From Accountants to Detectives: How Nuclear Safeguards Inspectors Make Knowledge at the International Atomic Energy Agency

Abstract

Abstract The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verifies state compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty through nuclear safeguards. The agency's legitimacy derives from the convincing display of technical authority. The politics of nuclear things, however, constantly threaten to undermine this authority. Nuclear safeguards are made legibly authoritative and credibly technical through bureaucratic objectivity. This epistemic logic and practice is widely shared by projects of technocratic governance in the liberal international order. After the discovery of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program, the IAEA transformed its accounting‐based knowledge practices. However, these transformations into more detective‐like ways of knowing call into question the presumed technical purity of safeguards reports. This article unearths the historical origins of safeguards as bureaucratically objective knowledge and demonstrates its enduring legacy at the IAEA, as its bureaucrats and diplomats attempt to manage the tension between effectiveness and credibility.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.