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Professor Larkin is currently focused on denuclearization, conceived as a deliberate political project. What are the possible paths? What obstacles and counter-arguments lie in the way? Are these amenable to assessment? How can the felt belief that nuclear weapons make for security be offset by non-nuclear security provisions? Conceiving denuclearization as a set of separate national judgments achieved with [approximate] simultaneity, what are the prerequisites of joint action? And on the hypothesis that adequate national commitment requires a [relatively] broad consensus and understanding of alternatives, what are the participatory prerequisites? At all levels, how can alternatives be portrayed [modeling, simulation, graphic representation] so that risks, uncertainties, and claims about effects can be brought within a vivid and rigorous political discourse? [Professor Larkin's previous work in nuclear policy is represented by the book Nuclear Designs: Great Britain, France, and China in the Global Governance of Nuclear Arms (1996).]
The denuclearization project displays his broader interest in war choice and war aversion, international politics, and the conception of politics as negotiation. War planning, on this approach, is informed by a repertoire of accounts ('stories'). Analysts ask: what situation are we in, and what elements of the repertoire available to us are appropriate in such a situation? The repertoire of possibilities is given by culture and experience, and subject to interpretation, reworking, and imagination to draft 'stories for the future'--plans--and put them to decision. Politics, then, is interpretive cultural practice, subject to pragmatic and material constraints, carried on by social negotiation through which initiatives are designed and launched. Such projects--after inevitable opposition, amendment, disappointment, and improvisation--are among those which constitute society and the polity. [Professor Larkin is completing a study of war which develops this approach.]
Throughout this research he expresses attention to China and foreign policy, which framed his first book China and Africa (1971). He has a strong interest, noted above, in negotiation; interests, complementary to war, in neutrality and collective security; and a distinct, developed consideration of the Net and Web as media for, and arenas of, politics and learning. |
