How we banned the bomb

with Daniel Högsta and Claire Yorke

On 7 July 2017 – following a decade of advocacy by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and its partners – an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations adopted a landmark global agreement to ban nuclear weapons. It entered into force on 22 January 2021. In this talk with Claire Yorke, expert on empathy and international security and convenor of the GCC's working group on International Relations, Daniel Hogsta - Interim Director of ICAN - will talk about how the treaty was won, the lessons he learned, and why peace is always possible.

Daniel Högsta

Claire Yorke

This event was held on Thursday, 28th September 2023.

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Daniel Högsta is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)‘s interim Executive Director and was a part of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize-winning campaign coalition that worked to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons.

Previously, Daniel was the Campaign Coordinator of ICAN, responsible for the ICAN Cities Appeal, the ICAN Parliamentary Pledge, as well as supporting the campaign activities and political engagement of ICAN’s partner organisations. In the period which culminated in the negotiations of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), Daniel coordinated advocacy efforts for ICAN and was responsible for generating awareness, understanding and support among governments for the “Humanitarian Initiative” and for the concept of a new treaty to ban nuclear weapons. During the negotiation of the tready in New York in 2017, he helped to lead ICAN’s lobbying team to ensure the Treaty reflected ICAN’s core principles. Since 2018, Daniel’s work focused on supporting the work of ICAN partners to garner political support for the Treaty in “nuclear umbrella” state contexts, as well as on broadening the community of stakeholders that champion the TPNW.

Claire Yorke is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian War College, an academia and author. She has recently completed an EU funded project on Empathy and International Security at the University of Southern Denmark, and prior to that was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. She completed her PhD at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and worked before that at Chatham House and in the British Parliament. Claire leads the GCC’s working group on International Relations.

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