India’s nuclear program is often misunderstood as an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats. In Ploughshares and Swords, Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom, narrating a global story of India’s nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program’s civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India’s leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.

The politically savvy, transnationally-connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the chokepoints of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.

Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.

Partition Machine was a two-day conference at the University of Glasgow on the centennial of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne to examine how the Treaty was the genesis of the norm for territorial divisions as a “solution” to protracted political violence in the world. The conference foregrounds new research on territorial divisions, their travelogues, and worldmaking influence in order to better understand the world that partitions have made in the short twentieth century.

A selection of conference papers are currently being developed into an edited volume, provisionally titled, Partition Machine: Legacies of Territoriality in a Violent World, for submission to the Oxford University Press' Proceedings of the British Academy.