The Nuclear Middle East
Funding: SRA-MECW. Duration: 2025-2029
The Nuclear Middle East project aims to confront the long-standing invisibility of the Middle East in nuclear thought by examining how nuclear politics in the region are imagined, contested, and lived.
It confronts disciplinary boundaries to account for more diverse perspectives on the nuclear sphere. In doing so, it challenges hegemonic approaches to nuclear politics in the modern Middle East, which have emphasized fears of horizontal proliferation and have reproduced the assumption of nuclear desire as a point of departure. Rather than treating nuclearization solely as a matter of state policy, the project conceives it as a process that unfolds beneath and beyond the state. Nuclearization is therefore approached as something that is experienced, interpreted, and reproduced through everyday practices, memories, fears, and imaginaries.
It is guided by the following three questions, which are interrelated:
- How has the Middle East participated in, or contested, the global nuclear order?
- How has nuclear thought in the Middle East been informed by imaginations of the future, memories, nostalgia, and culture?
- Which concepts and frameworks have been developed by people in the Middle East to better understand the nuclear condition, beyond the widespread assumptions of nuclear desire and nuclear deterrence?
Research team
Research team:
Hebatatallah Taha
Associate Senior Lecturer at CMES and the Department of Political Science.
hebatalla [dot] taha [at] svet [dot] lu [dot] se
Dina Tawfik
PhD Candidate at CMES and the Department of Political Science.
Dina [dot] tawfik [at] svet [dot] lu [dot] se