India’s recognition as a nuclear power: A case of strategic cooptation

ABSTRACT In the mid-2000s, India turned from a nuclear pariah of the international community into a de facto recognized nuclear power. Why and how did this status elevation come about? Realist, liberal, and constructivist perspectives point to important motivations but fail to elucidate the process of India’s (re-)integration. Our strategic cooptation argument conceives of India’s status upgrade as an exchange of institutional privileges for institutional support. To stabilize the nuclear non-proliferation regime, the United States and other nuclear powers offered India the privilege of being recognized as nuclear power—and of taking part in international nuclear trade—in return for India’s promise to provide additional support to the non-proliferation regime. This deal materialized because India was able and willing to provide the needed support and because the institutional setting provided favorable conditions for circumventing and overcoming third-party resistance. We thus establish “strategic cooptation” as a mode of adapting international security institutions.