Diplomatic Communication and Resilient Governance

Problems of Governing Nuclear Weapons

By Markus Kornprobst,

Abstract

This article examines the resilience of governance. My descriptive argument identifies variations of resilience by analysing the evolution of contestation and decontestation of governance-constituting institutions in the foreground and background layers of governance. My explanatory argument distinguishes different modes of diplomatic communication, ranging from coercion (most closed) via declaration, haggle, and problem-solving to polylogue (most open). While the occurrence of none of these modes is inconsequential, producing resilience in the foreground and background layers does not become possible unless problem-solving and polylogue, respectively, come to dominate communicative encounters. My abductive analysis of nuclear weapons governance underlines the plausibility of this conceptual framework and elaborates on it further. In the past two decades, communicative practices sidelined open modes of communication. This made the resilience of nuclear weapons governance decline. This study makes three contributions: It provides more details on how to describe governance resilience, shows that additional explanatory power is to be gained by looking at the breadth of communication employed by diplomats, and contributes to a better grasp of what keeps nuclear governance together and what threatens to tear it apart.

Keywords

• communication
• diplomacy
• governance
• pragmatism
• resilience
• nuclear weapons.

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank the anonymous referees, the editors of JIRD, Corneliu Bjola, Costas Constantinou, for very helpful feedback on this study. Furthermore, I am deeply indebted to Martin Senn. Our collaborative work has shaped my thinking about background and foreground institutions as well as how to apply it to the nuclear weapons field in a profound manner.

Last draft before final version and publication in Journal of International Relations and Development 23/1, 2020.

Full bibliographical details: Kornprobst, Markus. „Diplomatic communication and resilient governance: problems of governing nuclear weapons.“ Journal of International Relations and Development 23.1 (2020): 164-189.