The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
Deterrence has become a dominant but not unchallenged social and technical framework for imagining national security especially in the United States. This talk will explore how deterrence can be seen as culturally particular and related to social practices of military and colonial presence coproduced with technologies for weapons, settlement, and industrialization, and how it is being challenged by Indigenous perspectives offering an alternative security imagination. Looking at the case of the contending imaginations of security in the United States and Hawaii, it unpacks the Indigenous pursuit of social, environmental, and climate justice as security and how the underlying normative perspectives intersect with norms about nuclear weapon possession and use. This work is part of a project that aims to clarify if the normative and institutional pathways through which Indigenous visions of security operate could inform a wider security rethink and help enable people and states to reject nuclear deterrence.
About the speaker: Tamara Lilinoe Patton is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She is also Development and Communications Manager at The Avenue Concept, an organization dedicated to creating dialogue on social issues through public art. She received her PhD in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University.