Gru nd legung zur Metaphysik der Sitten

The nuclear taboo: the united states and the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945

A report on the Second EMBL/EMBO Symposium on Functional Genomics: 'Exploring the Edges of Omics', European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany, 16-19 October 2004.

Living on the edge

NATO Transformed: The Alliance's New Roles in International Security

Year in year out, hundreds of diplomats and civil society representatives partake in a seemingly endless stream of meetings on nuclear disarmament. These meetings seldom produce materially significant agreements. In fact, no nuclear warhead has ever been dismantled as a direct result of multilateral negotiations. And yet the web of institutions that make up the ‘multilateral nuclear disarmament framework’ continues to expand. Why? In this thesis, I identify three waves of institutional expansion in the multilateral nuclear disarmament framework (1975–1978; 1991–1999; 2013–2017), linking them to crises of legitimacy in the nuclear order. Institutional expansion, I argue, has been driven by ‘struggles for recognition’ by non-nuclear powers loath to accept permanent legal subordination. Institutional contestation has allowed non-nuclear powers to exercise symbolic resistance to the frozen nuclear hierarchy enshrined by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its distinction between nuclear ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. But the relegitimising function of institutional contestation reveals an irony: By solving recurrent crises of legitimacy in the nuclear order, the expansion of the disarmament framework has served to stabilise nuclear inequality in the long term. However, the 2017 adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) may signal an end to this cyclical pattern of de- and relegitimisation. After half a century of contestation within the hierarchical NPT framework, the TPNW represents a legal negation of nuclear hierarchy as such.

The road to prohibition : nuclear hierarchy and disarmament, 1968-2017

The humanitarian initiative for nuclear disarmament has challenged and transformed global nuclear politics. Aimed at delegitimising nuclear weapons as acceptable instruments of statecraft, the init...

/pdf/the-diplomacy-of-resistance-power-hegemony-and-nuclear-3tmzvzar9u.pdf

The Diplomacy of Resistance : Power, Hegemony and Nuclear Disarmament

In February 2020, French president Emmanuel Macron invited all interested European states to a “strategic dialogue” on the supposed contribution of France’s nuclear arsenal to European collective s...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09662839.2020.1855147

European nuclear weapons? Zombie debates and nuclear realities

Common knowledge has it that the end of the Cold War allowed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to push the nuclear genie back into the bottle. But whilst NATO members have reduced the a...

Spreading the Burden: How NATO Became a ‘Nuclear’ Alliance

The “global nuclear order” is commonly understood as an evolving set of institutions, norms, and practices governing the development and use of nuclear technology worldwide. The pursuit of nuclear ...

The Ideology of Nuclear Order

Robots formerly belonged to the realm of fiction, but are now becoming a practical issue for the disarmament community. While some believe that military robots could act more ethically than human soldiers on the battlefield, others have countered that such a scenario is highly unlikely, and that the technology in question should be banned. Autonomous weapon systems will be unable to discriminate between soldiers and civilians, and their use will lower the threshold to resort to the use of force, they argue. In this article, I take a bird’s-eye look at the international humanitarian law (IHL) pertaining to autonomous weapon systems. My argument is twofold: First, I argue that it is indeed difficult to imagine how IHL could be implemented by algorithm. The rules of distinction, proportionality, and precautions all call for what are arguably unquantifiable decisions. Second, I argue that existing humanitarian law in many ways presupposes responsible human agency.

Kjølv Egeland

Papers

The Diplomacy of Resistance : Power, Hegemony and Nuclear Disarmament

European nuclear weapons? Zombie debates and nuclear realities

Spreading the Burden: How NATO Became a ‘Nuclear’ Alliance

The Ideology of Nuclear Order

Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems under International Humanitarian Law