Humanitarian Disarmament

An Historical Enquiry

Treasa Dunworth

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781108473927
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108645102
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

The humanitarian framing of disarmament is not a novel development, but rather represents a re-emergence of a much older and long-standing sensibility of humanitarianism in disarmament. The Book rejects the 'big bang' theory that presents the Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention 1997, and its successors – the Convention on Cluster Munitions 2008, and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons 2017 – as a paradigm shift from an older traditional state-centric approach towards a more progressive humanitarian approach. It shows how humanitarian disarmament has a long and complex history, which includes these treaties. This book argues that the attempt to locate the birth of humanitarian disarmament in these treaties is part of the attempt to cleanse humanitarian disarmament of politics, presenting humanitarianism as a morally superior discourse in disarmament. However, humanitarianism carries its own blind spots and has its own hegemonic leanings. It may be silencing other potentially more transformative discourses.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Cases
• Table of Treaties
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Origins of Humanitarian Disarmament
• 3 The Manhattan Project to ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’: Humanitarian Disarmament Sidelined
• 4 Humanitarian Disarmament Rising: The Vietnam War and the Campaigns against Indiscriminate Weapons
• 5 Humanitarian Disarmament Triumphant?: The Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention 1997
• 6 Humanitarian Disarmament Consolidated?: The Convention on Cluster Munitions
• 7 The Humanitarian Campaigns against Nuclear Weapons
• 8 Rethinking Humanitarian Disarmament
• 9 Conclusion
• Index