Title: ‘The Atoms of Time’: The Politics of Sensorial Frictions Across the IAEA’s Nuclear Safeguards
PhD Supervisor: Professor Anna Leander / Dr. Rens van Munster (external - Danish Institute for International Studies)
Expected completion date: 2026 (expected)
This thesis explores the politics of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) nuclear safeguard, a key global nuclear governance instrument aimed at verifying whether states comply with their commitment not to divert nuclear materials and technologies from peaceful activities to nuclear weapons acquisition. In particular, this PhD research asks how the material elements - the atomic matter - operating in this policy intervene in the configurations of the global nuclear (dis)order. For instance, how the atom and a series of equipment, objects, tools, machines, devices etc. present in the workings of safeguards impact on power dynamics concerning embodied conditions of tension/violence and the distribution and dispersion of agential possibilities in the global nuclear (dis)order. This thesis aims at showing how these material components are integral to the constitution of the order, while keeping a recalcitrant condition that displaces the normal configurations of power. This PhD research contributes to and engages with transdisciplinary debates taking place across science and technology studies, social sciences, and humanities on the political role performed by (socio)materialities, and in particular, resituates International Relations and Political Science perspectives on the global nuclear order by looking at these material interventions. By articulating new materialism, posthumanism, actor-network theory, and aesthetic perspectives in social and political sciences, this study envisions to provide an empirically grounded theoretical repertoire that accounts for two dimensions of the atomic matter’s interventions, namely its associative and dissociative connections and the sensing ways in which these interventions unfold. This PhD research mobilizes affective methodologies through the direct observation of sites where safeguards operate, interviews with political stakeholders, archival research, among other qualitative methods.
Lucas Perez Florentino is a PhD researcher in International Relations/Political Science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva, Switzerland). He holds a bachelor and a master’s degree in International Relations from the Institute of International Relations at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and was an undergraduate exchange student at Georgetown University in Washington DC. His areas of expertise include global governance, nuclear governance, critical nuclear studies, IR theories, and epistemology. His current empirical research investigates global nuclear governance by articulating aesthetic approaches, new materialism and posthumanism, actor-network theory, science and technology studies, and affective methodologies. Between 2013 and 2022, he was involved in a series of academic and applied research projects on Brazil’s and Latin America’s nuclear politics and global nuclear governance.
Project Associate, FGV School of International Relations (Brazil) (2017-2022)