Biological and Chemical Disarmament and Security

Recent events in the Middle East, Ukraine, and North Korea show that the risk of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons is still high. While existing inter­national security regimes related to these weapons are robust, they are in crisis. Violations and contestation of regimes create shocks and junctures that would either strengthen or weaken them. Compliance and enforcement are the normative practices to address such violations. The robustness of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons regimes correlates to the effectiveness of existing enforcement norms and procedures. Having all three regimes at a turning point makes analyzing the evolution of enforcement practices across the three regimes timely. The project involves a cross-regime analysis of enforce­ment norms and procedures to study the differences and offer an under­standing of the implications for the regimes.

This project investigates why the prohi­bitions against chemical and biological weapons (CBW) remain compa­ratively robust despite weak verification and enforce­ment mechanisms. Building on the insight that CBW prohibitions function as moral norms, it com­bines perspectives from moral psychology and constructivist inter­national relations to trace how individual norm inter­nalization can scale up to collective adherence and regime resilience. By situ­ating the study within the broader CBWNet research agenda on streng­thening and safeguarding CBW norms, the project explores the con­ditions under which these prohibitions withstand contes­tation and how they might be reinforced. The aim is to gene­rate practice-relevant strategies for demonstrating, explaining, and bolste­ring the resilience of CBW norms in the face of political, techno­logical, and security challenges.