Authored by Andrew Lichterman, WSLF Senior Research Analyst
The Russian historian Alexander Etkind, writing in the harsh light of the Ukraine war, said,“Peace is good for complexity, war brings clarity…. It changes everything – first the present, then the future, and finally, the past.”
What do the wars dominating our headlines, those in Ukraine and Gaza, make clear? They show that we have not yet escaped the competition among empires, and the unwinding of empires through struggles to carve out new Nation-states, that engendered the horrific wars of the last century. Ethnolinguistic nationalism, a long-established element of strategies both for ruling empires and for carving new states out of them, remains a significant factor in strategies of rule and contending for rule. With Trump’s re-election, authoritarian nationalists now hold state power in seven of the nine nuclear-armed states.
These wars have made clear that humanitarian law, the law of armed conflict intended to limit war’s effects, has failed to prevent the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians and the destruction of the infrastructure urbanized populations depend on. Those laws also have failed to convince governments to forego nuclear weapons, weapons so horrific and destructive that their possession by a state constitutes a continuing rejection of the supposed purposes of humanitarian law.
The Ukraine war also has emphatically clarified that whatever window there was for nuclear disarmament following the end of the Cold War has been missed. For those who have been working for disarmament, our first priority today must be preventing catastrophic wars among nuclear-armed states. Work for nuclear disarmament must be long-term. And we will need to rethink the approaches that have prevailed for the last three decades. ¨
One starting point is reflecting on why post-Cold War nuclear NGO disarmament initiatives, grounded mainly in humanitarian law, had so little effect. At the same time, we should consider why humanitarian law, the main legal instrument for mitigating the horrors of war, has been so ineffective in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. How might we change the ways we think and talk about these issues in ways that might help both to prevent war, and to create conditions that some day could make disarmament possible?