APRIL 2006 Special Issue volume 27, issue 1
FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN SMALL ARMS CONTROL
Guest Editor: Stephen M. Hill
INTRODUCTION
Stephen M. Hill
CURRENT CHALLENGES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Escaping Reuterswärd’s Shadow
Aaron Karp - View Article
An Effective Reading of the United Nations Program of Action
David Mutimer
Scared Half to Death: The Gendered Impacts of Prolific Small Arms
Vanessa Farr
Assessing the Small Arms Movement: The Trials and Tribulations of a Transnational Network
Suzette R. Grillot, Craig S. Stapley and Molly E. Hanna
IMPROVING REGIMES FOR SMALL ARMS CONTROL
Two Sides of the Same Coin: Establishing Controls for SALW and Major Conventional Weapons
Natalie J. Goldring
The Black Market in Small Arms: Examining a Social Network
David Kinsella
What’s the Point of Arms Transfer Controls?
Neil Cooper
Completing the Circle: Building a Theory of Small Arms Demand
Jurgen Brauer and Robert Muggah - View Article
IMPROVING POST-CONFLICT ARMS CONTROL
From Anarchy to Security: Comparing Theoretical Approaches to the Process of Disarmament Following Civil War
Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie
From Political Economies of War to Political Economies of Peace: The Contribution of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration after Wars of Predation
Joanna Spear
Emerging from the Shadow of War: A Critical Perspective on DDR and Weapons Reduction in the Post-Conflict Period
Robert Muggah
BOOK REVIEW
The Global Gun Epidemic: From Saturday Night Specials to AK-47sby Wendy Cukier and Victor W. Sidel
Aaron Karp
ABSTRACTS OF ARTICLES
Escaping Reuterswärd’s Shadow by Aaron Karp
The small arms agenda remains almost exclusively reactive, responding mostly to the needs of the states that finance small arms diplomacy and fieldwork. NGOs and research institutes, tied to government priorities, have been unable to develop an independent voice. Activists have sought influence over small arms politics instead by broadening their agenda to include related social pathologies. This strategy, pragmatic in the short term, threatens the integrity and durability of small arms activism in the long run. It also has allowed small arms activism to prosper over the short run, but without articulating the kind of goals necessary to sustain it over the long run. Instead of clear goals, the field has been guided largely by images, including art, represented in this essay by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s Non-Violence. To assure its health and influence, small arms activism, research and policy requires greater control over its agenda. Instead of relying on aesthetic inspiration and the tendency to broaden its agenda, the field requires deeper engagement with core concerns. This can only come through articulation of goals to explicitly reduce the role of firearms in human affairs. The place for such action is less in the United Nations, and more through national campaigns, focusing on states, the only bodies that actually own and regulate guns.
"A Serious Threat to Peace, Reconciliation, Safety, Security…" An Effective Reading of the United Nations Program of Action by David Mutimer
Evaluations of the 2001 Conference on the illicit trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons and the Program of Action (PoA) which it produced cover the gamut from success to failure. This article does not seek to explain the success or failure of the Conference, nor does it look forward to the 2006 Conference and beyond to see what possibilities there are for global public policy on SALW. It is concerned, rather, with the topography of the issue which will come to the table in 2006. The article asks about the problem that the PoA has produced, by means of Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘effective history’. It shows how that problem is constituted around two key features: small arms and light weapons as a particular category of technology, and the division between the licit and illicit trade. It demonstrates both the contingency of this framing and the effects that it has produced. In particular, it shows how this framing makes possible a set of ‘proliferation control’ practices similar to those applied to other forms of military technology, and how it masks forms of gun violence, particularly those directed against women.
Scared Half to Death: The Gendered Impacts of Prolific Small Arms by Vanessa Farr
Due to their widespread availability, mobility and ease of use, small arms are a very important factor in the flaring up and perpetration of many expressions of trauma, both in times of war and in degraded “peacetime” environments characterized by large-scale violence. They have become central to maintaining social dislocation, destabilization, insecurity and crime in the build-up to war, in wartime and in the aftermath of conflict. Small arms are misused within domestic settings as well as in public spaces, and they impact everyone in the community: one means to counter their effects, therefore, is to increase our understanding of the role played by prolific small arms and light weapons in reinforcing and maintaining gender-specific violence before, during and after conflict.
Assessing the Small Arms Movement: The Trials and Tribulations of a Transnational Network by Suzette R. Grillot, Craig S. Stapley and Molly E. Hanna
For nearly ten years, nongovernmental actors have raised concerns about the increased accessibility of small arms and light weapons around the world. By the late 1990s, hundreds of these nongovernmental actors began to coalesce together in an effort to enhance awareness, conduct research, and affect policy relevant to small arms issues. How did this NGO coalition emerge? How does it operate? How effective has it been? Where is it headed in the future? To answer these questions we seek to assess the structure and activities of the SAM based on existing understandings of transnational social movements. We focus specifically on the emergence, structure, and effectiveness of the SAM – a movement that has, according to many of its own participants, founders, and observers, struggled over its years of operation to achieve its objectives. Moreover, we offer a comparative analysis of the successful International Campaign to Ban Landmines in an effort to demonstrate similarities and differences in the two transnational organizations. Our findings lead to a number of recommendations we believe the SAM should heed to become more effective.
Two Sides of the Same Coin: Establishing Controls for SALW and Major Conventional Weapons by Natalie Goldring
Since the end of the Cold War there has been a growing tendency within the arms control community to treat major conventional weapons and small arms and light weapons (SALW) as separate fields of action. This article challenges the utility of this differentiation and argues instead that effective arms control requires that the full range of conventional weapons be addressed when policy proposals are formulated.
The Black Market in Small Arms: Examining a Social Network by David Kinsella
In recent years, researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the proliferation of small arms, a transnational trade amounting to over $7 billion in value during 2002. Small arms are difficult to track and are not the stuff of military parades, but they are immensely destructive. As much as $1 billion worth enters the black market annually. I argue that the illicit trade in small arms should be understood not as a market but as a network, one that shares some important properties with networked forms of organization studied by sociologists. I then employ quantitative methods developed for the study of social networks in an effort to show the basic structure of illegal small arms transfers to Africa. The analysis draws from my Illicit Arms Transfers (IAT) dataset still in development, so the results make use of the most rudimentary information being collected. They are suggestive, however, and the analytical approach promises to shed considerable light on a corner of the global arms trade that is of great interest to the research and activist communities, and of great consequence to those in war-torn regions of the world.
What’s the Point of Arms Transfer Controls? by Neil Cooper
This article examines the contemporary architecture of conventional arms transfer restrictions and concludes that it is deficient. In part this is simply due to the absence of political will to effectively implement existing arms transfer restraint. However, it is also the case that the globalization of the defense industry, the growing use of dual-use technology and the pervasiveness and flexibility of illicit networks are, in combination, substantially eroding the utility of existing restrictions on arms circulation. This paper argues therefore, that such trends require a shift from a predominantly supplier orientated model of restriction to a system of regulatory diffusion that matches the reality of arms diffusion in the international system. Such a system encompasses a variety of initiatives but particularly includes a greater emphasis on recipient initiatives, an enhanced role for civil society and the incorporation of an outputs/impacts model of arms regulation.
Completing the Circle: Building a Theory of Small Arms Demand by Jurgen Brauer and Robert Muggah
This article presents a theory of small arms demand and provides initial evidence from on-going case studies in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, and Brazil. The theory revolves around the motivations and means to acquire arms, addressing issues such as contrasting acquirers and possessors and differentiating between acquirers and non-acquirers, consumers and producers, and final and intermediate demand. The paper also studies characteristics of small arms that make them so desirable as compared to other means of conducting violent conflict. The overall goal is to provide a theoretical framework and language that is common to a variety of social science approaches to the study of small arms use, misuse, and abuse.
/From Anarchy to Security: Comparing Theoretical Approaches to the Process of Disarmament Following Civil War by Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie
This article offers a critical evaluation of two contending theoretical approaches to achieving disarmament and an enduring peace following the negotiated resolution of civil war. The first, or neorealist approach, is associated with the work of Barbara Walter and suggests that third party enforcement of the terms of the peace is critical to fostering the confidence necessary for rival groups to lay down their arms and renew the process of intrastate cooperation. In contrast, Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie identify an alternative neoliberal approach; one that does not depend entirely on the unreliable goodwill of the international community. They suggest that former enemies have the opportunity autonomously to build the trust necessary to achieve disarmament through an agreement to create a network of power sharing and power dividing institutions.
From Political Economies of War to Political Economies of Peace: the Contribution of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration after Wars of Predation by Joanna Spear
Can disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) be a means to ‘jump start’ a transition to a political economy for peace? This article considers the key groups targeted in DDR: individual fighters, middle-level officers and leaderships, and each element of a DDR campaign with a focus on political economy issues. This leads to suggestions for re-orienting some elements of DDR campaigns to place more emphasis on looking after middle-ranked officers, for the international community to place much emphasis on an often under-resourced part of the process, reintegration, and for more parallel attention to dealing with illicit economic activities.
Emerging from the Shadow of War: A Critical Perspective on DDR and Weapons Reduction in the Post-Conflict Period by Robert Muggah
Drawing on a wide range and multidisciplinary literature, this article provides an overview of post-conflict armed violence. It then introduces a critical review of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration and weapons reduction activities – two comparatively new interventions championed by development donors ostensibly to reduce armed violence and secure the peace.