Contested Nuclear Taboo in the Third Nuclear Age A lecture by Michal Smetana (11/20/24)
Join us for a Global Security Speaker Series lecture by:
Michal Smetana, Associate Professor at the Institute of International Studies, Director of the Peace Research Center Prague (PRCP), Head Researcher at Experimental Lab for International Security Studies (ELISS), Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University
Moderated by Sanne Verschuren, Assistant Professor of International Security, Pardee School of Global Studies.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
4:30 to 6 PM
Howard Thurman Center, 808 Commonwealth Ave, Room 205 (Commons)
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Over the past decade, we have seen growing concerns that the renewed great power competition and the increasing salience of nuclear weapons in world politics could eventually lead to the erosion of the international norm against nuclear use—the “nuclear taboo.” The most prominent development widely seen as damaging to the nuclear taboo has been Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a military campaign accompanied by the Kremlin’s nuclear saber-rattling and persistent Western concerns about nuclear escalation. In my new book, I present the argument that while intense Russian nuclear signaling and other patterns of irresponsible nuclear behavior have opened the “contestation space” with respect to the validity and meaning of the nuclear nonuse norm, they are by themselves poor indicators of the erosion of the nuclear taboo. Building on an innovative conceptual framework from interactionist sociology and social psychology, I show how the international response to Moscow’s nuclear threats ultimately led to the reaffirmation of the nuclear taboo as one of the key prohibitory norms in world politics rather than to its weakening or disappearance. In addition to tracing the dynamics on the “macro-level” of international politics, I also present new “micro-level” data from cross-national surveys and survey experiments demonstrating that we do not witness any patterns of the taboo disappearing from world politics. However, I also show that the nuclear nonuse norm continues to be predominantly an “elite taboo,” with much of the world’s population internalizing it to a much lower extent than their political representatives. The findings of the book on both the “macro” and “micro” levels of world politics provide a new understanding of how the international norm against nuclear use operates at the onset of the third nuclear age.
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