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This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, ‘Feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics’. In this article, we argue that feminist International Relations scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that reckon more fully with the colonial matrix of power and its contemporary realignments. As the initial step in such a task, the first part of the article explores some of the distinctive insights that are generated about global nuclear politics by a feminist approach that takes coloniality seriously. We show that such an approach reconceptualizes nuclear destruction as a lived reality for many, within a broader history of domination; exposes the racialized, gendered and colonial dimensions of nuclear discourses; and casts fresh light on the material colonial relationships at the heart of the global nuclear order. In the second part, we reverse our focus to critically think through how the content of feminism, and its relation to coloniality and struggles for self-determination, might be understood differently if we start from a concern with global nuclear politics. The third and final part surveys the articles in the special section, highlighting where they pick up on the themes we have explored and some future lines of enquiry.

In this chapter, I argue for the reinvigoration and expansion of research on feminist anti-nuclear activism. I draw on a diverse range of sources —from the vibrant literature on the Cold War women's peace camps, through postcolonial framings of anti-nuclear activism in Asia and the Pacific, to claims about feminist influence on the negotiation of a global ban on nuclear weapons. Sketching the contours of a bolder and more inclusive research agenda on feminist anti-nuclear activism, I advocate that feminist peace researchers should renew their engagement with, and contribution to, the struggle for a nuclear-free world.

This short article introduces my research into the ways in which racialised and colonial hierarchies have been reproduced and/or contested within white-dominated, western, feminist anti-nuclear activism during the Cold War – particularly in efforts to forge relations of solidarity with activists in the global south. After establishing why this topic should be investigated, the article briefly reviews relevant literature that could structure such an investigation before introducing the British-based network that is the basis of my research project, Women working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (WWNFIP). I offer a preliminary discussion of the network’s newsletter archive, focusing on representations of the identities of both British participants and the Pacific women whose struggles they sought to support. Once completed, this research will offer a fuller picture of Cold War-era western feminist anti-nuclear activism as well as being of wider significance for contemporary debates about decolonising solidarity in peace and feminist movements.

From the Battle of Seattle to the Iceland Saucepan Revolution, and from the 'Arab Spring' to Gezi Park, we live in an age of globalized social movement activism. A distinct body of literature examining the relationship between globalization and social movements has emerged in response, covering two distinct periods of mobilization: the 'anti-globalization' or 'global justice' movement as it became known, from the 1990s and early 2000s, and the 'global wave' of protest since 2011. Intriguingly, both sets of mobilization are frequently postioned as post-identity, or more specifically as post-identity politics. In this chapter, we seek not only to condemn the broad-brush condemnation of 'identity politics', but also, more generally, to defend the category of identity, and particularly of collective identity, in the context of the study of contemporary activism. Moreover, we hope to demonstrate that approaching the global justice movement and the global wave through the lens of collective identity enables us to paint a more expansive empirical picture of both, revealing that they are not so much transcendent of identity, as doing distinctive forms of 'identity work'.

Mobilisation against nuclear weapons in Scotland is surprisingly under-researched. In that light, this chapter offers a preliminary account of anti-nuclear/peace campaigning in Scotland and its contribution to nuclear politics in the UK. It asks: in what ways and to what degree is such campaigning in Scotland distinguishable from that south of the border? And what is its relevance today, in the context of continued constitutional uncertainty and the looming 'Main Gate' decision on Trident renewal? The chapter argues for the existence of a distinct Scottish peace movement −one, moreover, that is likely to play a continuing role in symbolising and channelling opposition to the UK nuclear state in Scotland.

This article aims to rehabilitate women campaigners against nuclear weapons as a focus of study and interlocutor for feminist International Relations scholars. Highlighting the recent tendency in gender and security studies to ignore or stereotype these campaigners, I first show how their critical re-investigation has been facilitated by recent systematizations of poststructuralist-influenced feminist methodology. In this light, I then revisit the discourses circulating in women’s antinuclear activism in the 1980s before deconstructing in more detail the post-Cold War writings of Helen Caldicott and Angie Zelter. I argue that multiple, differently gendered constructions of the antinuclear campaigner were in play during the Cold War and have since been reconfigured in ways that reflect and reproduce the shift to a post-Cold War context and differences between the United States and UK. In such ways, then, women antinuclear campaigners continue to develop diverse oppositional subject positions in their efforts to challenge nuclear hegemony, in a discursive struggle worthy of attention from gender and security scholars as part of a broader, critical re-engagement with the gendered dimensions of nuclear politics.

Introduction to Special Issue that engages with the increasingly important, separate yet interrelated themes of feminism, women’s movements and women in movement in the context of global neoliberalism.

This issue engages with the increasingly important, separate yet interrelated themes of feminism, women’s movements and women in movement in the context of global neoliberalism.

Our starting point in this article is the widespread belief that academia and activism are separate worlds, driven by contrasting aims and imperatives and governed by different rules. Such a view is based on a series of takenfor-granted and highly problematic ontological dichotomies, including mind/body, theory/practice, reason/emotion, abstract/concrete and ‘ivory tower’/ ‘real world’. Perhaps most fundamentally, these serve to set up thinking and reflecting in opposition to doing or acting. Thus in both activist and academic characterisations of what it is that they do, we find the frequent assumption that academics theorise and write, while for activists ‘action is the life of all and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing’; academics exercise their cognitive skills, while activists are animated by passion; academics are impartial commentators on the world while activists are partisan, polemical advocates; academics work in elite institutions while activists are embedded in the everyday, ‘on the streets’ or at ‘the grassroots’.