2025/02/12 by Leonardo Bandarra · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Innovation and Knowledge Management #Management and Organizational Studies #Economic Theory and Institutions
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/09557571.2025.2461630
openalex publication_date 2025/02/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
This article addresses how peripheral non-nuclear-weapon states push for change in the global nuclear order. Ordering is a dynamic and multifaceted process driven by agents at different positions within global hierarchies. Those hierarchies are multi-layered and shape the international order in multiple ways. To make sense of this diversity, I develop the concept of ‘hierarchy complexes’ – that is, understanding hierarchies as a system composed of interacting parts which display collective behaviour that does not follow trivially the individual parts. The nuclear order, in that regard, is understood through three hierarchy complexes, each with its own layers and super- and subordinate relations. First, hierarchies in material power structures constrain countries in terms of their positionalities and localities. Second, hierarchies in institutional structures play out at the institutional level and at the sort of commitments that are made. Third, hierarchies as cognitive structures, that feature in ontologies and discourses. I illustrate how agency occurs in the interplay of those three complexes through the cases of Latin American and Caribbean countries’ participation in the Eighteen Nations Disarmament Committee (ENDC), which was tasked with negotiating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Treaty of Tlatelolco, and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).