pakistan’s nuclear exclusion: living with orientalism

Developed over six chapters, Pakistan’s Nuclear Exclusion provides an account of how orientalism is a lived experience of post-colonial racism, injustice, and inequality amongst members of the nuclear community in Pakistan.

The account is produced through interviews with members of the community consisting of students, academics, and physicists in Pakistan. Rahim offers unique insights into how Pakistan’s nuclear community is not only perceived and represented but also how it seeks to operate in a wider nuclear community dominated by Western nuclear powers. The provision of such highly contextualised insights is enabled by the book setting out to both (a) provide analytical space for and (b) ’give voice’ to how orientalism is experienced in the everyday of their lives. Consequently, the work provides (1) an analysis of how ’dominant discourses’ of nuclear management and their ’pictures of reason’ are exclusionary, (2) an analysis of the core features of orientalism as they pertain to Pakistan’s nuclear community; and (3) empirical findings which produce categories of the experience of orientalism into areas of the everyday - exclusion, making a career, Islamophobia, technology denial and self-reliance.

Pakistan’s Nuclear Exclusion is enormously valuable to the research community as well as extremely well-conceived and researched. In addition, much of the methodology chapter offers a level of sophistication and self-reflection that translates well in the interview material and its subsequent analysis.

Sana Rahim, Lecturer in Critical Security, Sheffield Hallam University

Sana Rahim SFHEA is an interdisciplinary researcher in her field of Politics and International Relations.
She recently joined Sheffield Hallam University as a lecturer and teaches 21st century crime and critical
security. She has previously held positions at The Manchester Metropolitan University, University of
Manchester and The University of Leicester. Dr Rahims’ primary research areas are in critical security studies
and postcolonial approaches with particular interests in nuclear weapons, the Global South and the
’notion of the voice’.