Advancing Disarmament in a New Age of Insecurity
I was very grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the workshop on Advancing Disarmament in a New Age of Insecurity. In this event, organised by the Simons Foundation in partnership with Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, I had the opportunity to hear from incredible scholars and activists working on disarmament education. Together, we reflected on the opportunities, challenges, and possibilities for nuclear disarmament, and committed to supporting each other’s work moving forward.
What strikes me the most about the nuclear issue is that disarmament rests on ideas of security and survival, and yet these are the very concepts that inform deterrence thinking and make a nuclear world possible. How do we escape the myriads of ambiguities that continue to perpetuate a violent status quo? While the state of the world right now pushes many of us to seek answers, it is the questions we ask that hold immense potential to advance possibilities for change. Whose security and survival and at what cost? What does the language of security and survival do? The very act of questioning exposes this context as “unsettled” and opens possibility for rethinking it. This is why disarmament education is so important and, I would argue, the most crucial feature of our nuclear disarmament toolkit. As scholars, activists, and educators working on this issue, we have the responsibility to equip people around the world with the analytical tools to ask well-informed questions, while also encouraging the public to remain hopeful and curious about the world and its possible futures.
As I engaged in conversations at the workshop, I kept returning to the idea that disarmament must involve understanding how and why nuclear weapons remain acceptable. Feminist scholarship, I argue, provides valuable analytical apparatuses to make sense of mechanisms normalising nuclear weapons as well as theorising the way forward. In the next few paragraphs, I will reflect on how paying attention to gender can help us see nuclear politics differently, while also revisiting some of the themes discussed during the workshop and offering insights on nuclear disarmament.
Like gender norms, the nuclear political landscape is sustained by naturalised expectations that make certain practices, actors, and futures pass as normal while alternatives remain at the margins. Indeed, many of these mechanisms are gendered, and rest on the continuity of gendered assumptions. For example, feminist scholars have shown how a hypermasculine technostrategic language enables defence intellectuals to legitimise militaristic solutions. More recent works have drawn attention to how gendered understandings about the context of war and the role that men and women play in it are also used to legitimise possession and relations power. Gendered assumptions are powerful structures of knowledge in our societies. These entrenched understandings underpin what and who passes as normal, acceptable and valid. Paying careful attention to how the dominant assumptions of the masculine and feminine pervade nuclear/global politics is crucial for realising a world free of nuclear weapons.
Recently, I attended the Third TPNW Meeting of State Parties (3MSP), and while gender was certainly at the centre of conversations, very few scholars and policymakers actually engaged with gendered language and the possibilities it enables and constrains. While mainstreaming and the disproportionate impacts of nuclear weapons on women and girls matters, more attention should be allocated to the role of gender in producing and sustaining knowledge about the weapons, possessors and the future. To this end, I believe that more should be done in terms of translating the theory behind these gendered mechanisms, making the answer to “why does it matter” more accessible to non-academic audiences, including policymakers. Without doing so we will ultimately fail to understand the ways in which power pervades global politics, preventing us from theorising and developing effective disarmament initiatives
Moreover, progress on nuclear disarmament depends not only on challenging the dominant narratives, but, most importantly, on exposing their political work. As such, if one is thinking about ways to challenge deterrence-oriented approaches, one should not simply demonstrate how nuclear weapons cause humanitarian impacts, or how deterrence assumptions are flawed, but also demonstrate how deterrence discourse enables actors to present themselves as a particular kind of actor (i.e. responsible possessor) as well as render the weapons to be seen as guarantors of security. All these points may seem obvious to those of us advocating for the elimination of nuclear weapons, but they still need to be made visible. In doing so, we can expose the dominant discourse as being less stable. Demonstrating the fluidity of dominant assumptions is a necessary pre-condition for seeing the world differently.
Even though deterrence is at the centre of nuclear weapons conversations and plays an important role in legitimising nuclear possession, more attention should be allocated to understanding the nuclear weapons beyond deterrence. Notions grounded in strategic stability are not the only ideas underpinning the legitimacy of nuclear weapons, and I would go further to say that perhaps not the only ideas being perpetuated through a deterrence discourse. This is why interrogating the political work is so important. What does a deterrence discourse enable and constrain? What does it do?
Several colleagues at the workshop expressed concern that the term “disarmament” is too entrenched in the power structures that make nuclear weapons a persistent feature of global politics. I remain quite critical of disarmament as presented in the NPT; however, I do not think we should stop using the term disarmament. On the contrary, I would argue that using it could grant abolitionists quite an advantage. The fact that disarmament is entrenched in the governance machinery and that it enables nuclear weapons states to justify possession - by framing disarmament as long term and by presenting themselves as less violent and more responsible - can serve as planform for exposing this form of “disarmament” as inconsistent and incoherent. Abolitionists should tailor their speech acts to expose the political work of the disarmament rhetoric and should continue to speak of disarmament in their own terms.
The logic behind this stems from feminist works on subversion and political change. One of the most powerful subversive acts, according to Judith Butler and their work on gender, is the performance by someone (as well as the expression of ideas) who is not considered acceptable but uses the dominant conditions to rearticulate it in their own terms. This enables exposing the dominant terms as incoherent and constitutes a powerful act of subversion.
To conclude, I would like to draw attention to the issue of state centrism in nuclear politics and how this enables and constrains possibilities when it comes to understanding the issue and, most critically, thinking about possible solutions (or questions to ask). Again, feminist scholarship has opened space for thinking beyond the state and unravelling core assumptions about state centrism. The nuclear issue is often represented as centred on what states think and do. While this is part of what the issue is, it is important to engage critically with this scenario and interrogate the possibilities it makes intelligible. State centrism prevents engagement with the more mundane forms for cultural representation where the weapon and possessors are made imaginable. Even though nuclear weapons are very much associated with states, there are a myriad of cultural mechanisms, for example, TV shows, books, music, video games, and the media more generally that produce and reiterate knowledge about nuclear weapons. This is how people make sense of the issue, and it therefore has profound implications for the legitimacy of nuclear weapons. As such, as feminists have taught us, it is important to interrogate the everyday politics of nuclear weapons while reflecting on ways to use these mechanisms to tell anti-nuclear and anti-militaristic stories. Nuclear weapons may be under state authority, and indeed, the decision to disarm must come from states. Nonetheless, their legitimacy and authority are made imaginable through the continuity of knowledge structures that allow them to be understood in this way. Ultimately, the stories we tell matter and can help us create a more peaceful, equal, and just world.