This thesis seeks to find the place that civil society and its intellectual apparatus have in the governance of nuclear weapons in constructing, challenging, and debunking its ideological architecture. The struggle that interests this project is the one happening at the transnational level involving civil society’s effort to shift the discourse around what nuclear weapons mean for security. A way of looking at the interplay between governance, ideas, and civil society is to analyse the diplomatic process and the extent of contestation present therein. Whilst analysing a national reality allows for a deeper understanding of the nuclear ideology in its various faces, one that includes the direct voices of the nuclear industry, military ranks, etc., the preference for a transnational approach rests on the intent to highlight a global dynamic.55 Therefore, the object of this study is not on the various types of private actors active on nuclear politics, but rather those organised groups that work on those issues transnationally.
In an effort to debunk the prevailing conceptualisation of nuclear order as centred on the non-proliferation regime, the empirical focus of this thesis is on its very heart, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which we aim to locate global nuclear civil society. The NPT is in fact one of the oldest and
55 Studying a diplomatic practice entails a concentration on the narratives of states as formulated by
the governmental bureaucracy through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a process on which the interests of the military and of influential private actors can weight, though often that inpus is unacknowledged.
most subscribed institutions of global nuclear regulation, which established the norm of non-proliferation since its entry into force in 1970.56 Since the nuclear order’s central cleavage is between the haves and have-nots (or those with or without the bomb), the NPT is the best location to study it given its role in establishing that divide. Setting a clear distinction between states that were permitted to have nuclear weapons and all the others that were expected to abstain, the NPT established the main roles of the struggle for nuclear order. It mandated the former NWS to keep the bomb technology for themselves, while all the non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS) commit not to seek it. In exchange the NWS promised to encourage cooperation on the peaceful applications of nuclear technology and to eventually disarm. Such an unequal commitment has held through more than four decades, and its subscribers grew ever more numerous. At the time of writing only five states are not parties to the NPT: four whose nuclear capability is not recognised by the treaty and one of recent independence. 57
The NPT’s centrality as a legal instrument, despite those significant outliers, is compounded by its crucial role as a deliberative forum. The NPT holds Review Conferences every five years and yearly Preparatory Committees, where there is an established tradition of scholars engaged in participatory observation researches.58 These periodic conferences provide an opportunity
56 For the text of the treaty, see United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, ‘Text of the Treaty,’ Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,
https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/text (last accessed 9 October 2016).
57These are India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan for the former and South Sudan for the latter. As
of October 2016, 191 states are parties to the NPT, see United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, ‘Status of the Treaty,’ Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/npt (last accessed 9 October 2016).
58Some examples are the many works by participants in multiple RevCons and PrepComs, Harald
Müller (one of the latest being Harald Müller, ‘The NPT Review Process and Strengthening the Treaty: Disarmament,’ EU Non-Proliferation Consortium, Non-Proliferation Papers 10 (2012)) and Bill
for the NWS and NNWS to discuss and deliberate the future of the treaty, potentially deciding on ways to favour its implementation. It seems useful, in fact, to conceptualise the meetings of the NPT as the reunions of a community of practice that contributes to the permanence of the treaty and its associated norms. Those negotiations are taken here to be a key analytical opening into the establishment, permanence, and transformation of those armed and disarmed subject positions. Through their rhetorical encounters state representatives contribute to crystallise the meaning the bomb has for their security as well as its intersubjective global meaning. The NPT meetings can indeed be seen as a ritualised stage where agents act off their identities gaining a sense of ontologic security, as conceptualised by Jasper.59
The world community of professionals of nuclear policy brought together at the NPT is crucial in the definition and constitution of the NPT and of what is meant by it. This community is composed of national diplomats, UN officials, and, importantly, non-governmental representatives, all of whom tend to travel from one to the other venue of global nuclear diplomacy. To be sure the NPT is not the only space in which the same interaction can be observed, with other options including the afore-mentioned fora where nuclear diplomacy is made. However, the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament (CD) and the Vienna-based IAEA summits suffer from limited representation, which makes them worse options. The UNGA First Committee and other UN bodies, moreover, do not mandate anything that is legally binding, thus reducing to an extent the heat of the debate. Further
Potter more recently with William C. Potter, ‘The Unfulfilled Promise of the 2015 NPT Review Conference,’ Survival 58 n° 1 (2016), but also, more in line with the empirical focus of this project, Kissling, Civil Society and Nuclear Non-proliferation.
59 Ursula Jasper, The Politics of Nuclear Non-proliferation: A Pragmatist Framework for Analysis
alternatives like the Nuclear Security Summits and the Humanitarian Initiative conferences were also considered, but ultimately discarded for the excessive specificity of their focus.
The NPT is an optimal place to look, in a Gramscian way, at hegemony in action, or the ability to command consensus without the exercise of coercion. The study of consensus is particularly appropriate to the analysis of multilateral diplomacy given the importance that finding solutions that are acceptable to everyone has there. The creation of consensus within the nuclear governance structures can be taken as a measure of the minimum shared understandings of that mechanism’s states parties. In the case of the NPT reunions, as with most negotiations, this means reaching a solution that no state would block, because everyone can live with it. In the NPT, justificatory discourse is put forward and the deliberation process is aimed at producing consensus documents which can be seen as mutually accepted sources of authority.
At a deeper level, however, common sense cannot be established exclusively within diplomatic practice and discourse. If we are to look at the established policy of a state, it would make sense to look at the discourse of its key decision makers. Indeed, it has been remarked that ‘[n]uclear weapons politics and discourse provides an excellent subject for study.’60 Policy discourse by elites has always been taken to be relevant for nuclear studies, but recently scholars have also investigated popular culture representations, as in Mutimer’s comparison of cinematographic depictions of the bomb with
60David S. Meyer, ‘Framing National Security: Elite Public Discourse on Nuclear Weapons during the
the more traditional discourse uttered by policy makers,61 or Taylor’s analysis of post-Cold War nuclear iconography.62 As Ulla Jaspers maintains, ‘non- official societal sources such as newspapers articles or statements by influential pressure groups and even pop-cultural representations also contribute to and shape the larger discourse by making particular modes of thinking and acting intelligible’.63
In effect, to reveal common sense one cannot keep within bounds of official pronouncements, but should enlarge the gaze to the wider, popular interpretation instead. This does not mean looking for cultural products that reference the NPT, as hardly anything would make the cut; rather, it requires looking at all those actors that are not decision makers, all the rest of the state that is not its bureaucracy. Civil society representatives attending the NPT are definitely ‘actors that possess expertise central to the act of governing’.64 In that spirit this project privileges the analysis of civil society discourses and practices. The groups examined here are many and highly diversified, including, among others, international campaigns, social movements, NGOs, religious movements, professional associations, think tanks, foundations, 65 and prominent individuals. This is taken to be a significant sample of the transnational movement lobbying for some changes to nuclear governance, thus the most relevant actors for the kinds of diplomatic-cultural shifts discussed here.
61David Mutimer, ‘Picturing Armageddon: Imagining Nuclear Weapons on Screen,’ 2014 ISA Annual Convention Toronto, March 26–29, 2014.
62 Bryan C. Taylor, ‘“Our Bruised Arms Hung Up as Monuments”: Nuclear Iconography in Post-Cold
War Culture,’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 n° 1 (2003).
63 Ursula Jasper, The Politics of Nuclear Non-proliferation.
64 Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann, ‘Governance to Governmentality: Analyzing NGOs, States,
and Power,’ International Studies Quarterly 50 n° 3 (2006): 654.
65 Foundations are part of civil society in their own right. See Richard Price, ‘Transnational Civil
The NPT does include a strong civil society participation, making it possible to pinpoint their narratives and practices, so as to assess the extent of their norm-building potential but also, crucially, of their counter-hegemonic nature. Although the involvement of civil society there has its limits, it is interesting to study the ways in which it intrudes into the formal negotiation process. For our analysis the limitation will be to those groups and individuals that are active at the transnational level, and in particular within the NPT process. Due to the detachment between a disengaged public opinion and an organised civil society activism, applying to the nuclear sphere too broad a definition of civil society runs against the problem of including groups of actors that are incomparable. While clearly this very limiting view of nuclear civil society is problematic, it is also an optimal test for the efficacy of the analytical framework.
This project is concerned with those non-governmental groups and individuals that have an active role in the NPT by closely studying their behaviour at the 2015 NPT RevCon with an ethnographic approach. On a mild New York spring day of 2015 the Ninth Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty opened its doors, starting four weeks of diplomatic wrangling concerning the ways to regulate the nuclear order. From the early morning of April 27, the halls and corridors of the United Nations building were crowded with the world leaders who delivered their countries’ opening speeches, but also with those diplomats, activists, and experts who in various corners of the world work on nuclear weapons politics. If John Kerry, Federica Mogherini, Javad Zarif and the like would
soon leave the stage, governmental and non-governmental representatives would stay on.
Those attending, indeed, included not only diplomats in charge of disarmament issues, but also hundreds of civil society representatives that, with varying perspectives, have a stake in global nuclear politics. Such a community is not entirely populated by the anti-nuclear activists one would generally expect. To be sure, there were marches for nuclear disarmament and a few demonstrations outside the UN gates, but most of the civil society involvement is in the room, shoulder to shoulder with diplomats and international public servants. Presided over by Ambassador Taous Feroukhi of Algeria, the four weeks of Review Conference saw the two attempting, each in their own way, to leave a mark on the negotiation and the ensuing Final Document. This transnational diplomatic process constitutes the central empirical preoccupation of the present work because, through that, it aims to say something broader about the place of civil society in the global nuclear order.
Building upon its author’s direct participation in the 2015 conference, this work provides original empirical material on civil society at the NPT. This is expected to contribute to the understanding, on the one hand, of the actorness of civil society in global nuclear politics and, on the other, of the NPT and its review process as an expression of the broader governance of nuclear weapons. After having identified what this thesis analyses, the next section is devoted to explain how the research was conducted.