Sarkar Participates in TNSR Roundtable on Nuclear Revolution
On June 14, 2021, Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, participated in a roundtable with Professors Scott D. Sagan (Stanford University), Jasen Castillo (Texas A&M), and Thomas Mahnken (Johns Hopkins University & CSBA) on the nuclear revolution.
The roundtable was published in Texas National Security Review and comprised reviews by Sarkar and the three other participants of the book, The Revolution that Failed, by Brendan Green. The book questions the conventional wisdom on nuclear deterrence.
An excerpt of Sarkar’s review titled, “Who and What Made the Revolution that Failed?” is below:
This book makes a valuable contribution to the security studies literature by explaining some of the shortcomings in what is perhaps its most influential theory. [Mutually assured destruction] MAD, in the view of many scholars, allegedly kept the Cold War cold and has prevented great-power war since 1945. Even though Green is not the first person to challenge the claim that nuclear weapons tend to have a stabilizing effect on international politics or the core assumptions upon which that claim is based, he unquestionably makes significant theoretical and empirical contributions. His work is bound to shape future research on questions relating to the effects of nuclear weapons on adversarial dyads, nuclear crises, crisis bargaining, and arms control, among others. The Revolution that Failed would be an excellent addition to syllabi in both graduate research seminars and undergraduate courses on international nuclear politics.
The full book review roundtable can be read on the Texas National Security Review‘s website.
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.