Call for Papers: Conference on "The Role of Leaders in Nuclear Politics", 11-13 June 2020

A conference convened by the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Today’s leaders appear to exercise a heavier hand in steering their countries’ foreign policies in line with their personal visions. After decades during which international relations scholarship underemphasized leaders, recognition of their crucial role for security outcomes is growing. Leaders loom especially large in nuclear politics. Most nuclear weapons choices require top-down decisions under deep uncertainty, elevating both the impact of leaders’ characteristics on their choices and leaders’ leeway to shape policy.

Leader-focused scholarship on nuclear issues has made substantial progress over the last decade. Further promising research is underway. To see what scholars have learned, which questions remain unaddressed, and how such scholarship could improve, this conference will explore the impact of political leaders and their personal characteristics in different areas of nuclear politics. Moreover, to bring scholarship on leaders closer to the needs of policy practitioners, we have invited former senior policymakers and intelligence analysts with expertise in profiling political leaders and nuclear weapons issues to comment on accepted papers.

We invite papers that examine the independent causal impact of leaders in specific nuclear policy areas, including the supply and demand sides of proliferation, nuclear threat assessment, counter-proliferation choices, nonproliferation diplomacy, nuclear crisis decision-making, and superpower arms control.

While we welcome submissions from all disciplinary approaches, we are particularly interested in papers that 1) make explicit which characteristic accounts for the variation across leaders; 2) specify the causal process through which the characteristic shapes leaders’ choices; 3) address endogeneity concerns; and 4) support their arguments with solid empirical evidence, ideally drawn from archival sources or historical scholarship. We aim to publish a selection of the papers in a special issue of a first-rate international relations journal. Therefore, we seek work that has not been published or which tests established theories against new evidence.

We expect paper proposals to include a detailed discussion of how the paper fulfills the outlined requirements and whether and how it builds upon previous work by the author. Paper proposals should be submitted as a 500–800 word abstract together with a short CV. A single PDF file should be sent to by October 30, 2019. The Center for Security Studies of ETH Zurich will cover the costs of transportation, accommodation, and meals for all accepted participants. For further information on the Center for Security Studies or ETH Zurich, visit https://css.ethz.ch/en/.