Finally, the book assesses the contribution of international assistance programmes to the denuclearization process under way in the former Soviet Union.

Co-winner of the 2009 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in Women's and Gender Studies, Imagining Russia uses U.S.–Russian relations between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a case study to examine the deployment of gendered, racialized, and heteronormative visual and narrative depictions of Russia and Russians in contemporary narratives of American nationalism and U.S. foreign policy. Through analyses of several key post-Soviet American popular and political texts, including the hit television series The West Wing, Washington D.C.'s International Spy Museum, and the legislative hearings of the Freedom Support Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, Williams calls attention to the production and operation of five types of "gendered Russian imaginaries" that were explicitly used to bolster support for and legitimize U.S. geopolitical unilateralism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, demonstrating the ways that the masculinization of U.S. military, political, and financial power after 1991 paved the way for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

With the collapse of the USSR, fifteen fledgling sates inherited a massive Soviet arsenal, unstable political systems, and desperate economies. A "sell everything" mentality threatens to result in the largest arms bazaar in human history, and this potential "fire sale" includes weapons of mass destruction. This book addresses the challenges the new independent states (NIS) of the former Soviet Union (FSU) face in controlling and monitoring their sensitive, military-related exports.Dangerous Weapons, Desperate States explores the various theoretical approaches that help explain the development of nonproliferation export control systems in the NIS. The contributors, coming from both the FSU states and the US, provide a broad range of perspectives on the problems posed by the threat of proliferation.