Jared Rabinowitz

Nuclear Politics

“The Other Nuclear Taboo: Impression Management and the Origins of the Norm Against the Public Display of Nuclear Tests”

In the early nuclear age, nuclear weapons tests were frequently put on public display. First justified as an act of transparency, civilian and military officials were soon insisting that nuclear demonstrations and test films could awaken policymakers, local leaders, and the general public to the realities of modern warfare. But by the end of the 1950s, public showcases of nuclear tests had all but vanished. Why did the public display of nuclear testing disappear from international politics? This article argues that a norm against the public display of nuclear weapons emerged through interactions between U.S. officials and international publics during the 1950s. Though officials initially conspired to use nuclear displays to build public support as they developed a usable nuclear arsenal, their efforts to manage impressions through selective demonstrations and broadcasts of tests broke down as public fallout fears recast testing as an independent source of danger. Rather than seeing tests as illustrations of future war, any tests the public could see were interpreted as a problem in and of themselves. Under tremendous pressure to end testing altogether, officials proactively sought to undermine the dramatic portrayal of atmospheric nuclear testing in the popular press. At the same time, they pursued technologies that would alter the public narrative on testing, supporting programs to develop “clean” weapons and to conduct tests deep underground. The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty thus not only barred the dirtiest forms of nuclear testing, it helped to institutionalize a norm underpinning modern nuclear politics: that nuclear weapons are publicly known but their destructive capacity is never seen.

“Legitimation, Expertise, and the Social Standing of Critique: How Justifying the Bomb Turned Scientists into Authorities on International Politics”

Why were scientists such effective public critics of U.S. foreign policy in the initial postwar years? This paper argues that the American government fell victim to the success of its own early narratives about the atomic bomb. At the end of World War 2, U.S. political leaders sang the praises of atomic scientists. The atomic bomb was, in Truman’s words, “the greatest achievement of organized science in history.” These official discourses tying victory to scientific achievement boosted the political status of scientists and allowed them to claim expertise on one of the most vexing political issues of the time—nuclear weapons. The paper first theorizes how states’ legitimation efforts produce hierarchies of relevant expertise; these may remain active even after governing actors have sought to shift their legitimating narrative. While instrumentally important to the state, hierarchies produced in the course of legitimation can also give new actors standing to publicly critique government policy. I then demonstrate the theory by examining the case of postwar American scientists, showing how their roles were redefined for political purposes and how this afforded the scientists social influence to sway public views on nuclear weapons policy.

Environmental Politics & Governance

“Unbracketing Nature: Nuclear Test Sites, Security Narratives, and the Everyday Making of Nature-Society Hierarchy“

The rhetoric of national security officials often appears to portray an entirely different planet than the one illuminated by ecologists and other natural scientists. Why is there such a radical disconnect in discourses about the geophysical Earth, even among professionals working in the same departments of government? While conventional accounts focus on competing interests and perceptions of security, this paper illuminates the role of practical knowledge and narratives in framing and portraying the natural world. Drawing on the literature on communities of practice, it argues that understandings of nature are produced and communicated informally through everyday practices and know-how. Using the case of U.S. nuclear testing, the paper reconstructs U.S. officials’ debates over acceptable uses of the American nuclear test site in the Marshall Islands, showing how security policy is often conducted in a language of practical operations that recasts the natural environment as an empty backdrop for state action. Demonstrating how this recasting of nature produces adverse outcomes, the paper then shows how this process at once obscures the presence of local populations and justifies environmental harm by depicting nature as a stable landscape, capable of absorbing each individual instance of human-induced damage.

“Plastic Governance Objects: Object Redefinition, IOs, and the Governance of Plastics Pollution” (with Dominic Pfister)

International relations scholars have highlighted the role of problem framing in global governance. Object-oriented theories of global governance emphasize the importance of the constitution of governance objects in setting the conditions of possibility for governance. However, limited attention is paid to how changes in the framing of objects influence the effectiveness of governance. This paper develops a theory of governance object redefinition. Due to the stickiness of governance objects, it is often unfeasible for policymakers to entirely discard existing governance objects that fail to accumulate adequate international support. As a result, governance objects are redefined to improve the argument for governance and alignment with existing regimes for addressing global-scale problems. Using the illustrative case of the construction of plastic as a governance object, we argue that rather than discarding objects, policymakers redefine them in ways more amenable to adoption and effective regulation. The paper demonstrates this process by tracing the redefinition of plastic governance from 2018 to 2025: the paper reconstructs how during this period, policymakers at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) responded to a lack of success in governing plastic by shifting emphasis from macro-plastics to micro-plastics—a move that increased the salience of plastic for global public health.

Politics of Territoriality & Bordering

“Uneventful Expansion? The Missing Accounts of Settler Colonial Expansion in IR Theory”

International relations has long been concerned with the territorial expansion of aggressive states. However, little attention has gone to the “peacetime”—though not bloodless—processes of territorial seizure that characterize settler colonial arrangements. This theory note argues that international relations theory has a significant blind spot for the practices settler colonial states use to evict indigenous communities from land. Settler states take territory using different means—sometimes going to war, but more often backing settlers’ property claims against indigenous claimants. This blind spot for “domestic” agents like courts and police forces disguises how settler states transform political, legal, and social arrangements and alter the physical landscapes to naturalize their territorial rule while avoiding the higher potential for international alarm that comes with war. I suggest that settler colonial territorial expansion is better understood as a process than a singular event, which raises significant questions about whether IR’s dominant theories of territorial aggression are equipped to interpret and explain the behavior of settler states.