Catherine Maia (Universidade Lusófona do Porto - Law) &
Jean-Marie Collin (GRIP – Groupe de recherche et d’information sur la paix et la sécurité) have published
Nuclear Weapons and International Law: Visions of a Plural World (Edições Universitárias Lusófonas 2021). The table of contents is
here. Here's the abstract:
In a world affected by the Covid-19 global pandemic, where more financial resources would be needed for medicines instead of weapons, all nuclear States – whether parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or not, whether democratic or authoritarian regimes – keep modernising their nuclear arsenal.
Despite this attitude, which highlights the crisis of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, since the launch of the “Humanitarian Initiative” in 2010, nuclear disarmament has been at the centre of the action of an increasing number of countries, with the strong support of NGOs.
This phenomenon gave unprecedented visibility and significance to the topic, and allowed the entry into force in 2021 of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons, in order to achieve their total elimination.
These recent developments show that there are hopes and challenges in a pluralistic world where nuclear and non-nuclear weapons States continue to confront each other in this highly sensitive area. It is against this background that readers are offered a set of different perspectives on these weapons of mass destruction, authored by a multidisciplinary team of contributors from a wide array of geographical areas.
