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Heba Taha

Lund University, Sweden (CAT Program)
Theories of Change and Nuclear Disarmament
14 October 2024 - 18 October 2024
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Heba Taha is Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science and the Center for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University. Her research deals with intersections of political economy, technology, and war in the modern Middle East, particularly in Palestine/Israel and Egypt.

She joins the Paris IAS in October 2024 for a group research stay as part of the CAT collaborative program, working with researchers Lyndon Burford, Kjølv Egeland, Tom Vaughan, and Jana Wattenberg.

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Research Interests

Nuclear politics, Nuclear Histories, Disarmament, Political Economy, Development, Technology, Security and Insecurity, Militarism, International Relations from below

Theories of Change and Nuclear Disarmament
(Collaborative project, awarded a NetIAS Constructive Advanced Thinking grant, 2021-2024)

Theories of Change and Nuclear Disarmament (TCND) seeks to initiate interdisciplinary conversations between researchers on the question of nuclear disarmament and how it might be achieved. Scholarly conceptions of 'change' as a concept are relatively limited within the fields of international relations (IR) and security studies, with mainstream theories often reproducing an implicit methodological 'continuationism' which discounts the possibility of meaningful change of, or within, the international system. Nuclear weapons are therefore too often accepted as an inevitable presence in world politics. TCND engages researchers from diverse disciplines on the concept of 'change’ and asks whether accounts of change processes from outside of IR might allow us to think about nuclear disarmament in a new light. Questions include: how much must change—is nuclear disarmament possible only in the context of much wider, sweeping changes in world socio-economic order, or can it be achieved through smaller, targeted interventions? Would the advent of a more just and peaceful world guarantee nuclear disarmament, or would nuclear weapons somehow remain? How can lower-order social changes be leveraged to feed into this process? How can interdisciplinarity contribute to answering these questions?

Key Publications

Taha, Hebatalla. Atomic aesthetics: gender, visualization and popular culture in Egypt. International Affairs 98: 4 (2022), 1169-1187.

Taha, Hebatalla. Hiroshima in Egypt: interpretations and imaginations of the atomic age. Third World Quarterly 43: 6 (2022), 1460-1477.

Taha, Hebatalla. Everyday nuclear histories and futures in the Middle East, 1945–1948. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, early view, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2275611.

32537
2024-2025