Nobel Peace Prize Goes to anti-nuclear group, ICAN

This year's Nobel Prize went to the International Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a group made up of more than 450 civil society organizations in some 100 countries around the globe. To give some background on their campaign from their webpage:

"ICAN began in Australia and was officially launched in Vienna, Austria in 2007. Our campaign’s founders were inspired by the tremendous success of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which a decade earlier had played an instrumental role in the negotiation of the anti-personnel mine ban convention, or Ottawa treaty. Since our founding, we have worked to build a powerful global groundswell of public support for the abolition of nuclear weapons. By engaging a diverse range of groups and working alongside the Red Cross and like-minded governments, we have helped reshape the debate on nuclear weapons and generate momentum towards elimination."

Source: http://www.icanw.org/campaign/campaign-overview/

I was a bit surprised that a diffuse transnational umbrella organization like ICAN would receive this year's peace prize, which usually resonates more strongly (in my opinion) when its awarded to a single individual or organization, rather than a campaign. When the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was awarded the prize in 1997, it was jointly awarded with its founder, Jody Williams. Perhaps the Nobel Prize Committee felt the issue of nuclear disarmament was especially important this year given the North Korea crisis and the potential unravelling of the Iran nuclear deal. But other "political" reasons may include the trouble/controversy of giving the award to an individual who may not deliver, as noted by the growing criticism against Nobel winner Aung Sang Suu Kyi and her silence in the face of the Rohingya crisis. Or perhaps there was a lack of clear consensus or frontrunner for the peace prize this year. Finally, it may just be a nod to large scale transnational campaigns like ICBL which won the prize two decades ago, and to give an idealistic movement like ICAN extra credibility and symbolic leverage in the fight to bring about a nuclear free world.


If I were still doing research on transnational campaigns, I would explore how activists from ICAN learned from and emulated the experience of ICBL. For my current research on the politics of peace, I would probably want to interview a number of ICAN activists and study their profile to understand how and where their beliefs about nuclear disarmament come from and how they engage proponents of nuclear deterrence.

Intro to IR Roundup: Nukes, Migration, Syria and IR Research

Today is the first day of fall 2016-17 classes. I usually teach Intro to International Relations in the fall, but am out of my routine due to a conference I'm organizing. However, I thought I'd post several good sound bytes which I would have offered to students had I been kicking off class with a dose of current events and international crises.

Syria: Why is the war so damn long and bloody. It's gets more violent by the day. Drawing on IR

 AFP/Getty Images

research, Max Fisher of the New York Times provides a run-down of some of the factors contributing to the ugly nature of the Syrian war. The usual suspects like multiparty factions and ethnic/sectarian divisions. But a big culprit appears to be foreign sponsorship/intervention. As Fisher writes:

"Foreign interventions that were intended to end the war ...have instead entrenched it in a stalemate in which violence is self-reinforcing and the normal avenues for peace are all closed...Whenever one side loses ground, its foreign backers increase their involvement, sending supplies or air support to prevent their favored player’s defeat. Then that side begins winning, which tends to prompt the other’s foreign backers to up their ante as well. Each escalation is a bit stronger than what came before, accelerating the killing without ever changing the war’s fundamental balance."

Intervention: Recent interventions (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) have left us pondering the costs of such intervention.  Anne Applebaum asks what the costs of non-intervention have been in Syria in terms of total deaths, the refugee crisis, the destabilization of the region, and security threats in Europe . Of course, intervention could have made all of this even worse. Fareed Zakaria earlier argued that it was probably best for the U.S. not to intervene, but it could/should have done much more on humanitarian assistance, even if it rightfully chooses not to pursue humanitarian intervention. Part of the problem may be the politicization of aid.

Nuclear Weapons: Obama is toying with the idea of changing U.S. strategic doctrine by declaring a no first use nuclear weapons policy. Some pros and cons of a first no use policy are outlined by the WSJ.  While reducing nukes sounds good in theory, Stephen Sestanovich of CFR pushes back against this change.

Migration: Want to know the difference between migrants and refugees. A CFR video and backgrounder explains here.

Politics of Peace and Nuclear Weapons

As a reminder for what to read for research on the politics of peace and nuclear weapons, I've added a a couple books to my reading list. The first is Dan Zak's Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age. The book opens with the story of three activists - a nun, Vietnam vet, and housepainter - breaking  into a nuclear security complex in Oak Ridge, TN as a launching point for investigating America's history, horror, and fascination with nuclear weapons. Richard Rhodes who penned a four volume set on nuclear history, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb provided a good review in the WaPo.  Rhodes highlights an important passage from the book detailing the hypocrisy of non-proliferation from the nuclear five. Excerpted from the review:

 The most important single idea in “Almighty” emerges in the assertion of an exasperated South African ambassador to the United Nations, Abdul Samad Minty: “If for security reasons the [five original nuclear powers] feel that they must be armed with nuclear weapons, what about other countries in similar situations? Do we think that the global situation is such that no other country would ever aspire to nuclear weapons . . . when the five tell us that it is absolutely correct to possess nuclear weapons for their security?”

The second book I learned about at a book launch event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for Brad Roberts's  The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century. As the title suggests, Roberts cautions against our haste in promulgating (unilateral) nuclear disarmament. Existing international realities (particularly in relation to China and Russia) make it very difficult for the U.S. to give up its nuclear weapons. Roberts told me after the event that there's a fairly wide consensus among U.S. policymakers on nuclear policy - which I assume to believe that maintaining a limited supply of nukes is still in our national interest. How do policymakers and the activists highlighted by Zak come to different logical conclusions about nuclear policy and the utility of nuclear weapons.

The Iran Nuclear Deal: Historical Lessons

Friday's Washington Post published two op-eds using historical cases to support (Phil Gordon) or counter (Fred Kagan) the viability of the Iranian nuclear deal. Political scientists conduct qualitative case study analysis might be pleased to see such arguments. But taken together, the articles suggest that one may pick and choose historical analogies to prove a point, making the logic of any comparison indeterminate. Not sure if this is good or bad for doing comparative historical case study analysis.