Disarming International Law: forgotten pasts and future possibilities on a global front line

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This project proposes a timely reappraisal of traditionally marginalised contributors to international law, generating new insights into the history of disarmament laws. Despite the widely acknowledged fact that mass movements have been behind every major disarmament initiative of the 20th century, legal scholarship remains centred upon either a state-based or elite-focused account of this history. And recent attempts to address the role of non-state actors have tended towards universalising narratives that offer a panoramic view from above, rather than a place- and context-specific account of the many and varied engagements with disarmament legal issues 'from below'. Contemporary debates on the scope, definition and goals of international disarmament continue to be framed by historical narratives, therefore a reappraisal of those narratives is necessary to offer critical insight on present disarmament struggles.Significantly, the project takes as its central case study, the examination of Scottish-based disarmament activism. Scotland is a rarely engaged site for international legal scholarship and one that, the project hypothesises, offers the potential for radically rethinking where and how international law can be debated, contested, and made that runs counter to traditional understandings of doctrine and legal practice. In depth analysis of activism in Scotland illuminates the connections and comparative experience of other global sites at which disarmament issues were and continue to be debated and legally contested. Using activist-generated materials and sources, the project situates Scotland's experience as a global front line - at one time the site of the largest concentration of nuclear weapons in Europe - within a broader context of anti-imperialism, transnational social movements and environmentalism. The project tracks distinct understandings of disarmament that emerged from this specific site at particular moments of legal struggle. It traces activism by the Peace Crusade women of 1916 through Glasgow's Red Clydeside and the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution on Scottish internationalists, to Cold War anti-nuclear activism and environmentalist direct actions at the turn of the 21st century. The project's focus on global connections and marginalised legal struggles draws renewed attention to the entrenched deficits in traditional understandings of legal change and law-making in international law. The project's methodological engagement with a wide range of materials to inform legal analysis - taking account of, eg, the importance of images, banners and creative artworks alongside lived histories - similarly provokes a rethinking of how to investigate the making and debating of international law.Crucially, the project's recovery of this marginal history is informed by innovative insights drawn from feminist and postcolonial theory. It recognises that the voices of women and the dispossessed are continually erased from the record not only through partial narratives centred upon great events and great (white) men, but upon professional practices and doctrinal orthodoxies. It draws upon an 'alternative archive' for understanding the development of disarmament laws, examining personal diaries, memoirs and local community campaigning materials together with oral testimonies to document and preserve this marginalised history. The PI's monograph will provide the grounding for sustained interdisciplinary exchange and a wider debate on the implications of its empirical approach, this debate being extended by a major international conference and Special Issue. The project testimonies, and commissioned artworks - portraits of testimony participants and graphic novel depicting events described by participants - will be used for an in-person and permanent online exhibition to enhance historical awareness, and form the basis of educational resources for curriculum development in Scottish schools.