Regional socialization and disarmament preferences: Explaining state positions on the nuclear ban treaty

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ABSTRACT We bring nuance to the understanding of cleavages among states over the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). We measure the positions of the participants to the 2022 and 2023 TPNW Meetings of State Parties, employing text-as-data approaches. Our results show that the participants can be placed along a single axis, roughly associated with whether they view nuclear disarmament in an “old” way as primarily a security problem or in a “new” way as a humanitarian and emancipatory issue. We find that membership in a nuclear weapon-free zone—particularly in Latin America and Africa—has a statistically significant effect on state positions. We therefore debunk the idea that parties to the nuclear ban treaty are a coherent single block. Our article provides a new, quantitative way of measuring the positions of states vis-à-vis the TPNW and contributes to the emerging scholarship on the treaty.