For more than a century, politicians and diplomats, scholars and strategists, as well as artists and activists have debated the necessity and nature of a political order for handling the tremendous power and ambivalence of “the fire of the gods” (Kissinger 1957, 65). Some participants in this debate sought a fundamental reordering of world politics through the abolishment of state sovereignty and the establishment of a world state, which would remove the specter of (nuclear) inter-state war (see, for example, Craig 2019), while others proposed the establishment of a supranational organization that would take nuclear technology out of the sovereign control of states and thus prevent its military (ab)use (see, for example, Mallard 2008). 
 

In the actual order that emerged after 1945, states have remained in control of nuclear energy, and they have put in place formal and informal limitations on the acquisition and use of nuclear technologies - the overall aim being the prevention of nuclear war.

In the course of the nuclear order’s existence, these limitations have become increasingly complex with formal and informal institutions on the (non)use of nuclear weapons, nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation, nuclear-weapons testing, nuclear arms control, civilian applications of nuclear energy, and, most recently, the prohibition of nuclear weapons coexisting and interacting in multiple ways. While scholarship on the nuclear order has regained momentum in recent years (e.g. Biswas 2014, Egeland 2021, Horsburgh 2016, Popp et al. 2017, Walker 2012), the complex nature of this order – i.e. the interrelations of its elements and the order’s interrelation with other orders in world politics – have so far not received sustained attention (see, however, Kienzle 2017, Knopf 2012, Lantis/Wunderlich 2018, Mallard 2014, Senn 2021). Moreover, a static understanding of order often prevails in the literature, neglecting the mutable and context-bound nature of nuclear ordering processes.

This project seeks to advance our understanding of the complex nature of processes of global nuclear order(ing). It invites contributions that address different aspects of this complexity and use different theoretical approaches to make sense of it. While we welcome theoretical and methodological heterogeneity and eclecticism, all contributions should pay attention to agents, structures and processes through which different elements of the nuclear order are interrelated and, therefore, co-evolving.