Post-Cold War US nuclear policies towards India witnessed a major swing as they developed from being a demand for the ‘halt, cap, rollback’ during Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001) to the signing and implementation of the historic ‘civil nuclear deal’ during the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009). This thesis addresses this change in US nuclear foreign policy by focusing on three core categories of identity, inequality and great power narratives. First, building upon the theoretical paradigm of critical constructivism, the thesis problematises the concept of the ‘state’ by focusing on identity-related questions arguing that the ‘state’ becomes a constructed entity standing as valid only within relations of identity and difference. Secondly, focusing on postcolonial principles, it argues that imperialism as an organising principle of identity/difference enables us to understand how difference was maintained in unequal terms through US nuclear foreign policy and that foreign policy is manifested in five great power narratives constructed around: peace and justice; India-Pakistan deterrence; democracy; economic progress; and scientific development. Thirdly, identities of ‘race’, ‘political economy’ and ‘gender’, in terms of radical otherness and otherness were recurrently utilised through these narratives to maintain a difference, which enabled the Bill Clinton and the George W. Bush administrations to maintain ‘US’ identity as a progressive and developed western nation, intrinsically justifying the US role as an arbiter of the global nuclear order. The contribution of the thesis: an interdisciplinary perspective on US state identity as connected to the global nuclear order and implications of nuclear policy towards India; a comparative perspective on great power narratives of the Clinton and the Bush administrations that are historically contingent; and methodological insights into temporal and spatial dimensions of textuality through the discourse analysis of primary material.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:687159 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Pate, Tanvi |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/79947/ |
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