (2012). Liberal Peace: Selected Essays. New York: Routledge. Drezner, D. (2014). Theories of International Politics and Zombies (Revived ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dryzek, J.  S. (1986). The Progress of Political Science. The Journal of Politics, 48(2), 301–320. Edkins, J. (1999). Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Enloe, C. (2014). Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Espirito Santo, D., & Blanes, R. (2014). Introduction: On the Agency of Intangibles. In R. Blanes & D. Espirito Santo (Eds.), The Social Life of Spirits (pp. 1–32). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1976). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finnemore, M. (1996). National Interests in International Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Finnstrom, S. (2012). ‘KONY 2012’ and the Magic of International Relations. e-International Relations. Retrieved from http://www.e-ir.info/2012/03/ 15/kony-2012-and-the-magic-of-international-relations/ Finnstrom, S. (2013). Today He is No More: Magic, Intervention and Global War in Uganda. In N. Whitehead & S. Finnstrom (Eds.), Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing (pp.  46–64). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Alresford: Zero Books. Fox, J. (2002). Siam Mapped and Mapping in Cambodia: Boundaries, Sovereignty, and Indigenous Conceptions of Space. Society and Natural Resources, 15, 65–78. Fox, J., & Sandler, S. (2004). Bringing Religion into International Relations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Garcia, D. (2011). Disarmament Diplomacy and Human Security: Regimes, Norms and Moral Progress in International Relations. New York: Routledge. Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. (2005). The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Nuclear War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gieryn, T. F. (1983). Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-­ Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists. American Sociological Review, 48(6), 781–795. Gonzalez, R. J. (2013). Cybernetic Crystal Ball: ‘Forecasting’ Insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. In N.  Whitehead & S.  Finnstrom (Eds.), Virtual War and

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Stroeken, K. (2013). War at Large: Miner Magic and the Carrion System. In N.  Whitehead & S.  Finnstrom (Eds.), Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing (pp. 234–250). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taussig, M. (1987). Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Taussig, M. (1997). The Magic of the State. New York: Routledge. Toynton, G. (2012). Wizards at War: Buddhism and the Occult in Thailand. In D. Z. Lycourinos (Ed.), Occult Traditions. Geelong: Numen Books. van der Geest, S. (2005). ‘Sacraments’ in the Hospital: Exploring the Magic and Religion of Recovery. Anthropology & Medicine, 12(2), 135–150. Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of International Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Wasserman, D. (1972) Man of La Mancha (A.  Hiller, Dir.). Los Angeles: United Artists. Welty, E. (2016). The Theological Landscape of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: the Catholic Church, the World Council of Churches and the Bomb. Global Policy, 7(3), 396–404. Wendt, A. (1999). Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Whitehead, N., & Finnstrom, S. (Eds.). (2013). Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wildfire. (2016). Removal of Exhibition. Retrieved February 15, 2017, from http://www.wildfire-v.org/Exhibition_removal.pdf Williams, J. (2013). My Name is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl’s Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wittner, L. S. (2009). Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zak, D. (2016). Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age. New York: Blue Rider Press.

Act 3. Lysistrata: Meaningful Human Control

Abstract  The causes of the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece have long obsessed international relations (IR) scholars, who often claim that Thucydides’ proto-realist History offers the definitive ancient account. But not everyone in Athens agreed with Thucydides’ bleak view that fear of the Other inevitably leads to violence. This chapter reflects on Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, which depicts the war between Athens and Sparta as rooted in political processes dividing people along gender and cultural lines. Themes in Lysistrata illuminate the role of protest, economic divestment and social non-cooperation in disarmament campaigns, including on killer robots and nuclear weapons. The chapter draws on the insights of feminist IR theory and the story of women’s occupation of the Greenham Common nuclear weapons base. Keywords  Disarmament • International relations • Gender • Protest • Meaningful human control • Killer robots • Peloponnesian War In May 2014, I attended the first official meeting of governments on “lethal autonomous weapons systems” at the UN’s Palais des Nations in Geneva. As computers increasingly integrate with weapons, we face the alarming possibility of “killer robots”—weapons programmed to kill or maim without requiring a person  to pull the trigger. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is calling for a global prohibition on © The Author(s) 2020 M. B. Bolton, Imagining Disarmament, Enchanting International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17716-4_3

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weapons that fail to maintain “meaningful human control” over the use of violence (Docherty, 2018). Just as the landmines treaty banned a kind of “analogue” automated violence, the Campaign aims to generate an international taboo against all autonomous killing. If force is not controlled by people, it is literally—and should be legally—inhumane. But maintaining “humanity” in war also requires a reinvigoration of disarmament diplomacy, making it more representative of humanity itself. The organizers of the meeting at the UN had arranged 18 presentations on military, technological, legal and ethical aspects of delegating violence to machines. Every single scheduled presenter was a man. When campaigners inquired why, they were told there were “no suitable women” qualified to present. This was an absurd claim. A year before, a coalition of human rights groups, academics and activists had launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, coordinated by Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch. The Campaign had high-profile support from 1997 Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams. Both the Nobel Women’s Initiative and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) were on the Campaign’s steering board. And many women attended the conference in Geneva—scholars, experts and diplomats—who were more than capable of delivering expert presentations on the topic. But they were literally marginalized by the meeting, off the podium and at the back of the room in the civil society section (Williams, 2014). The presentations themselves revealed the engrained sexism of the military, diplomacy and IT industry. Speakers suggested that killer robots might be more ethical than human combatants because they would not be “emotional.” One presenter argued that robots would not rape people—as if they could not be programmed to do so. The treaty under whose auspices the meeting was convened—the Conventional on Certain Conventional Weapons—commits states to “the principles of humanity” (CCW, Preamble). But many presenters seemed unimpressed with actual humans and willing to turn over the capacity to end human life to machines. And the panelists represented a narrow vision of the great diversity that humanity entails. In 2000, women from around the world ­mobilized to pressure the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1325, requiring the inclusion of women, and gender perspectives, in international peace and security policy. Almost a decade and a half later, many policymakers still needed convincing that women had something to contribute. Appalled, a group of women attending the conference met to discuss ways to improve respect for gender diversity in discussions of killer robots

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and other disarmament matters. Among their many ideas was a plan to call out gender discrimination in global policymaking on weapons. They committed to post photos on social media of panels featuring only men, with the tagline, drawn from a popular Tumblr (allmalepanels.tumblr.com), “Congratulations, you have a manpanel!” If the floor was open to questions, they would ask why there were no women on the panel. They refused to let men avoid responsibility for challenging gender discrimination, calling on us to reject participation on panels with no women. Chastened, a group of us men associated with the Campaign drafted a Pledge “not to speak on panels that include only men.” We agreed that when invited to participate on a panel we would ask whether women would be included, direct organizers to a copy of the Pledge and send them the names of women with appropriate expertise (manpanels.org). Out of these efforts, the Campaign eventually compiled a list of capable experts from around the world who are women (Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, 2016). That October, we hosted the annual humanitarian disarmament NGO Forum at Pace University on the theme of “gender and disarmament.” Jody Williams challenged advocates to reject the concept that violence is inevitable—especially violence by men—and resist the suggestion that those who work for peace are somehow weak and “woman-like.” Gender-based violence “should not be portrayed as a ‘woman’s issue’—it’s humanity’s issue, everybody’s issue. … Men must use their privilege to challenge and push back against gender discrimination in disarmament” (in Pace University, 2014). Since signing the Pledge, I have become more aware of my body in academic and policy settings. The Pledge requires me to think about how my gender, race and sexual orientation shape people’s interactions with me. Bodies like mine—male, white and straight—are expected, or at least not unexpected, in discussions of international peace and security. This is unearned privilege that means I get the benefit of the doubt when I am not as qualified as others in the room. I have also learned the awkwardness, even backlash, that is waiting when I point out this fact. When I refuse to speak on an all-male panel, I hear the exasperation in the organizers’ voice. But I feel accountable to my community of campaigners, who I know will call me out if I give in. This chapter examines how both IR theory and global policymaking have marginalized consideration of actual human bodies, even in discussions of “humanity” in war. The next section critiques faith in disembodied security, outsourced to machines (and technocratic thinking that makes people more like machines). Feminist IR theories call

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attention to the embodied experience of global politics, asking where certain bodies are (“where are the women?”), considering whose bodies bear the brunt of decisions and how bodies can themselves serve as vectors of resistance. I illustrate these themes with Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, which imagines women campaigning to end the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece. The subsequent two sections examine the main strategies offered by Lysistrata—withholding one’s body from collaboration and placing unexpected bodies in unexpected places—as they relate to disarmament. I show how activists seeking  to maintain meaningful human control over violence have dramatized the embodied nature of politics, refusing to hide bodies behind the cloak of ideology. They have denied allowing their bodies to participate in exclusion, while demanding the inclusion of participation by marginalized bodies. The chapter concludes with reflections on the role of the comic community—fostering bodies’ laughter and joy—as a means to subvert militarism.

Disembodied Security At Pace University’s 2012 Summit on Resilience, keynote speaker and former US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge declared that improving national security required “no more people, more technology” (in Bolton, 2013). His technophilia is representative of the American establishment’s faith in a fantasy of disembodied or “unmanned” security. In a 1970 speech, General William Westmoreland, US commander in Vietnam, predicted that “On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control.” He welcomed and “applaud[ed] the developments that will replace wherever possible the man with the machine” (1970/2007). Neo-realist international relations (IR) thought exhibits a similar distrust of the human body and its emotions. Hans J. Morgenthau (1978) insisted global politics “is governed by objective laws” discerned by distinguishing between what is “true objectively” and “subjective judgment” (p. 4). He urged “statesmen” (he only refers to men) to be “unemotional,” because “contingent elements of personality, prejudice, and … all the weaknesses of intellect and will which flesh is heir to, are bound to deflect foreign policies from their rational course” (p. 7). His perfect statesman, to me, sounds like a robot, trusting objects more than subjects. Morgenthau believed his laws were deduced from insight into an unchanging “human nature” (p. 4).

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Kenneth Waltz (1954) was less certain about the essential nature of “Man” but was convinced that given the structure of the international system, state motivation was essentially unchanging in its pursuit of survival. Global politics is an anarchic space marked by a “brooding shadow of violence” (Waltz, 1986, p. 98), where human “society”—norms, law and bonds of solidarity—is essentially meaningless. In the absence of any overarching governance, states are the only entities capable of agency, derived from their ability to wield violence. For Waltz, the only meaningful difference between states for an IR theorist is their “capabilities”— their material resources and their arsenals (1979). It is the size of one’s stockpile that determines one’s importance in global politics. And states’ rational pursuit of their interests leads inexorably to competition and often war. To demonstrate that their insights revealed something unchanging, post-World War II (WWII) realist theorists constituting the IR discipline drew on ancient tradition. They fixated on what seemed like a prophetic text, Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) was a series of conflicts between Athens and Sparta that eventually drew in most of the ancient Greek peninsula and archipelagoes. The devastation cast a traumatic pall over the literature of the time. Thucydides described how Athens, which saw itself as a democracy, and Sparta, an authoritarian regime, became locked into deadly misunderstandings. As Athens built up its navy, seeking security in military strength, Sparta grew suspicious. Unable to verify Athenian intentions for their new ships, Sparta’s fears, according to Thucydides, “made war inevitable” (2014a). The lack of an overarching system—above Athens and Sparta—to resolve conflict and ensure justice, forced both city-states to look out for themselves, abandoning high principles. In Thucydides’ Melian dialogue, appeals to “justice” mean little in war, because, as Athens informs the leaders of the poorly defended island of Melos, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Thucydides, 2014b). Caught by fear of an unknowable Other, Athens and Sparta made choices that, while rational responses to threat, ended up destroying each other and those caught in between. The “Thucydides Trap” (Allison, 2015) describes a tragedy of fate made by humans (rather than the gods) but no less inescapable than that of the Greek dramatists. War is thus beyond human control, trapping us in cycles of distrust and reprisal. For Americans on the eve of the Cold War, Thucydides offered a compelling explanation of superpower rivalry. In the absence of a world government,

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appeals to international law meant little. States would need to protect themselves. But as they built up military capabilities, there was no way to verify whether such forces were truly defensive, spurring unavoidable arms races. This mechanistic view of history leads people like Kenneth Anderson and Matthew Waxman (2012) to declare: “Lethal autonomous machines will inevitably enter the future battlefield” (p. 2). Not only will military robots operate without human oversight, their advent is irresistible by people. Indeed, there is a creeping proliferation of automated killing. Landmines, automated bombing systems and anti-ballistic missiles are all antecedents of emerging robots that require limited or no human control to kill. A South Korean robotic machine gun has the capacity to fire automatically on a heat signature (i.e. person) detected by its sensors. For now, the manufacturer insists a person must authorize the device to fire. Similarly, the Israeli Harpy loitering munition automatically dive-bombs a radar tracking it (Human Rights Watch, 2012, pp. 18–19). For some, the only escape from the tragedy of great power competition is to make it so destructive that no rational person would choose war. Waltz (1981) argued that US and Soviet “Mutually Assured Destruction” maintained a “nuclear peace.” Other neo-realists argue that America’s overwhelming military superiority imposes global stability, acting as an international police force (Webb & Krasner, 1989). Both the “nuclear peace” and “hegemonic stability” theories retain a technological determinism, suggesting that a state’s arsenal is  largely its destiny. As a result, voices in the Washington DC think-tank circuit have urged America to win the race for fully autonomous robotic weapons, staying ahead of completion from Russia and China. However, the “peace” offered by neorealism elides the violence visited on supposedly “peripheral” proxy countries (Westad, 2005), indigenous peoples, atomic veterans and “downwinders” (Fihn, 2013). It ignores those considered “collateral damage” in US efforts to police the world’s terrorist networks via drone strikes and other airborne assassinations (Acheson, Bolton, Minor, & Pytlak, 2017). Ellen Ullman (2012) warns us that computers make our thinking and behavior “closer to the machine.” Modeling the Other as a stimulus—a fragment of data to be detected and eliminated—stunts our imagination. We struggle to imagine the creativity and emotions of the person in the pixel. Paul N. Edwards (1996) has documented how American Cold War strategic thinking and information and communications technology

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co-constituted each other. The abstraction needed to program the world into binary code was aided by the world’s division into discrete, comparable units—blocs—with straightforward motivations. This worldview was then further encoded into machines that then, in turn, shaped human choices and thought. He uses an analogy drawn from literary criticism, which contrasts the “closed world” of tragedy—in which the characters are caught in the inevitability of their fate—and the “green world,” the fertile spaces of comedy, full of unexpected possibility (c.f. Berger, 1990). Edwards argues that computers often reflect back to us a “Closed World” of constrained choices, in which the complexity and surprise of the “Green World” is stripped away. Edwards offers the example of the Vietnam War-era “electronic battlefield” program which attempted to automate the fight against communist supply lines into South Vietnam. The US dropped thousands of landmines, but also acoustic, seismic and chemical sensors along the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” which sent their data to a computer in Thailand. The computer supposedly tracked troop movements and relayed target coordinates to bombers already in the air, which could release their payloads automatically. Toward the end of the war, the US experimented with pilotless drones to take humans out of this loop altogether—General Westmoreland’s grand vision. However, the electronic battlefield was easily spoofed by Vietnamese communist forces. They left audio recordings next to acoustic sensors, sent animals down trails and left jars of urine next to sensors that detected human waste. The general in charge of the program later admitted to Congress that the sensors could not distinguish between guerillas and “a group of woodcutters coming … down the trail” (in AFSC, 1972). The architects of this system, a group of academics and technologists who met far from the battlefield in Boston and Santa Barbara, also failed to anticipate people’s moral qualms about digitized slaughter. Disclosed in the Pentagon Papers, the electronic battlefield program prompted Congressional hearings, spurred the outrage of the peace movement and fueled communist propaganda, casting the America as a heartless technological behemoth (Cockburn, 2015; Edwards, 1996).

Body Politics There are IR thinkers who offer alternative theories of global politics, as if we have bodies. When feminist IR theorist Cynthia Enloe (1990) asks “Where are the women?,” she means it literally. Where, physically, are the

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bodies of women in international politics? What are they doing? With whom are they relating? None of these questions ever appear in the works of the classic neo-realists. But answering them, says Enloe, “reveals the dependence of most political and economic systems not just on women, but on certain kinds of relations between women and men” (p.  133). Enloe’s analysis showed that military forces, diplomacy and international trade relied on the hidden labor of women: affective work of keeping male soldiers company, throwing diplomatic parties, providing counsel to highprofile spouses. Constructivist and post-structuralist thinkers have taken these questions further, asking how the ways we construct the very notion of what it means to be woman (or man, or transgender) affects global politics and vice versa (Brettschneider, 2011; Sjoberg, 2015). If, as Alexander Wendt (1992) put it, the world is what we make of it, gender norms, states and global institutions are social constructions, they are mutable. They are shaped by human bodies narrating, drinking, arguing, having sex, cursing, sailing, praying, caressing, negotiating, fighting and celebrating. Therefore, the development of killer robots—like any other weapon—is not the inevitable result of some unchanging essence of the state. Rather, it is a social process, the result of norms that frame power as the domination of human bodies. Masters (2005) argues that military robots are expressions of “militarized masculinities,” worldviews that impart to technology “the ability to reason and think without being interrupted by emotions such as guilt or bodily limitations” (Masters, 2005, p. 114). As expressions of culture, then, Sharkey (2012) argues that killer robots are “evitable”—humans can make decisions about the technological future. We can constrain violence through norms of humanity and institutions favoring dialogue over fighting. Indeed, it matters which bodies are in the room where decisions are made. Research on peace negotiations suggests that meaningful participation of women is “positively correlated with agreements being reached and implemented” (Paffenholz, Ross, Dixon, Schluchter, & True, 2016, p.  6). This is not because women are more peaceful as a matter of biological essence, but rather, their presence can aid in reframing conversations outside discourses of militarist masculinities (Charlesworth, 2008). Similarly, Minor (2017) has shown that greater representation of the diversity of humanity—whether of gender or of national origin—is correlated with more progressive disarmament policymaking. However, it is no accident that most discussions of weapons and war have been exclusionary. In her classic analysis of cleanliness taboos, anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966/2002) argues that “dirt” is not an

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objective category. Rather it is “matter out of place” (p. 44), the “residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications” (p.  45): objects, substances, creatures and even people that have transgressed a discursive boundary that provides us with meaning. Cleanliness taboos protect “consensus on how the world is organized” and shore “up wavering certainty” (p. xi). When “behavior … blurs the great classifications of the universe. … We denounce it by calling it dirty and dangerous” (p. xi). The polluting element is represented as a threat to the health of the whole, a contagious source of corruption. Our sense of what is a risk or threat is an emotional one, an affective relationship to the world around us (Beck, 2006). Fear is the result of social and political processes that have focused our anxieties on specific Others. We can see this classifying process in international policymaking on weapons. The neo-realist IR theory that is so influential in diplomatic, military and intelligence circles is representative of a broader Western tendency to establish a binary division between mind and body. The mind is classified as reasonable, dominant over a body, easily swayed by sentiment and sensation (Ussher, 2002). The binary is mapped onto gender, with straight men associated with the mind and everyone else—women, LGBTQA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer and Asexual) persons— coded as more driven by the body (Rosengren, 2018). Policymakers use euphemism and statistics to mask the body in conversations about war, fixating on weapons rather than people affected by them (Cohn, 1987). The body—and those people associated with it—is an unwelcome intrusion. As Douglas might predict, when bodies show up in spaces where they are not expected—or they fail to show up where they are anticipated—it can generate anxiety. Instead of every  body being where it is “supposed to be,” an unexpected appearance or non-appearance generates a confusion about the categories that ground our sense of normalcy. The body that is “out of place” demonstrates the permeability of social classifications: “Ambiguous things can seem very threatening” (p. xi). Since, unlike many diplomats, I am not chauffeured to the UN, I have to walk from Grand Central Station. In summer, by the time I get there, I am a sweaty mess. If it is raining, umbrellas offer little protection against winds blustering around skyscrapers. With no assistant to carry my bags, I juggle my computer and stacks of heavy policy reports. Arriving at the security gate, I watch jealously as diplomats and UN staff are waved through by bored guards. I go through the metal detectors, taking off my belt and jacket, unpacking my laptop and removing my wallet and keys.

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Once I have reassembled myself, I feel discombobulated. I worry that I smell. Something must be in my teeth! Damp and askew, aware of my cheap Men’s Wearhouse suit, I notice people’s raised eyebrows. Similarly, representatives of states with a few diplomatic staff confide that they simply cannot be in all the relevant meetings at the same time. In honest moments with civil society and diplomatic personnel, I have learned that many of us worry about how bodies, in all their messiness, do not always seem welcome at the UN. In not conforming, they become visible and an inconvenient reminder of how much global policymaking relies on bodies. However, Douglas argues that a society’s attitudes toward dirt, and the social codes that frame it, are malleable: “taboo-maintained rules will be as repressive as the leading members of the society want them to be. … [W]hen the controllers of opinion want a different way of life, the taboos will lose credibility and their selected view of the universe will be revised” (p. xiii). We do not always react to the advent of the strange matter in the same way: “pollution beliefs can be used in dialogue of claims and counter-claims to status” (p. 4). The word sacred comes from the Latin sacer— “to set apart.” Prophets and poets alike see the ambiguity of an object or person set apart. The transgression of normal categories helps us imagine alternative worlds. It is, Douglas observes, “not always an unpleasant experience to confront ambiguity” and “Aesthetic pleasure arises from the perceiving of inarticulate forms” (pp. 46–47). To call someone dirty, in the English language, can be an expression either of disgust or of erotic excitement. Similarly, the word “germ” is both a symbol of threatening pollution and the seed of new life (“germinate”). For Douglas, then, matter out of place can be profoundly transformative (see also Campkin, 2013). “Persons in a marginal state,” who are “placeless” or transgress “the patterning of society” pose a threat to the established order (p.  118). They will often be subjected to “social s­anctions, contempt, ostracism, gossip, perhaps even police action” (p. 92). But if they are persistent in their defiance, they can challenge people to imagine new ways of being. Dirty people—people in the “wrong place”—can be revolutionary. Judith Butler (2011) has argued that “For politics to take place, the body must appear.” Social change occurs when bodies relate to each other: “I appear to others, and they appear to me, which means that some space between us allows each to appear.” This space is that of performance, culture and negotiation. When an unexpected body appears in such political space, it is “posing the challenge in corporeal terms,” forcing other bodies to come to terms with previously ignored lives.

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Therefore, disarmament advocacy has often relied on placing unexpected people—survivors, women, diplomats from the Global South, activists—into spaces where they are not welcome. In doing so, they aim to reorder the world in new ways. They insist that it is not their presence that is sullying global politics, but rather nuclear weapons, landmines, cluster munitions and killer robots that are the source of pollution.

Lysistrata’s Green World Given the wide range of ancient writings about the Peloponnesian War, it is odd that IR scholars have fixated on Thucydides. Thucydides’ pessimism reflected a cultural moment, in which many Athenians felt trapped: “there seemed to be no way out” of the war “other than the unthinkable option of capitulation” (Sommerstein, 2002b, p.  134). But there were other Greek voices, rarely taught in IR classes, with alternative explanations for the war and who imagined possibilities for peace (Roberts, 2017). Aristophanes, among Athens’ most popular contemporary playwrights, was troubled both by the war and by the vilification of Spartans (Sommerstein, 2002a). Rather than offering a scholarly treatise, he opted for a bawdier genre. Unlike Thucydides, who claims to offer a factual account of the war, Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata offers us an imagined world of “unlimited possibility” and “unlimited inclusivity” (Sommerstein, 2002a, p. xxxix, emphasis in original). At first glance, Lysistrata seems like a farcical romp. In McLaughlin’s (2005) adaptation, a character describes the play as “a bunch of Ancient Greek dick jokes” (p. 240). But contemporary audiences would not have interpreted this as inherently frivolous, as “Athenians … thought that comedy could exert an influence on public opinion and … public policy” (Sommerstein, 2002a, p. xviii). The ­dramatic festivals in honor of Dionysus—god of wine and fertility—attracted thousands, giving playwrights “the biggest citizen audience that any kind of public discourse could ever hope to have in Athens” (p. xix). While Athenians felt trapped by the war, “comedy specializes in doing the impossible, and in Lysistrata fantasy supplies a way out” (Sommerstein, 2002b, p. 134). In Lysistrata Aristophanes suggests the Peloponnesian War is not just about military imbalances and fear, it also has something to do with gender. Seeking to stop the war, the title character calls together young women from across the Greek world, even Sparta. Lamenting how women disproportionately bear the costs of the war, Lysistrata proposes women

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work together to bring about peace: “The whole future of the country rests with us” (Aristophanes 421 BCE/2002, p. 142, line 33). The text implies the Other is not unknowable; Athenian women can find mutual solidarity with those from Sparta. Lysistrata’s proposed course of action—refusing to have sex with men until they stop fighting—is so preposterous that her co-conspirators protest. But Lysistrata predicts that when the “men are all horny and can’t wait to leap on us … then they’ll make peace soon enough” (p. 146, lines 151–154). The women tease their lovers, leaving them in a state of desperation, using “see-through shifts,” “saffron gowns and make up” as their weapons (p. 142, lines 20, 47). The sex strike runs into the usual problems of collective action. Some women’s will is stronger than others’. Lysistrata repeatedly has to maintain her comrades’ resolve. Aristophanes suggests that some spirit beyond human comprehension is at work. Lysistrata insists the women swear an oath to the “mighty Goddess of Persuasion” (p.  148, line 204), cursing those who break it. Aphrodite quickens the men’s desire and Aristophanes hints that Lysistrata is an avatar of Athena, patron goddess of the City, war and wit (Sommerstein, 2002b, p. 136). History is thus not an unwinding of our preprogrammed nature, it is open to surprise from the spirit in the machine. In one of the play’s darker moments, Lysistrata acknowledges that men may rape them. Those who fight for peace often suffer brutalizing backlash and women live with the persistent fear of sexual violence. Lysistrata offers no suggestion that such suffering is redemptive. But she insists the women must refuse to participate in any cover up of their suffering or to offer any comfort to their abusers. “Make life a misery for them,” counsels Lysistrata, offer them “no pleasure” (pp.  146–147, lines 161, 163–164). As a result, Lysistrata’s strike is not only a refusal to have sex, it is a defiant boycott of all affective labor that makes men feel comfortable with their privilege and violence. This is not easy. Lysistrata is frustrated by women’s internalization of narratives portraying them as sex objects (p. 146, lines 139–140). She expresses exasperation with women’s preoccupation with domesticity: “dammit, there are more important things than” cooking and weaving! (p. 142, line 20). While less remembered, the play has another important subplot. Lysistrata accuses the men of using war for profiteering, making them reluctant to seek peace. In McLaughlin’s (2005) adaptation, Lysistrata condemns this as a “truly criminal lack of imagination”; the only thing men “ever think to do with money” is to squander it “on the machinery of death” (pp.  228, 230). “We,” says Lysistrata, “have other plans for our

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riches” (p. 230). She organizes the elderly women to “occupy the Acropolis” (Aristophanes, 421 BCE/2002, p. 147, line 176), which served as both the center of Athenian religion and as the city-state’s treasury. Ending war, according to Lysistrata, requires direct action, a refusal to accept the current modes of allocating resources. Such action need not be violent. Lysistrata says, “It’s not crowbars that we need, it’s intelligence and common sense” (p. 157, lines 432–433). The women’s defiance shocks the men. In the dueling choruses, men threaten women with the “funeral pyre” (p.  155, line 373). By contrast, the singing women allude to the power of water to douse and emasculate the flames: “With all this shivering,” the men complain, their phalloi are “already … withering” (p.  156, lines 385–386). Their power, once it has been unmasked, is more fragile than it might be initially appear. For Lysistrata, weaponry is not beyond our control and we are capable of influencing our destiny. Overcoming insecurity is not achieved through mutual threat, but rather through building linkages across the divisions of culture, gender and age. Society is malleable, changed through disciplined collective action. Lysistrata identifies two forms of nonviolent power that offer agency even in the midst of terrifying violence: 1. Non-cooperation: refusing to allow access to one’s body, withholding it from where it is expected 2. Occupation: placing one’s body where it is unexpected and using it to obstruct the normal operation of politics, the market and religious and cultural rites Ultimately, the men of Athens and Sparta are so defeated by the women’s nerve, so desperate for sex, that they come to Lysistrata to broker a deal. She reminds Athenians and Spartans of their shared institutions, including shrines and a history of fighting the Persians together. While Thucydides’ History frames ancient Greece as a “closed world”—a trap with no escape from our fate of mutual distrust and violence—Lysistrata offers us a “green world.” She sees inter-Greek relations as full of surprising (re)productive possibility. The play dramatizes opening politics in Athens to new bodies: “including everyone, immigrants, friendly foreigners … those in debt to the Treasury … [and those from] other states which are colonies of Athens” (p.  163, lines 581–583). Both choruses would have sung and danced to their lines, enlivening the stage with their movement. Aristophanes’ comedy, asserts McLaughlin, “has its counterparts in new vaudeville clowns, circus and cabaret far more than in conventional

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drama” (McLaughlin, 2005, p. 195). Rather than insisting on dour activism, Lysistrata offers a vision of what Bergman and Montgomery (2017) call “joyful militancy,” filled with wit, humor and play. While Lysistrata arguably had little impact on the outcome of the Peloponnesian War, it has served as a perennial encouragement to women’s peace movements. McLaughlin’s adaptation was one of more than a thousand productions of Lysistrata staged in 59 countries in 2003–2004 to protest the invasion of Iraq (Blume & Bower, 2004). One of the most notable intersections between the play and disarmament history is the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common military base, in Newbury, UK, from 1981 to 2000. The play served as both an inspiration for the participants in the occupation and has been used by observers to try to understand it.

Greening Greenham Common The Greenham Common encampment started with a 1981 march by “Women for Life on Earth,” from Cardiff, Wales, to protest the planned deployment of American nuclear cruise missiles at what was officially a Royal Air Force base. Deploying intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe was a serious escalation of the arms race, putting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ (USSR) Western cities within range of rapidly deployable nuclear weapons. The new cruise missiles were uninhabited and self-guiding. Using preprogrammed maps in their onboard computers, they were immune to the human second thoughts of a bomber pilot. Once they were fired, there was no chance to stop them. For the marchers who stayed to establish a Peace Camp, the base was the ultimate expression of a closed military worldview. In their recollections, they express horror at the perimeter fence, which enclosed an ancient common. Rebecca Johnson, who had been living at Greenham for a year, recalled to Harford and Hopkins (1984, p.  41), the fence represented “violence, against us and against the land.” The missiles were disembodied machines, constructed by the mutual mistrust of “frightened, rigidly defensive old men” (Pettitt, 2006, p. 10). In an attempt to allay the public’s fears of nuclear war, in 1980 the UK’s Conservative government had widely distributed civil defense leaflets, titled Protect and Survive. With a cover depicting the silhouette of an archetypal heterosexual nuclear family—man, women, girl and boy—it outlined ludicrously inadequate ways “to make your home and your family

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as safe as possible under nuclear attack.” The leaflet’s approach amounted to constructing a closed world inside one’s own house: “Your best protection is to make a fall-out room and build an inner refuge within it. … You will need to block up windows in the room, and any other openings” (Central Office of Information, 1980). The women at Greenham did not want to hunker down and accept the apocalypse. Pettitt (2006, p.  309) asserts that “There is no inevitability about history” and that “ordinary people can and do make a difference.” The women thus looked for ways to “escape nuclear warfare’s suicidal trap” (Fairhall, 2006, p. 190). Unlike the blithe fatalism of the soldiers who told the women “We are just doing our job,” Greenham women felt seized by the terror of nuclear weapons. Many Greenham women recalled having baroque nightmares of nuclear devastation that compelled them to speak out (Fairhall, 2006, p. 10). Rebecca Johnson spent five years at the Greenham Common encampment, serving time in prison for participation in actions like scaling and occupying the base control tower. While I have known her for several years in disarmament circles—we also share in common childhoods at the Bruderhof intentional communities—I had never interviewed her about her Greenham experience until recently. We sat down in the East River Lounge at UN headquarters during a break between meetings. She told me that after visiting Hiroshima while teaching in Japan for two years, she had recurrent nightmares in which she would look out of the window of her flat and London “would all be rubble and the Dome of Saint Paul’s [cathedral] was broken in the same way as the [Atomic Bomb] Dome of Hiroshima.” “You spend your waking life rationalizing” nuclear weapons, she reflected, “but when you sleep … your mind connects things up with the rest of you. My subconscious was showing me the post-nuclear apocalypse. I didn’t feel terrified by the dream—it kept making me think. I needed the dream to shift me, to help me recognize that this is something frightening that I need to do something about.” The dream spurred her to visit Greenham Common. “After I started living there,” Johnson said, “I never had the dream again.” Arriving at Greenham, the peace women saw hints of alternative possibilities. Johnson told me that she saw the encampment as “creating the space for other imaginations.” Ann Pettit recalls feeling enchanted by the “ancient common”: “a sylvan corner of the Old English Wildwood … with green trees and brambles and fungi” (2006, p. 78). She imagined it as the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It, in

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which “All the world’s a stage” (Act II, Scene VII, Line 139): identities are mutable, love is powerful and the air is full of magical opportunities. Over the coming years the women framed their occupation as a “theatrical arena” (Liddington, 1991, p.  252, emphasis in original), dramatizing a confrontation between men and women, force and non-violence, destruction and fertility, death and life, inhumanity and humanity. Early on, the campers determined that the Greenham occupation would be governed by two crucial rules. First, the occupation and any demonstrations would remain committed to non-violence. Second, the camp would only allow women to stay, and women would play a central organizing role in all associated actions. Greenham women enlivened the Common, infusing it with feral energy, drawing attention to their embodied presence. One member of the Peace Camp remarked that tearing away sections of the fence “was, for me, a powerful celebration, and an expression of … ‘No’ to the machine and the barriers it creates … that keeps us so alienated, East from West, black from white, heterosexual from homosexual” (in Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 159). Visiting protestors were encouraged by “Carry Greenham home,” a popular song that folk-singer Peggy Seeger wrote after participating in the women’s iconic “Embrace the Base” public encirclement on 12 December 1982. Just as Lysistrata sought to link up with women across Greece, the Greenham women’s efforts demonstrated interconnections between the supposedly closed world of the base and people around the globe (Liddington, 1991, p. 251). Greenham women supported the women in Palau/Belau resisting US efforts to overturn the country’s anti-nuclear constitution. Their work was publicized through feminist networks around the world (Fairhall, 2006, p. 33). They traveled to the USSR to meet with dissidents and peace activists. They filed suit in a US Federal Court, seeking to block the deployment of the cruise missiles (Hickman, 1986). Women from all over the world visited the camp, including a delegation of Maohi people/French Polynesians who spoke about the impact of nuclear testing in the Pacific and a Namibian activist who alerted them to the impact of uranium mining (Harford & Hopkins, 1984, pp. 104–106). As a Greenham leaflet put it: “The ‘camp’ seems to be the centre of the web—threads reaching everywhere—each one … creating new strands of thought in hidden corners” (in Liddington, 1991, p. 251). There were, of course, conflicts between the Greenham women: over money, representation to the outside world, tactics, even, initially, the decision in March 1982  to exclude men. However, drawing on

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Quaker, anarchist and feminist practice, they sought to make decisions not through hierarchy but rather consensus and listening circles (Fairhall, 2006, p. 25; Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 3). This commitment to open dialogue was itself a demonstration of an alternative politics. Its egalitarianism contrasted with the brutality of the police and bailiffs who periodically arrested, beat, evicted and dispossessed them (Fairhall, 2006, pp.  35–37). Notwithstanding the difficulties, Greenham, Johnson told me, “was a very freeing place.” Greenham Common, as part of the broader transnational outcry against nuclear weapons, helped push the superpowers to the negotiating table (Wittner, 2009). The Greenham women showed that “however the odds were stacked, it was still possible to protest and survive” (Julie Christie in Fairhall, 2006, p. vii). Heralding progress on nuclear arms control, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1984) endorsed the goal “removing the threat of nuclear war anywhere”: “whatever is dividing us, we live on the same planet and Europe is out common home—a home, not a theatre of military operations.” On 8 December 1987, the US and USSR signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated from their arsenals an entire class of nuclear weapons, resulting in the eventual withdrawal of cruise missiles from Greenham. In a lawsuit brought by two Greenham women, judges ruled that the UK Ministry of Defence had illegally fenced and built upon the common, restricting the rights of the public to use and traverse it (Fairhall, 2006, pp. 109–114). Sommerstein (2002a), authoritative translator of Aristophanes, dismisses the comparisons between Lysistrata and the Greenham Common peace women as “misleading” because Aristophanes was not a pacifist. Lysistrata hints at using violence to achieve her goals (pp. xx, xlii). However, this represents an impoverished view of how art and life interact. The Peace Camp at Greenham Common was of course not an exact copy of a fictional story set in ancient Greece. Rather, it displays serendipitous parallels that offer insight into feminist organizing against war. The play has also woven into the discourse about Greenham Common—some peace campers were inspired by the play, re-enacting and reinterpreting it in their own moment. In 1982, supporters of Greenham Common began publishing a “women and peace magazine” titled Lysistrata, offering commentary on camp life and nuclear disarmament. The cover of the first issue depicts Lysistrata snapping a cruise missile in half (Feminist Archive North, 2008, p.  4). The Greenham Common experience has, in turn, generated new interpretations of the play. For example, British secondary

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school students are assigned to write essays comparing the play and the camp. Playwright Tony Harrison’s The Common Chorus (1992) relocates an adaptation of Lysistrata to the Women’s Peace Camp. Most crucially, Greenham women shared with Lysistrata an imaginative politicization of their bodies, refusing to be complicit in state violence and placing their bodies where they are least expected.

Withholding Bodies Lysistrata has inspired many “lysistratic strikes” around the world, with women in places of conflict refusing to have sex with men until they made peace with their enemies (Anderson, 2012). The witness of Greenham Common also shows us less literal, but nonetheless still powerful, ways to withhold our bodies’ participation in oppressive systems. Greenham women refused to comply with laws and instructions from authorities they saw as unjust and maintaining the patriarchal structures of nuclear deterrence. When arrested for blockading the gates to the base, many would go limp, making the job of the police more difficult, forcing awareness of the embodied humanity of the person being detained. Johnson told me that from Lysistrata they drew inspiration for “not giving men what they want” and connecting militarism to toxic forms of masculinity. The Greenham women also withheld their participation from sexist and homophobic elements of the peace movement. A letter to the editor in response to a Guardian article “Peace Campaign That Fuels the Sex War,” asserted that “As long as men still insist on being at the centre of e­ verything that happens in our society, we’ll still need women-only demonstrations. … Too many men—even those in the peace movement—still think storming the fence is more glorious than bringing up children” (in Liddington, 1991, p. 255). Johnson asserted that the Greenham occupation was not based on a biological claim that women were “nicer, kinder, sweeter.” Rather, both sexism and militarism relied on systems of domination that constructed women and civilians as passive and vulnerable, requiring the protection of violent men. Breaking into a quiet song—to the surprise of a diplomat sitting near us at the UN—Johnson offered me a Greenham anthem sung to the troops and police inside the wire: “You got power over/But you got no power within.” Lysistrata helps us imagine ways to refuse collaboration with dehumanization. In a more recent example, more than 4000 Google employ-

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ees signed a letter calling on their bosses to pledge never “build warfare technology.” Under “Project Maven,” Google had agreed to help the Pentagon use artificial intelligence (AI) to process drone footage. Alarmed, several employees resigned. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots supported the protesting workers, drawing media attention to the company’s betrayal of its early (recently abandoned) mission statement: “Don’t Be Evil” (Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, 2018). Given the competition for skilled technologists in Silicon Valley, Google managers feared the implications of losing talent. The company announced that it would not renew the Project Maven contract and “would not use A.I. for weapons or for surveillance that violates human rights” (Wakabayashi & Metz, 2018). Johnson, whose Acronym Institute is on the steering board of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), sees the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) as an expression of the spirit she found at the Women’s Peace Camp. “Like Greenham,” she writes, “the effectiveness of ICAN has depended on the decision to reframe disarmament as a humanitarian and environmental issue. Instead of becoming trapped in State-centred, military-stability arguments such as deterrence,” both ICAN and the Greenham occupation “challenged the role of power, status and gender in normalizing and perpetuating weapons and war” (Johnson, 2016, pp. 44–45). These concerns are reflected in the final TPNW text. The Preamble acknowledges the “disproportionate impact” of ionizing radiation “on women and girls” and recognizes that “the equal, full and effective participation of both women and men is an essential factor for the promotion and attainment of sustainable peace and security.” It commits states “to supporting and strengthening the effective participation of women in nuclear disarmament.” Article 1 of the TPNW commits states parties “never under any circumstances to. … Assist, encourage or induce, in any way, anyone to engage in any activity prohibited” by the treaty. Since humans exist in webs of relationships, they can be molded, persuaded, stigmatized and cajoled. ICAN campaigners in New York City are now trying to persuade the local government to divest its pensions and finances from nuclear weapons. We want to disentangle the fruits of our city’s labor from weapons of mass destruction (WMD). By refusing to allow our labor and possessions to be used for nuclear destruction, we demonstrate that

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weapons are not magical; they rely on humans to produce, maintain, deploy and legitimate them.

Unexpected Bodies Militarism relies on controlling human bodies, reshaping soldiers with conditioning and clothing them in uniforms. Military bases are highly regulated spaces that require specific documentation to visit and circumscribe activities to rigid timetables. Greenham women’s symbolic power derived from the arrival of their unexpected bodies into the closed realm of a nuclear weapons base. Cutting through the fence, women dressed as snakes and furry animals invaded the base. They wove massive spider webs from yarn, floating one over the base with helium balloons. They decorated the fence: “I wanted to fill its holes with colour,” said Chris Mulvey, “so that when I looked again I would see Life and Beauty not threat and cold sterility” (in Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 91). Jonathan Steele, former Soviet Union correspondent for The Guardian, described the effect of the Greenham encampment and similar demonstrations as putting “a third actor on to the Cold War stage. … Whereas arms control negotiations used to take place in arcane private discussions between superpower leaders … the advent of the peace movement forced the core issues into the open” (in Fairhall, 2006, p. 202). In one of their largest ever demonstrations, the Greenham women persuaded 35,000 women to surround the entire perimeter and “Embrace the Base” on 12 December 1982. “Hand in hand in hand, for nine miles we formed a living chain to … stand between them and our world and to say: we will meet your violence with a loving embrace” (Chris Mulvey in Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 92). Breaking in on New Year’s Day 1983, they danced atop one of the missile silos, resulting in one of the o ­ ccupation’s most iconic photographs. They demonstrated the “embarrassing insecurity of the base” (Tracy Hammond in Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 156). The fence was a “semi-permeable membrane” (Fairhall, 2006, p.  108); Greenham Common could never be a hermetically sealed world. Greenham women revived ancient British and Celtic spiritualties, syncretizing them with other indigenous traditions, calling on the pagan spirits of the earth to protect them: “You can’t kill the spirit,” they would sing, “She is like a mountain/Old and strong/She goes on and on and on.” In protests at Parliament Square and outside the High Court, they would keen, the ancient Celtic practice of wailing in mourning, associated

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with the banshee—fairy women of Irish lore who warn of impending death. Watching the footage fills me with dread as their discordant notes refuse to resolve, drawing out of me an unbearable pain, keeping me there, denying any chance to hide my emotional response (Grandmothers Keen, 2010). To English people used to maintaining emotional reserve, it was deeply unsettling: “there was a buzzing in my ears and I thought I was going to pass out,” recalled one Greenham woman of her first encounter with keening, “instead the tears just flowed. … In fact, it was the completion of my whole life up to that point.” Johnson told me that she arrived at Greenham as a “political person,” a “scientist” by training, with a master’s degree in Far East Politics. She was initially uninterested in the prevailing mysticism at Greenham. However, “living outdoors—in seasons, seeing trees bloom, feeling the cold,” she began to feel an “intimacy and protectiveness of the natural world.” She found the rituals before nonviolent actions concentrated her mind. Even though she had convincing social scientific explanations for the functions of such practices, “it doesn’t mean it wasn’t magical.” She discovered wonder and enchantment at the Common: “we aren’t just a body and a mind with bits attached.” While the military sought to strip any affective response from their soldiers, the Greenham women staged startling moments of performance, drawing out the emotions of soldiers, police, judges, reporters and the public. “Whose side are you on?,” they would sing insistently in the faces of police: that of life or that of mass slaughter? At the fence, demonstrators held up mirrors, encouraging troops inside to reflect on their work. Johnson told me she sought to look into the eyes of the drivers of the missile launchers as she stood in front of them in the road. This was not only intended to “see the humanity in those whose jobs was to protect inhumanity.” It was also to “confront them with their own humanity.” In chanting “Here I am, a woman unarmed! You’re driving a big machine,” she showed  the driver his own responsibilities. If his sense of humanity prevented him from running over a single person in the road, how much more preposterous was his mission to deploy weapons capable of killing entire cities full of people. The advent of the Greenham women’s unexpected bodies provoked a fierce reaction from those who saw them as out of place. Johnson recalls people shouting “dirty lesbians” out of their cars; “damn right” was her rejoinder. Others remember comments of “why aren’t they at home looking after their families” (Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p.  21). Greenham

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women were also subjected to legal persecution and violence by police and bailiffs. Vigilantes from the nearby town destroyed their property, food and water supplies. But some Greenham women also used their very unexpectedness as a kind of protection: “the police would feel uncomfortable and less competent when faced with peaceful resistance from hundreds of cheerful, smiling, singing women, particularly as their training relates to … aggressive crowds” (in Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 31). While perhaps more open than a military base, access to multilateral discussion of peace and security matters is also carefully controlled. Entering one of the more open forums—the General Assembly’s First Committee— requires passing through airport-like security at the UN’s entrance on First Avenue. Unless you are a diplomat or UN official, you must have an NGO “grounds pass”—an ID card that is only issued to a small number of people working with groups officially approved by the UN.  If you are not an accredited journalist, the UN’s police officers will confiscate any sophisticated camera equipment and hold it until you leave the building. If you try to bring an unauthorized banner, they may refuse your entrance. During the TPNW negotiations, several ICAN activists were blocked from entering for several hours because UN Security had seen them shouting their support to activists committing civil disobedience at the US Mission across the road. Many of the civil society representatives who have access to such spaces are thus an elite few—highly educated experts, often from the Global North, with years of insider experience in multilateral policymaking. There are often revolving doors between these civil society representatives and diplomats and officials from their countries or regions. Instead of being advocates for change, many come to share with their diplomatic colleagues assumptions about what is appropriate and possible. They participate in disciplining and silencing other civil society voices. Few have been directly, personally affected by the violence under discussion. Limiting access stunts pressure for bold action. It reduces the possibility that squeamish decisionmakers will have to encounter anything emotionally unsettling. In my experience of observing global disarmament policymaking, it has taken the advent of unexpected people to spur progress. As we often learn from mythology, a stranger coming to town is profoundly disruptive. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) fought hard against the bloodless tone in the CCW in Geneva. The surging public outcry against mines carried many people into the policy conversation who were, according to the norm, not supposed to be there. Jody Williams’ pugnaciousness shocked diplomats used to the smooth charm of the

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cocktail circuit. But most importantly, ICBL placed survivors of landmine blasts themselves at the very center of the conversation. For example, at the 1995 CCW Review Conference, Song Kosal, an 11-year-old survivor from Cambodia, addressed the diplomatic community, calling for a ban on landmines and assistance to victims. The appearance of a child, bearing the physical impact of the weapon in her body, is a moment that many diplomats and civil society campaigners remember as a galvanizing one. In a letter to a CCW meeting on landmines the following year, she and five other Cambodian landmine survivors wrote: If you fail to outlaw landmines you will not extinguish our hope. … But you will be less human for your decision. You will go home knowing that you had it in your power to alleviate the suffering of many and you will also know that you did not have the courage to break free from old thinking and out of date ideology. (in Cole, Mullen, O’Brien, & Coghlan, 2011, pp. 24–25)

ICAN similarly foregrounded the experiences of nuclear weapons survivors. In the final session, chair of the TPNW negotiations Ambassador Elayne Whyte expressed her appreciation to “the victims who have shared their personal stories with us … and have been an ongoing inspiration for our work” (in United Nations, 2017). The final text of the TPNW Preamble acknowledges the “unacceptable suffering of and harm caused to the victims of the use of nuclear weapons (hibakusha), as well as of those affected by the testing of nuclear weapons.” It also recognizes the specific role of nuclear weapons victims in expressing the “public conscience in the furthering of the principles of humanity as evidenced by the call for the total elimination of nuclear weapons.” At the December 2017 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, brought us to tears with her defiant Nobel Lecture. Speaking as a “member of the family of hibakusha,” she asserted: We were not content to be victims. We refused to wait for an immediate fiery end or the slow poisoning of our world. We refused to sit idly in terror as the so-called great powers took us past nuclear dusk and brought us recklessly close to nuclear midnight. We rose up. We shared our stories of survival. We said: humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist. (Thurlow, 2017)

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The more assertive role of nuclear weapons survivors in the TPNW was not universally welcomed. In a UN disarmament forum in 2017, a diplomat of a nuclear-allied state accused ICAN of “politicizing” the testimony of the hibakusha. Such a condescending attitude suggests that hibakusha are somehow incapable of being political in their own right, despite their long history of national and international mobilization. It suggests a desire for hibakusha to remain angelic symbols of suffering, rather than full agents in the policy conversation. He, someone not directly affected by nuclear weapons, nevertheless felt entitled to participate in the global political processes on nuclear weapons. Perhaps the real objection is that nuclear weapons survivors had successfully outmaneuvered stale traditional nuclear diplomacy. One recalls the line from Lysistrata in which the men’s chorus leader expresses alarm that if women are given “the semblance of” a role in politics, “Before we know, they’ll be adept at every manly art” (p. 167, lines 672–673). The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has difficulty in replicating the model offered by the campaigns on landmines, cluster munitions, the arms trade and nuclear weapons, as there are currently no survivors of an as-yet-future weapon. Nevertheless, the Campaign has sought to summon the spirits of future victims, encouraging diplomats to use their imaginations regarding the implications of killer robots. For example, on a panel at the UN in 2016, AI pioneer Professor Stuart Russell painted a horrifying picture of a not-too-distant future in which a terrorist could summon swarms of miniature drones to deliver explosive charges into cities and assassinate people by flying into their heads. The diplomats in the room were aghast. The Campaign has also more broadly reintroduced humanity into spaces that are clinically technical and technocratic. They have stressed the importance of including women and people from the Global South in CCW discussions. And campaigners have also sought to insert an earthy sense of humor into bland diplomatic meetings. Noel Sharkey, an AI expert associated with the Campaign, sprinkles his remarks with bawdy jokes about being “unmanned.”

The Comic Community A key feature of the comic mode in Western drama, dating as far back as Aristophanes’ work, has been the conclusion of the story with a festival, usually a wedding or safe return home. Comedy resolves into a welcoming space, comfortable and warm, where human bodies can live “happily ever

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after.” In Lysistrata, as in so much of Western comedy, the homecoming depicted is a heteronormative one, albeit transformed by the women’s empowerment. Once peace is agreed, Lysistrata reunites couples and invites them to share in a “dance of thanksgiving” (p.  191, line 1276). Lysistrata calls on them to remember what has happened and “Not to repeat our errors, never ever!” (p. 191, line 1279). Just as the play opened with the women swearing an oath, it ends with Lysistrata challenging the combined chorus to make a “solemn vow”: To keep and never to evade The peace that Aphrodite made, The goddess who is Love! (p. 192, lines 1286–1291)

Despite the hostile weather and repression at Greenham Common, many of the women recall it providing for them a new kind of home. Some, including Johnson, even registered to vote using the camp as their permanent address (Harford & Hopkins, 1984, pp.  112–113). They worked together to provide a space uniquely welcoming to women—a lively, festive community built through mutual aid, art and protest. “[F]or generations,” wrote Harford and Hopkins (1984, p.  3–4), “we have missed out on the love of other women … free of men’s expectations and demands, beyond the isolation of the nuclear family. That’s why Greenham is a women’s place.” The encampment took women’s bodies seriously in practical ways, such as offering free tampons. One of the original marchers remarked that “Special space and consideration for women doesn’t just happen, it has to be worked for” (Jayne, in: Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 13). One woman even chose to give birth in the camp. Greenham women also innovated alternative models of gender and family, where queer people could live confidently out of the closet. They “queered” the hypermasculine space of a military base, making Greenham a common again, a place of renewal and surprise (Roseneil, 2000, 2012). Hearing the accounts of Greenham women, I am struck by how much effort went into making the camp an enjoyable place. They recall parties, organizing an arts festival, “great sex” and for  some, a relaxed attitude toward marijuana. Johnson recalled that Greenham women would offer cups of tea to the police and soldiers guarding the perimeter fence, if necessary even cutting holes in the fence to hand the cups through. “We wanted to have fun while saving the world,” said Johnson. In doing so they sought to engender a community that would “continue to enflame

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and rekindle another’s passion” and find that “together we are more powerful … than the machinery” (in Harford & Hopkins, 1984, p. 162). I too have found family—a kind of comic community—among disarmament activists. Humanitarian disarmament coalitions like ICAN, ICBL and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots make a concerted effort to shape the affective experience of policymakers and advocates in ways that favor the campaign. There is a self-consciously performative element to some of their work, aimed at creating a seductive sense of doing something that matters. This means campaigners pay close attention to parties and social occasions, drawing in new activists and friendly diplomats. While this might seem somewhat tangential to the “real work” of lobbying, campaigners take seriously this playful or “ludic” dimension of campaigning. ICAN’s initial founders sought to infuse their new campaign not only with a sense of the “Horror” of nuclear weapons and “Hope” for a ban, but also “Humour,” undermining the self-important seriousness of nuclear diplomacy (Whyte, 2017). The ludic approach to campaigning is not only directed at poking fun at, amusing and drawing in people external to the campaigns. Partying functions to create a tight social cohesion among campaigners—shared memories of dance floors, a few embarrassing incidents shared in common, amusing karaoke stories, a complicity and, as a result, a strong sense of trust and community. In the ICAN Campaigners Kit, Hunt tells activists to “celebrate your successes and the small victories” because “If you are excited, the energy will be infectious” and “having fun in your campaign will keep everyone motivated and engaged” (2012, pp. 26–27). (Other scholars have noted the role of humor in the “everyday practice” of diplomacy (e.g. Hochschild, 1969; Morgan, 2012) and activism (e.g. Bogad, 2006; Shepherd, 2011).) In the critical literature on activism, there is a debate over the conflation of “having fun” and resisting dominant systems of power. Some raise concerns that the carnivalesque mode can entrench repression by lifting restrictions that actually protect vulnerable people (for a summary of this debate, see Bogad, 2006, pp. 55–57). As Zizek (2008) and others have argued, a demand that we “Enjoy!” is no less political—and potentially exclusionary—than a forbidding demand. However, for others, the “carnival” of funny tweets, painting fences and dressing up unsettles—if only temporarily—the existing order. It represents a challenge to dominant discourses that forbid “lack of productivity” and insist politics is a “serious business.” A campaigner described this to me as “building friendship with

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people you are taking on the world with.” Aligned against the “money and power” of the nuclear-armed states, another campaigner told me, “all we have is each other, principles and a really good work ethic” and so it is crucial to have “shared purpose, mutual trust and be a part of a team.” Much of the policy conversation over meaningful human control has focused on the latter word—that of “control” over violence. However, work to maintain meaningful human control over weapons must also be linked to meaning-making—to our humanity, expressed in the creation of culture and community. Such an “affective strategy” draws people into imagining alternatives to violence. As Fairhall (2006, p. 184) writes, the Greenham women’s “contribution was a simple one: to restore a human perspective.” Our work for disarmament must be humane, including people whose voices have been excluded from the conversation, supporting the arrival of unexpected bodies in policymaking spaces. The work of our community must be to perform acts of collective habeas corpus, producing affected bodies in the public sphere, making sure responsibility is attached to specific human bodies who seek to evade it in dehumanized systems of violence. Peace is made by humans encountering and talking with each other, not by machines.

References Acheson, R., Bolton, M., Minor, E., & Pytlak, A. (Eds.). (2017). The Humanitarian Impact of Drones. New  York: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom & International Disarmament Institute, Pace University. AFSC. (1972). Automated Air War. Retrieved from https://www.afsc.org/video/ automated-air-war Allison, G. (2015, September 24). The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War? The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/ international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-war-thucydidestrap/406756/ Anderson, K., & Waxman M. C. (2012, December and 2013, January). Law and Ethics for Robot Soldiers. Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 12-313. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2046 375## Anderson, L.  V. (2012, August 27). Do Sex Strikes Ever Work? Slate. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/08/ sex_strike_in_togo_do_sex_strikes_ever_work_.html

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Aristophanes. (2002). Lysistrata and Other Plays (A. H. Sommerstein, Trans., 2nd ed.). New York: Penguin. Beck, U. (2006). Living in the World Risk Society. Economy and Society, 35(3), 329–345. Berger, H. (1990). Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-­ Making. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bergman, C., & Montgomery, N. (2017). Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. Chico, CA: AK Press. Blume, K., & Bower, S. (2004). Lysistrata Project. Yes! Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/finding-courage/600 Bogad, L. M. (2006). Tactical Carnival: Social Movements, Demonstrations, and Dialogical Performance. In J.  Cohen-Cruz & M.  Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (pp. 46–58). New York: Routledge. Bolton, M. (2013, March). Security for Whom? Putting a Human Face on Resilience: Critical Response Paper Following the Pace University 2012 ‘Summit on Resilience: Securing Our Future through Public-Private Partnerships’. In J.  Ryan (Ed.), Summit on Resilience: Securing Our Future through Public-Private Partnerships. New York: Pace University Press. Brettschneider, M. (2011). Heterosexual Political Science. PS: Political Science & Politics, 44(1), 23–26. Butler, J. (2011). Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street. Retrieved from http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. (2016, February). Binder of Women. Retrieved from http://www.stopkillerrobots.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ WomenExperts_1Feb2016.pdf Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. (2018, May 16). Google, Other Companies Must Endorse Ban. Retrieved from https://www.stopkillerrobots. org/2018/05/google/ Campkin, B. (2013). Placing ‘Matter Out of Place’: Purity and Danger as Evidence for Architecture and Urbanism. Architectural Theory Review, 18(1), 56. Central Office of Information. (1980). Protect and Survive. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Retrieved from http://scyfilove.com/wp-content/ uploads/2011/01/Nuclear-War-Survival-Guide-British-Government.pdf. Charlesworth, H. (2008, December). Are Women Peaceful? Reflections on the Role of Women in Peace-Building. Feminist Legal Studies, 16(3), 347–361. Cockburn, A. (2015). Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Cohn, C. (1987). Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals. Signs, 12(4). Retrieved from http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/~rlipsch/ pol179/Cohn.pdf.

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Cole, H., Mullen, M., O’Brien, T., & Coghlan, D. (2011). Ambassadors before They Knew It: Song Kosal and Tun Channareth, Cambodia Campaign to Ban Landmines, 1994–2011. Siem Reap: JRS. Docherty, B. (2018, April 11). Statement by Human Rights Watch on Meaningful Human Control in Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems to the Convention on Conventional Weapons Group of Governmental Experts, Geneva. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/04/11/statement-human-rightswatch-meaningful-human-control-lethal-autonomous-weapons Douglas, M. (2002). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge Classics ed.). New York: Routledge Classics. Edwards, P. N. (1996). The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Enloe, C. (1990). Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fairhall, D. (2006). Common Ground: The Story of Greenham. London: I.B. Tauris. Feminist Archive North. (2008, Summer). Treasures: Women’s Peace Activism. Feminist Archive North Newsletter, No. 3 (pp. 3–4). Retrieved from http:// feministarchivenorth.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2008/08/newsletter-no3-summer-08.pdf Fihn, B. (Ed.). (2013). Unspeakable Suffering: The Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons. Geneva: Reaching Critical Will. Gorbachev, M. (1984). Excerpts from Speech by Gorbachev. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/19/world/excerptsfrom-speech-by-gorbachev.html Grandmothers Keen. (2010). Greenham Women Keening in Parliament Square. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knWpLdlPD88 Harford, B., & Hopkins, S. (Eds.). (1984). Greenham Common: Women at the Wire. London: The Women’s Press. Harrison, T. (1992). The Common Chorus: A Version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. London: Faber & Faber. Hickman, J. (1986). Greenham Women Against Cruise Missiles and Others v. Ronald Reagan and Others. In J.  Dewar (Ed.), Nuclear Weapons, the Peace Movement and the Law (pp. 200–218). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hochschild, A. (1969). The Role of the Ambassador’s Wife: An Exploratory Study. Journal of Marriage and Family, 31(1), 73–87. Human Rights Watch. (2012). Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots. Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch. Retrieved from https://www.hrw. org/sites/default/files/reports/arms1112_ForUpload.pdf. Hunt, E. (2012). Building a National Campaign. ICAN Campaigners Kit [Online]. Retrieved June 12, 2015, from http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/ uploads/2012/08/Campaigners-Kit-Pernilla_final2.pdf

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Johnson, R. (2016). Banning the Bomb: From 1950s Activism to the General Assembly via Greenham Common. In Civil Society Engagement in Disarmament Processes: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Ban (pp. 35–46). New York: UNODA. Liddington, J. (1991). The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-­ militarism in Britain Since 1820. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Masters, C. (2005). Bodies of Technology: Cyborg Soldiers and Militarized Masculinities. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7(1), 112–132. McLaughlin, E. (2005). The Greek Plays. New  York: Theatre Communications Group. Minor, E. (2017, December). Missing Voices: The Continuing Underrepresentation of Women in Multilateral Forums on Weapons and Disarmament. Arms Control Today. Retrieved from https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2017-12/features/ missing-voices-continuing-underrepresentation-women-multilateralforums-weapons Morgan, L. (2012). Diplomatic Gastronomy: Style and Power at the Table. Food and Foodways, 20(2), 146–166. Morgenthau, H.  J. (1978). Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (5th ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Pace University. (2014, October 29) Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams Gives Address on Gender and Disarmament at Pace University. Retrieved from https://pacenycmun.org/2014/10/29/nobel-peace-laureate-jody-williamsgives-address-on-gender-and-disarmament-at-pace-university Paffenholz, T., Ross, N., Dixon, S., Schluchter, A.-L., & True, J. (2016, April). Making Women Count—Not Just Counting Women: Assessing Women’s Inclusion and Influence on Peace Negotiations. Geneva: Inclusive Peace and Transition Initiative & UN Women. Pettitt, A. (2006). Walking to Greenham: How the Peace-camp began and the Cold War Ended. South Glamorgan, Wales: Honno. Roberts, J.  T. (2017). The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roseneil, S. (2000). Common Women, Uncommon Practices: The Queer Feminisms of Greenham. London: Cassell. Roseneil, S. (2012). Queering Home and Family in the 1980s: The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Retrieved from https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/12681493.pdf Rosengren, E. (2018). A Feminist Reflection on Nuclear Disarmament and Change (D.  Hogsta, Trans.). Stockholm: Swedish Physicians against Nuclear Weapons & WILPF Sweden. Retrieved from https://ikff.se/wp-content/ uploads/2018/09/emma-rosengren-a-feminist-reflection-on-nuclear-disarmament-and-change.pdf Sharkey, N. (2012, Summer). The Evitability of Autonomous Robot Weapons. International Review of the Red Cross, 94(886), 787–799.

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Shepherd, B. (2011). Play, Creativity, and Social Movements: If I Can’t Dance, It’s Not My Revolution. New York: Routledge. Sjoberg, L. (2015). Seeing Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in International Security. International Journal, 70(3), 434–453. Sommerstein, A. H. (2002a). Introduction. In Aristophanes. Lysistrata and Other Plays (A. H. Sommerstein, Trans., 2nd ed., pp. xi–xlviii). New York: Penguin. Sommerstein, A. H. (2002b). Preface to Lysistrata. In Aristophanes. Lysistrata and Other Plays (A.  H. Sommerstein, Trans., 2nd ed, pp.  133–138). New York: Penguin. Thucydides. (2014a). The State of Greece from the Earliest Times to the Commencement of the Peloponnesian War. The History of the Peloponnesian War. Chapter 1. Retrieved from https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/ thucydides/crawley/chapter1.html Thucydides. (2014b). Sixteenth Year of the War—The Melian Conference—Fate of Melos. The History of the Peloponnesian War. Chapter 17. Retrieved from https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/thucydides/crawley/chapter17.html Thurlow, S. (2017) International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—Nobel Lecture. Retrieved from https://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2017/ican-lecture_en.html Ullman, E. (2012). Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents. New York: Picador. United Nations. (2017, July 7). (29th meeting) UN Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards Their Total Elimination. UN Web TV. Retrieved from http://webtv.un.org/ search/29th-meeting-un-conference-to-negotiate-a-legally-bindinginstrument-to-prohibit-nuclear-weapons-leading-towards-their-totalelimination/5496837948001/?term=nuclear%20weapons&sort=date Ussher, J. (2002). Body Talk: The Material and Discursive Regulation of Sexuality, Madness and Reproduction. New York: Routledge. Wakabayashi, D., & Metz, C. (2018, June 7). Google Promises Its A.I. Will Not Be Used for Weapons. The New  York Times. Retrieved from https://www. nytimes.com/2018/06/07/technology/google-artificial-intelligenceweapons.html Waltz, K. N. (1954). Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press. Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of International Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Waltz, K. N. (1981). The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Better. Adelphi Papers, No. 171. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies. Waltz, K. (1986). Anarchic Orders and Balances of Power. In R. Keohane (Ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (pp. 98–130). New York: Columbia University Press. Webb, M. C., & Krasner, S. D. (1989, April). Hegemonic Stability Theory: An Empirical Assessment. Review of International Studies, 15(2), 183–198.

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Wendt, A. (1992). Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics. International Organization, 46(2), 391–425. Westad, O. A. (2005). The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westmoreland, W.  C. (2007). Gen. Westmoreland on the Army of the Future. NACLA. Retrieved from https://nacla.org/article/gen-westmorelandarmy-future Whyte, S. (2017). ‘Horror, Humour and Hope’ Getting ICAN’s Message Through Nuclear Disarmament Circus. Crikey. Retrieved from https://www. crikey.com.au/2017/10/10/humour-horror-and-hope-getting-icansmessage-through-nuclear-disarmament-circus/ Williams J. (2014). Even Killer Robots Have a Gender Gap. Foreign Policy. Retrieved July 8, 2014, from https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/11/evenkiller-robots-have-a-gender-gap/ Wittner, L. S. (2009). Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zizek, S. (2008). The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso.

Act 4. Caliban and the Nuclear Ban

Abstract  The humanitarian discourse used to ban indiscriminate weapons has colonial undertones, suggesting that “civilized nations” abstain from “barbaric” ways of killing. This same “standard of civilization” language was used to justify conducting nuclear testing in Pacific communities. Portraying Pacific peoples as “primitive” and nuclear weapons as evidence of a country’s “civilization,” colonialism and nuclear testing were intricately intertwined. This chapter uses Shakespeare’s The Tempest to demonstrate how a demeaning “tropical island imaginary” shaped colonizers’ interactions with Pacific peoples. But in the character of Caliban, one sees possibilities of “talking back” to the oppressor. In pursuing nuclear disarmament, Pacific intellectuals, diplomats and advocates have flipped the “standard of civilization” script. The chapter questions the territorialist assumptions of international relations (IR), exploring the contributions of post-colonial theory. Keywords  Disarmament • International relations • Oceania • Nuclear testing • Post-colonial Theory • The Tempest • Pacific Shortly after observing the collapse of negotiations at the 2015 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the UN in New York, I saw the Public Theater’s production of The Tempest in Central Park. Having co-taught a university class that spring on global politics and © The Author(s) 2020 M. B. Bolton, Imagining Disarmament, Enchanting International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17716-4_4

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literature, I was receptive to the resonances between Shakespeare’s play and the political drama I had just seen. Watching Prospero—colonizer of his island—conjure a tremendous storm to punish his political rivals, I could not help but think of how, to threaten the Soviet Union, the US had blown up Pacific atolls, subjecting people to sickening radiation. Colonial disregard disproportionately imposed the costs of nuclear testing on indigenous and colonized peoples and the environments they live in, including the 315 detonations in the Pacific. American, French and British nuclear weapons test programs in Australia, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Maohi Nui/French Polynesia and Kalama/Johnston Atoll generated legacies of illness, environmental degradation and pervasive anxiety.1 Soldiers and civilians who participated in the tests, from Australia, France, Fiji, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the US, the UK—and French Foreign Legionnaires from around the world—have also suffered the humanitarian consequences (Hunter, 2004; Maclellan, 2017a; Ruff, 2015). The resonances between The Tempest and nuclear testing in the Pacific are not simply a serendipitous analogy. Pacific nuclear testing began with a theatrical performance. US Navy Commodore Ben H. Wyatt arrived at Pikinni/Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 10 February 1946, a Sunday, to persuade the residents to vacate their island. He brought along a military film crew. Following World War II (WWII), the US Navy was determined to take over the Japanese mandate in Micronesia (including the Marshall Islands). The US eventually persuaded the United Nations in 1947 to grant them a unique “strategic trusteeship” over Micronesia, which, unlike other trusteeships, allowed them to use the islands for military activities, including nuclear testing (Firth, 1987, pp.  1–38; Weisgall, 1994). Following their church service, Wyatt assembled the people of Bikini and offered a sermon. Wyatt announced the new “bomb that men in America had made and the destruction it had wrought upon the enemy” (Richard, 1957, p. 510). Addressing Juda, a local leader, 1  Note on names: I deliberately draw attention to the fluctuation and hybridization of colonial and indigenous legacies in the Pacific. When covering the colonial period, I use English or French name places, such as “Christmas Island” and “Gilbertese.” When referring to contemporary post-colonial states where there is wide consensus on names, I will use their naming and spelling conventions, such as “Kiritimati” and “I-Kiribati.” Where there is a persistent dispute over names, I will use both, listing first the widely used indigenous name, followed by its legally recognized name, such as “Maohi Nui/French Polynesia.” For “Moruroa,” I use the indigenous Maohi spelling, rather than the French “Mururoa,” since that is also the conventional spelling in English.

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Wyatt said that America’s atomic bomb could “put an end to war.” Wyatt asked the Bikinians to leave their atoll “temporarily” for “the good of mankind and to end all world wars” (Niedenthal, 2001, p. 2). Aware of the Bikinians’ reverence for Christianity, a legacy of colonial missions, Wyatt imbued his remarks with biblical references, casting them as “the children of Israel whom the Lord saved from their enemy and led unto the Promised Land” (Richard, 1957, p. 510). Following deliberations, Irioj Juda responded, saying, “If the United States government and the scientists of the world want to use our island and atoll for furthering development, which with God’s blessing will result in kindness and benefit to all mankind, my people will be pleased to go elsewhere” (Kiste, 1974, p. 28). Later, Bikinians told Weisgall (1994, pp. 108–109) they were afraid to say no to such a powerful adversary. As Bikinians prepared for their removal, they were “entertained on the deck of the [USS] Sumner with Mickey Mouse cartoons, a Roy Rogers western, and a Hollywood bedroom farce” (Weisgall, 1994, p. 111). They too were soon captured in celluloid, staged in the drama of their own expulsion. While pleased with Irioj Juda’s remarks, Wyatt was dissatisfied with how they turned out on film. Slipping into the role of director, he repeated eight takes of his encounter with Juda for the cameras (Weisgall, 1994, pp. 111–112). The Bikinians were also made to repeat their final church service and prayers for camera operators who “were not satisfied with their angles” (p.  112). Wyatt was participating in the tradition of American filmmaking in its Pacific colonies, like the early “documentary” Moana (1926), in which the directors Robert and Frances Flaherty staged supposedly real stories of “primitive” people in American Samoa (Hood, 2017). The resulting 1946 newsreel, Bikini—the Atomic Island (Wilson, 1946), opens with the same sun-through clouds, rippling water and orchestral music repeated in countless Hollywood films of the Pacific. The narrator asks the audience if they have “ever dreamed of having an idyllic existence under the waving coconut palms of a remote South Sea island? Of course you have!” He describes Bikini as a “remote” and “tiny, lovely, lost coral island” in the “languorous Pacific” far from “civilization.” US propaganda compulsively staged Marshallese people in enactments of these fantasies (Horowitz, 2011). An Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) film documents the visit of seven men (“savages by our standards,” says the narrator) from the Marshall Islands (“in the middle of the Pacific Islands, where hardly anybody lives”) to an AEC lab in Chicago for

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radiation screening. “John as we said, is a savage,” the narrator tells us, “but a happy, amenable savage. His grandfather ran almost naked on the atoll. The white man brought money and religion and a market for his coco” (in Half Life, 1985). Such racist perceptions of Marshallese undergirded the disregard for their well-being and destruction of their atolls. The people of Bikini believed their displacement would be temporary but their homeland is still too radioactive for their return (Georgescu, 2012; Horowitz, 2011; Johnston & Takala, 2016; Teaiwa, 1994). Frustrated by the repetitive filming of his exchange with Commodore Wyatt, Juda exercised subtle resistance. He refused to parrot the script prepared for him, instead repeating that “Everything is in God’s hands.” As Weisgall put it, Juda “had served up Wyatt’s biblical references back to him” (1994, p. 113). Aggravated, Wyatt eventually gave up, walking away. Similarly, while Shakespeare clearly identified most with his character Prospero, he was too sophisticated an artist to make The Tempest colonial agitprop. Caliban, enslaved by Prospero, talks back and undermines the main character’s intentions. Caliban has served as an inspiration for island peoples struggling for freedom. Anti-colonial intellectuals and artists have read The Tempest against the grain, composing works of imagination that demonstrate their peoples’ humanity. In the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement, Oceanic peoples demanded that colonial powers live up to the supposed “standard of civilization” used to judge colonized societies. As a Marshallese survivor of the nuclear tests told Dennis O’Rourke in the documentary Half Life (1985), Don’t Americans know that every life is precious? They are educated people. Do they really believe that one person’s life is unimportant? What goes on in the minds of these people? They think they are smart but really they are crazy. They are smart at doing stupid things.

More recently, in the 2017 UN negotiations of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the people most marginalized from the international system have shown they can turn humanitarian discourse on their former colonizers. They are casting a new spell, one that curses nuclear weapons as mala in se by using the very language created by the colonial powers most complicit with the nuclear order. How can you claim to be civilized if you threaten the world with weapons that could end all civilization? The Tempest offers us hope that “talking back” can change the behavior of the oppressor. By the end of the play, Caliban is free and Prospero destroys his magical staff.

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This chapter draws on fieldwork in Fiji and Kiribati, as well as observations of the involvement of Pacific states and civil society in UN disarmament negotiations.2 The next section uses the work of Pacific theorist Epeli Hau’ofa to critique international relations’ (IR) territorialist assumptions. This is followed by a discussion of The Tempest, as an early expression of the European “tropical island imaginary” which frames islands as spaces for experimentation and renewal, populated by simple, primitive peoples. I then demonstrate how this imaginary framed Pacific Islands as eligible for nuclear testing. However, Pacific peoples were not passive subjects of this dynamic. I show how they have imagined new decolonized— and denuclearized—identities. Their struggle has inspired the solidarity of people around the world, who innovated methods of nonviolent direct action on the high seas. Supposedly “small states,” indigenous peoples, artists, academics, pastors and sailing enthusiasts have thus reshaped nuclear politics in the Pacific and beyond.

An Oceanic Turn The IR discipline is terracentric. Perceiving politics primarily as conflict over territory (and its resources), rather than about the fluid meanings of territory and people, has made land the fixed point on which political thinkers could stand (Walsh, 2014). In international law—and to become UN members—states must claim sovereignty over an externally recognized and bounded area of land. Even ships fly national flags, ensuring they remain legally moored to territorial states. These assumptions lead us to IR theories that are static, statist and fixated on great powers with large territories (e.g. Waltz, 1986). IR is paying increasing attention to maritime politics, driven by concerns about climate change (e.g. CNA Military Advisory Board, 2014), marine pollution (e.g. van Tatenhove, 2013), interstate rivalry over maritime resources (e.g. Fravel, 2015) and piracy (e.g. Murphy, 2013). One social theorist has even heralded an “Oceanic Turn” (Belanger, 2014). However, much of this research maintains a “methodological nationalism,” fixated on the concerns and actions of territorial states (Bailey & Winchester, 2012). Given that states are the actors most capable of ­marshaling organized violence, IR research has focused more on the securitization, rather than demilitarization, of the sea. 2  Elements of the argument in this chapter were explored in Bolton et al., (2016) and Bolton (2018a).

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Arriving in New York in 2011, I started studying political struggles over unexploded munitions submerged in the city’s harbor. I began to perceive the waters surrounding New  York not as an “Other Space,” beyond the reach of society, but rather as infused with a continuation of the politics on land (Bolton, 2012). Following the devastation of Superstorm Sandy, I saw how rising sea levels resulted from systemic disregard for environmental degradation, imposing the costs on marginalized communities (Bolton, et al., 2016). Taking seriously the impact of social location on our thinking, my spouse (Emily Welty) and I moved to Rockaway—a peripheral neighborhood and frontline community at risk from the rising seas. We wanted to see if New York City looked different here, less a confident metropole than a fragile archipelago, exposed to an increasingly volatile ocean. I bought a surfboard and took lessons from the patient mystics of Locals Surf School. As someone who has spent years with intellectual minutiae, my immersion in the waves has been profoundly unsettling. It has required me to live in my body, to be intimately aware of the flow of water, tossed about by the immensity. Despite the heresy—both to my Christian upbringing and to my scientific training—I find myself praying to the sea itself, to Poseidon, urging him to spare me as I tumble inside a wave. And as I return to work, I long for political theories that could surf with elegance upon the roiling depths, rather than turn their backs and look inland. A submerged tradition has long imagined an alternative politics of the sea (James, 1985). The jurist Hugo Grotius is commonly remembered in IR for his work on international law, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (“On the Law of War and Peace,” 1625). But 16 years earlier, in Mare Liberum (“The Free Sea”) Grotius (1609/2010) argued that the sea must be open to all—an international space, unenclosed, where standard notions of nationhood, sovereignty and property do not apply. There persists among mariners today a kind of oceanic libertarianism, insistent on the freedom of the high seas. Similarly, reading Malinowski’s (1922) account of the Kula Ring in the Trobriand Islands offers a very different conceptualization of the relations between societies than IR’s expectations of military competition. Despite its condescension, Malinowski’s account depicts Trobriand Islanders’ sophisticated gift economy, facilitating cultural exchange, friendships and trade, buttressed by supporting norms, mythologies and magical practices. If one pays attention to the seas’ undulations, the ropes mooring IR theory to static spatial politics seem to fray. Looking beyond the “countries and nation-states” of “great continents,” Torre calls social scientists’

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attention to the “vast number of alternative other worlds” found in the islands “dotted throughout the oceans” (2013, p.  246). For example, Tuvalu faces existential threat not from state-based security risks, but from rising sea levels. What happens when a state—whose legal existence presupposes territory—disappears under the ocean? Does it lose its General Assembly vote? Are its people refugees? The dominant structures of political thought have no straightforward answers to these questions. But Tuvalu is not just a passive object of international systems, it has played a pivotal role in climate change diplomacy. As Baldacchino asserts, “Islands are … sites of agency” (2007, p.  170; see also: Slade, 2003; Stringer, 2006; Weivel & Ji Noe Oest, 2010). Participating in advocacy during the 2012 and 2013 negotiations of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), I began noticing the agency of small island developing states (SIDS in UN-speak). Caribbean states championed progressive changes to the text, working together and with global civil society to amplify their voices. In the TPNW, Pacific states pushed successfully for provisions on victim assistance and environmental remediation. Working with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) team that advocated for inclusion of these “positive obligations” in the TPNW, I was embarrassed at how little I knew about the region. Seeking to redress my ignorance, taking seriously Malinowski’s injunction to “get off the verandah,” I decided to learn from Pacific peoples directly. Since the negotiation of the TPNW, I have sought to understand the impact of Pacific nuclear testing and the efforts to resist it, visiting Fiji and Kiribati. In speaking with Pacific Studies scholars about my interest in the agency of “small states” in disarmament diplomacy, I was surprised to find them reject the premise of my questions. They saw themselves as living in “large ocean states,” not in “small island states,” stewards of a “significant portion of the earth’s surface” and teeming marine ecosystems (e.g. Tong, 2015 p. 23). Many recommended I read the work of Pacific social theorists, notably Epeli Hau’ofa, who taught at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Suva, Fiji’s capital city, until his death in 2009. Hau’ofa argued that state-centric analysis of the Pacific constructs it as a fragmented space of “tiny needy bits” (1999, pp.  31, 36). Equating “smallness” with insignificance and lack of agency, outsiders’ “calculation is based entirely on the extent of the land surfaces they see” (1999, p. 30). But this division of the Pacific is not an intrinsic one; “continental men— Europeans and Americans” framed the region as empty and “drew imaginary lines across the sea, making the colonial boundaries that

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confined ocean peoples to tiny spaces” (1999, p.  31). Imagining the Pacific as a space of “islands in a far sea” (1999, p. 31)—with few, “dispensable” people—facilitated “certain kinds of experiment and exploitation” like nuclear weapons tests by “powerful nations,” with “minimum political repercussions to themselves” (1997, pp.  130–131). If Pacific people adopt self-­ definitions as “individual, colonially-created tiny countries acting alone,” Hau’ofa worried, they “could … disappear into the black hole” of global inattention (1997, p. 125). However, Hau’ofa rejects the “smallness view of Oceania” (1999, p. 36) as “an economistic and geographic deterministic view of a very narrow kind” (1999, p.  30). The lived experience of Pacific peoples is an expansive and mobile one, with growing networks of trade, cultural exchange, political movements, religious connections and family relations “that criss-cross the ocean” (1997, p.  124, 1999, p.  35). For Hau’ofa, “The world of Oceania is not small; it is huge and growing bigger every day” (1999, p. 30). Hau’ofa imagined a “new Oceania,” an optimistic regional identity that would “help free us from … externally-generated definitions of our past, present and future” (1997, p.  124). Hau’ofa’s forward-looking vision simultaneously draws on “the myths, legends, oral traditions, and cosmologies of the peoples of Oceania” whose “world was anything but tiny. They thought big and recounted their deeds in epic proportions” (1999, p. 31). They traveled great distances to trade, adventure, marry, fight, visit friends and exchange art, skills and culture: “boundaries were not imaginary lines in the ocean but rather points of entry that were constantly negotiated and even contested. The sea was open to anyone who could navigate a way through it” (1999, p. 33). For Hau’ofa, drawing on a shared Pacific mythos should not be a nostalgic return to an essential “Pacific Way.” Rather it is a state of mind, a political stance, in which Pacific people act together in the “advancement of our collective interests” (1997, p. 125). Instead of the alienated pursuit of national interest, he argued that “chances for a reasonable survival” require Pacific peoples to act “in unison … for the benefit of the wider community” (1997, p. 125). This is because the “solutions to the major and long-term problems” in Oceania are “global in nature” (Hau’ofa & Subramani, 1987, p. 164). The Pacific region has “its greatest degrees of unity” when working to protect the ocean, such as the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement and mobilization on climate change (1997, p.  135). Therefore, agency for supposedly small Pacific societies

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will come through collective action as “guardians of the world’s largest ocean” (1999, p. 36). This would represent “no less than a major contribution to the well-being of humanity” (1999, p. 36). Given the power of external forces, Hau’ofa’s vision of a powerful, united and open Oceania might be dismissed as ill-fated (e.g. Borer, 1993). However, “Oceania is neither tiny nor deficient in resources” (1999, p. 34). In migration, Hau’ofa saw political opportunities, to break “out of … confinement” (1999, p.  34), establishing pan-Oceanic connections, including with indigenous peoples of New Zealand/Aotearoa, Australia and North America. As a result, Hau’ofa framed his Oceanic imaginary expansively: “the ocean is uncontainable and pays no respect to territoriality” (1997, p. 143). This means “the sea must remain open to all of us” (1997, p. 143), but also that the Oceanic identity should “transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming” (1997, pp.  143–144). Since the Pacific “merges into the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans to encircle the entire planet,” the ocean “should also be our route to the rest of the world” (1997, pp. 143–144). To be the “custodians of the ocean” requires Pacific peoples to “reach out to similar people elsewhere for the common task of protecting the seas for the general welfare of all living things” (1997, p. 144). In his own work, Hau’ofa turned away from the “objectifying gaze” of his discipline of anthropology to composing works of imagination (Wilson, 1999, p. 4). Exploitation and irradiation of the Pacific, its islands and peoples, was wrapped up in European and North American colonial imagination. Akin to Ngugi’s efforts to “decolonize the mind” (1986), Hau’ofa believed resistance required telling new narratives of the Pacific. The Pacific intellectual’s role was not to be a supposedly objective observer, but rather bring into being more independent, hopeful, inclusive and peaceful worlds (Hau’ofa & Subramani, 1987, p. 164).

The Tempest and the Tropical Island Imaginary European and North American interactions with Pacific islands and their peoples are shaped by a “tropical island imaginary” (Torre, 2013). This “archive of myths, writing, art and song,” which has “evolved from ­antiquity to the present,” constructs tropical islands as distant and deserted spaces that nonetheless offer potential for renewal (pp.  246–250; also Addison, 2002). An early crystallization of this narrative is The Tempest, set in “an idealized world of imagination, a place of magical rejuvenation …

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where everything is controlled by the artist” (Bevington, 1988a, p. xvii). A place of both danger and redemption, the island’s enchantment unsettles existing arrangements of power and knowledge. The text draws on early accounts of European exploration of the Caribbean. But while his source material was specifically situated, “Shakespeare’s island is to be found both somewhere and nowhere” (Bevington, 1988a, p. xvii), a heterotopia contrasted with continental Europe. The Tempest and its kin of other island tales—Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson—exert a powerful influence on how Europeans and North Americans interact with islands, whether in the Caribbean, the Pacific or beyond (Neptune, 2007; Torre, 2013). My own perceptions of the Pacific were shaped by this imaginary, transmitted through family lore of my missionary grandfather, illustrated by photos of him wreathed with flowers and shells. Tahiti was described as Tiona—“Zion” in the South Seas—whose people nonetheless needed to repent the supposed sinfulness of their dancing. Among his effects posthumously passed to me was his copy of Mutiny on the Bounty. The Tempest’s stage notes describe the island as “uninhabited,” but we soon learn people, in fact, live there. Prospero “rules as the artist-king” (Bevington, 1988a, p. xviii). Before he arrived, Prospero was an intellectual seduced by books: “rapt in secret studies” (1.2.73, 76–77), he neglected his duties as Duke of Milan. Inattentive to the machinations of his brother Antonio, he loses his domain. Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, are expelled to sea in a leaky boat (1.2.147–148) with few provisions but his library (1.2.159–168). By “Providence divine” (1.2.158), they alight on the island, discovering it is populated by beings represented as not-quite-human. Before Prospero and Miranda’s arrival, the island was ruled by Sycorax, a witch whose character mirrors Prospero. She too was banished from her home, in Algiers, and wielded powerful magic that could control the sea. Sycorax’s erstwhile servant, “an airy spirit” called Ariel, “belongs to a magic world of song, music and illusion that the artist borrows for his use but which exists eternally outside him” (Bevington, 1988a, p. xxii). When Ariel objected to her “abhorred commands” (1.2.275), Sycorax imprisoned him within a tree. When she later died, Ariel remained trapped. Prospero, using his own magic, released Ariel but bound him in servitude, promising eventual freedom. Prospero’s enchantment with books unseated him in Milan, but his accumulated magical knowledge overcomes any opposition in his new home. Caliban grumbles “I must obey. His art is of such power” (1.2.375). But like colonial authorities that relied on local interlocutors to rule

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indirectly, Prospero cannot exercise his supernatural power alone. He requires his magical staff, cloak and collaboration from Ariel. Not unlike American interventions in Pacific societies, Prospero frames his control of Ariel as a kind of liberation, reminding Ariel “Dost though forget/From what a torment I did free thee?” (1.2.251–252). But Prospero also holds over Ariel a threat to return him to the tree’s “knotty entrails” (1.2.297). Shakespeare contrasts Ariel with the island’s other inhabitant, Caliban, described as “a savage and deformed slave.” Unlike Ariel’s obsequiousness—“I thank thee, master” (1.2.295)—Caliban refuses to accept Prospero’s rule. He “never/Yields us kind answer,” complains Prospero (1.2.311–312). Caliban, a rough anagram of “Cannibal,” is Sycorax’s son. Just as survivors of radiation exposure often suffer from stigmatization (Jacobs, 2014), Caliban’s disabilities function in the text to stir our disgust, rather than sympathy or solidarity. Miranda proclaims that she dislikes looking at him. He is subjected to unending slurs: “a born devil on whose nature/Nurture can never stick” (4.1.188–189); “abominable monster” (2.2.156). Nevertheless, Caliban is not always depicted negatively. Shakespeare represents him as attuned to nature and the island’s enchantment. The Bard invites our sympathy as Caliban “protests with some justification that the island was his in the first place and that Prospero and Miranda are interlopers” (Bevington, 1988a, p. xxi). When Prospero and Miranda first arrived on the island, Caliban showed them “all the qualities o’ th’ isle,/The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile” (1.2.340–342). Now Caliban regrets his generosity, seeing Prospero as a “tyrant,” “A sorcerer who by his cunning hath/Cheated me of the island” (3.2.41–43). Prospero struggles to prevent solidarity developing between the other characters. Prospero reminds Ariel that Caliban did nothing to free him from the tree (1.2.285–288). Miranda initially “pitied” Caliban and “Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour” (1.2.356–358).3 Of course, Caliban could already speak; Miranda mistakes Caliban’s language as “gabble” (1.2.359). Caliban is ambivalent about his colonizers’ knowledge. On one hand, “with instinctive cunning he senses that books are his chief enemy, and plots to destroy them first in his rebellion” (Bevington, 1988a, p. xxii). But Caliban also realizes that by knowing his colonizers’ tongue, he can “curse” them in language they understand (1.2.367). “Test it in Paris,” a common slogan of the Nuclear Free and 3

 In some versions of the text, editors have assigned these lines to Prospero.

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Independent Pacific movement functioned to redirect at least discursive fallout on the metropole. Similarly, Caliban calls for a “wicked dew” to fall on Prospero and Miranda “And blister you all o’er!” (1.2.326–327). In one of the play’s more fraught passages, Prospero accuses Caliban of trying to “violate/The honor of” Miranda (1.2.350–351) and imprisons him. When Caliban objects, Prospero threatens to torture him (1.2.372–373) and sends magical creatures, like landmines, to lie in Caliban’s path and wound his feet (2.2.5–13). Depicting Caliban’s potential violence as barbaric, Prospero frames his control of Caliban as humane (4.1.189–191). (For critical commentary on the gender and race dimensions of this passage, see Singh, 1996; Valdivieso, 1998.) The French Pacific nuclear testing program at Moruroa and Fangataufa Atolls was an attempt to recover France’s status as a world power. The islands’ worth was placed in relation to France’s “Grand Design,” so could thus be bombed with impunity (Chesneaux, 1991; Thompson, 2014, p. 155). Similarly, despite his newfound power, Prospero sees the island not for its intrinsic worth as a new home. Rather his primary reference point remains his lost domain. Prospero uses the island, its magic and Ariel to reacquire his status in Europe, enrolling them in his geopolitical rivalries. Prospero learns that King Alonso of Naples’ ship is nearing the island, carrying his rival brother Antonio. With Ariel’s help, Prospero uses his magic staff to conjure a great storm. Ariel is as stealthy as a nuclear submarine, “invisible” and moving “like a nymph o’ the sea” (1.2.304–306). Together, they make the “The sky … pour down stinking pitch” (1.2.2–3), stirring a “sulfurous roaring” (1.2.205). Just as the UK forced “Cloudsniffer” pilots to fly through mushroom clouds in the Pacific, Prospero relies on Ariel “to fly,/To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride/On the curled clouds” (1.2.191–193) to gather intelligence on the tempest’s effects. Prospero insists that his “monstrous” capacity (3.3.95) establishes peace under his hegemony: “Your swords … will not be uplifted” (3.3.67–68), “My high charms work,/And these mine enemies are all knit up/In their distractions. They are now in my power” (3.3.88–90). But Miranda is horrified, crying “I have suffered/With those that I saw suffer” (1.2.5–6). She begs Prospero “allay” the storm (1.2.2), appealing to his humanity and chivalry. Prospero responds with the rationalizations of diplomats from nuclear-armed states. Her “piteous heart” is too emotional (1.2.13–14), “There’s no harm done” (1.2.15) and “I have done nothing but in care of thee” (1.2.16). Prospero’s dissembling overcomes Miranda’s resistance. Her sentiment is swayed by her father’s tale of flight from

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Milan: “O, my heart bleeds” (1.2.63), “Alack, what trouble/Was I then to you!” (1.2.151–152). Finally, he resorts to the time-honored tactic of nuclear technocrats; he bores her: “cease more questions./Thou art inclined to sleep. ‘Tis a good dullness” (1.2.185–187). Shipwrecked, the newcomers awake on the island’s beach. Shakespeare’s text insists that the magical storm’s effects are all fleeting. “Not a hair perished,” claims Ariel (1.2.218). It was all an illusion, just like the play itself. Knowing the history of nuclear testing, though, I find it hard to accept the text at face value. The US also insisted the risks of radiation’s invisible rays to Marshallese people were minimal (Weisgall, 1994, pp. 7–10). As the newcomers look around, they project onto their surroundings versions of Europeans’ tropical island imaginary: either it is a “desert/ … Uninhabitable and almost inaccessible” (2.1.37, 40) or a paradise—“How lush and lusty the grass looks!” (2.1.55). Ferdinand finds the island full of erotic possibility, immediately enamored of Miranda: “I’ll make you/The Queen of Naples” (1.2.451–452). Alarmed, Prospero casts a spell on Ferdinand that hints at the phallic anxiety underlying non-proliferation policy (e.g. Cohn, 1997): “I can here disarm thee with this stick/And make thy weapon drop” (1.2.476–477). More dangerously, Antonio and Sebastian—and their comic mirrors, Stephano and Trinculo—see in the island an opportunity for political ambition. Comparing the sea’s fluctuating tides to the changing fortunes of monarchs, Antonio and Sebastian contemplate assassinating King Alonso. Stephano and Trinculo, inept butler and jester respectively, dream of reversing their servile fortune by ruling the island. Through them, Shakespeare mocks Europe’s “supposedly civilized … arts of intrigue and political murder” (Bevington, 1988a, p. xxi). Stephano and Trinculo lure Caliban with promises of an ersatz “freedom” (2.2.184), plying him with wine. Caliban performs abject debasement for his new patrons—“Let me lick thy shoe” (3.2.23)—but he uses European fantasies for his own ends. He offers to show Stephano and Trinculo where to find food and water and help them overthrow Prospero: ‘Ban, ‘Ban, Ca-Caliban Has a new master. Get a new man! … Freedom, high-day, freedom! (2.2.174–184)

Shakespeare’s tragedies are set in “closed worlds,” “sealed claustrophobic spaces” such as castles and fortified cities, with characters caught in

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deadly fated trajectories (Edwards, 1996, pp.  12–13). By contrast, his comedies occur in “green worlds”—often forests—open to surprising opportunities. In The Tempest, the island is both. Initially, it is a place of repressive isolation. Ariel and Caliban are literally confined and the enchanting arts of Prospero, Sycorax and Ariel are vectors of coercive control. But following the arrival of the newcomers, the world gradually opens as characters dare to dream. Caliban tells Stephano and Trinculo not to be frightened by Ariel’s haunting music, but to find in it the stirring of new vision (3.2.135–145). Sebastian too is enthralled by the island’s mysterious tones and entertains new possibilities: “Now I will believe/That there are unicorns; that in Arabia/There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne” (3.3.21–23). Prospero’s much-quoted prophesy in Act 4 contains the possibility of both apocalypse and liberation. Just as the “baseless fabric” of the play is “melted into … thin air” when the curtain falls, “the great globe itself”—all of us—“are stuff/As dreams are made on” (4.1.148–157). Given Prospero’s destructive tendencies and the play’s explosive political tensions—between genders, between colonizer and enslaved subject, rulers and pretenders, masters and servants—we would expect the bloody ending of a Shakespearean tragedy. Yet The Tempest ends on a hopeful note, a “brave new world” (5.1.185). Ariel appeals to Prospero’s humanity; if only Prospero could see the afflictions he has caused, his “affections/Would become tender” (5.1.18–19). Prospero agrees to break his spell and seek reconciliation rather than revenge: Yet with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue rather than vengeance. (5.1.25–28)

In doing so, Prospero decides to disarm: “this rough magic/I here abjure” (5.1.50–51), breaking and burying his magic staff and throwing his book of spells into the sea. Prospero allows Miranda to choose Ferdinand as her companion and grants his promised manumission to Ariel: “Be free, and fare thou well!” (5.1.322). Prospero also frees Caliban, with whom he comes to an uneasy mutual understanding. Prospero recognizes Caliban as a “thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine” (5.1.278–279), accepting “Caliban is a part of humanity” (Bevington, 1988a, p. xxii). Prospero grants Caliban his “pardon” and offers him to “trim it handsomely” by taking anything from Prospero’s cell (5.1.297). Caliban appears to make peace with his colonizer’s knowledge and religion,

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resolving to “be wise hereafter/And seek for grace” (5.1.298–299). Finally, Prospero regains his Dukedom and plans to “retire” to Milan (5.1.214). In the Epilogue, Prospero appeals to us, the audience, to free him from his enchanted entanglements. In our applause, he finds “Gentle breath” to fill his “sails” (Epilogue. 10–12).

A Nuclear Standard of Civilization Nuclear weapons testing, like all scientific endeavors, depended on an enabling apparatus—a network of tools and infrastructure—from the bomb itself to scientific instruments, ships, airplanes, military bases, people and capital (c.f. Latour, 2007). But intertwined with this apparatus, as inseparable from it as the Geiger counters and detonators, was the complex of ideas that made them possible. Artistic representations of the tropical island imaginary did not deterministically cause Pacific nuclear testing. But they formed part of the network of discourses and technologies that enabled it to happen. In a pattern Pugh calls “thinking with islands” (2013, p. 9), tropical islands often feature as sites of European and North American philosophical thought experiments, anthropological inquiry and scientific study: “as tabulae rasae; potential laboratories for any conceivable human project, in thought or in action” (Baldacchino, 2007, p. 166). US government officials described the Marshall Islands as “one of the most remote places of the earth,” with local people stereotyped as “few” and “co-operative,” able to “be moved to a new location with a minimum of trouble” (in Jacobs, 2013, p. 158). In framing islands as “a convenient platform for any whim or fancy” (Baldacchino, 2007, p. 165), this imaginary helped to constitute the Pacific as a space to be dominated and used. Interpretation of The Tempest since Shakespeare’s time has been contested as people enrolled it in colonial legitimation or resistance. Early audiences saw Prospero as a sympathetic philosopher-king who both uplifted his vassals and learned from them. But Victorian Social Darwinism racialized the play: Prospero as wise trustee, tutoring Ariel and Caliban in the fruits of civilization. An influential 1891 Stratford-upon-Avon ­production portrayed Caliban as the supposed “missing link” between primates and humans, with the actor “dressed in a costume his wife described ‘as half monkey, half cocoanut [sic]’” (Bevington, 1988b, p. xxxii). Other European and North American literary works followed this trend. Early representations of the exploratory encounter with islands

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suggested the possibility of learning from indigenous peoples. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, aesthetic representations increasingly depicted white protagonists as racially superior and tropical island inhabitants as abject (Addison, 2002). Such narratives not only were a reflection of emerging colonial attitudes but also shaped how white people interacted with island peoples. In Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1919)—inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin—the artistic genius of Strickland is held back by the sentiments of women who care for him, living in London and Paris, Europe’s imperial metropoles. He finds his true potential when he sojourns to the South Seas. Approaching Tahiti, the English narrator tells us, is an erotic experience, akin “to the golden realms of fancy” (pp. 206–207). USP poet and social theorist Teresia Teaiwa (1968–2017) has argued that the irradiation of Pacific peoples bodies required their fetishization: “The bikini-clad woman is exotic and malleable to the same colonial gaze which coded Bikini Atoll and its Islanders as exotic, malleable and, most of all, dispensable” (1994, p. 93). Similarly, while there was little contact between the British personnel and the I-Kiribati residents on Christmas (now Kiritimati) Island during the nuclear tests, the soldiers maintained the persistent “myth of the Islander Wife, the woman who fell in love with a soldier and left to marry him in the UK” (Alexis-Martin, 2016). In Sixpence Strickland finds a local woman who will support him materially and submit to his coercive control—“She does what I tell her. She gives me what I want from a women” (pp. 248–249): “I shall beat you,” he said, looking at her. “How else shall I know you loved me,” she answered. (pp. 241–242)

It is only in these conditions—of release from the bourgeois, feminizing strictures of “civilization,” of dominance over a pliable and abundant landscape and people—that Strickland “found himself” (p. 205) and realizes his vision. The narrator describes a French doctor encountering Strickland’s masterwork: It was tremendous, sensual, passionate; and yet there was something horrible there, too, something which made him afraid. It was the work of a man who had delved into the hidden depths of nature and had discovered secrets … which it is unholy for men to know. … It was beautiful and obscene.

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One finds echoes of this tone in the awed descriptions of the first nuclear tests (e.g. Laurence, 1959, p. 118). This may not be coincidental. Canaday (2000) showed how developers of the first atomic bombs “turned to literature” to describe their work (2000, p. 206). Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, was a popular choice; the first ever government report on the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab described it as the “magic mesa” (p. 206). J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, cultivated at Los Alamos the cultured ethos of a salon: “One evening the Oppenheimers gave a party. Edward U. Condon picked up a copy of The Tempest and sat in a corner reading aloud passages appropriate to intellectuals in exotic isolation” (in Canaday, 2000, p. 206). Canaday argues that “literary rhetoric” played a “pivotal function … in transforming the bomb from a scientific artifact into a social construct. … [T]his process imposed on the bomb a peculiar and powerful textuality, which prepared its way for a wide dissemination throughout society and its constant utility as a military-political weapon without the need for its regular physical use” (p. 208). Literary allusion enmeshed nuclear weapons in texts that provided for their discursive familiarization and legitimation. The literary layers accreted onto the Bomb also constructed certain parts of the world as exotic nuclear playgrounds, sites of white intellectual self-actualization (Hecht, 2011; Jacobs, 2013; Teaiwa, 1994). In June 1957, a British military magazine featured the army engineers who had spent ten months on a “lonely island … boasting little more than a few coconut palms.” Preparing the way for the UK’s nuclear tests on Christmas Island, they had built a “‘boffin town’ from prefabricated material” along with an airport, roads and troop housing.4 The article noted the presence of “two white women” from the Women’s Voluntary Service who “ran a club for the troops.” The “only other inhabitants,” the article mentions, “are a few natives from the Gilbert Islands, who worked on a coconut plantation” (Sapper, 1957). This basic narrative of “How a plucky group of boffins made Britain a nuclear superpower” (Kelly, 2017) has persisted in the British press (e.g. BBC, 2017). The framing is one of “achieving extraordinary things under often very challenging circumstances,” which is, apparently, “a very British tale” (Brian Cathcart in Kelly, 2017). Imbuing tropical islands with transformative power generated not only exhilaration among white settlers, nuclear scientists and soldiers, but also anxiety. Fear fixated on the image of the cannibal, whose “barbaric” 4

 “Boffin” is British slang for a scientist or intellectual.

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violence became a colonial obsession (Lyons, 1999; Biber, 2005). Works of white imagination deal with these ambivalent feelings by bifurcating indigenous people into servile, obsequious Ariels and devious, despicable Calibans. In the Pacific, the Ariel/Caliban binary was transposed onto supposedly submissive Polynesians and “warlike” Melanesians (Hau’ofa, 1999, p. 28; Hereniko, 1999, p. 144). Those constructed as docile were expected to serve imperial ends without complaint. Supposedly aggressive people were subjected to extreme violence, or, in the case of the British reliance on Fijian troops, turned on other Pacific peoples. The tropical island imaginary (and related colonial discourses) has been institutionalized in the international norms managing violence. On face value, nuclear weapons would seem utterly contrary to the basic norms of international law. They are indiscriminate, are disproportionate and cause unnecessary suffering. They arbitrarily deprive people of their right to life. However, when the International Court of Justice has been asked to weigh in on the legality of nuclear weapons, judges’ responses have been ambivalent (1973 New Zealand vs. France, 1996 New Zealand and Australia vs. France, 1996 Advisory Opinion). The lack of clarity derives in part from an implicit assumption embedded in international law that some societies meet a higher “standard of civilization” than others. Early international treaties on weapons distinguished between the supposedly limited and moral violence of “advanced” societies and the “savagery” of those they sought to control. The “barbarism” of “uncivilized people” disqualified them from protection and sovereignty (Mathur, 2014; Cardinal, 2016). One of the earliest arms control treaties, the 1890 Brussels Acts, explicitly linked limits on selling guns in Africa with “extinction of barbarous customs, such as cannibalism, and human sacrifices” (Article 2(1)). Doing so required putting “African territories … under the sovereignty or protectorate of civilized nations” (Article 1(2)). In the Pacific, colonial powers’ overheated panic about cannibalism was used to legitimate their violence against local peoples (Biber, 2005; Lyons, 1999). When the League of Nations mandate system ranked peoples based on their supposed capacity for self-rule, Pacific colonies were placed in “Class C” for the “most ­backward territories,” enabling greater intrusion in their societies (Anghie, 2002, p. 526). Following WWII, the five imperial victors (the US, USSR, China, the UK and France) placed themselves at the apex of the international system, the UN Security Council, establishing themselves as the permanent guardians of global peace and security. An early resolution (S/RES/21 [1947])

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granted the US strategic trusteeship over the Marshall Islands and other parts of Micronesia, legalizing the American Pacific nuclear tests. As the other members of the Permanent Five (P5) began nuclear testing, their vetoes foreclosed any condemnation by the UN’s top decision-making body. In 1968, the NPT extended the legal division between the P5 and the rest of the world, entrusting them with nuclear arsenals (so long as they progress toward disarmament). For all other states nuclear weapons are prohibited. When non-nuclear-armed states suggest faster progress on nuclear disarmament, they are belittled like Miranda, or threatened like Ariel and Caliban (Mathur, 2016). Diplomatic institutions prevented Pacific peoples’ concerns from reaching regional and global forums. The South Pacific Commission, a regional body established by the colonial powers to coordinate regional development policy, specifically banned any topic deemed political. In 1965, a Cook Islands’ resolution calling on France to consider the impact of its nuclear tests on people in the region was considered too controversial for the Commission (Ogashiwa, 1991, pp.  1–2). Similarly, in 1956, pre-­ independence Samoan leaders attempted in vain to stop British nuclear tests at Christmas Island by appealing to the UN Trusteeship Council (Maclellan, n.d.). Perhaps counterintuitively then, possession of nuclear weapons has become evidence of a country’s status—civilization—rather than its barbarism. A discursive slippage equates a state’s technological superiority with its higher moral capacity to be responsible stewards of such devastating power (Harrington de Santana, 2009). Fears of nuclear weapons’ inhumanity are focused on barbaric Others—“terrorists” and “rogue states” who pursue unsanctioned nuclear arsenals—rather than existing stockpiles. Even states that seek a nuclear-free world are cast as threat to the international order. In February 1982, former US Ambassador to Fiji William Bodde urged the US to “do everything possible to counter” anti-­ nuclear activism in Oceania, because a “nuclear free Pacific” would “change the balance of power … and thereby endanger world peace” (in SPPFC, 1982, p. 1). While the “standard of civilization” norm ostensibly limits state violence—by stigmatizing practices and weapons considered inhumane— there is also an undercurrent that suggests these expectations of humane treatment are expected only “among civilized peoples” (1907 Hague Convention IV Preamble). In The Tempest, Prospero treats his European rivals—who pose a greater threat to him—better than Caliban. Therefore,

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the inhumanity of nuclear weapons did not prevent them from being tested among people who were also considered inhuman. USP playwright and literary theorist Vilsoni Hereniko argues that imagining islands and supposedly remote peoples as “savage” enabled the “papalagi (skybreakers)” to withhold the rights-based protections offered to “civilized” people (1999, p. 140). This racism was not incidental to nuclear testing, it provided the political scaffolding on which the testing program could be built (Jacobs, 2013; Johnston, 2007). For example, in planning for the Christmas Island tests, British government officials deemed that the “only very slight health hazard to people would arise, and that only to primitive peoples,” who they decided could cope with a levels of radiation “15 times higher … than what would be permitted by” international standards (in Maclellan, 2005, p, 363). Listening to the stories of I-Kiribati people who lived through the tests was excruciating when I visited Kiritimati, now in the Republic of Kiribati, in early 2018.5 Teeua Tetua, president of Kiritimati’s association of test survivors, was a child at the time. During one test she remembers gathering on the tennis courts in her village in the middle of the night. “The people were really afraid,” she recalled. The British authorities gave them blankets and some eye protection, “but not enough glasses for everyone.” When the countdown began, everyone was instructed to hide under the blankets and cover their eyes. “The babies were crying because they don’t like the blanket and some kids ran away from their families and their eyes were blinded because the light was so strong,” she told me. She described the blast as very hot and so loud that “people tried to put their fingers in their ears.” The tests caused considerable anxiety: “We felt uncomfortable every day.” Residents of Kiritimati have struggled to gather information about residual risks, facing denial from the British government.

Caliban Writes Back Many Pacific peoples refused to accept that they represented a lower standard of civilization than their nuclear-armed colonizers. In 1957, a Fijian newspaper declared, “Nations engaged in testing these bombs in the Pacific should realize the value of the lives of the people settled in this part of the world. They too are human beings, not ‘guinea pigs’” (in Maclellan, 2017b, p.  79). Pacific critics of nuclear testing framed their  The rest of this section is adapted from Bolton (2018b).

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critique by creatively reimagining the textual and artistic archive imposed upon them by their colonizers. The contradictions in the standard of civilization discourse make an unstable foundation for legitimating colonial and nuclear violence. Its instabilities were noticed early on in its genealogy. In “Of the Cannibals,” source material for The Tempest, Montaigne (1580/1988) observes that people label unfamiliar practices as “barbarous or savage” (p.  102): “Prying” into the “faults” of other peoples, “we are so blinded in ours” (p. 105). He applies to his own society the humanitarian standard used by colonial powers to judge supposedly “savage” people. The complexity of Shakespeare’s text offers possibilities for such a rereading of the colonial encounter with islands. In Une Tempête, Martinican poet and playwright Aimé Césaire rewrote Shakespeare’s text to make Caliban the protagonist. Césaire’s Caliban changes his name to “X,” greets Prospero with pan-African slogans and refuses to carry out orders without protest (pp. 17, 20). Flipping the standard of civilization script, Césaire suggested that the violence of the colonial encounter “‘decivilize[s]’ the colonizer … pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism” (Kelley, 2002, p. xi). Césaire’s Prospero desperately needs to believe that the world cannot change: “no matter what you do, you won’t succeed in making me believe that I’m a tyrant,” Prospero tells Caliban (p. 61). Prospero’s violence thus demonstrates the fragility of his control. A simple act of “insubordination” can, as Césaire’s Prospero puts it, call “into question the whole order of the world” (p. 50). Césaire’s rewrite of The Tempest was not just a representation of contemporary anti-colonial politics, it was part of an effort to use the knowledge, religion, institutions and language of the colonizer against them. Césaire believed that literature “can be the motor of political imagination, a potent weapon in any movement that claims freedom as its primary goal” (Kelley, 2002, p. vii). For Césaire and many other anticolonial intellectuals, Caliban is a symbol of resistance who can inspire the world’s colonized and island peoples to define their own identities (Wilson-Lee, 2016). Just two years after watching The Tempest in Central Park, I sat looking out at the ocean on the verandah of a cabin at the Captain Cook Hotel, former officer quarters for the UK and US nuclear tests on Kiritimati. In the intervening period, ICAN had successfully pushed 122 governments— including all the Pacific states but Australia and the Federated States of Micronesia—to negotiate the TPNW at the UN. In December that year,

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ICAN was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts, with Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow (2017) declaring in her Nobel Lecture that “The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.” My spouse Emily and I had come to Kiritimati to learn more about the impact of nuclear testing and the potential of the TPNW to address it. I found research on the island to be a slower process than expected. My attempts to get off the verandah thwarted, and running out of reading material, I pulled from my suitcase a dusty 1992 issue of the Pacific literary journal Mana I had bought at the USP Bookshop in Suva. In its pages I found a satirical ten-minute play Best No Bombs! (Clarke, 1992). The everyday tasks of four Pacific Islander characters are interrupted when a French nuclear scientist appears and begins setting up “une bombe atomique.” The Frenchman becomes confused when one of the islanders asks him what he is doing: “Who is that?” he asks, “I thought there was no one here.” Three of the islanders ask questions about radiation and protest: “We’re here! We live here. It’s our home.” The fourth interjects “Best no bombs!” in a pidgin that alludes to Caliban’s “gabble.” Finally, fed up, the islanders pick up the scientist and carry him off stage, declaring “We shall have a nuclear-free Pacific.” Best No Bombs! expressed the sentiments of the NFIP movement that received widespread support across Oceania. At the movements’ founding conference in Suva in 1975, participants from around the Pacific region determined that ongoing nuclear testing—and transit by nuclear-armed ships—was enabled by the persistence of colonialism (Johnson & Tupouniua, 1976). The conference adopted a “Pacific People’s Charter for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific,” linking demands for a Pacific Nuclear Free Zone; decolonization; respect for the environment; and protection of the rights of indigenous peoples (in Smith, 1997). Support from independent trade unions and the Pacific Conference of Churches (and World Council of Churches) gave the NFIP grassroots reach through Oceania (Weir, 2012). Further NFIP conferences were held every few years in cities around the region. For intellectuals at USP, the nearby Pacific Theological College and other regional academic institutions, commitment to the NFIP required not only activism but also fostering independent, Pan-Pacific culture and thought (Hau’ofa, 1997, pp. 126–128; Hereniko, 1999; Thaman, 2003). As a result, the NFIP coincided with a “cultural explosion” of Pacific art

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and literature (Hereniko, 1999, p. 147), particularly in the USP creative writing program, its associated journal Mana and the annual USP Pacific Arts Festival. NFIP meetings featured visual art, musical performance and poetry by Pacific artists, notably the Ni-Vanuatu reggae band Huarere, whose song “Nuclear Free” became the anthem of the Port Vila conference. The independence generation of Pacific thinkers—Epeli Hau’ofa, Teresia Teaiwa, Albert Wendt, Patricia Grace, Konai Helu Thaman, Subramani, Vanessa Griffen and Vilsoni Hereniko—regarded art, theory and political engagement as “inseparable” elements of their identity (Hereniko, 1999, p. 138). They wanted to “restore full humanity to their people” by refusing “to allow representations of themselves … to be the preserve of foreigners” (p.  145). Their “ultimate goal was political and cultural independence” (p.  145). The first novel by a Maohi woman, Chantal Spitz’s L’Île des Rêves Écrasés (translated as Island of Shattered Dreams (2007)), wrestles with intimate family dilemmas heightened by the advent of the French nuclear tests. Vanessa Griffen, an NFIP activist who served as editor of Mana, wrote short stories exploring post-colonial Pacific identities, such as “The Concert” in which a teacher of European descent tries to “civilize” her Fijian students by taking them to hear Western classical music (e.g. Griffen, 1981). She later joined ICAN and addressed the TPNW negotiations, highlighting the effects of the testing on “the islands of the Pacific, my home, on atolls and above the seas, destroying homelands, removing people forever from their lands” (Griffen, 2017). While often writing in English and French, Hereniko says Pacific writers took inspiration from the creolization, hybridity and performance of everyday life in the Pacific. Similarly, many Pacific political leaders creatively used externally imposed structures, like the state, European-style legal institutions, churches and universities, to advance denuclearization, independence and regional Oceanic solidarity (Wesley-Smith, 2007). Unable to defeat the dominance of European religion and culture ­outright, in what Hereniko calls a “selected and politicized synthesis” (p.  148), Pacific peoples “satirized … appropriated … and refashioned it to suit their social and political needs” (p. 142), including exploiting “stereotypical images of the … ‘savage’ to their advantage” (p. 144). In Hau’ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends (1987), also read on the verandah in Kiritimati, the protagonist Oilei engages in an absurd quest throughout Tonga and beyond to cure an excruciating pain in his anus. Writing a novel in English, Hau’ofa nonetheless managed to breathe into this colonial form surprisingly subversive ideas. Hau’ofa deliberately set himself

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the challenge of “writing something … disgusting and utterly silly” in a traditional form that allowed him “get away with” persuading a “respectable publishing house” to print it (in Hau’ofa & Subramani, 1987, p. 162). In Nederends you never quite know whether the mystic character Babu Vivekanand’s “new philosophy of kissing the anus” (Hau’ofa & Subramani, 1987, p. 166) is an elaborate joke or a serious critique of the denigration of what US President Donald Trump has called “shithole countries.” The Babu instructs Oilei that the same hatred he feels for lower parts of his body is expressed by leaders from the “top” of the world for those at its “bottom.” To paraphrase Prospero, the Babu calls on Oilei to acknowledge the parts of darkness in his own body as his own. “The problem with your anus,” the Babu teaches, is rooted in the inherent human tendency to isolate and divide manifestations of the One Infinite … into different parts and assign to each of them different values. You must change and be convinced … that the anus is good, beautiful, lovable and respectable. (1987, pp. 99–101)

Our taboos and phobias about our own bodies, or about the bodies of Others, misdirect us from what genuinely threatens us: The anus … is neither revolting nor obscene. The most revoltingly obscene thing that we live with today is the threat of nuclear annihilation. It is obscene because of the spectre of destruction that it presents to all of us, but more so because it perpetuates, for as long as nuclear weapons exist, the fears, suspicions and hatreds that blind us to the beauty of creation; that is, the love, trust and respect that we can have for one another. (1987, p. 104)

Like Césaire, Hau’ofa’s Babu flips the standard of civilization script, saying that “Those who control the most destructive weapons” are ­“psychopathically violent” and will send their “nuclear ships … to your shores to draw you into the vortex of their paranoia, for they can neither conceive of nor tolerate that there are human beings who are genuinely free” (p. 105). The Babu prophesies that only those the world sees as “the lowest organs”—Pacific peoples—can end the “madness” of “the purveyors of terror.” By refusing to be complicit in “the undoing of us all” (p. 104), Pacific peoples can “maintain a semblance of civility and humanity” (p. 104) and even “expand elsewhere” their moral witness (p. 105). In essence, Hau’ofa’s yogi calls for a reverse mission civilisatrice, in which Oceania shows its nuclear colonizers how to be humane.

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The power of public opposition to nuclear weapons expressed by the NFIP—had a significant impact, with newly independent Pacific countries establishing anti-nuclear policies (Johnson & Tupouniua, 1976, p. 214; Ogashiwa, 1991, p.  50, pp.  70–77). However, these national initiatives put Pacific states under intense diplomatic pressure from the US and France, making them vulnerable to reversal. As a result, in 1971 Pacific states established a new regional body, the South Pacific Forum (now Pacific Islands Forum), independent of external colonial control. The body’s first communique expressed concern with French nuclear testing. Semesa K. Sikivou, a Fijian diplomat, later reflected that “our independent status enabled us for the first time to protest in our own right at the contamination of the atmosphere and of the sea” (in Ogashiwa, 1991, p. 47). In 1985, Pacific states gathered in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, to sign the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone (SPNFZ) Treaty. While much more modest than the NFIP’s call, the SPNFZ framed nuclear weapons as a “terror” that poses a threat of “devastating consequences for all people.” Voicing a determination to protect “the bounty and beauty of the land and sea” (Preamble), the treaty banned possession, manufacture, acquisition and testing of nuclear weapons and prohibits assisting and encouraging such activities (Articles 3 and 6). Civil society and diplomatic pressure to end French Pacific nuclear tests intensified in the late 1980s, becoming a global phenomenon. When in 1996, Jacques Chirac announced a new series of eight underground tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa Atolls, he set off a frenzy of protest around the Pacific and the world. In Papeete, capital of Maohi Nui/French Polynesia, 15,000 protestors took to the streets. Rioting surprised foreign journalists accustomed to stereotypes of Tahitian docility. Bowing to international pressure, France canceled its two final planned tests and signed the recently completed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in late 1996 (Maclellan & Chesneaux, 1998, pp. 103–105). The NFIP struggled to maintain momentum after the end of nuclear testing. Fiji’s 1987 coup exacerbated tensions in the movement regarding the politics of indigeneity and competing priorities (Robie, 2015; Smith, 1997, pp.  147–174). Skeptics of the NFIP suggest its history demonstrates the limits of Pacific peoples’ agency, given the SPNFZ’s loopholes, little compensation to nuclear test victims, constraints to independence of the Micronesian states and ongoing French control of Pacific territories. However, in the TPNW, one sees a belated globalization of the NFIP’s ideas and provisions from the SPNFZ. In a submission to the UN in

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advance of the TPNW negotiations, five Pacific states argued that all states are equal under international law and that “every nation, whether nuclear-­ free or nuclear-armed, small or large, has a direct interest in realizing a world without these indiscriminate, inhumane weapons” (Fiji, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, & Tuvalu, 2016, Para. 1). They contrasted the diplomatic obstructionism of nuclear-armed states with Pacific states’ efforts “aimed at compelling the nuclear-armed States to fulfil their legal obligations” to disarm under the NPT and “customary international law” (Para 6). In doing so, they offered the Pacific states as a standard to be emulated, encouraging states to consider the SPNFZ treaty’s provisions as “a useful starting point for discussions” on the TPNW, saying that it was “high time … for a new legally binding instrument that would transform these regional norms into global norm” (Para. 5). The TPNW’s eventual Preamble highlights “the unacceptable suffering of and harm caused to … those affected by the testing of nuclear weapons,” including the “disproportionate impact on women and girls” and indigenous peoples, as well as environmental contamination. By describing nuclear weapons as contrary to international law and “abhorrent to the principles of humanity,” the TPNW flips the standard of civilization script. TPNW supporters use the very same language used to outlaw barbaric violence to stigmatize the nuclear-armed states and highlight the humanity of nuclear test survivors. In May 2018, Palau became the first Pacific state to ratify the TPNW; at the time of writing four other Pacific states were parties and three were signatories. ICAN Australia’s Gem Romuld celebrated the “poetic justice” of “countries who are former colonies of the nuclear weapon states” proclaiming “the weapons of their former colonisers illegal” (in McQuire, 2017). At the UN General Assembly in 2017, Fiji cast those that had ­carried out Pacific nuclear testing as “offending states”—pariahs—and condemned their “silence” about the ongoing harm as an “utter disregard for humanity.” By contrast, Fiji lauded the “small island developing states” that fought to ban nuclear weapons and address their humanitarian and environmental effects (Fiji, 2017).

Setting Sail European and North American missionaries once set sail to convert supposedly barbaric Pacific Islanders. But with a treaty banning nuclear weapons, Oceania has reached back into the metropoles in a kind of

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“re-civilizing mission,” declaring nuclear weapons an affront to our shared humanity. The TPNW is but the latest expression of the reimagining of the world advocated by Pacific artists and intellectuals who saw that their oppression was entwined with how Europeans and North Americans imagined the Pacific, its peoples and islands. Just as Pacific activists spun new tales, by creatively appropriating the forms of their colonizers, the TPNW encodes nuclear survivors’ proud assertion of their human rights, indigeneity and gendered experiences in the language of international law that was once used to judge Pacific societies as “savage.” IR has long ignored the contributions of “small states” and social movements (particularly in the Global South). But the history of Pacific anti-nuclear diplomacy and activism shows that the advent of independent, sovereign islands into the global political system has changed conversations, even of arcane, high nuclear strategy. Nevertheless, in retelling the story of Pacific resistance to nuclear colonialism, we should not reproduce the colonial imaginary of a region radically separated from the world. Locating nuclear testing in “remote” areas of the ocean reduced the ability of people from around the world to demonstrate against the tests. However, it also raised the dramatic stakes. The romance of navigating across the open ocean had an epic quality that encouraged people to experiment with novel forms of seaborne protest, sailing into Pacific test zones. Many of these maritime activists were white, of European descent; many of them were men. Often, they seemed more offended by enclosure of the high seas into exclusion zones than by the nuclear tests themselves. But their nonviolent action showed the interconnectedness of the Pacific with the rest of the world; if a humble sailboat could travel from New Zealand to Moruroa, fallout could no doubt make the return journey (Bigelow, 1959; Eyley, 1997; McTaggart & Hunter, 1978; Reynolds, 1961, pp. 14–18; Vanchieri, 2011). Albert Bigelow, one of four American Quakers arrested trying to sail the ketch The Golden Rule into the Marshall Islands test zone in 1958, saw their voyage as a self-consciously performative act; quoting Hamlet, he described it as “the play … [to] catch the conscience of the King” (1959, p. 23). Similarly, Greenpeace founder Robert Hunter said “The boat is an icon … sailing across an electronic sea into the front rooms of the masses” (in How to Change the World, 2015). The narratives of these ocean-borne campaigners often drew on the tropical island imaginary—framing testing as a spoiling of paradise (e.g. Spencer, 1985). But in doing so, they used the subversive dimensions of this narrative to question the “civilization” of nuclear destruction.

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They found life at sea upended norms and identities, profoundly disand reorienting for people used to life on land (c.f. James, 1985). “[E]verything is moving,” wrote Anne-Marie Horne, who sailed on the protest boat Vega, “Have to be always bracing oneself. … Water slushing and crashing. … Everything damp” (Firth, 1987, p.  101). They exposed themselves to the arbitrary violence of nuclear colonialism; protest sailors were rammed, arrested and beaten. In 1985, French agents bombed the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in a New Zealand harbor, killing the photographer Fernando Pereira. Their adventures were less reenactments of the voyages of discovery and more an expression of solidary with Oceanic peoples unsettling the nuclear colonial order. Like Hau’ofa, Hunter saw the division of the world into discrete, ranked, fragments at the root of exploitation of the ocean, its animals and people. He was driven by a conviction that “all life is interwoven, the whales, the moss, us. We are all one” (in How to Change the World, 2015). Just over a year after the negotiation of the TPNW, Marshallese activist-­ poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Dan Lin, a Hawaii-based photographer, made the short film Anointed (Frain, 2018). Sailing on a traditional ocean canoe, Jetñil-Kijiner, daughter of the current president of the Marshall Islands, approaches and addresses Runit Island, home to a massive concrete dome housing radioactive waste from US nuclear tests at Enewetak. “You were a whole island once,” she says, describing Enewetak’s heritage and natural bounty. But “Then you became testing ground/…/engulfed in an inferno of blazing heat.” Walking up the dome, standing alone on its peak, JetñilKijiner looks directly at us “Who anointed them with the power to burn?” Jetñil-Kijiner synthesized the defiance of Caliban, the erudition of Prospero and sentiment of Miranda and transcended them all by telling a profoundly respectful island story, one that challenges outright the colonial narrative. Perhaps floating on a “protest boat” offers an alternative metaphor for navigating out of IR’s complacent harbor of terracentrism. The protest boat offers a social location from which to take seriously the fluid complexity of global politics, as well as the potential to build a safe vessel in which to nurture radical new identities for peace. Taking this seriously requires one to literally unsettle one’s politics, to acknowledge its flow, to let go of settled ideas about the nation-state and settler colonialism, to set sail into dangerous waters. This troubles me, because, frankly, like Prospero, I like getting lost in my books. But in late 2016, I joined 800 people from the diplomatic and NGO community at a function on board Peace Boat, a ship operated by a Japanese advocacy NGO with same name, docked on the west side of

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Manhattan. The reception highlighted the work of ICAN, which was on the cusp of achieving the UN General Assembly resolution opening the TPNW negotiations. As a member of ICAN’s international steering group, through their work at sea and in global policy forums, Peace Boat have highlighted the voices of hibakusha and nuclear test survivors, taking them on speaking tours and calling into the ports of affected countries. After leaving New York, Peace Boat traveled to Japan and on to Tahiti, where they participated in a Pacific Peace Festival with survivors of Moruroa and the Marshall Islands tests just before the beginning of the TPNW negotiations. As I left the docks that night, feeling awed by the size of the ship towering above me, lit up against the night sky, it felt reassuring to have such a powerful vessel enlisted in our cause. Together—the boat, the campaign, diplomats of affected states—I thought we might untether an unjust global order and rewrite a new disarming narrative.

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Epilogue: Orpheus Meets the Sphinx

In lieu of a traditional conclusion, this Epilogue closes the book with an attempt to engage directly with the creative process of retelling myth. It offers a brief reimagining of the Sphinx, considering how the story would have been turned out differently if Orpheus—the artist—had confronted her atrocious riddle, rather than Oedipus, the hubristic politician. If obliquely expressed, the Epilogue’s intent is to call for a re-enchantment of international relations (IR) theory and practice, an engagement with story, song, ritual and collective action. For this is how those of us who are unarmed can find agency as we face technologies of killing.1

Once upon a time, long after King Oedipus became a distant memory and his answer to the Riddle was forgotten, the Sphinx returned to the outskirts of Thebes. It stalked the checkpoints outside the city wall, unresponsive to any query or protest, roaring its Question: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening?

The Sphinx killed, without mercy or restraint, all those who answered incorrectly, stared in bafflement or broke down in panic. The borderlands 1  My reimagining owes much to New  York Theatre Workshop’s 2016 production of Hadestown, the Public Theatre’s 2017 production of OedipusEl Rey, the poemMyth by Muriel Rukeyser and Sandow Birk’s Depravities of War series, particularly his 2007 painting The Riddle of the Sphinx.

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were strewn with victim’s uninterred remains: the hubristic who had tried to blast their way through, the wonks who thought they had disentangled the cypher and the unwitting who strayed beyond the border fence. At times, the bellowing would cease; Thebans dared to hope the Sphinx had disappeared. There were rumors that a heroic or foolhardy few had made it to the Other Side. But then the Sphinx would reappear. It seemed like the Sphinx was everywhere and nowhere, until manifested by the moment of terror. The city turned on itself, obsessed with conspiracies. Someone, somewhere was The Corruption—the bug in the system, the person who had installed and operated the Sphinx. Occasionally, Thebans expelled the scapegoat of the moment, watching the Sphinx’s mangling interrogation with fascinated dread. Some turned to millenarian cults, convinced that the Cursed Holy One would descend to save them. Others, who had the means, pursued ever more desperate pleasures on ever-larger screens. One man drove into the Sphinx and blew himself up in its robotic arms. But the infernal machine remained unharmed. Now, one day, the itinerant musician Orpheus appeared on the abandoned road into town. Long ago, his lover Eurydice had stepped on a landmine, hidden in a meadow. Orpheus’ dirge so crushed the nymphs that they revealed to him the way into the Underworld. He had descended into the land of dead, found his soulmate and sang lullabies so sweet they soothed the fury of Hades. Even the guard dogs sighed with pleasure. The ancient warlord granted them release on one condition: that they never look back. Orpheus and Eurydice made their escape, but as they reached the threshold into our world, Orpheus doubted. Could art really offer a way out of hell? As he stepped into the sunlight, in fear, he turned to make sure Eurydice was still there with him. Her shade, not yet passing into the day, was lost forever to the night. But Orpheus remained convinced that one day he would see Eurydice again. He was much older now, hair white, spine crooked; but he took heart in the meaning of his lover’s name: “she whose justice encompasses the world.” Surely, he willed himself to believe, Justice will prevail. He followed every haunting trace of her throughout Greece, every imagined sighting, every rumor. Everywhere he went, he sang so mournfully that even those who mocked the old man shed stifled tears. There was once a Eurydice who lived and died in Thebes, a Queen, not the woman Orpheus had known. But without further clues, and trusting

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his mystic heart, Orpheus believed—on the basis of this fragment alone— that perhaps the great city would offer a sign of his true love’s whereabouts. As he approached Thebes, the Sphinx confronted Orpheus with a clanging cacophony: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening?

“Oh Contraption,” he lamented hoarsely to the Sphinx.    I feel your incessant Challenge weaving    Into my memories, smoth’ring my dreams.    Winding tighter, you squeeze my throat. I cry.    Spluttering, my imagination chokes.

But then, Orpheus intuited what Oedipus had so long ago deduced. Strumming his lyre softly, he sang out: “Humanity!” “That is the answer to your Riddle,” spoke Orpheus over his melody. “When I was but a child, I moved about the royal court on all fours. In the days when Eurydice and I burned with the passion of young love, we walked tall, upright, on our own two feet. Now, as I blunder through the world, seeking my Justice, I need the help of the extra foot my walking stick provides.” As the Sphinx collapsed, smoldering, beeping, you could hear Orpheus lilting over the din:    Humanity, crawling, wand’ring,    Stumbling—self-­mutilated—can still find    And disarm you, singing, enchantingly.

Index1

A Acheson, Ray, xiii, 37, 58 Acronym Institute, 71 Activism, vii, ix, x, 5, 13, 14, 30, 34, 37, 39–45, 54, 63, 66, 68, 74, 78, 103, 106, 107, 111 Actor-Network Theory (ANT), 25, 28 Advocacy, vii–xi, 5, 12, 14, 15, 25, 26, 30, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 55, 63, 74, 78, 91, 112 Affect, x, 6, 12, 16, 28, 29, 45, 60 See also Emotion; Sentiment Afghan Campaign to Ban Landmines (ACBL), 8 Afghanistan, 6, 7, 15, 29 Africa, 29, 102 Agency, xii, 2, 4, 14, 15, 22, 28, 37, 57, 65, 91, 92, 109, 121 American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), 59 See also Quakerism Anthropology, 24, 26–28, 44, 60, 93

Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, 36 Antipersonnel Landmine Ban Treaty, 7–9, 34, 43, 44 See also Landmines Aphrodite, 64, 77 Arabian Nights, see 1001 Nights Arendt, Hannah, 30, 36 Ariel, 94–99, 102, 103 Aristophanes, xi, 56, 63–65, 69, 76 Arms control, x, 36, 40, 41, 69, 72, 102 Arms races, 39, 58, 66 Arms trade, viii, 15, 25, 76 Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), 37, 91 Art, vii, xi, xii, 3, 4, 9–11, 15, 16, 23, 28, 34, 69, 76, 77, 88, 89, 92–94, 97, 98, 106, 107, 111, 121, 122 Artificial intelligence (AI), 71, 76 Artillery, 33, 44 As You Like It (play), 67 Athena, 64 Athens, xi, 57, 63–65

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 87 Atomic veterans, 58 Australia, 43, 86, 93, 105 B Banshees, 73 Belarus, 41 Best No Bombs! (play), 106 Bigelow, Albert, 111 Bikini Atoll, 86, 100 Bikini–the Atomic Island (film), 87 Birk, Sandow, 121n1 Biswas, Shampa, 13, 14, 35 Blanes, Ruy, 28 Bodies, 5, 23, 28, 39, 41, 55, 56, 59–63, 65, 70–77, 79, 90, 100, 103, 108, 109 Borders, 122 See also Boundaries Bosnia and Herzegovina, 9, 15 Boundaries, 11, 12, 15, 24, 27, 61, 91, 92 See also Borders Bruderhof, 67 Brussels Acts, 102 Butler, Judith, 62 C Caliban, xi, xiii, 16, 85–113 Cambodia, 15, 30, 31, 37, 75 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 41 Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, xiv, 14, 53–55, 71, 76, 78 See also Killer robots; Meaningful human control Camus, Albert, 33, 34 Canada, 7, 42 Cannibalism, 95, 101, 102

Caribbean, 91, 94 Carpenter, Charli, xiii, 14, 37 Catholicism, 40 Cervantes, Miguel, x, 25, 31–34 Césaire, Aimé, 105, 108 China, 8, 58, 102 Christmas Island, see Kiritimati Civilization, xi, 13, 87, 88, 99–105, 108, 110, 111 Civil society, viii, 4, 14, 33, 41–43, 54, 62, 74, 75, 89, 91, 109 See also Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) Cleanliness, 60, 61 See also Dirt; Douglas, Mary Climate change, 89, 91, 92 Closed world, 59, 65, 67, 68, 97 Cluster munitions, viii, ix, 15, 25, 37, 63, 76 See also Convention on Cluster Munitions Cohn, Carol, 12, 26, 61, 97 Cold War, 37, 57, 72 Collateral damage, 58 Collective action, 16, 64, 65, 93, 121 See also Protest Colonialism, xi, 13, 14, 23, 86–88, 86n1, 91, 93, 94, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105–107, 109, 111, 112 See also Post-colonialism Comedy, 56, 59, 63, 65, 76–79, 97, 98 Common Chorus, The (play), 70 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), 109 Conference on Disarmament (CD), 41 Constructivism, 26, 60 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects (CCW), 54, 74–76

 INDEX 

Convention on Cluster Munitions, ix, 37 See also Cluster munitions Cook Islands, 103, 109 Cooper, Neil, 14, 35, 37, 38 Cosmology, 92 Costa Rica, 35 Croatia, 15 D Dance, 65, 72, 77, 78, 94 Das, Runa, 14 Day After, The (film), 39 Dehumanization, x, 25, 70, 79 Demining, 6–9, 15, 21–24, 27, 31, 33, 42 Department of Defense, viii, 25, 39, 66, 71 Deterrence, 6, 13, 35, 36, 39, 40, 70, 71 Development studies, 27 Diana, Princess, 44 Dionysus, 63 Diplomacy, vii–ix, xi, 9, 10, 14, 16, 25, 30, 34, 41–45, 54, 60, 61, 63, 70, 74–76, 78, 91, 96, 109, 111, 113 Dirt, 60–62, 73 See also Cleanliness; Douglas, Mary Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR), 37 Discourse, viii, ix, xi, 10–12, 14, 16, 22, 25, 28, 35, 36, 38, 42, 60, 63, 69, 78, 88, 99, 102, 105 Discursive turn, x, 11, 14, 15 See also Discourse Docherty, Bonnie, xiv, 54 Don Quixote, The Adventures of (novel), x, 15, 25, 31–34 Douglas, Mary, 24, 44, 60–62 Downwinders, 58

127

Dreams, viii, x, xi, xiv, 13, 26, 28, 34–40, 44, 45, 67, 87, 97, 98 Drones, 36, 38, 58, 59, 71, 76 E Education, 7, 9, 37 Emotion, 15, 43, 54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 73, 96 See also Affect; Sentiment Enewetak, 112 Enloe, Cynthia, 26, 59, 60 Environment, vii, viii, 44, 71, 86, 90, 91, 106, 110 Espirito Santo, Diana, 28 Europe, 22, 23, 25, 31, 44, 66, 69, 89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103, 107, 110, 111 Eurydice, 122, 123 Evil, x, 6, 21, 25, 30, 32, 106 F Fangataufa Atoll, 96, 109 Feminism, xi, xiii, 12, 16, 26, 68, 69 See also Gender; Sexuality Fetishization, 30, 33, 36, 38, 39, 100 Fihn, Beatrice, xiv, 5, 58 Fiji, 15, 86, 89, 91, 102–104, 107, 109, 110 Finnstrom, Sverker, 13, 29, 38 France, 86, 87, 96, 102, 103, 109 French Polynesia/Maohi Nui, 68, 86, 86n1, 109 G Gauguin, Paul, 100 Gender, viii, xi, 4, 10, 12, 41, 54, 55, 60, 61, 63, 65, 71, 77, 96, 98, 111 See also Feminism; Sexuality

128 

INDEX

Gender-based violence, 55 Geneva, 15, 42, 53, 54, 74 Germany, 42 Global South, vii, 14, 63, 76, 111 Going after Cacciato (novel), 31 Golden Rule, The (ship), 111 Google, 70, 71 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 69 Grace, Patricia, 107 Gramsci, Antonio, 38 Greece, xi, 56, 57, 63, 65, 68, 69, 122 Greenham Common, xi, xiv, 66–74, 77, 79 Greenpeace, 111, 112 Green world, 59, 63–66, 98 Griffen, Vanessa, xiv, 107 Grotius, Hugo, 90 Guns, 15, 33, 35–38, 58, 102 Gusterson, Hugh, 13, 35, 36, 39–41 H Haddawy, Husain, 2, 4 Hadestown (musical), 121n1 Hague Conventions, 103 Half Life (film), 88 Hamlet (play), 111 Haunting, 22, 28, 29, 39–45, 98, 122 See also Hauntology Hauntology, 28 See also Haunting Hau’ofa, Epeli, 89, 91–93, 102, 106–108, 112 Hawaii, 112 Hereniko, Vilsoni, 102, 104, 106, 107 Heteronormativity, 12, 77 Hibakusha, 4–6, 41, 75, 76, 113 See also Survivors Hiroshima, viii, 5, 39, 41, 67, 75, 106 Hobbes, Thomas, 26 Ho Chi Minh Trail, 59 Homer, 11, 34

Horne, Anne-Marie, 112 Huarere, 107 Humanitarianism, viii, xi, 6, 7, 14, 22, 36–38, 40, 43, 55, 71, 78, 86, 88, 105, 110 Humanity, viii, 3, 37, 38, 54, 55, 60, 68, 70, 73, 75, 76, 79, 88, 93, 96, 98, 107, 108, 110, 111, 123 Human rights, viii, 41, 54, 71, 111 Human Rights Watch, 54, 58 Humor, 10, 66, 76, 78 Hunter, Robert, 86, 111, 112 I Ideology, 11, 12, 56, 75 Imagination, ix–xi, xiii, 1, 9–15, 27, 30, 33, 35, 44, 58, 62, 67, 70, 76, 88, 89, 91–99, 102, 105, 111, 123 Indigenous peoples, vii, xi, 15, 58, 72, 86, 86n1, 89, 93, 100, 102, 106, 110 Indochina, 2 See also Cambodia; Laos; Vietnam Inhumanity, viii, 25, 54, 68, 73, 103, 104, 110 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), 40, 69 International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), vii, viii, xiv, 5, 37, 71, 74–76, 78, 91, 105–107, 110, 113 International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), 7, 25, 38, 43, 74, 75, 78 International relations (IR), ix–xii, 1, 4, 9–16, 25–31, 35, 45, 55–57, 59, 60, 63, 85, 89, 90, 111, 112, 121 Iraq, 29, 66 Island of Shattered Dreams, see L’Île des Rêves Écrasés

 INDEX 

Islands, 57, 86–89, 91, 93–102, 104–107, 111, 112 J Japan, 42, 67, 86, 112, 113 Jetñil-Kijiner, Kathy, 112 Johnson, Rebecca, xiv, 66, 67, 69–71, 73, 77, 106, 109 Johnston Atoll, 86 Juda, Irioj, 86–88 K Kahn, Herman, 36 Keen, David, 29, 30, 32, 73 Keening, 73 Kenya, 15 Killer robots, xi, xiii, xiv, 14, 15, 25, 37, 41, 53, 54, 60, 63, 76 Kiribati, 15, 86, 86n1, 89, 91, 100, 101, 104 Kiritimati, 86n1, 100, 104–107 Kisses in the Nederends (novel), 107 Knotted Gun, see Non-Violence (sculpture) Kula Ring, 90 L Landmines, viii–x, 6–9, 15, 21–45, 54, 58, 59, 63, 75, 76, 96, 98, 122 Laos, 15 Law, 7, 15, 26, 34, 37, 56–58, 70, 89, 90, 102, 110, 111 international law; customary international law, 110; international human rights law, 111; international humanitarian law, 36 rule of, 4 Lennane, Richard, xiv, 43

129

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer and Asexual (LGBTQA), 61, 68, 77 Lethal autonomous weapons systems, see Killer robots Liberalism, 26 Libertarianism, 90 Lin, Dan, 112 Livermore National Laboratory, 35 L’Île des Rêves Écrasés (novel), 107 Los Alamos National Laboratory, 101 Lysistrata (play), xi, xiii, 16, 53–79 Lysistrata (magazine), 69 M Maclellan, Nic, xiv, 86, 103, 104, 109 Magic, x, 3, 23, 26–30, 68, 88 Magic Mountain (novel), 101 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 23–25, 24n1, 45, 90, 91 Mana (literary journal), 106, 107 Mann, Thomas, 101 Man of La Mancha (musical), 45 Manpanels, 55 Mare Liberum (book), 90 Marley, Bob, 10 Marshall Islands, Republic of the, 86–88, 97, 99, 103, 111–113 US trusteeship of, 86, 103 Martinique, 105 Marxism, 26 Mathur, Ritu, 14, 38, 102, 103 Maugham, Somerset, 100 Mauss, Marcel, 23, 34, 38, 43–45 McLaughlin, Ellen, 63–66 Meaningful Human Control, xi, 16, 53–79 See also Campaign to Stop Killer Robots; Killer robots Melanesia, 102 Melian Dialogue, 57

130 

INDEX

Methodological nationalism, 89 Mette-Marit, Crown Princess, 6 Mickey Mouse, 87 Micronesia (region), 86, 103, 109 Micronesia, Federated States of, 105 Migration, 93 Militarism, x, 36, 38, 56, 70, 72 Mine risk education, 7, 9 Minor, Elizabeth, xiv, 14, 15, 27, 37, 43, 58, 60 Miranda, 94–98, 103, 112 Missiles, 39, 40, 58, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73 Missionaries, 31, 71, 73, 87, 94, 110 Moana (film), 87 Monsters, ix, x, 25, 34, 41 Moon and Sixpence, The (novel), 100 Morganthau, Hans J., 26 Moruroa Atoll, 86n1, 96, 109, 111, 113 Music, xii, 9, 10, 45, 68, 70, 87, 93, 94, 98, 107, 121 Mutiny on the Bounty (novel), 94 Mutually Assured Destruction, 58 Myth (poem), 121n1 Mythology, ix, xi, xiii, 10–13, 15, 16, 26, 27, 74, 90, 92, 93, 100, 121 N Nagasaki, viii, 5, 41 Namibia, 68 Narrative, x, 2, 3, 10–14, 16, 64, 93, 100, 101, 111–113 Nauru, 110 Navy, United States, 86 Netherlands, 42 New Wars, 27 New York City, 71 New Zealand, 86, 93, 102, 111, 112 NGOs, see Non-governmental organizations

Nobel Peace Prize, viii, 5, 7, 43, 75, 106 Non-cooperation, xi, 65 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), x, 7, 9, 30, 42, 43, 45, 55, 74, 112 See also Civil society Non-proliferation, 85, 97 See also Proliferation Non-violence, 68 Non-Violence (sculpture), 37 Norms, 4, 8, 15, 28, 43, 44, 57, 60, 90, 102, 110, 112 Norway, 5, 6 “Nuclear Free” (song), 107 Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement (NFIP), 88, 92, 96, 106, 107, 109 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 35, 85, 103, 110 Nuclear testing, vii, viii, xi, 11, 13, 15, 35, 36, 68, 75, 86, 88, 89, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99–101, 103–107, 109–113 Nuclear weapons, vii, ix, xi, 5, 11, 13–15, 25, 35–40, 42, 43, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78, 88, 99, 101–104, 106, 108–111 O O’Brien, Tim, 31, 75 Occupation, xi, 13, 24n1, 65–68, 70–72 Oceania, 92, 93, 103, 106, 108, 110 Oedipus, xii, 121, 123 Oedipus El Rey (play), 121n1 Operation Grapple, 34 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 101 O’Rourke, Dennis, 88 Orpheus, xii, 11, 16, 121–123 Otherness, xi, 28, 38, 58, 64, 122

 INDEX 

P Pace University, xiii, 55, 56 Pacific, xi, 23, 68, 86 See also Oceania Pacific Arts Festival, 107 Pacific Conference of Churches, 106 Pacific Theological College, 106 Pacifism, 35, 69 Pakistan, 7 Palau, 68, 110 Peace, viii, xiv, 3, 5, 16, 26, 27, 35, 37, 45, 54, 55, 58–60, 63, 64, 66–72, 74, 77, 79, 93, 96, 98, 102, 103, 112 Peace Boat (NGO), 113 Peace Boat (ship), 112, 113 Peace symbol, 41 Peloponnesian War, xi, 56, 57, 63, 66 Pentagon, see Department of Defense Pentagon Papers, 59 Pereira, Fernando, 112 Performativity, x, 9, 12, 16, 24, 27, 28, 30, 34, 38, 45, 62, 73, 78, 86, 107, 111 Pettitt, Ann, 66, 67 Piracy, 89 Plowshares (social movement), 40 Political geography, 13, 27 Political science, 11, 31 Pollution, 40, 62, 63, 89 See also Dirt; Douglas, Mary Polynesia, 68, 86, 102, 109 Poseidon, ix, 35, 90 Positive obligations, 91 Post-colonialism, xi, xiii, 12, 13, 16, 27, 86n1, 107 See also Colonialism; Post-structuralism Post-positivism, 15, 26, 38 See also Post-structuralism Post-structuralism, 15, 27, 60 See also Post-colonialism; Post-positivism

131

Price, Richard, 12 Project Maven, 71 Proliferation, 13 See also Non-proliferation Prospero, xi, 86, 88, 94–99, 95n3, 103, 105, 108, 112 Protect and Survive (UK government civil defense leaflet), 66 Protest, xi, 32, 34, 40, 64, 66, 69, 72, 77, 95, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112, 121 Public Theater, The, 85 Q Quakerism, 111 See also American Friends Service Committee R Race, viii, 10, 39, 55, 58, 66, 96 Racism, 88, 104 Radiation, 15, 71, 86, 88, 95, 97, 104, 106, 112 Rainbow Warrior (ship), 112 Rationality, 13, 23, 25, 39, 43, 56 Reaching Critical Will (RCW), xiii See also Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Reagan, Ronald, 39, 40 Realism, 26, 31, 60, 61 Reenchantment, 15, 121 Refugees, 7, 91 Religion, ix, 7, 8, 14, 23, 24, 24n1, 26, 27, 40, 45, 65, 88, 92, 98, 105, 107 Resistance, 27, 56, 74, 88, 93, 96, 99, 105, 111 Riddle of the Sphinx, The (painting), 121n1

132 

INDEX

Ritual, x, xii, 12, 13, 15, 22–25, 27, 30, 31, 33, 39–41, 45, 73, 121 Robinson Crusoe (novel), 94 Robotics, xi, xiii, 14, 15, 37, 41, 54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 122 Rockaway Beach, 90 Romuld, Gem, 110 Rukeyser, Muriel, 121n1 Runit, 112 Russia, 8, 10, 58 See also Soviet Union S Sailing, 23, 60, 89, 94, 99, 110–113 Samoa, American, 87, 103, 110 Samoa, Independent State of, 87, 103, 110 Science, 11, 14, 23, 24, 24n1, 26, 27, 31, 36, 45 See also Social Science Sentiment, 6, 26, 61, 96, 100, 106, 112 See also Affect; Emotion Sexuality, xi, 64, 65, 70 Shahrazad, ix, x Shakespeare, William, xi, 67, 86, 88, 94, 95, 97, 99, 105 Sharkey, Noel, xiv, 60, 76 Sisyphus, 34 Slavery, 2, 14, 88, 98 Small arms and light weapons (SALW), see Guns Small island developing states (SIDS), 91, 110 Small states, 14, 89, 91, 111 Social science, x, xi, 11, 15, 16, 26, 28, 30, 31, 45 Sociology, 26–28 Solberg, Erna, 6 South Korea, 58 South Pacific Commission, 103

South Sudan, 15 Soviet Union, 40, 66, 68, 69, 72, 86, 102 See also Russia Spain, 32 Sparta, xi, 57, 63–65 Sphinx, The, xi, 16, 121–123 Spirits, 22, 26–28, 30, 41–43, 45, 64, 71, 72, 76 Spitz, Chantal, 107 Standard of civilization, xi, 14, 38, 88, 99–105, 108, 110 Stavrianakis, Anna, 14, 38, 45 Subramani, 92, 93, 107, 108 Sudan, 15 Surfing, 90 Survivors, vii, viii, 5, 7–9, 15, 25, 37, 39, 41, 42, 75, 76, 88, 91, 95, 104, 106, 109–111, 113, 122 See also Hibakusha Swiss Family Robinson, The (novel), 94 T Taboo, 12, 27, 38, 39, 44, 54, 60–62, 108 Taliban, 6–8 Tanzania, 29 Tattoos, 21, 22 Teaiwa, Teresia, 88, 100, 101, 107 Technocracy, 22, 76 Technophilia, 29, 56 Tempest, The (play), xi, 85, 86, 88, 89, 93–99, 101, 103, 105 Terminator, The (film), 14, 41 Terracentrism, xi, 89, 112 Terrorism, 27, 30, 58, 76, 103 Thailand, 15, 59 Thaman, Konai Helu, 106, 107 Theatre, 69 1001 Nights, ix, x, 1, 2, 10, 14, 16 Thucydides, xi, 26, 57, 63, 65

 INDEX 

Thurlow, Setsuko, 5, 6, 75, 106 Tonga, 107 Torture, 30, 36, 96 Tragedy, 57–59, 97, 98 Treaty of Rarotonga (South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone (SPNFZ)), 109, 110 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), 6, 71, 74–76, 88, 91, 105–107, 109–113 Trobriand Islands, 23, 90 See also Papua New Guinea Tuvalu, 91, 110 U Uganda, 15 Une Tempête (play), 105 UNICEF, see United Nations Children’s Fund United Kingdom (UK), 4, 10, 22, 34, 44, 66, 69, 72, 73, 86, 86n1, 96, 100–105, 101n4, 107 United Nations (UN) General Assembly, 41, 110, 113; First Committee (Disarmament and International Security), 41, 74 Open-ended Working Group taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations, 42 Security Council, 10, 35, 54, 102; Resolution 1325 Women, Peace and Security, 54 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 9

133

United States of America (USA), 22, 31, 39, 58, 59, 66, 86–88, 95 University of the South Pacific (USP), 91, 100, 104, 106, 107 V Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, 36 Vietnam, 15, 31, 56 Virgil, 11 W Waltz, Kenneth, 26, 57, 58, 89 Wareham, Mary, xiv, 54 Weaponization, 13 Weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 37, 71 Weisgall, Jonathan, 86–88, 97 Welty, Emily, 13, 27, 35, 90 Wendt, Albert, 107 Wendt, Alexander, 26, 60 Westmoreland, William, 56, 59 Whitehead, Neil, 13, 29, 38 Whyte, Elayne, 75 Wildfire (NGO), 42, 43 Williams, Jody, 7, 43, 44, 54, 55, 74 Witchcraft, 29, 41 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 54 World Council of Churches, 106 World War II (WWII), 40, 86, 102