Good morning, everybody, and thanks for having me.
My name specifically Williams, I'm the co-director of a think tank in London that promotes meaningful dialogue to build international trust,
reduce nuclear risks and advance disarmament.
My central argument today is that whereas the international community has traditionally favoured the pursuit of legally
binding arms control measures to regulate weapons and prescriptive rules to regulate domains such as the Law of the Sea,
today we're seeing a serious interest in alternative approaches that aim to establish non-binding norms or standards of acceptable behaviour.
Specifically, we're seeing the language of responsibility, responsible behaviour or responsibilities,
which are all forms of what Marianne gladdened called responsibility talk,
appear as a common thread in parallel diplomatic discussions about arms control and the secure and sustainable use of the global commons.
For this reason, I would theorise that what we're seeing is a shift currently to responsibilities based approach to the regulation,
control and ultimately governance of strategic weapons technologies and demands.
And I'd situate this is one specific kind of principles based approach to regulation, which can be contrasted to a rules based approach.
So as Julia Black defines it, writing in the context of financial sector regulation, in general terms,
principle based approach means moving away from reliance on detailed, prescriptive rules and relying more on high level,
broadly stated rules of principles to set the standards of my ten minutes or so today,
I'm going to talk to you about where we're seeing these shifts in the realm of international security,
why we might be seeing them and what they might mean for the future. To start with.
There are three weapons technologies and associated domains where responsibility talk has become an important feature cyberspace,
space and nuclear weapons.
Over the past 10 years, we've seen the development of a diplomatic conversation about responsible behaviours in cyberspace, quote unquote,
with the language being particularly picked up by the 20 15 group of governmental experts that year,
senior or one hundred ninety three UN member states agreed on a framework for responsible behaviour of states in cyberspace.
Over the past year, we've seen an equivalent conversation on responsible behaviours emerge in relation to outerspace.
This began when the United United Kingdom even tabled a resolution entitled Reducing Space Threats through Norms,
Rules and Principles of Responsible Behaviours at the UN General Assembly First Committee,
which was formally adopted with one hundred sixty four votes in favour, 12 against and six abstentions.
In both cases, it's worth pointing out that this approach has been opted for at the expense of pursuing stricter, legally binding approach instead.
Over the past five years or so, basic, my organisation and the icks the Institute for Conflict,
Cooperation, Security at the University of Birmingham have been working with a range of states,
including the United Kingdom, on the subject of responsibilities in relation to nuclear weapons, which we called nuclear responsibilities for short.
So with more time, I'd say a bit more about sort of how each of these conversations have emerged, but since a bit of time,
I'm just going to focus on nuclear weapons before saying a bit about why I think a responsibility based approach has fetched.
So I've been working on the idea of responsibility in relation to nuclear weapons since twenty sixteen.
As director of the Programme on Nuclear Responsibilities.
The purpose of the programme is to stimulate and support a global conversation about our responsibilities in relation to nuclear weapons,
and our contention is that just as it seems to have helped unlock diplomatic discussions on this and more recently on space,
a responsibility based approach could open up room for a new kind of dialogue that could reverse
the mutually destructive culture of blame that we currently see in the nuclear weapons debate.
We call this way of thinking, talking and writing about nuclear weapons,
the nuclear responsibility's approach for short, and it's both a mindset and a model of dialogue.
Our results so far have suggested that it creates opportunities to reduce distrust and nuclear risks and so pave the way for nuclear disarmament.
And we've tested the nuclear responsibility's approach with a wide range of countries in the past four years at
national roundtables and also international multistakeholder dialogues to make it as robust as we can make it again,
in the interest of time. I'll be happy to say a bit more about this in the Q&A, if you'd like to hear about it.
We're primarily working with states, but we're also open to engage with any actors who have the capacity to affect nuclear futures,
including international organisations, alliances and nongovernmental organisations.
And currently we're exploring the nuclear responsibilities approach at the regional level and conversations
on nuclear responsibilities in the Asia Pacific with a view to framing dialogue between India,
Pakistan and others.
But we're also looking at ways that we can initiate a more inclusive dialogue on nuclear responsibilities at the multilateral level,
echoing in a way that the kinds of conversations we're seeing on cyber and space.
We'll be publishing the nuclear responsibility approach in a new practical toolkit in June or July.
So I invite you all to account for that. We're not the first to invoke nuclear sorry responsibility talk in relation to nuclear weapons,
as professor we learnt tattling our 20 reports nuclear responsibilities,
a new approach for thinking and talking about nuclear weapons, the language of special responsibilities,
primary responsibilities and shared responsibilities existed in diplomatic discussions
around nuclear weapons since the 1960s and since the end of the millennium,
the idea of a responsible nuclear weapons state or responsible nuclear sovereignty has also matched.
So I welcome the programme has never sought to build on these foundations and the work of others, amongst them William Walker, Scott Sagan, John Gowa,
Amelia Morgan and Heather Williams and Nina Tannenwald to translate academic thinking on responsibility,
talk in relation to nuclear weapons into something more practical.
At the moment, the responsibilities based approach in relation to nuclear weapons is not as established as that in relation to cyberspace or space,
yet we're seeing it pop up more and more.
And the feedback that we're getting from states is this is the kind of shift that the nuclear weapons conversation needs.
So I think we'll see it gather momentum.
I'd like to spend my last few minutes considering why we might be seeing a responsibilities based approach popping up in the cases of cyberspace,
space and nuclear weapons, and I suggest that there are both push and pull factors at play.
The main push factor, I'd suggest, is the challenge of and loss of confidence in agreeing legally binding arms control measures,
of which there are a few aspects to consider. In the case of nuclear weapons,
the arms control agreements of the Cold War have fallen away one by one as either Russia or the United States have left them.
Yet even these were immensely challenging to agree and evidently to sustain.
In today's world, things are far more complex with more adversary actors and more technologies, as Marina Talk amply demonstrated.
Well, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try.
It is unclear in the nuclear sphere what could be controlled next or even which actors will even be involved in such an agreement.
The Trump administration sought to no avail to bring China into the next round of arms control.
Russia and China have both, not unreasonably, response. Why not the U.S. and France, both India and Pakistan?
It's not that we may never achieve such a multilateral and nuclear arms control agreement.
It's a question of whether we have time in light of today's growing risks.
The same is true in the case of cyber and space weapons, which have even more players in the game,
thus the agreement of even a limited set of core political responsibilities or
standards of responsible state behaviour might serve as a crucial stopgap measure.
Other challenges for legally binding measures in the case of cyberspace are the difficulties of attributing attacks and verifying compliance.
And again, I can say a bit more about this, if you'd like to hear. Not to say a few words on the pull factors first,
one of the common features of responsibilities based approach seems to be that the processes through which they develop a more inclusive,
pluralistic and open ended, they take a less traditional approach.
And as rather than a state designing a specific proposal on capital, capital and then lobbying others to agree with it,
they instead get all of the parties together from the start and ask the broad questions about what
direction regulation should go in because responsibilities are inherently socially constructed,
a responsibility based approach allows for plurality of views to be shared,
meaning all parties feel heard and their perspectives are taken into account better as frameworks are developed from a process perspective,
it seems like an improvement. Second, as with principles based regulation, more generally,
the outcomes of any agreement seem likely to be more future proofed because they rely
less on prescriptive rules written down at a point in time and which risk obsolescence.
The technologies and technology producers evolve. By contrast,
agreeing to a set of higher level responsibilities that are more technologically and temporally agnostic is likely to
be more resilient because it puts the focus on the actor using the technology rather than one technology or another.
Third, although non-binding approaches have been around much longer.
I wonder whether part of the reason for the emergence of responsibilities based
approaches is that they are more evocative and therefore more likely to be complied with.
Soft norms and guiding principles have been used for decades, but they imply to me voluntary standards.
By contrast, even as they are socially constructed,
responsibilities feel deeper and more eternal and as though they are the standards that exist and should be followed.
Even in the absence of law, we must pay attention to the impact of language on our emotions in international politics.
And finally, I note that there's been a wider move towards responsibilities based approaches
that goes beyond the field of international security in the climate change regime,
for instance, the principle that states have common but differentiated responsibilities and respective
capabilities to address global heating has run through the agreements of the past 30 years.
Under the auspices of the United Nations, the Global Compact, formed in 2000,
pushed for a principles based approach to global business in relation to human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption.
And, of course, what I've just discussed sits within a broader set of conversations about the ethical or responsible uses of technology,
much of which emanates from the private sector.
It's a language that they understand to which is helpful for for public private multistakeholder regulation.
So the thought I'd like to leave you wondering is this is a responsibilities based approach, one whose time has come in the 21st century.
Are things getting so complicated today that what we need are simple principles
framed evocatively as responsibilities that we can follow in various domains?
And if these conversations continue to emerge in a Bottom-Up way,
other perhaps some general metter responsibility that we can eventually draw out as a world?
Or is a responsibility based approach a cop out of negotiations to agree stricter measures?
To me, responsibilities based approaches might at the very least serve as a stopgap measure to
stand in the way of total pandemonium while rules based approaches are under negotiation.
They might also serve as the precursors to those rules, helping crystallise and solidify principles and norms, paving the way for hard law to follow.
This might even become standard procedure for states in the future as they
look at new weapons technologies or domains or hard law may never eventuate,
in which case at least the responsibilities based approach will be there.
Of course, it would be good for the peace community to take an active part in these discussions to develop understandings
of responsible behaviour in relation to nuclear weapons and a range of other weapons and means as they emerge.
With that, I will conclude it's been a pleasure to speak to you and I look forward to you Q&A, I will be delighted to answer any more questions.
And you can also email me at Rexy Williams at Basic L.A. dot org, should you wish to discuss anything further.
In the meantime, thank you listening.