Nuclear Stigma and Deviance in Global Governance: A New Research Agenda

In contemporary times, scholars have increasingly turned to the research on norms to study behavior and identity transformation in international politics. This has led to understanding stigma as attached to global actors refusing to follow normatively shared expectations of social conduct. However, the field of nuclear politics has largely ignored this research in particularly identifying how noncompliant states manage their stigmatized identities, after engaging in acts of nuclear deviance against hegemonic norms. By combining and advancing the existing literature on international political sociology, constructivist approaches in international relations theory, and nuclear governance, this paper first argues that stigma should be understood as a position of relational power dynamics that recalcitrant states occupy in contesting dominant norms. Second, it conceptualizes a new category of stigma management as stigma redaction, whereby noncompliant nuclear states occasionally engage in corrective conduct to prevent their identities being permanently cemented as rogue by dominant powers. To contextualize both these arguments, this paper examines the empirical case of India's relationship with the United States, post India's nuclear test in 1974. In doing so, it furthers our understanding of sociological deviance in international politics through an interdisciplinary lens and contributes to the field of international security studies.