@article{THESIS,
      recid = {1770},
      author = {Weichselbraun, Anna Maria},
      title = {Constituting the International Nuclear Order: Bureaucratic  Objectivity at the IAEA},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2016-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {282},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines the role of ideologies of  knowledge for the legitimization of international treaty  verification at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s  Department of Safeguards. Political legitimacy—and thus the  organization’s effectiveness in carrying out its mandate—I  argue, depends at the IAEA on the felicitous performance of  “technical independence:” the making of judgments  ostensibly free from political considerations. I argue  further that what undergirds this performance is the  regimentation of verification practices by an epistemic  ideology of bureaucratic objectivity. Under this Weberian  ideology, the bureaucracy is imagined to be capable of  producing impartial technical knowledge through a  rationalistic, rule-bound system of procedures by which  individual bureaucrats are turned into disinterested  actors, their threatening subjectivities contained by  process. I show that the ideological success of  bureaucratic objectivity provided the political conditions  of possibility for the implementation of an international  system to control the spread of nuclear weapons. But  bureaucracy imagined as a neutral form, I contend, also  permits the maintenance of a global nuclear hierarchy of  “haves and have nots” and indeed, naturalizes this  distinction as technocratic legal fact.

The IAEA’s  Department of Safeguards verifies nuclear material and  nuclear activities in individual states as part of its  obligations to the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which  carved up the world into states permitted to possess  nuclear weapons and states who forswear weapons in exchange  for the promise of nuclear power. In the early 1990s, the  discovery that Iraq had clandestinely pursued a nuclear  weapons program produced a crisis of confidence in IAEA  safeguards. Since then, the IAEA has transformed its  safeguards system with additional legal instruments,  technical tools, and a more expansive analytic methodology  that purports to evaluate the “state as a whole.” This  methodology has, in recent years, been criticized by member  states who worry that the inclusion of more qualitative  knowledge invites politicization, and who insist on  maintaining an “objective, technical” basis for evaluating  state compliance with safeguards agreements. The political  legitimacy of the IAEA Secretariat, grounded in  technocratic neutrality, is threatened when the  organization’s expertise is no longer considered  authoritative.

The study is based on 18 months of  fieldwork at and around the IAEA headquarters in Vienna,  Austria, as well as archival research at the IAEA archive  and the US National Archives. Through observation of  inspector training courses, a mock inspection, and  interviews with inspectors, analysts, managers,  translators, and support staff I examine the nuclear  safeguards project to illuminate the ways in which these  actors negotiate the technopolitical tensions of their  everyday work. By bringing a semiotic analysis of  bureaucratic practices to bear on questions of knowledge  production and expertise as articulated in the history and  social study of science, this work theorizes the production  of knowledge as a fundamentally communicative enterprise.  In considering the practices, objects, and discourses of  the IAEA’s multilingual and multinational nuclear  bureaucrats, this work contributes to understanding the  core possibilities of organizations in international  governance, and reveals bureaucratic strategies for  negotiating the boundaries of epistemic ideologies in  moments of crisis.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1770},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1770},
}