Description
This article interrogates the humanitarian discourse, often acknowledged as the one thing that made the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) possible. While the human security perspective is credited with enabling the treaty’s adoption by exposing the moral and legal imperatives of relying on nuclear weapons for deterrence purposes, this article sheds light on a different mechanism at play. Rather than simply a tool for moral persuasion and weapon stigmatization, I will argue that the humanitarian discourse enabled non-nuclear weapons states to subvert an exclusionary and violent framework that sustains the nuclear status quo. Drawing on feminist poststructuralist theory, I will show how speaking in humanitarian terms challenged war traditions reproduced in nuclear discourse and that sustain dominant configurations of power. By invoking the humanitarian discourse, pro-disarmament states destabilized the repetition and reiteration of the protector/protected dichotomy that has placed them in a position of dependency and prevented these actors from reaching agential grounds in nuclear politics. The article contributes to the body of literature that engages with the emergence of the TPNW while also advancing an important theoretical apparatus that complexifies how change happens in global politics.
