Globalization, Social Movements, and Peacebuilding

1. The Post–Cold War Arms Trade Paradox: Humanitarian Arms Control, NGOs, and the Strategic Complexes of the Liberal Peace

21 1 The Post–Cold War Arms Trade Paradox Humanitarian Arms Control, NGOs, and the Strategic Complexes of the Liberal Peace1 Neil Cooper Anotable aspect of the post–Cold War arms control agenda has been the appearance, and in many respects the relative success, of what has been labeled as a humanitarian arms control (HAC) (Greene 2010; Hynek 2007) or humanitarian disarmament (Borrie 2009, 312; Borrie and Randin 2006) agenda. This has included, in particular, the campaign on landmines that led to the 1997 Ottawa Convention, the campaign to ban cluster munitions that resulted in the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, and a range of initiatives designed to control the trade in small arms and light weapons , most notably, the 2001 UN Program of Action on Small Arms. To the extent that current efforts to negotiate an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) are animated by humanitarian concerns, this initiative might also be classified as a further example of HAC in action. What all these cases of conventional arms regulation also have in common is that they have generally been discussed by commentators as examples of a control agenda that 1. Research for this article was conducted with the aid of grants from the British Academy (Ref: SG101199) and the Trust for Research and Education on the Arms Trade. Archival material from the National Archives of the UK is quoted with permission. 22  Discourses of Conflict and Movement marks a striking departure from the traditional practices and foci of arms control and as instances of the transformative power of global civil society campaigners working to operationalize a benevolent human security agenda. This chapter aims to challenge these assumptions. Instead, it will argue that such initiatives are far more ambiguous in both their roots and their consequences than mainstream accounts might suggest. Initiatives such as those on landmines and cluster munitions are actually part of a much longer history of regulation and taboos constructed around “pariah weapons.” Following on from this, I will argue that the social construction of certain weapons as particularly odious has more to do with the interests of powerful actors and the relationship of such weapons to legitimized military technologies than any inherently inhumane characteristics claimed for them. These points will be illustrated by way of brief discussions on the way the meanings attached to both cluster munitions and small arms have altered over time. The chapter will then discuss the ways in which dominant models of economy and geographies of threat construction have worked to produce particular approaches to arms trade regulation in different eras. A key contention with regard to the post–Cold War era will be that it has been characterized by an (apparent ) arms trade paradox, whereby the proliferation of formal instruments of international regulation, ostensibly designed to constrain the conventional arms trade, has also coincided with a shift to a more permissive approach to arms sales in general. Viewed at the system level however, the specific combination of permission and proscription characteristic of the post–Cold War era makes sense as a morphology of regulation that, in broad terms, aims to triangulate between efforts to discriminate against pariah actors, to support the bio-political goals of intrastate pacification in the global South, and to maintain military hierarchy. Understood from this perspective, the humanitarian arms control agenda has had far more ambiguous effects than its supporters allow. While it has certainly produced some notable arms control achievements, it has also served to reflect and reaffirm a new “new standard of civilization” centered around the distinction between discriminate and indiscriminate weapons and modes of warfare that are key elements in the legitimizing discourse of both contemporary militarism and liberal peace intervention. The Post–Cold War Arms Trade Paradox  23 This chapter then, represents an attempt to respond to the call from our editors, Jackie Smith and Ernesto Verdeja, for thinking about peacebuilding that is systemic. That is, scholarship that does not simply focus on the inside of the postconflict state but that, rather, considers how broader historic and world-system factors shape the global architecture of peace and violence that specific instances of liberal peacebuilding are both located in and conditioned by. Accordingly, the chapter will conclude by briefly considering the implications of this analysis for our understanding of the role played by arms trade NGOs as actors in the strategic complexes of the liberal peace and by briefly outlining the elements of a...