Disarmament has long been a dirty word in the international relations (IR) lexicon. Across political systems and time, people have chosenāfor reasons of security, honor, ethics, or humanitarianismāto prohibit or limit certain categories of violent technology. However, the dominant IR discourse has focused more on processes of armament and militarization than on their reversal. In the last two decades, the āhumanitarian disarmament movementāāa loose coalition of small and medium-sized states, humanitarian agencies, and advocacy groupsāhave successfully achieved global bans on blinding lasers, landmines and cluster munitions, and the Arms Trade Treaty. They have also renewed investment in programs of landmine clearance, stockpile destruction of small arms and demobilization of combatants in conflict zones. These āNew Disarmersā most recently achieved the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and have now set their sights on banning autonomous weapons systems . Within the policy and advocacy community, there is a vigorous debate about humanitarian disarmament that could inform the limited discussion of this issue in IR. Some see humanitarian disarmament as a way to breathe new life into a moribund policy arena. Others worry that this approach is piecemeal and depoliticizing, banning the āeasierā cases of particularly odious weapons rather than pursuing earlier diplomatic commitments to āgeneral and complete disarmament.ā This book showcases new interdisciplinary research by scholars seeking to understand the dynamics and impact of the humanitarian disarmament movement .
This chapter introduces and defines the concept of humanitarian disarmament. From there, it proceeds to review the history of humanitarian disarmament from its roots in the 1899 Hague Conventions; through the landmine and cluster munitions bans; protocols on guns, explosive remnants of war, and the Arms Trade Treaty; to the current campaigns on killer robots, explosive weapons, and nuclear weapons. It will show the emergence of a transnational advocacy network and community of practice that spans the various campaigns, having established common values, language, and infrastructure. The chapter then concludes with the plan for the volume.
Changing Disarmament Norms
Disarmament means, in general parlance, the reduction or destruction of some of a stateās weapons or the withdrawal of armed forces. The UN specifically defines it as the ācollection, documentation, control and disposal of small arms, ammunition, explosives and light and heavy weapons of combatants and often also of the civilian populationsā (United Nations Secretary-General , May 2005). In international weapons law, it refers to treaties or initiatives that prohibit or restrict the production, stockpiling, and/or transfer of weapons (Weapons Law Encyclopedia 2013). It thus overlaps with arms control, a notion that encompasses efforts between different states to build confidence that force will not be used between them by limiting or reducing certain arms or military forces. In general, disarmament is about the extent to which states are willing to submit themselves to legal restraints on their means of making war. Therefore, negotiation of such instruments has historically been the purview of states. As a result, disarmament as an approach has not been pursued throughout most of history. Most recently, during the Cold War, arms control remained exclusively in the realm of superpower politics. Most arms control agreements involved quantitative disarmament (reductions in numbers of a kind of weapon) rather than qualitative disarmament (removing or limiting specific kinds of weapons in an arsenal). With the exception of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) of 1972 and, more recently, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) of 1993, no agreements were negotiated that categorically and globally prohibited specific weapons.
Weapons that are perceived as inhumane often generate a public outcry. For example, when the Luftwaffe dropped cluster munitions on the port of Grimsby, UK, public response reacted in horror at the harm to civilians that persisted after the raid, as initially unexploded ordnance continued to claim new victims (Borrie and Randin 2006). However, the context of World War II was not ripe for the emergence of a disarmament movement. Indeed, while the war did inspire the development of the Geneva Conventions, during WWII and the Cold War it was difficult for voices of public conscience to exercise power over statesā arsenals. Humanitarian concerns were subordinated to matters of state security.
The end of the Cold War created space for new thinking in arms control. This period saw a significant increase in internal conflicts that targeted civilians, but also a reduction in conflict between states. The growing number and strength of international civil society networks amplified the humanitarian motivations for addressing the impact of conventional weapons used in these internal conflicts. These challenges to the prevailing, state-centric discourse on weapons ultimately converged into a humanitarian disarmament movement led by transnational civil society .
Practitioners of humanitarian disarmament consider weapons, weapons systems, and general practices of war from the primary consideration of whether or not particular weapons or actions cause unacceptable humanitarian harm. As an approach, humanitarian disarmament seeks to prevent and remediate arms-inflicted human suffering and environmental harm through the establishment of norms (Humanitarian Disarmament) which would devalue and ultimately delegitimize particular weapons of war, within the broader context of unacceptable conduct in warfare. This includes, but goes beyond, questions of legality to include moral and political assessments of the effects of certain weapons on both civilians and combatants, and whether the use of such weapons can withstand this scrutiny by responsible states and military commanders (Florini 2000).
The notion of unacceptable humanitarian harm is drawn in contrast with historic justifications by military and political leaders about āacceptable losses,ā with regard to the ability andāmore importantlyāthe willingness of states to suffer particular costs in order to secure their defined military objectives within the context of war. Notable historic examples include the carpet-bombing of major cities during World War II and the American use of landmines and cluster munitions during the Vietnam War. The calculus of acceptable loss, and particularly loss in the form of civilian casualties, has been repeatedly refined over the past century to now consider virtually no instance of civilian harm āacceptable.ā Acceptable loss is no longer an appropriate justification for the consequences of statesā conduct in war. This is remarkable given that, during this same period of time, states advancing ever-deadlier weapons research increased by orders of magnitude their capacity to cause human harm; but it is not surprising given civil society contestation of the appropriateness of this type of calculation by states.
Humanitarian disarmers in transnational civil society have, in the decades since, driven this redefinition of wartime practices by repeatedly calling into question the justifications made by states after their actions resulted in disproportionate and indiscriminate harm to civilians. While not initially effective, it has increasingly resulted in rhetorical back-bending in the rationalizations of states that continue to deploy harmful practices and indiscriminate weapons, as well as efforts by some other states to categorize weapons and tactics of warfare into those that are acceptable and those that are not. While intending to design legal protections for states and their arsenals, states have found themselves ārhetorically entrappedā by their own justifications (Checkel 2001). For instance, having recognized harm caused by some cluster munitions, states were later forced to reconcile this position with harms caused by any cluster munitions (Petrova 2008, 2010).
The authors in this volume broadly take the position that humanitarian disarmament as an approach has had an impact on international outcomes, including the creation and form of new international legal instruments and norms , and that humanitarian disarmament norms and ideas have real agency in shaping the behavior of individual actors and states. Civil society actors drive the processes and outcomes of disarmament in a variety of ways: they have at their disposal particular issue or process expertise (Price 1998, 2003; Keck and Sikkink 1998), networked organizational capacity to mobilize and spread information (Cortell and Davis 2000; Carpenter 2007; Schrad 2010), and special moral authority (Price 1998; Tannenwald 1999; Checkel 2005) which has the potential to shape state perceptions about their own arms control behavior or at l...