Irrelevant or Indispensable?: The United Nations in the Twenty-first Century

10. Small Arms, Big Killers

introduction The central challenge today facing Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan (Darfur), the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Colombia, and several other states is arguably insecurity stemming primarily (but not exclusively) from the proliferation and misuse of small arms and light weapons.1 The ability to establish public order, to deliver humanitarian relief, to maintain basic government services (schools, clinics, food distribution points, etc.), to establish political stability, and to launch more ambitious development and reconstruction efforts is over and over held hostage to organized violence on a small and large scale, in these and many other states. One could unpack each of the major conflict situations around the world—some in a violent, others in a quiescent, phase—and attribute the root causes to a variety of complex factors. The quest for root causes and underlying factors is not nearly as important though—from the point of view of designing effective and cost-efficient policy interventions —as focusing on the tools of violence, the small arms and light weapons that are in the wrong hands, and that are used on a daily basis to threaten, injure and kill. There are more than 640 million small arms and light weapons in circulation worldwide, a large percentage of which are legally held or which are not likely to be used to cause harm. But the weapons that are misused are probably responsible for at least 300,000 (and likely more), deaths each year, and a significantly higher number of injuries, with enormous short- and long-term economic, social, and human costs. As the Inter-American Development Bank estimated, the direct keith krause 10 SMALL ARMS, BIG KILLERS 105 and indirect costs of violence in Latin America amounted to US$140170 billion per year. Perhaps more than half of these deaths do not occur in conflict zones—but from a human security perspective, this is irrelevant, and the distinction between war and everyday forms of insecurity is increasingly blurring in many places around the world. Addressing the proliferation and misuse of small arms and light weapons means breaking out of some old modes of thinking, and recognizing some distinct features of the problem. I will summarize these in four points, which I will develop and illustrate below. I should say that most examples and cases are drawn from the five years of extensive research and analysis of the Small Arms Survey, an independent non-governmental research institute based at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, in Geneva, Switzerland.2 My fourth—and longest—point will attempt to answer directly the question of what role the United Nations can and should play in the panoply of efforts to address the small arms and light weapons challenge . My central points are that: 1. Small arms and light weapons do not represent one problem, but rather a cluster of different issues grouped under one umbrella. In this respect, the problem of small arms is a challenge to global public policy of the same order as global warming, rather than a discrete problem such as thinning of the ozone layer. 2. Small arms should not be understood as an “arms control and disarmament” issue, subject to comprehensive international restraint and treaty-based measures. The “arms control” approach represents one aspect among many in the policy tool-kit. 3. Small arms are social artefacts, and as such are usually—unlike other types of weapons—embedded in complex social systems, and a nuanced understanding of the social and economic context of weapons possession and use is essential to effective policy-making. 4. Tackling the problem of small arms requires “multi-level” governance , from the global to the local level. The most important measures that can be developed are often national in nature, but these must be embedded in robust regional and global regimes to regulate the cross-border or external consequences of national policies. 106 keith krause small arms: not one issue, but many inter-related issues Colombia, a country long in the thrall of a bitter ideological conflict, has among the world’s highest rates of firearm deaths. Yet only 20 percent of the more than 20,000 annual deaths from firearms occur as a result of the ongoing conflict; the vast majority are associated with high levels of criminal violence. The picture is even more dramatic in Brazil, where firearms violence claims about 30,000 victims a year, and the murder rate of 29 per 100...