Nuclear Governance and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

Abstract

On the 7th July 2017, the United Nations adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) by a vote of 122-1-1. The TPNW has been widely credited with opening a new chapter on nuclear governance norms with the potential to disrupt the current order. Therefore, studying this contemporary treaty is important topical piece of research. Due to the frequently expressed normative value of the TPNW, two theoretical frameworks have been used to evaluate the normative progress of this treaty. This research project studies not only the TPNW, but two other treaties that are commonly grouped into Humanitarian Disarmament. The Mine Ban Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and the TPNW have been analysed in order to study their linguistic similarities through the methodological approach of discourse analysis in order to consider the salient aspects of the Humanitarian Disarmament trend. The results of this project suggest that the TPNW has opened up new room for debate in the typically state centric field of nuclear governance but the TPNW has not yet become a widespread norm. Instead, it remains at the "tipping point" and more time is required to see if it will cascade across international relations or fail. The treaty is still contested by Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) and supported by...