Review
“Fallout’s historical investigation into nuclear diplomacy offers the kind of carefully crafted empirical examination that gives historical sociologists a good name among both sociologists and historians. . . . It is not only useful, but also insightful, while still, inevitably, leaving some important questions open.” ― Nitsan Chorev, Trajectories
“As a sociology of diplomacy and law, Mallard’s choice of case study is ingenious. . . . His choice of method allows him to break new methodological and conceptual ground in the sociology of international law. He is able to combine attention and faithfulness to legal texts with attention to the social position of those who negotiate and write them. . . . A tour-de-force, a mesmerizing book that is chockablock with intrigue and world politics.” ― Ron Levi, Trajectories
“A strikingly original book, one that opens important intellectual terrain for historical and global/transnational sociology. . . . Fallout’s most exciting innovation is the emphasis on ambiguity and opacity as a key strategy that actors adopt in international affairs.” ― Julia Adams, Trajectories
“With this extraordinarily ambitious and pioneering work Mallard opens up an entirely new research frontier for sociology—the terrain of international relations, diplomacy, and treaty-making in pursuit of nuclear arms control. Through a fine-grained parsing of complex foreign policy struggles, Fallout recounts how Euratom and the IAEA emerge alongside states as influential transnational actors. Mallard offers a sophisticated theoretical account of the role of transparency, ambiguity, and most importantly, opacity in treaty-writing and international law. This artful and path-breaking study of interpretation and reinterpretation of treaties reveals how much formal properties of law influence subsequent negotiations and shape the trajectory of non-proliferation and international law more generally.”
-- Terence Halliday, coauthor of Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis
“In Fallout, Mallard examines an important and understudied issue: the origins of the complex of rules that make up the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Scholars of international institutions tend to eschew hard security issues in favor of areas where international law has a firmer basis, such as international trade and finance, while students of nuclear issues often overlook institutions in order to study the strategic dynamics of nuclear deterrence and proliferation. The nuclear nonproliferation regime is, however, one arena where international institutions and high politics undoubtedly come together, and in this thoughtful and well-researched book, Mallard has the good sense to make it his field of study.” ― American Journal of Sociology
“This brilliant book should be of wide interest to students of government, politics, sociology, and law, as well as to high-level policy makers and the general public concerned with nuclear non-proliferation and problems of global governance. Mallard draws deftly on a wealth of primary and secondary sources to provide us with a lucid and captivating account of the centrality of 'opacity' as a discursive strategy in transnational affairs.”
-- Daniel Halberstam ― University of Michigan
“A very original and quite sophisticated toolbox for analyzing what would seem to be, at first sight, a very classic and age-old theme of study, that of diplomacy, secrecy, and treaty-making strategies.” ― Antoine Vauchez, Trajectories
“The nuclear age is often bifurcated between a Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union on the one hand, and then a transition into the age of globalization focusing on nuclear non-proliferation on the other. Grégoire Mallard has uncovered a profound link between the two narratives in the frustrated ambitions of influential Eurofederalists―architects of today’s European Union―to build a unified nuclear force. Mallard traces the path from the Euratom treaty to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to today’s nuclear-armed or -arming Israel, India, and Iran by exploring the productive ambiguities and opacities of nuclear negotiations. Fallout masterfully combines several disparate histories into a single powerful analysis of the nuclear regime in particular and global diplomacy in general.” -- Michael D. Gordin ― Princeton University
“Diplomatic machinations to limit Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs command headlines. To make sense of why nuclear programs in these countries have proved to be so difficult to restrain, one could not do better than consult Mallard’s thoughtful, analytic history of global nuclear diplomacy. Fallout’s strength lies in its ability to combine historical detail with conceptual clarity in order to bring diplomatic choices into focus. The book portrays law not just as something made by men and women in robes but also as a phenomenon that is constructed by how people talk about and use written laws and unwritten norms.” ― Political Science Quarterly
About the Author
Grégoire Mallard is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of Development at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
