Sarkar’s JCWS Article Receives Positive Review in H-Diplo
Prof. Jayita Sarkar’s article, “U.S. Policy to Curb West European Nuclear Exports,” published in the Journal of Cold War Studies in 2019 recently received a highly positive review from LSE historian of Europe and the European Union, Prof. Piers Ludlow. The review was published in H-Diplo’s International Security Studies Forum (ISSF). The review can be accesses here.
Excerpts from the review are below:
Sarkar has thus made intelligent use of her pre-existing expertise on Franco-Indian nuclear relations, and her familiarity with the archival systems of both countries. The depth of her expertise on all matters nuclear is also strongly conveyed by the sheer weight and detail of the secondary literature referred to. The footnotes are almost Germanic in their desire to list all of the possible secondary sources that might be relevant, which can at times lend the article a slightly daunting appearance, but certainly increases its value for anyone wishing to put together a bibliography on nuclear non-proliferation, the politics of the 1970s, or the history of the Cold War. And the same impression of expertise is augmented by the string of footnotes referring to either texts or documents that have been supplied to the author by other specialists working in this field. This is thus very much an insider’s piece written with all the benefits that being a real specialist brings. Thankfully, however, Sarkar writes and explains clearly enough, and has been given sufficient space by the journal editors to set out the necessary background, in a way which means that even non-specialists can follow and gain much from the twisting tale that she tells.
This is important because there is much here that is of interest to Cold War historians who are not necessarily first and foremost nuclear experts or devotees of the tangled non-proliferation saga
H-Diplo is a network for diplomatic history, international affairs, foreign policy, international relations, peacekeeping studies, nuclear history and policy studies, and transnational studies.
Jayita Sarkar is Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, where she is also the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She teaches diplomatic and political history at graduate and undergraduate levels. Professor Sarkar’s areas of research expertise are 20th century South Asia, history of U.S. foreign relations, politics of nuclear technologies, and connected partitions. Her book, Ploughshares & Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, (Forthcoming, Cornell University Press, 2022), examines the first forty years of India’s nuclear program through the prisms of geopolitics and technopolitics. Read more about Professor Sarkar on her faculty profile.