Considine, L orcid.org/0000-0002-6265-3168 (2017) The ‘standardization of catastrophe’: Nuclear disarmament, the Humanitarian Initiative and the politics of the unthinkable. European Journal of International Relations, 23 (3). pp. 681-702. ISSN 1354-0661
Abstract
This article reviews the recent Humanitarian Initiative in the nuclear disarmament movement and the associated non-proliferation and disarmament literature. It argues that this initiative, rather than being a transformative moment in nuclear politics as claimed by supporters, instead fits into a long history of nuclear politics as the politics of ‘rethinking the unthinkable’ and, as such, is located not only within the long-established institutions of international society, as realist critics claim, but also within the long-established and limiting forms of speech of international society. The article questions the limitations of the dominant framing of nuclear weapons as ‘unthinkable’, and claims that focusing on the seemingly trivial matter of the prevalence of cliché in this discourse actually reveals a deeper problem of the limits of this approach. In doing so, the article shows how the problem of standardised, repetitive ways of speaking, reliance on ‘nukespeak’ and dominant tropes of nuclear speech identified in much of the literature is not that of the somehow innate ‘unthinkability’ of nuclear weapons, but that this ‘unthinkability’ and the associated ‘unspeakability’ of the nuclear are rhetorical frames that limit the possibility for political change.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2016. This is an author produced version of a paper accepted for publication in European Journal of International Relations. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Disarmament; Humanitarian Pledge; Nonproliferation; Nuclear Critique; Nuclear weapons |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 08 Aug 2016 15:54 |
Last Modified: | 16 Jan 2018 14:57 |
Published Version: | https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354066116666332 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/1354066116666332 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:103407 |