Preventive Action in World Politics

In only a few instances in international relations, states anticipate major problems and address them before they become disastrous: negotiating and creating new international norms to avert human and financial loss. One example is the Protocol banning laser weapons that can permanently blind. It was created in the mid‐1990s before the weapons were fully operational and set a powerful norm that banned their future development. With new evolving technologies that have unparalleled capacity to harm and maim, such as fully autonomous weapons systems (killer robots), it is imperative that states take preventive action and create new multilateral agreements to cope with problems yet to materialize. This article aims to initiate the discussion of when states act preventively to avert major future problems. It advances three initial explanatory propositions on preventive multilateralism in areas of ‘commonly perceived global dimension of future potential harm’ to improve states’ security dilemmas; based upon reputation and humanitarian, material concerns, and national security, and presents the initial discussion toward a world politics of prevention.