The Struggle for Abolition Power and Legitimacy in Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Diplomacy

Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament and International Order. 1. Nuclear Order and the Struggle for Recognition 2. Democratisation and Discord, 1969–1978 3. Renewing the Bargain, 1979–2000 4. The Road to Prohibition, 2001–2021. Findings and Implications.

Biography

Kjølv Egeland is a postdoctoral fellow with the Nuclear Knowledges Programme at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po in Paris. Completing his doctorate in International Relations at the University of Oxford in 2018, his research interests centre on international security, ideology, and multilateral diplomacy. Egeland’s work on nuclear arms control and disarmament has appeared in a range of leading social science journals. His article ‘A Theory of Nuclear Disarmament’ was awarded the Bernard Brodie Prize in 2022.

"Kjølv Egeland renders us a valuable service in giving us this painstakingly accurate account of the long efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. They have been sadly frustrated and the weapons have retained their strategic importance. Yet, the broad resistance to them, including the Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons, has undoubtedly caused them to be delegitimized. Even the G 20 group of states meeting in New Dehli in September 2023 with China, US and Russia participating acknowledged that ‘the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible’."

Hans Blix, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and foreign minister of Sweden

"In The Struggle for Abolition, Egeland has written an essential book on nuclear disarmament and nuclear order. Egeland’s book/This book/ The Struggle for Abolition is a carefully researched history of the evolution of a multilateral framework for nuclear disarmament as well as an important statement on the future of nuclear politics. 

‘The Struggle for Abolition’/This book/Egeland’s book combines extensive primary research with thoughtful analysis of questions of legitimacy, order and recognition to provide a new understanding of the international disarmament framework and the potential for nuclear abolition."

Laura Considine, Associate Professor of International Politics and Director of the Centre for Global Security Challenges, University of Leeds, UK

"Kjølv Egeland’s book very usefully explores how the unequal but long-standing global nuclear order enshrined in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has been challenged over several decades by the non-nuclear weapon states. The dwindling legitimacy of the ‘nuclear regime complex’ with the NPT – a discriminatory and ineffective treaty – at its heart, has prompted repeated contestation by non-nuclear states. The book explores how these waves of contestation have been rebuffed or ignored by the major nuclear weapons states who staunchly refuse to uphold their original promise to disarm.

Yet as Egeland shows, these crises have sometimes brought about changes to the institutions and practices that make up multilateral nuclear diplomacy. Within a novel and illuminating conceptual framework, the author uses elements of recognition theory and identity to show how the prevailing nuclear hierarchy has threatened non-nuclear states’ identities as sovereign equals, rejecting them as partners in the nuclear ordering process. Unsurprisingly, and in a world where all states are vulnerable to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, the non-nuclear states’ most recent action has been the creation of a new treaty, the TPNW, to transcend and move beyond the inequities of the NPT.

Egeland’s book sheds a revealing light on the history of the long struggle against a dominant nuclear order that threatens planetary security. It is vital reading for anyone interested in peace and disarmament, and the role of small and middle-sized states in resisting entrenched but inequitable narratives and practices."

Marianne Hanson, Associate Professor and Director of the Rotary Centre for International Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution, University of Queensland, Australia

"US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara once offered a dire prospect for humankind: “If, then, man is to have a future at all, it will have to be a future overshadowed with the permanent possibility of thermonuclear holocaust. About that fact, we are no longer free.” This book smartly traces the history and politics of the more than 50-year struggle through international diplomacy to break free from this future. It shows how nuclear diplomacy has sometimes mattered, critically illuminating the roles of institutional legitimacy, rules and roles, and the recognition of others, in the fitful evolution of the current global nuclear order from the 1960s effort to stop the spread of the bomb to the new treaty banning nuclear weapons. The focus here is showing why the handful of powerful nuclear-armed states do not always get their way, bringing into sharp relief the importance of diplomatic contestation, confrontation, and crisis, in driving occasional but seemingly inevitable reforms in the nuclear order. It offers insightful and compelling scholarship on the need to shift attention to the very nature of the nuclear order as the source of the problem rather than one or other nuclear-armed state."

Zia Mian, Senior Research Scholar and Co-Director, Program in Science and Global Security (SGS), Princeton University