Relaciones comercial de Ecuador con el mundo

It is now useful to briefly go back to the vision of global nuclear governance delineated in Chapter Three and the continuum along deterrence and disarmament regimes on which it is established. According to this view, countries can either operate according to the rules of deterrence or those of disarmament, with the value of nuclear arms for security being the decisive variable for moving along the continuum. Investigating how deterrence can come to be perceived as superfluous should indeed receive much more than the sparse attention it has so far received. What this project seeks to argue is that in this ideological shift civil society has an important part to play. Indeed, in Gramscian terms change should take place at the popular before than at the political level and could be traced through a hermeneutical approach.

The role of discursive moves on the part of non-governmental actors has been inquired in passing by Fierke in relation to the 1980s anti-nuclear movement. While the central actions of the two superpowers—restoring, maintaining, undermining—are acts undertaken with military tools, the dismantling

actions of independent movements are directed more at the ideological structures in which the military actions of the arms race are embedded.78 Such ideological dismantlement is the same process lying at the heart of this thesis of nuclear weapons devaluation.79 Since the beginning of the nuclear age, its ideological milieu has undergone several turns and it is an analysis of ideological structures, both dominant and subordinate, that promises to give a more accurate view both of the status of nuclear relations and on the role of civil society therein. What Fierke calls ‘dismantlement’ roughly corresponds to what this project understands as disarmament, or any move away from a deterrence forma mentis. This is not to mean that global civil society is alone what makes the shift from one mentality to the other. However, to understand this shift we must look at civil society in order to see how change can be possible.

Given the hegemony of deterrence explicated in Chapter Two, Gramsci would push us to look within civil society to assess the strength of the common sense, on the one hand, and whether counter-hegemonic forces are building a historic bloc. Civil society and its conceptions of disarmament are particularly interesting because they appear as the quintessential disarmed actor, those that would, more than any, ascribe no value to nuclear weapons. Bobbio suggests we need to recognise that those that do not have arms, and who even if they had them would not use them, are the majority.80 Marxists at other times pointed out that:

78 _{Karin M. Fierke, ‘Changing Worlds of Security,’ 237.}

79 _{The work by Nick Ritchie deserves being reiterated in this context: Ritchie, ‘Valuing and Devaluing}

Nuclear Weapons.’

80 _{Norberto Bobbio, ‘Disarmati di Tutto il Mondo Unitevi,’ La Stampa, March 11, 2014,}

http://lastampa.it/2014/03/11/cultura/disarmati-di-tutto-il-mondo-unitevi- oDR14MVinlxpcyoa70JO6O/pagina.html (last accessed 26 October 2016).

Only an alliance which takes in churches, Eurocommunists, Labourists, East Europeans dissidents (and not only ‘dissidents’), Soviet citizens unmediated by Party structures, trade unionists, ecologists – only this can possibly muster the force and the internationalist elan to throw the cruise missiles and the SS-20 back.81

An analysis of the narratives of civil society based on the governance framework of this thesis, which recognises both deterrence and disarmament as competing regimes, helps demonstrate that these groups can either support disarmament or, more or less explicitly, undermine it. The analysis of this supposedly subjugated voice of nuclear politics, will show that civil society’s struggle with the global ordering structures is productive of emancipatory alternatives; but also that the extent to which this is true largely depends on the implication of civil society with the nuclear state and the ideology of deterrence.

A further reason for concentrating on civil society comes from the critical nature of this research, which takes issue with the dominant makeup of nuclear politics and proposes to reverse towards a more emancipatory route by giving voice to subaltern knowledges. Contestation and resistance in nuclear politics is a fertile ground for research because most studies have fallen short of asking their significance or have done so mostly descriptively. The great majority of studies related to nuclear issues have focused on states that have, had, or wanted nuclear weapons. This approach, regardless of its value, fails to explain the emergence of ‘disarmed’ identities by states and non-state actors that have renounced nuclear weapons possession or that criticise it, thus providing a limited take on nuclear relations. Moreover, it

81 _{Edward P. Thompson, ‘Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization,’ in Exterminism and} Cold War, ed.New Left Review (London: Verso, 1982), 30.

does not recognise their voice and agency in shaping the meaning attached to nuclear arms.

Civil society is relevant not only for the extent and quality of its activities, but also because of the complex relation that links it to other actors, namely states, institutions, business, and media. Moreover, it is the ideological component of such activism that results particularly well positioned to produce new insights. What kind of ordering ideas have been put forward? And what do these ideas do? Asking such questions promises to enlarge our understanding of the diplomatic process surrounding nuclear governance. In line with Gramscian thought, taking the perspective of the subordinate promises to denaturalise prevailing frameworks so as to make visible interesting elements that might otherwise go unseen.

In keeping with the discursive analytical tools outlined above, the empirical analysis will proceed in a first stage to examine the discursive opposition of civil society. In a second stage, to understand the pervasiveness of a certain discourse – or in a Gramscian way whether it constitutes common sense – an analysis of the material side of the struggle is necessary. To that end, the discursive interventions will be investigated first, with a look to understand the ways in which each articulates the concept of nuclear disarmament. Such articulations will be broken down to examine the source of threat and communities at risk but also the policy responses advocated. This allows to gauge the variance of positions and to inquire into the common-sense nature of those discourses. Indeed, the critical constructivist tools will allow to break down the components of those discourses, while a Gramscian approach will