Description
What sustains the status quo in the global nuclear order? Global nuclear politics have mainly been explained through a functional lens and a material-based approach, which attributes the status quo to the lack of political will of NPT nuclear-weapon states (NWS) to eliminate nuclear weapons. Such an approach, however, offers little explanation on why all NPT States parties continue to strongly defend the Treaty and even seek its strengthening. Further, it is distant from the experience of practitioners and largely ignores the constitutive effect that diplomacy brings to nuclear politics. This paper highlights the value of Bourdieu in understanding how power works through the discursive practice of multilateral diplomacy. It argues that a critical examination of multilateral practice will demonstrate how it conditions agency and limits what can be achieved in and through diplomacy. The logics of (discursive) practice of multilateral diplomacy have reinforced the NPT as an undisputed “truth,” a doxa, which in turn reproduces inequality, it structures all negotiations around symbolic violence and diplomatic permissibility. The paper concludes how NPT practice makes it impossible to move beyond the status quo by confining nuclear disarmament into an indefinite future.
