Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
The introductory chapter presents the puzzle around the inclusion of civil society and intergovernmental processes at the United Nations, laying theoretical, methodological and empirical groundwork to revisit the very notion of inclusion. Guiding the reader through rich empirical data, generated through ethnography as member of the Women’s Major Group in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the author brings to the fore an innovative theoretical framework built on interest group theory and Foucault’s concept of apparatus to analyse the various mechanisms that allow civil society to gain access, participate and advocate for agenda items. Developing three types of apparatus – institutional, social and substantive – the chapter suggests a new definition of inclusion to nuance and rethink the mechanisms of inclusion – but also of exclusion. The last section convinces the reader of the relevance of the book, namely, if international organizations aim to have an impact on the world, we ought to study how these institutions include civil society in intergovernmental negotiations because it reminds us of the United Nations’ initial pledge which speaks to democratic values.
Chapter 3 presents the context in which the research took place. As the ten-year programme, the Hyogo Framework for Action, was coming to an end, the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) initiated new impetus in the creation of what was going to be the Sendai Framework. While UNISDR fights for disaster risk reduction, promotes resilience and updates outdated frameworks, by convening Member States in intergovernmental negotiations, it opens the debate globally by inviting and consulting with civil society. The chapter delves into UNISDR’s vision, such as its agenda, the alignment – or dissonance – of Member States, and the claims of civil society. The chapter gives background information, which sets the stage to understand the ways in which actors get involved and position themselves in the Sendai process.
Chapter 6, ‘The Text Before All Things’, puts centre stage the subsequent versions of the Sendai Framework in the making from July 2014 to March 2015 to highlight specific agenda items pushed by civil society and the Women’s Major Group especially. It shows the importance of words – for some contentious, for others, vehicles for consensus building – by highlighting what is retained in the text and thus what is substantively included or excluded. A retrospective analysis from the first ratified document dedicated to disaster risk reduction in Yokohama in 1994 to the one ratified in Sendai 2015, with a special focus on gender, provides a socio-historical account of gender gains and losses in the past 30 years and the challenges that arise with using the term ‘woman’.
Chapter 4, ‘We the Peoples’, not only refers to the UN General Assembly statement in 1945, but also provides a solid basis to look at who the individuals are that mobilize forces for disaster risk reduction in the institutional apparatus. To better grasp the claims, resources and the way they organize as Major Groups, the chapter draws on collective action theory to help get a sense of the motivations and networks that build around the Major Groups. Combining collective action with the concept of career allows to depict the essential milestones required for a civil society member to be institutionally included and considered as an ‘insider’, that is, to take part in the Sendai process as a member of the Women’s Major Group.
Article VI of the NPT obliges all parties to the treaty to pursue negotiations toward arms control and eventual disarmament. A number of gaps in our understanding of Article VI exist, however, and these impede efforts to revive negotiations today.
Under international law, an obligation to negotiate is an obligation of best efforts, not an obligation of result. It is therefore an enduring puzzle why the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its 1996 advisory opinion on nuclear weapons, said that Article VI obliges disarmament as a result. The ICJ read too much into Article VI. Realists, by contrast, deprecate Article VI: they describe it as hortatory—the expression of a wish, not the stipulation of a duty.
To negotiate in good faith, a party must do more than go through the motions. The party must come prepared to make, and to entertain, fresh proposals. Moreover, the party must observe an essentially negative obligation: it must not seek to impose a fait accompli in respect of the subject matter of the negotiations; and it must not aggravate the problem that it has committed to negotiate to resolve.
Policy makers across the political spectrum in the US and allied countries recognize that China’s nuclear weapons buildup is a challenge to the strategic balance that had prevailed for decades among nuclear-weapon states. However, consensus is lacking as to what to do about it. One element of our response should be to negotiate toward arms control, as Article VI of the NPT requires.
It takes more than one party to hold a negotiation. China has refused to take part in a nuclear arms control negotiation. China maintains that only when China is at nuclear weapons parity with the US and Russia will it be appropriate for China to negotiate. But NPT Article VI does not stipulate parity as a precondition for the pursuit of negotiations.
An NPT party violates Article VI that refuses to negotiate. An NPT party that instigates an arms race and seeks to impose a strategic fait accompli also violates Article VI. The US, its allies, and like-minded countries should call attention to the inconsistency of China’s conduct, including its nuclear weapons buildup, with Article VI.
Armed aggression, geopolitical rivalry, and an impasse in nuclear arms control are realities of today’s international environment. The Nuclear Ban Treaty, the TPNW, attracts support in many quarters, but it does not address the realities. Lacking a good faith effort toward arms control, the pressure will grow on countries with democratic systems of government to pursue alternatives such as the TPNW. An insight of an earlier generation of strategists was that nuclear arms control, in the world as it exists, requires negotiation. In the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT, realists fashioned a negotiated approach to seek verifiable limits on nuclear arms, and, by so doing, they ensured that nuclear-weapon states would preserve the opportunity to achieve progress toward the eventual disarmament that was, and remains, a shared goal. It is timely to consider how to renew the negotiated approach. Engagement with the NPT among policy makers in the US and allied countries appears to be at a low ebb, but important voices continue to champion this cornerstone treaty. The preceding chapters offer an argument for realists in particular to return to arms control.
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the NPT, has supplied the cornerstone for nuclear arms control ever since countries adopted it over half a century ago. This open multilateral treaty no longer stands alone, however. In 2021, a new treaty, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the TPNW, entered into force. As its title suggests, the TPNW bans nuclear weapons outright for any country that becomes a party. The weapons ban in the TPNW reflects a radically different approach to arms control from the negotiated approach in the NPT. Unlike the NPT, the TPNW demands any country holding nuclear weapons that becomes a party eliminate these almost immediately and provides no means to navigate the strategic challenges that such disarmament would present. Unsurprisingly, no country that holds nuclear weapons has signed the TPNW—again, a contrast to the NPT, which embraces the five main nuclear-weapon states. The chapters that follow argue that the nuclear-weapon states, in an age of resurgent great power rivalry, need to return to negotiations under the NPT if they are to sustain a realistic chance for nuclear arms control.
In this book, a former US Department of State senior arms control official critically analyses two pivotal nuclear arms control treaties: the established Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the rising Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
The book offers a concise and critical analysis of the two, illuminating both their strengths and shortcomings. The author acknowledges the idealistic goal of the TPNW but argues that its immediate abolitionist stance lacks a roadmap for achievement. Instead, the book advocates realistic progress within the NPT framework. It provides twelve key negotiation topics for fostering meaningful dialogue among nuclear-weapon states, while emphasizing the urgency of concrete action in a world facing growing nuclear threats.
Reading the NPT as three interdependent promises—non-proliferation, peaceful use of nuclear energy, and the pursuit of negotiations toward disarmament—states and commentators have come to see the slow progress toward disarmament as a green light to relax the obligation to refrain from proliferating nuclear weapons. The ‘three pillars’ reading of the NPT has especially eroded observance by non-nuclear-weapon states of their obligation under the treaty’s Article III, the provision requiring them to submit their nuclear activities to safeguards in agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). A legal theory of continuous bargaining over peaceful use of nuclear energy and safeguards threatens to obscure non-proliferation, the NPT’s one foundation. Meanwhile, the TPNW gains support among politicians and the citizenry at large in countries with democratic governments and open societies. These developments place the NPT at risk and imperil the realistic approach to arms control that the NPT embodies.
