Does Nuclear Disarmament Activism Work? Global Advocacy in Local Politics

Speaker:
Stephen Herzog is a Senior Researcher in Nuclear Arms Control at the Center for Security Studies of ETH Zurich and an Associate of Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom. Previously, Stephen was a U.S. Department of Energy technical nuclear arms control official and a researcher for the Federation of American Scientists. His scholarship on nuclear weapons is published or forthcoming in venues including Contemporary Security Policy, Energy Research & Social Science, International Security, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, the Journal of Politics, the Nonproliferation Review, Science, and Survival. Stephen earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University.

 

Abstract: Across the United States, anti-nuclear weapons activists are taking their arguments to towns, cities, and states alike. Many municipalities have passed nuclear disarmament resolutions, but nuclear policy falls within the purview of the highest and most classified levels of the federal government. What then do attempts at localizing disarmament politics aim to achieve, and are these efforts effective? Using qualitative interviews, we theorize mechanisms through which activists attempt to influence local attitudes on nuclear politics—emphasizing bottom-up dynamics—in hopes of prompting global change. We then test the efficacy of these strategies with a survey experiment, which yields some very surprising results. This paper is co-authored with David M. Allison (Harvard University), Giles David Arceneaux (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs), Rebecca Davis Gibbons (University of Southern Maine).