The humanitarian initiative for nuclear disarmament has challenged and transformed global nuclear politics. Aimed at delegitimising nuclear weapons as acceptable instruments of statecraft, the initiative has been backed by many civil society organisations and most nonnuclear-weapon states. The nuclear-armed states, however, have opposed the initiative, accusing it of undermining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and destabilising nuclear politics. Conceptualising a 'diplomacy of resistance', this article positions the humanitarian initiative as a transnational social movement and traces its development through practices of resistance and counter-resistance. Drawing on Robert Cox's conception of resistance as counter-hegemonic and Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall's taxonomy of power, the article explores the nexus of power and resistance in global nuclear politics. We explain the humanitarian movement's specific aims and practices as a function of its champion's relative political weakness vis-à-vis the nuclear armed states. The movement's coherence and effectiveness, in turn, was fostered by a coalitional logic that allowed different identities of resistance to be steered towards a nuclear ban treaty within the UN's institutional framework.

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The "global nuclear order" is commonly understood as an evolving set of institutions, norms, and practices governing the development and use of nuclear technology worldwide. The pursuit of nuclear order is often portrayed as a "pragmatic" or "practical" compromise between unconstrained nuclear anarchy, on the one hand, and prompt steps toward nuclear disarmament, on the other. In this article, I use the tools of ideology critique to conceptualize the discourse and practices of nuclear order as a political ideology that has entrenched extant power structures and constrained the space for political action. While the ideology is formally wedded to the pursuit of the "sublime object" of a world without nuclear weapons, its underlying assumptions imply that the grand vision of abolition can never be realized in practice. To overcome the status quo, agents of change must subvert the ideology and repoliticize the nonproliferation and disarmament regime.

Robots formerly belonged to the realm of fiction, but are now becoming a practical issue for the disarmament community. While some believe that military robots could act more ethically than human soldiers on the battlefield, others have countered that such a scenario is highly unlikely, and that the technology in question should be banned. Autonomous weapon systems will be unable to discriminate between soldiers and civilians, and their use will lower the threshold to resort to the use of force, they argue. In this article, I take a bird’s-eye look at the international humanitarian law (ihl) pertaining to autonomous weapon systems. My argument is twofold: First, I argue that it is indeed difficult to imagine how ihl could be implemented by algorithm. The rules of distinction, proportionality, and precautions all call for what are arguably unquantifiable decisions. Second, I argue that existing humanitarian law in many ways presupposes responsible human agency.

Common knowledge has it that the end of the Cold War allowed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to push the nuclear genie back into the bottle. But whilst NATO members have reduced the alliance's practical, military reliance on nuclear arms, their commitment to nuclear defence as a shared, symbolic enterprise has in fact grown increasingly explicit over time, with NATO declaring itself a 'nuclear alliance' in 2010. The following analysis develops two arguments. First, political responsibility for nuclear defence has shifted from individual member-states to the alliance as such; and, second, this development has been fuelled by member-states' recurrent need to deflect criticism and adapt to the strengthening of humanitarian and anti-nuclear norms. The pulverisation of responsibility for nuclear defence in NATO has enabled pro-nuclear actors to justify costly nuclear moderni-sation programmes as acts of 'alliance solidarity' whilst exercising rhetorical coercion over advocates of denuclearisation.