Disarmament from the Margins
Published: 15 October 2025
Commentary
At a time when the outlook for disarmament progress looks particularly bleak, what might we learn from historical and contemporary efforts towards disarmament from places other than global institutions and powerful states? Professor Charlie Peevers (School of Law) and Professor Karen Engle, University of Austin, Texas, reflect on learning from the recent Disarmament from the Margins conference held at UofG.
Earlier this month in Glasgow, long-time disarmament activists from across Scotland met with international law and politics scholars from around the world, to take seriously the lessons of “Disarmament from the Margins.” The conference, held at the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian University, was organised by international law Professors Charlie Peevers (Glasgow) and Anna Hood (University of Auckland).
The conference opened with an exhibition of over a century of Scottish peace activism, including from the Western Isles, Skye, Glasgow, Ullapool, and Orkney. It closed with a visit to Faslane, site of the British Government’s nuclear weapons systems and long a focal point of anti-nuclear protests. These activities from across Scotland framed the conference and provided important points of reference for scholars coming to Glasgow from around the globe.
Several scholars spoke about disarmament activism by a range of communities and transnational solidarity networks – from campaigns against nuclear testing in Algeria, the Pacific Islands, and Indigenous territories in the US and Australia, to women’s peace camps and citizen diplomacy during the Cold War, to the aid flotillas seeking to break the blockade of Gaza. Together, their research highlighted the uneven distribution of economic, environmental, social, and political costs in a militarised world.
Other scholars used the concept of margins to consider not only the role of social movements in disarmament but the role of states that have long been marginalized, whether through histories of Empire or, in the case of nuclear weapons, their non-nuclear status. They discussed moments from the 1955 Bandung Conference to the 2021 entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Throughout the conference, activists and academics discussed the promises but also pitfalls of relying on international law alone to achieve transformative change. International law can be used as a tool of resistance, but it can also be dominating, exclusionary, and marginalising. Laws that are used to proscribe, delegitimise, or criminalise protest – including against suffragettes, peace camps, Trident Ploughshares actions, boycott and divestment movements, are often justified in the language of sovereignty and the national interest.
The keynote lectures all built in some way on these sites of protest. Karen Engle charted the anti-nuclear activism (against both nuclear weapons and energy) of women’s peace and development movements in the late 1980s, dating their collective work to the 1985 Nairobi Peace Tent. Borrowing, as many speakers did, from the thought and aspirations of penal abolitionists, she emphasised that these activists saw militarism both as a symptom of imperialism and economic inequality and as an obstacle to change.
Vasuki Nesiah identified the commons as a place for dissident political imagination that challenges the politics of enclosure, distributive injustice, and militarization. The commons is not only about agitating for a share of the resources, she argued, but also for the processes through which collective governance of those shared resources is exercised and community is constituted.
Anna Hood highlighted the importance of emotions and creativity needed to constitute such community, work that can be joyful but also messy and fraught with challenges, dissents and disagreement. We would be deluding ourselves if we imagined the work of constituting peace to be otherwise.
Perhaps our biggest take-away from the conference is that studying past and present activities from the margins offers multiple sources to draw upon for confronting today’s arms race. Indeed, it is crucial to achieving not only disarmament, but abolitionist, futures. In the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments. Abolition is building the future from the present in all the ways we can.”
The Exhibition ‘Disarmament from the Margins: Local Actions, Global Stories from across Scotland’ is curated by Charlie Peevers in collaboration with designer Rose Parfitt and GCU archivist Heather Panayiotaki. The exhibition is free and open to the public at the Sir Alex Ferguson Library, GCU until 24 October 2025.
First published: 15 October 2025