Techno-Racial dynamics of denial & difference in weapons control

ABSTRACT This paper argues that there is an urgent need for postcolonial scholars to engage with the problem of arms control and disarmament. It is also an invitation for experts on arms control and disarmament to gain insights from existing postcolonial perspectives on problems of violence. A violence that is resurfacing with the simultaneous emergence of the ‘dynamic of difference’ through civilizational posturing of West and the Rest and the ‘dynamic of denial’ that encourages erasure and reclusion of colonial violence, Hiroshima and the contribution of the Global South towards arms control and disarmament. This paper seeks to make visible how the ‘dynamic of difference’ and the ‘dynamic of denial’ work in tandem with each other in everyday practices of weapons control. It introduces the concept of ‘techno-racism’ to understand the circulating power of discourses on racial reductionism and technological determinism that are productive forces having an effect on the intersecting dynamics of difference and denial in weapons control. This is demonstrated with reference to the historical trajectory of representation and memory of Hiroshima in contemporary discourses on arms control and disarmament.