State Advocacy for Nuclear Disarmament

FWF funded research project, Grant-DOI 10.55776/PAT8575123

Updates

New FWF Project!

Congratulations to Martin Senn and Katja Astner

Mar 15, 2024

Short Description

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, states have emphasized the necessity of nuclear disarmament. Yet some states have not only talked the talk but also walked the walk. They have taken action for the disarmament agenda such as sponsoring resolutions in the United Nations or supporting disarmament initiatives. A recent example is Austria, which played a key role in the creation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) that entered into force in 2021. Such states are advocates of nuclear disarmament and the subject of this project.

Although state advocates have been important drivers of nuclear disarmament efforts, our knowledge of their motivations is very limited. Existing research provides only inadequate answers to the question of why states are acting as advocates of nuclear disarmament. To answer this question, the project identifies those states that have fostered nuclear disarmament since 1945. It then examines the motivation of these states and develops a theory of state advocacy for nuclear disarmament. It shows which factors interact to motivate these states to promote disarmament or to end these efforts. The project examines both factors outside the state, such as the security environment, and factors inside the state, such as the nature of the political system or the influence of civil society. In addressing this research question, the project combines several social-science methods: quantitative text analysis, the analysis of panel data and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA).

In addition to developing a theory of state advocacy of disarmament, the project also seeks to make a contribution to text data-based research in international security research. To this end, the extensive text data from the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly (“Disarmament and International Security”) and the review conferences of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty are made available as an open-access data set.