Engendering New Nonproliferation Research and Viewpoints?

That military matters and foreign policy tend to be dominated by men is hardly news. Built into the military are institutionalized hierarchies favoring male leadership. The civilian leadership structures also favor male leaders over female. Furthermore, while shallow, first-wave feminism has been adopted in many state and military institutions, deeper (transformative) understandings of feminism remain exiled.

The same gender inequalities seen in the state and military operate within the scholarly communities that exist to study national security theories and state policy.

This quick and dirty analysis of content in the Nonproliferation Review, a leading arms control journal, demonstrates an extreme gender imbalance. By counting the gender of authors of articles, viewpoints, and interviews in every NPR issue since 1994 it is observable that 84% of authors are men while only 16% are women. Men were published no less than 400 times while women were published only 74 times. See figure 1. Furthermore, in some articles women only appear as co-authors, not the principle authors, meaning that the instigators of particular studies appearing in the NPR are even more often men than the 84% figure implies.

In addition to this gross over-representation of male points of view are other problems built into nonproliferation scholarship as represented by the NPR. For example, while the NPR does publish an international roster of authors, the vast majority are US citizens with over-representation from EU nations, especially the UK. Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, and Russian authors also appear, but there is a lack of authors from Africa and much of Latin America. This observer could identify no African American, Latino-American or Native American voices, although there might be several examples. Indigenous voices are virtually non-existent in the pages of the NPR.

There is an over-representation of a set of elite US institutions such as Stanford University's Hoover and CSIS, the University of California, Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Henry L. Stimson Center, MacArthur Foundation, and of course the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterrey Institute of International Studies. Although I did not operationalize and count the representation of institutions, it is apparent that well-funded, centrist to conservative think tanks and academic centers dominate the NPR. They, along with the military and executive branch of government, represent the US nuclear weapons policy formation network. It's lonely at the top, and it's designed to be so.

The absence of certain voices from the pages of publications like the NPR is disconcerting, but not for the obvious reason. Solving this problem does not mean adding women, non-whites, and global-south nations, and stirring. The problems inherent in the tight and high circles that trade ideas in the pages of journals like the NPR are much deeper than that. In a sense, the lack of diversity represents a very real lack of democracy in policy making around nuclear weapons in the US. This is the same in virtually every nuclear nation, of course. The US, however, has by far the largest policy formation network. The ideological weight of the US is hegemonic world-wide and influences the possibilities of scholarship around nuclearism, war and international relations, for good and ill.

Figure 1.