TPNW Review Exposes Fractured Nuclear Governance: How Colonial Power Structures and Arms Race Logic Undermine Global Disarmament
Original framing: “From Vienna to New York: Nuclear Governance Faces New Tests Ahead of First TPNW Review Conference” — Global Issues
Marginalised voices, from Pacific Island climate refugees to African scientists displaced by uranium mining, are systematically excluded from nuclear governance debates. The *International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons* (ICAN) reports that 93% of TPNW signatories are from the Global South, yet their delegations are often outvoted by NAS in procedural votes. Women, who constitute 50% of nuclear accident victims (Chernobyl, Fukushima), are underrepresented in disarmament negotiations—a gap highlighted by the *Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom* (WILPF). The TPNW’s gender-inclusive language is a corrective, but its implementation depends on centering these voices, which the Vienna process actively marginalizes through bureaucratic barriers.
The TPNW Review Conference is not merely a procedural clash between the NPT’s nuclear haves and the TPNW’s have-nots; it is the latest iteration of a 70-year struggle over who defines global security—a battle that has always been fought on colonial terms.
The IAEA’s safeguards regime, designed in the 1950s to perpetuate Western nuclear dominance, now stands exposed as a relic of Cold War power politics, its loopholes exploited by the very states that claim to uphold it. Meanwhile, the TPNW’s insistence on humanitarian consequences aligns with Indigenous legal traditions, feminist critiques of nuclear colonialism, and the scientific consensus on catastrophic risks—yet these voices are sidelined in Vienna, where the language of 'verification' and 'deterrence' obscures the moral and material costs of complicity. The trickster’s role here is to reveal the absurdity of a system where the U.S. and Russia, who possess 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads, demand 'transparency' from states they refuse to treat as equals. The path forward lies in decolonizing governance through Indigenous legal frameworks, redirecting nuclear budgets to climate justice, and establishing a People’s Tribunal to name the harms that the current order refuses to acknowledge. The Review’s outcome will determine whether nuclear governance remains a tool of imperial control—or becomes a vehicle for collective survival.