Professor Devika Hovell gives Annual Kirby Lecture in International Law
Professor Devika Hovell recently gave the Annual Kirby Lecture in International Law, hosted by the ANU Law School Centre for International and Public Law (CIPL). Her lecture examined the idea of the nuclear bomb as constitutional object, examining how nuclear weapons shape the conditions of world order, what forms of domination they sustain, and why disarmament should be understood not as utopian aspiration, but as a constitutional imperative.
This lecture reflects on the idea of the bomb as a constitutional artefact: not simply a weapon of unique destructive force, but one that has helped to structure world order. It argues that the status of nuclear weapons has been sustained through two dominant routes of justification. The first shelters the bomb under the grammar of self-defence and protects it as a sovereign right. The second defers to the logic of deterrence, recognising the bomb as a form of strategic control. In different ways, both routes embed nuclear weapons within the structures of legal and political authority. Against both fatalism and nostalgia, the lecture revisits these justifications through legal and political theories of authority, fear, non-domination, and public reason. It asks how nuclear weapons shape the conditions of constitutional order, what forms of domination they sustain, and why disarmament should be understood not as utopian aspiration, but as a constitutional imperative.