Russia, the Global South and the Mechanics of the Nuclear Order

Russia's war against Ukraine has reverberated across the global nuclear order. The heightened tensions between Russia and Western states have paralysed and politicised processes in various multilateral nuclear forums and governance bodies, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the United Nations First Committee. The earthquake in procedure has further exacerbated frustrations with the state of the nuclear order, particularly among the non-nuclear-weapons states of the Global South. These states have long lamented insufficient progress towards nuclear disarmament, the prospects for which were rendered even more remote by the war. Russia, for its part, has pursued a dual strategy in multilateral nuclear diplomacy: it has undermined non-proliferation efforts and chipped away at trust in the legacy forums on the one hand, while leveraging them in pursuit of greater alignment with the Global South on the other. These dynamics have combined to drive the further fragmentation of the nuclear order in ways that, while taking time to fully play out, promise to be profound.