This chapter begins the application of Pragmatic Constructivism by interpreting and assessing how, as a community of practice at the macro level, international society has responded to mass atrocity and its challenge to the practices of state sovereignty. It demonstrates how political mobilization on behalf of excluded publics (vulnerable populations) contributed to a reimagining of sovereignty as a responsibility to protect, as well as a normative reassignment of that responsibility to international society when states ‘manifestly fail’. It applies the two tests – inclusionary reflexivity and deliberative practical judgement – to the micro level by assessing the working practices (e.g. penholding, veto reform) of the UN Security Council. While greater inclusivity signposts ways in which the Council can better respond to the public interest, the impact of micro-adaptation is ultimately contingent on a deeper level of change in the identity of member states. Practices of atrocity prevention in the R2P context can act as a pedagogic tool, helping to mobilize the transnational activism that is a necessary part of that progressive change. This discussion extends to nuclear atrocity prevention and the way vulnerable publics deconstructed the Cold War, a lesson that should inform a renewed commitment to deep arms control practices.

Multiple asymmetries characterize the Sino-Indian rivalry. India’s slow and fitful (absolute) rise over the past three decades has happened in the context of relative decline vis-à-vis China because the latter has grown faster and more comprehensively. Despite this asymmetry, newer functional areas – economics, nuclear, and naval – have appeared in this contest. These areas are riddled with domain-specific asymmetries and domain-specific pathways to conflict escalation. While there is no reason to believe that war is inevitable, the Sino-Indian relationship has entered a troubled phase because further asymmetry as well as strategies to address these asymmetries are both conflict-prone. There are three specific pathways (which are not mutually exclusive) that cut across these different domains and point towards heightened conflict: any Chinese attempt to create a new status quo reflective of the power gap in its favor; any Indian endeavor to redress this power gap in order to be taken more seriously by China; and the United States’ promotion of the rise of India.

Chapter 8 argues that any steps or program can be effective only if they adopt a justice lens and reject proposed technical and market fixes that threaten to perpetuate the same inequities, corporate agendas, and extractivist mentality that created the climate and ecological crisis in the first place.

In this chapter Sharae Deckard reminds us that far from being a “green” country, Ireland’s carbon emissions are currently among the highest per capita in the EU and continue to rise, so that the Irish state falls far short of the reductions required by the Paris Agreement.” The chapter traces the history of Ireland’s energy regimes that range from turf, coal, oil, and more recently, renewables. In a comprehensive survey of the energy regimes and their representation in Irish literature Deckard argues that literary and cultural representations play a crucially subversive role in the contemporary neoliberal environment by offering “alternative conceptions of value that repudiate capitalism’s devaluing of human and extra-human life.”

This essay situates the rise of US empire in the nineteenth century within a longer, transnational, and transoceanic colonial project that has been continuously catastrophic – from the arrival of Columbus to the threats of climate change and nuclear disaster – for both Indigenous societies and nonhuman ecosystems. The essay shows how such ecological and geopolitical disruptions were central to both US nation-building and the development of an American national literature, while at the same time highlighting the causal relation and essential continuity between the extractive enterprises and imperial expansionism of the early United States and the planetary crises of the twenty-first century.

This conclusion summarizes the book and its core arguments, emphasizing the importance of a shift towards ecological security in the way we view and approach the security implications of climate change. It also reflects on the potential utility of such an approach beyond the issue of climate change to other dimensions of global security regularly linked to the Anthropocene context, including nuclear weapons and the coronavirus pandemic.

This chapter offers a critical analysis of the relationship between postmodernism and the environment, in particular the climate and climatic change. It outlines an alternative understanding of postmodernism and the literature of the period that resists normative assumptions regarding culture eclipsing nature during this postmodern period. Reading across canonical postmodern texts, genre fiction, and social movements literature, it identifies within this body of work a persistent preoccupation with resource scarcity, pollution, environmental degradation, and, in particular, anthropogenic climate change. Arguing that this tendency with postmodernism necessitates a rethinking of the archives of climate literature, this chapter argues that the period designation "postmodern" names a transition point in how climate is imagined, a period within which we can identify the emergence of an understanding of the global climate that is focused increasingly on environmental threats, their predictive modeling, and the cumulative effects of industrial and nuclear civilization.

The March 11, 2011, Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami led to a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, leading many observers to predict a major transformation of Japanese energy policy. However, since the 2012 election of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan has restarted its nuclear reactors, weakened subsidies for renewable energy, and submitted emissions reduction goals under the Paris Agreement widely criticized as insufficient and reliant on accounting gimmicks. Under what we call Abenergynomics, Abe used energy policy as a tool to support the economic growth objectives of Abenomics, even when the associated policies were publicly unpopular, opposed by utility companies, or harmful to the environment. We show how Abenergynomics shaped Japanese policy toward nuclear power, electricity deregulation, renewable energy, and global climate change negotiations.

In his exhaustive cultural history of the atomic bomb, Paul Boyer suggests that the unthinkable scale of nuclear warfare registered in the American consciousness as an aesthetic problem. “How was one to respond imaginatively to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he writes, “and, still more, to the prospect of world holocaust?” This chapter sees the decidedly American strain of black humor that emerged in the wake of the Japanese bombings as an attempt to build a new “atomic aesthetics” that would be capable of registering and critiquing nuclear violence. A key feature of these aesthetics is an “atomic laughter”—a shattering strain of laughter that is both interior to and elicited by these darkly comic texts. This essay offers a theory of this atomic laughter—its political and affective dimensions—by way of a close reading of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964).

The preface reflects on the history of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission from the author’s first knowledge of its existence as a child, to her first visits to the area in 2004 and 2006. It describes the GHARR-1 after her first visit to the reactor building.

Energy policy making is complex, and policy makers have traditionally relied on evidence and assessments dominated by a handful of disciplines from the natural and physical sciences. These assessments have often focused on technological solutions with the implicit message that the answer to policy needs lies in identifying and developing the right technology. Historically, however, problems arise in the implementation process of new technologies. These obstacles may be better understood, and either alleviated or avoided, through a more holistic analysis of energy policy requirements that includes multidisciplinary approaches from the social sciences and humanities. This chapter introduces the main ideas of the book, including an overview of each chapter and the most important arguments of the book.