Suchergebnisse

This paper contributes to the literature on norms, arms regulation, humanitarian arms control, and arms control as governmentality by examining the different "Matryoshka dolls" of arms trade governance as they operated in the late nineteenth century. I suggest that analysis of practices in this era has relevance for debates about contemporary arms governance. The innermost doll is represented by a specific regulatory initiative, in this case, the 1890 Brussels Act, which represented an attempt to graft a regulatory arms trade norm onto an established and constitutive anti-slavery norm. The Act was also located within the second matryoshka doll, the broader approach to arms trade prohibition adopted in an era. Despite representations of the period as one of free trade in arms, I highlight extensive efforts to restrict the transfer of firearms to colonial subjects. Finally, I examine the third matryoshka doll, the way in which mechanisms of prohibition and permission constitute the practices of arms control as governmentality—the effort to define and manage which gradations of people can legitimately own, trade, and use which gradations of weapons in what contexts. Overall, the paper challenges the optimistic literature regarding humanitarian arms control and arms trade norms with three concluding implications: the merging of humanitarianism and arms control can reflect both good and bad norms; such a confluence is not necessarily incompatible with colonialism, racism, or imperial violence; and, such a merger is consonant with the maintenance of liberal militarism.

This article examines three types of initiatives that have been deployed in the effort to transform the political economies of civil conflict: Voluntary ethical trading initiatives, formal regulation to promote ethical trading or good resource governance, and economic supervision schemes. The article draws on brief case studies of the United Nations Global Compact, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme as well as discussing economic supervision schemes such as those imposed on Chad and Liberia. The article argues that the current representation of these initiatives obscures that they represent a retreat from the more ambitious programs of reform articulated in the 1970s.

This article begins by deconstructing the dominant discourse on arms control and disarmament, and argues that it works to dismiss disarmament as an idea whilst simultaneously coopting really existing disarmament into a perspective that imagines a world long on dangers and short on peaceful strategies to confront them. In contrast, it is argued, not only is the traditional distinction between arms control and disarmament problematic but, in certain respects, the world is experiencing quite a lot of disarmament. Partly however, this is because both disarmament and broader arms limitation activities are taking place as part of an asymmetrical arms limitation system underpinned, in particular, by the US in its role as a 'disarmament Empire'. Nevertheless, there are a number of factors immanent in the contemporary international system that suggest a more radical form of emancipatory disarmament might be both realisable and indeed necessary.

Discourse and policy on war economies has tended to treat them as separate and distinct from both the pre- and post-conflict economy. In reality, war economies tend to represent simply more violent versions of the neo-patrimonialism and external trade relations that characterize many developing states both before and after conflict. Assuming that peace will inevitably resolve the legacies that war economies leave behind is thus a forlorn hope. In addition, the discourse and control agenda surrounding conflict trade has been constructed in a way that negatively affects peacebuilding. In particular, the focus on certain pariahs or specific conflict goods tends to understate the complexity of war economies and the social function they serve - features that persist into peace.