Support for a ban? An analysis of the Norwegian Labour Party's nuclear policy from 2009 to 2019

The political character of nuclear disarmament has often been overlooked in international relations theory. Another omission of nuclear disarmament theory is the perspective of non-nuclear weapon states. Between 2005 and 2013, the Norwegian red-green coalition in government, with the Labour Party at its centre, promoted a humanitarian-based approach to nuclear disarmament policy. However, when the TPNW was adopted in 2017 realising the goal of a ban, the Labour Party argued that Norway should abstain from signing the treaty. This indicates an interesting puzzle. Therefore, the research question and aim of this thesis is: how has the Norwegian Labour Party’s support for a ban changed? To answer this research question, the thesis will applies three theoretical approaches to the political dynamics of the Labour Party’s policy; a neorealist framework based on alliance security dilemma theory; and two competing theories within the constructivism framework; the persuasion model and the rhetorical coercion model. These three theoretical approaches are applied to the empirical case of the Labour Party’s nuclear policy from 2009 to 2019, culminating in the Labour Party Congress of 2019. The case study applies a method of process tracing to the Labour Party’s policy from 2009 to 2019, and includes nine interviews with Labour Party politicians to contextualise the empirical tracing. The resulting narrative highlights how the Labour Party’s support for a ban has changed. The thesis concludes that Labour Party’s support for a ban changed with the development of the TPNW. The Labour Party argued that the TPNW conflicted with Norway’s NATO commitments, as the treaty called for unilateral disarmament. The thesis concludes that the Labour Party were concerned about the international security environment. However, the empirical evidence shows that the limits of rhetorical commonplaces, made supporting the TPNW difficult. The opposition of the TPNW was a result of the leveraging of NATO norms, which left Labour politicians without socially sustainable arguments to defend the ban treaty