ABSTRACT
There has been substantial progress in international relations in the last decade. Change has occurred in the least likely realm: the one closest to the national security of states. Within this sphere, an indicator is disarmament diplomacy, which has seen tremendous change. Far-reaching negotiations have led to sweeping innovations in the making of treaties and agreements that have an impact on saving lives and improving human security. Ground-breaking, pioneering and inventive vision and craft have either led to the creation of treaties and agreements on arms restraints and prohibitions of use or initiated novel processes of regime building in order to establish new prohibitions. Disarmament diplomacy is often thought to be the realm of stalemate, defiance and non-compliance. Stories abound of deadlock or ineffectiveness at the United Nations (UN), conflicts raging everywhere inflicting enormous suffering on civilian populations, and states’ refusal to accept restrictions on their authority and sovereignty. However, there is room for hope and ingenuity, even in the areas where one would imagine that states would be the least likely to be influenced: in their war policies and strategies. At their core is the procurement and management of arms, especially conventional arms.1 Disarmament diplomacy has seen unprecedented inspiration, moral drive and vision in the last decade, bringing a revolution to international security. This, in essence, is what I explore in this book, whose main premise is that there is little progress in international relations without progress in international law. This book’s key objective is to assess the evolution of international regimes and emerging norms on issues that are closely associated with the security of states. It aims to determine moral and normative progress in international relations by investigating three cases: first, how a new emerging international norm has shaped the evolution of and support for an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT); second, the evolution of two processes to ban and regulate cluster munitions;2 and, third, the small arms3 international regime and its complementary and powerful diplomatic initiative, the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence. These three issues are very close to the national security of states and have nonetheless attained prominence in the international agenda. This would have been unheard of two decades ago. The formation of international norms in the realm of the high politics of security that impact military doctrine (regarding the
use and non-use of certain arms and in preparation for war) and restraint in weapons procurement is a remarkable development that deserves a proper place in the scholarly study of political science and international relations. This means that a domain that was previously thought to be the exclusive purview of states, i.e. how they procure and manage their conventional arms, has been penetrated by multiple sources of influences originating from worldwide civil society and many other actors and sources. As a result, norms and treaties are being established to address the previously excluded domain of conventional arms, which is the area closest to how states prepare to wage war. Consequently, there are now more multilateral restrictions on arms production, transfer and use, and less state sovereignty in this domain. Arms procurement and management constitute an area that states traditionally guard jealously. The sweeping attempts to impose restrictions on conventional arms and tackle the consequences of their use are thus unprecedented.4 The question driving this project is: why have states engaged in innovative forms of multilateral diplomacy in highly sensitive national security areas? This leads me to working research questions that investigate the following:
• How do new regimes form and new norms emerge in key areas proscribing or prescribing conduct vis-à-vis conventional arms production, transfer and use?
