On the Legitimating Effects of Brinksmanship

Introduction

This post is the first in a four part symposium on the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the the most studied cases of IR. With the release of documents in recent decades, historical revisions have challenged the received wisdom informed by mainstream approaches to nuclear strategy and a US-centric perspective. However, these revisionist accounts are not well incorporated by IR narratives of the crisis. Sixty years later, a revisiting of the legitimating role that the missile crisis plays in theories of nuclear deterrence and nonproliferation is overdue. The main concern of this symposium is to question the lessons of this crisis for nuclear nonproliferation/deterrence studies, and to ask what happens when we decenter the US and Soviet narratives of this iconic event. It gathers postcolonial, critical, and feminist experts—Itty Abraham, Lorraine Bayard De Volo, and Hugh Gusterson—to explore what it would mean to decolonize our knowledge of the Cuban Missile Crisis.