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1. Is a postcolonial approach useful when considering the proliferation of life-annihilating weapons? Is there any value added by considering a justice-based postcolonial approach rather than putting all efforts into preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons?
2. Why is there so much focus on Iran’s nuclear programme? What does this focus tell us about the global nuclear and political order?
In answering these questions, it is useful to begin with the sensibility that a reading of the Iranian negotiations on WMD through a justice-based postcolonial lens, helps us uncover a series of ontological and epistemological assumptions that dominant strands of theorizing and practicing IR is premised on. These include assumptions over: the inadequacy of statehood among formerly colonized states, who are often termed ‘weak’ or ‘failed’ states (p. 9) and in the Iranian case posits the latter as ‘unpredictable’ and thus dangerous; who the ‘proper’ members of the international community, and thus ‘legitimate’ holders of WMD are, where the ‘P5 plus 1’ are often narrated as the representatives of the international community in opposition to which Iran is thus made to stand (p. 19-20). Engaged seriously, what these assumptions underline is the idea that the international is in fact a realm of separation rather than relation (its own name notwithstanding), in which persistent dichotomizing colonial narratives dividing formerly colonizing powers from formerly colonized entities shine through. These include separations between moral/immoral, rational/irrational, civilized/uncivilized actors of the international and brings to the fore important questions over whom this sphere includes, whom it is intended to serve, at who pays the cost for its sustenance.