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Civil Society Schizophrenia
2008-02-26 14:38:00
Reading John Borrie's daily postings from last week's Wellington conference on cluster munitions (see below), I was reminded of something that I have been mulling over in my mind for some time now but have not yet had the chance to examine properly. I am referring to a highly specific professional disorder that seems only to afflict disarmament diplomats. It's called 'civil society schizophrenia.'Last week in Wellington, 122 States slogged it out with each other and with the now formidable Cluster Munitions Coalition of NGOs to agree a draft text that will serve as the basis for negotiations on a new Cluster Munitions Convention. NGOs were present in Wellington's Town Hall for the entire duration of the conference. They intervened at will in the discussions and openly criticized certain States for attempting to weaken the Wellington text. NGOs provided valuable inputs to the debates based on sound research, interpretation of evidence and testimony of victims. In short, ...
More About: Society , Civil , Civil society , Schizophrenia

From Welly to Dublin: cluster munition conference a success
2008-02-22 05:30:00
This week, 122 states met as part of the Oslo Process in Wellington , New Zealand, for a conference on addressing the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions. The meeting, which concluded today, was widely hailed as a success. 72 countries present spoke up to explicitly endorse the Wellington Conference Declaration, with other states certain to follow in the weeks and months before Dublin .Wellington represents a crucial stage in the Oslo Process. Over the last year a 'core group' of countries (Austria, the Holy See, Mexico, Ireland New Zealand, Norway and Peru) has managed the process of developing a discussion text, which has become a "Draft Cluster Munition s Convention". That document was the focus of this week's talks. The hope was that, at the end of the meeting, states would associate themselves with the "Wellington Declaration", which a government must do if it wants to be admitted to formal negotiations in Ireland in the second half of May. Attached to the Declaration wou...
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Cluster munitions: breaching the firewall?
2008-02-21 11:49:00
This week I've been reporting on the Wellington Conference on cluster munitions, as regular readers of this blog no doubt know. Many of the discussions at the Conference, both in plenary and in accompanying informal consultations on tricky issues like defining unacceptable cluster munitions and military inter-operability, are highly technical. To the uninitiated these talks are a morass of acronyms and legal or diplomatic-speak. And, as the (incomplete) timeline I prepared above shows, there have been many written proposals and other documents circulated.Tomorrow, New Zealand as Chair of the Conference will try to bring it to a successful conclusion, in readiness for formal negotiations on the draft Convention in Dublin, Ireland, in the second half of May. This, as I'll explain, will be a delicate task.The Oslo core-group of countries are seeking to take a leaf out of the Ottawa Process toward a treaty banning anti-personnel mines more than a decade ago. Way back then, a conferenc...
More About: Firewall , Cluster

Cluster Munitions: Just a quickie ...
2008-02-20 11:58:00
It's well after midnight here New Zealand time, so this blog is just a brief one to outline some of what happened today at the Wellington Conference on cluster munitions, which is part of the Oslo Process.Today, in the plenary, there were sessions on mine clearance in the morning and victim assistance in the afternoon. As worthy and substantive as these issues were, I spent the day with many others in a smaller side chamber (well, upstairs in the Wellington Town Hall, actually) attending informal consultations on Article 2 of the draft Convention text.I'm not going to outline blow-by-blow what happened. But in the morning there were discussions under the direction of the Conference chair, Ambassador Don Mackay of New Zealand, on further possible exemptions to the definition of prohibited cluster munitions based on the text in Article 2(c). (You can find all of the conference documents, including the Wellington text, at the conference website here.)Although exploring potential base...
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Cluster munitions: Down to the nitty gritty
2008-02-19 11:28:00
Today's discussions at the Wellington Conference on cluster munitions - part of the Oslo Process to negotiate a treaty to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions - got down to the nitty gritty on two key issues: definitions and military inter-operability.Informal consultations commencing at 8a.m. this morning tackled inter-operability: how and whether the prospective treaty on cluster munitions will set rules for military joint-operations between countries with differing legal obligations. In plain language, this is about what the obligations will be for member states working in military alliances with non-members - including questions of state and individual criminal liability if non-member states use cluster munitions in those operations. It also potentially applies to multinational interventions such as UN peace keeping or enforcement operations.It is fair to say that while these consultations (which resumed at the end of the afternoon for a while, after the confer...
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Cluster munitions: the Wellington Conference begins
2008-02-18 11:29:00
Today, the Wellington Conference on addressing the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions commenced - the last milestone on the way to negotiations on a treaty in Dublin in May as the culmination of the so-called Oslo Process we've followed over the last year on this blog.Many delegates arrived this morning at the Wellington Town Hall jet-lagged but wired awake with coffee, having arrived from all over the world over the weekend. They were eased into their first of five days of work with a traditional Maori welcome called a Powhiri by a group representing the local Te Atiawa tribe. (The Te Atiawa, lacking a Maori word for cluster munition, simply decided to refer to the weapon as "taniwha", their word for monster.)Wellington represents a crucial stage in the Oslo Process. Over the last year a 'core group' of countries (Austria, the Holy See, Mexico, Ireland New Zealand, Norway and Peru) has managed the process of developing a discussion text which has become a "Draft Cluster M...

Arms and the Spaceman
2008-02-15 09:29:00
Having been quoted in Wednesday's New York Times and International Herald Tribune in connection with the presentation by Russia and China this week of a draft treaty to prevent the placement of weapons in outer space, I've been inundated by calls from journalists asking me to explain the significance of the move, Washington's negative reaction to it, and the likelihood that this development could break the long-standing deadlock in the Conference on Disarmament .So, how significant was this? Short answer: quite significant but not at all surprising. Preventing an arms race in outer space has been on the agenda of the Conference on Disarmament (CD) since 1982. Russia and China, together with five other States, presented elements of this draft treaty to the Conference back in 2002. The issue has been the subject of especially intense debate in the CD over the last 2 years. The presentation of the draft treaty by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday was simply the ...
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Dealing with Deadlock in Multilateral Disarmament Negotiations
2008-02-12 20:19:00
We've had a very interesting start to the week on the disarmament front here in Geneva.On Monday, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy organised a Negotiation Day to analyse the state of the art of multilateral negotiation with the help of the PIN Group (PIN stands for 'Processes of International Negotiation').Today, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, made a statement formally presenting the Conference on Disarmament with a draft treaty on the 'Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects' (PPWT).The same question ran through my mind at both events: How can multilateral negotiation processes best deal with deadlock when it occurs? In other words, when parties to a multilateral negotiation find themselves in a mutually hurting stalemate but cannot find an obvious way out, what options are open to them?Moday's negotiation day offered a number of mostly theoretical answers that focused mainly on dilutin...
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Cluster munition resources online
2008-02-07 10:39:00
2008 is shaping up to be the international year of the cluster munition. There are not one but two multilateral process underway to try to address the weapon's humanitarian effects. There is work to "negotiate a proposal" on cluster munitions in the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). And there is a free-standing "Oslo Process" that emerged early in 2007 following the Norwegian Foreign Minister's decision to host an international conference in Norway's capital to kick-start efforts to ban cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians.Over the past year, Disarmament Insight has provided commentary on both processes, and will continue to do so in 2008. Many people have inquired with us about online resources on cluster munitions, and so we offer some suggestions below.To search our blog for commentary on cluster munitions, the easiest method is to use the search box at right, or click on a relevant word in the word cloud below it. Useful key words or...
More About: Resources , Online , Munition , Cluster

The Opportunity Cost of Arms Control Meetings
2008-02-04 16:55:00
UN meetings and conferences on disarmament and arms control are hugely expensive. Member States spend vast sums of money every year sending delegates to meetings in Geneva, New York and elsewhere and in housing and feeding them while there are there; often for extended periods of time.By way of illustration, the First Committee of the UN General Assembly (the one that deals with disarmament and international security) meets at UN Headquarters in New York for four whole weeks every autumn. The UN Disarmament Commission meets there every spring for three weeks. This year in Geneva, there will be a total of seven weeks of negotiations on cluster munitions in the framework of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, albeit split into shorter sessions and spread throughout the year. The list goes on (for the full picture, see the Geneva Forum's 2008 disarmament calendar).On top of travel, room and board expenses, one must also count the high costs associated with translation ...
More About: Opportunity , Cost , Arms , Control , Meetings

Everything bad is good for you?
2008-01-31 16:21:00
Last weekend I read Steven Johnson's latest book, Everything Bad is Good for You. I had begun reading it in the departure lounge at London City airport a few days earlier, but felt a bit put off by the looks the paperback's bright pink cover got from tanked-up City traders and stag party skiers: perhaps they figured I was tucking into Belle de Jour or a Mills & Boon pulp romance. (The UK version is pinker - much pinker - than the picture looks above. Bad Penguin!)Johnson is a prominent American technology journalist. Publishers describe his books as "culture", but - like his contemporaries Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki and to some extent others like Timothy Ferris, Matt Ridley and Mark Kurlansky - Johnson really spans lots of different non-fiction genres including science, history and psychology. The title of his last (excellent) book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software conveys a sense of his enthusiastic, entertaining and slightly brea...

Synthetic biology & weapons: How soon is now?
2008-01-28 14:30:00
There have been some interesting disarmament-related developments in the last week:- In a think tank report, a group of former senior Western military commanders has called for a major change to NATO's approach to defending its members, insisting that the first-strike use of nuclear weapons is an "indispensable instrument", and claiming that there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world". (Paul Rogers and Jeffrey Lewis have posted useful critiques of this report.)- Meanwhile, opinion editorials continue to appear that reflect the call reiterated by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and others for renewed efforts on nuclear disarmament.- As Patrick Mc Carthy reported, the UN's Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon gingered up the Conference on Disarmament here in Geneva with his appraisal of its inability to get back to work after a decade of inactivity.- Paul Wolfowitz, former American deputy secretary of defence and an architect of the 2003 Iraq war - and of course former ...
More About: Biology , Weapons , Synthetic

Spurring on the Conference on Disarmament
2008-01-24 19:44:00
"A spur of conscience to the flank of plodding procedure" was how the Ambassador of Sri Lanka characterised the message delivered to the Conference on Disarmament yesterday by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon .The 65-member Conference has been plodding along for more than 10 years now, unable to deliver a single disarmament agreement since completing its work on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996 (for some background, see our posting from August 2007 entitled, "Last chance for the Conference on Disarmament?").The Conference has managed periodically over the last two years to break into a canter thanks to some innovative coordination by the rotating Conference Presidents and sheer determination on the part of most Member States to break the deadlock in which they find themselves. Despite these efforts, the goal of galloping headlong towards a much-needed treaty to cap (and possibly then reduce) global stocks of fissile material for nuclear weapons has remained elusive.In expre...
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Ideas, Homework and Message
2008-01-22 09:28:00
Randall ?Randy? Forsberg was best known as the creator of the Nuclear Freeze idea that blossomed into a movement in the early 1980. Randy passed away in the fall of 2007 after the recurrence of cancer that had first appeared twenty-some years earlier (see Patricia Lewis' posting, "Randy Forsberg: A tribute to an inspiration").In today?s political culture she would be seen as a great messenger. The idea of a ?freeze? on the nuclear arms race was the right way to frame an issue for the times and, indeed, it took off as a popular movement in way that nothing had for arms control before that time.Today it is important to remember that the Freeze did not come about as a result of a messaging exercise. Randy did not say to herself that she wished for disarmament and that the freeze might be a good way to market that dream. Rather, Randy came to the freeze idea from analysis of data. Randy was someone who believed passionately in the power of ideas when grounded in rigorous analysis o...
More About: Ideas , Homework , Message , Mess

CCW ends first week of negotiations on cluster munitions
2008-01-18 14:39:00
The Group of Governmental Experts of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) today completed the first of 7 weeks of work scheduled this year to "negotiate a proposal" on cluster munitions that would balance military with humanitarian concerns.One of the problems faced by the expert group is that nobody is quite sure what it actually means to negotiate a proposal. Negotiate a protocol, fine; or even an instrument. But a proposal? A proposal to do what? To negotiate a protocol, instrument or some other form of agreement?The novel formulation of negotiating a proposal was born out of a compromise at the CCW Meeting of States Parties in November last year. Under pressure from the parallel Oslo Process on cluster munitions, which was building momentum between its Lima and Vienna meetings, many States perceived the need to begin serious work on cluster munitions in the CCW in order to keep pace. The European Union, the United States and others insisted that negotiatio...
More About: Week , Ends , Cluster , Negotiations

Cluster munitions: From Russia with love
2008-01-16 13:23:00
It's been a curious week so far for international efforts on cluster munitions. A Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) approved at last November's meeting of states party to the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) has gathered in Geneva for its first week of formal talks.As noted in previous posts, there are currently not one but two international processes underway to address the humanitarian effects of cluster munitions. There is the free-standing Oslo Process begun last February. And there is the CCW's more recent and not completely unconnected consensus decision - after years of prevaricating - to "negotiate a proposal" for some sort of agreement on some as-yet unspecified measures in this regard.As the first official week of seven allocated to the CCW's work this year, there is already concern this won't be enough, and that - with six of the seven weeks scheduled for the second half of 2008 - the CCW will lose momentum between this meeting's deliberations a...
More About: Love , United Nations , Dublin , Russia

2008 Disarmament Calendar
2008-01-14 09:44:00
Our last few posts have previewed in general terms some of the main negotiations and discussions on disarmament and arms control that will take place during 2008 . The Geneva Forum has just made it easier to follow all of this year's goings on by publishing online its 2008 Disarmament Calendar (click on "Calendar" in the menu bar on the left of the Geneva Forum's homepage). The Geneva Forum will keep this calendar updated throughout the year so why not put it in your bookmarks and refer back every now and again to get the full picture? Also, if you would like to suggest additions, please feel free to use the link at the top of the calendar to do so.The 2008 disarmament year officially starts today with the opening of a one-week meeting of the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). The GGE is scheduled to meet for up to 7 weeks this year to "negotiate a proposal to address urgently the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions...
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Disarmament Grumblefest 2008
2008-01-10 08:42:00
As we foreshadowed in December, 2008 is gearing up to be a busy year for disarmament in Geneva. From 21 January, the Conference on Disarmament (CD) will resume talks to try to get back to work after a decade of blockage and inertia, for instance. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will meet for the second preparatory meeting to its upcoming five-yearly review conference 2010 in Geneva from late April, after a tough start in Vienna last year . And, next week, representatives of member governments of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) will begin work to "negotiate a proposal to address urgently the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions, while striking a balance between military and humanitarian considerations".So, 2008 will be busy for disarmament. The real question is - will it be productive? Though Geneva-based disarmament processes like the Biological Weapons Convention are quietly boxing on, there are some wider doubts. Officials doggedly try to be p...
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Disarmament & Globalisation: Old & New Wisdoms
2008-01-07 08:35:00
Around the time that the Wall Street Journal published a well-received and watershed opinion-editorial by Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, Charles Schultz and others signalling a potential new beginning in nuclear disarmament public policy, a new project emerged?entitled ?Disarmament and Globalisation ??based at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, United Kingdom. As was reported on this blog later in 2007, momentum picked up in June when the UK Foreign Secretary echoed the op-ed?s call and those of many others for a world free of nuclear weapons. Great: the ?D-word? was making something of a comeback, this could only be a good thing and we pressed on with our work.However, with this apparent progress there still seemed to be a disparity between calls for nuclear disarmament and the Trident renewal in the UK or the continuing debate over the Reliable Replacement Warhead program in the United States.What also appeared evident, and at SOAS we heard it most clearly, was that ...
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Signing Off for 2007
2007-12-14 15:05:00
The (thankfully quite uncontroversial) Meeting of States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention has just ended, bringing to a close a typically busy year of disarmament and arms control work in Geneva. In the previous posting, John Borrie reviewed 2007 as perceived and analysed through the lens of the Disarmament Insight blog. Before signing off for the year and wishing all of our dedicated readers a pleasant holiday, I would like (at the risk of ruining your festive repose) to cast an eye forward to what awaits us next year.Of course, we'll have all of the usual fare:-- The Conference on Disarmament will continue its struggle to break its now more than decade-long deadlock so that it can finally start negotiating a treaty banning the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons.-- States Parties to the Biological & Toxin Weapons Convention will continue their intersessional work programme (this time by holding expert meetings on biosafety and biosecurity, as wel...
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Disarmament Insight: 2007 in review
2007-12-12 08:37:00
As we head into the festive season and begin to wind down for the holiday break, the Disarmament Insight team thought it would be worth pausing to review some of the main themes we?ve covered on the blog in 2007, and a few of the highlights readers might have missed.Since we launched the blog in March, it?s grown from a small ?neighbourhood? site known to 20 or 30 people in Geneva , Switzerland (where UNIDIR?s project on Disarmament as Humanitarian Action and the Geneva Forum are based) to attracting thousands of visitors, at least some of whom we hope have bookmarked the site and return on a frequent basis. Indeed, this post is the 111th. We?d like to thank in particular our Geneva Forum and DHA project donors, our guest bloggers and everyone who?s used the blog?s comment function to contribute their thoughts over the course of 2007.Cluster munitions have been a major theme in recent months as concurrent international processes have unfolded by means of the Oslo process and a mandat...
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Defection Denial
2007-12-10 09:17:00
One of the themes the DHA project has explored over the past two years is how cooperation emerges in multilateral negotiating environments. One of the challenges in informal social exchange in these situations involves judging others and deciding who is trustworthy and who?s not ? in game theory terms this would mean discerning the difference between a cooperator and a defector. We would expect known defectors to be punished for their infractions. But recent research suggests this is not how humans normally react in everyday situations. Instead, we tend to overlook or ?forgive? the wrongs others commit.In fact, as University of Miami psychologist Michael McCullough told the New York Times recently:?The closer you look, the more clearly you see that denial is part of the uneasy bargain we strike to be social creatures? We really do want to be moral people, but the fact is that we cut corners to get individual advantage, and we rely on the room that denial gives us to get by, to wiggl...
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Cluster Munitions: Passing the baton from Vienna to Wellington
2007-12-07 13:03:00
The Vienna Conference on Cluster Munitions ended a few hours ago. With participation by 138 States, NGOs from more than 50 countries (under the umbrella of the Cluster Munitions Coalition ), eloquent testimony from victims, and participation by parliamentarians and United Nations agencies, the Vienna Conference brought the Oslo Process on Cluster Munitions to a new level of participation and momentum.As pointed out by the CMC, only 4 users of cluster munitions did not participate in the Vienna conference (Eritrea, Israel, Russia and the United States). Twenty-three of the 34 producers of cluster munitions were here; as were 55 of the 79 stockpilers.The conference sketched the lines of the negotiations that will take place at the diplomatic conference in Dublin on May 19-30 next year that is scheduled to negotiate a new treaty banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians. The next meeting in the Oslo Process, however, will be in Wellington on 18-22 February....
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Cluster Munitions: Vienna ? tough talk on definitions
2007-12-06 18:27:00
As foreshadowed in our preceding post about the first day of the Vienna international conference on cluster munitions, definitions were the focus of today's discussions.Why are definitions important? February's Oslo Declaration contains a commitment for states to ?prohibit the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians?. Article 2 of the Vienna discussion text arguably goes further ? it doesn?t mention the phrase ?that cause unacceptable harm to civilians?.In setting out scope Article 1 says as follows:?Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to:a) Use cluster munitions.b) Develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer toanyone, directly or indirectly, cluster munitions.c) Assist, encourage or induce anyone to engage in any activity prohibitedto a State Party under this Convention.?And the Vienna discussion text defines cluster munitions broadly. There is also an explanatory annex i...
More About: Talk , Definitions , Tough , Cluster

Cluster munitions: Vienna Conference day one
2007-12-06 09:03:00
Yesterday, the Vienna international conference on cluster munitions formally commenced. On Tuesday it had been preceded by a civil society forum (see our previous post for Patrick Mc Carthy's impressions of that gathering). The Vienna Conference is the latest step in the so-called Oslo process to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions on civilians.Readers may recall from earlier posts on this blog that, less than a month ago, members of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) agreed a mandate to work on addressing cluster munitions in 2008 - a mandate that most involved seemed prepared to concede had come about largely because of the existence of the Oslo process. Nevertheless, there was uncertainty in some quarters about what the impact of the CCW mandate might be for participation in Vienna. Would it undercut support for the Oslo process? Hopes among campaigners on cluster munitions were that the goal of 100 states would nevertheless be achieved.In fa...
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If this blog was a cluster bomb, you'd be dead
2007-12-04 22:03:00
The Vienna Conference on Cluster Munitions, the latest step in the Oslo Process, kicked off today with a parliamentary forum in the morning and an NGO forum in the afternoon; both of which sought to set the bar high for the intergovernmental discussions that will take place over the remainder of the week.Over 130 States have registered for the conference, almost double the number that participated in the last global meeting of the Oslo Process in Lima in May. The momentum that this process has gained in quite a short period of time is truly remarkable and lends credence to the claim made earlier today that the Oslo Process is now "unstoppable;" that it is no longer a question of whether it will succeed in negotiating a new treaty on cluster munitions, but rather how strong that treaty will be.It is clear from today's discussions that NGOs want a very strong treaty indeed. The Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) is no longer talking about banning cluster munitions "that cause unaccep...
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Clusters: Dah-dump... Dah-Dah-Dah-dump (bsssh!)
2007-12-03 15:52:00
Ah Vienna . Eat your heart out Midge Ure and Ultravox (check the outfits)...This is a quick post to note that Patrick Mc Carthy and I are in Vienna this week to attend an international conference here on addressing the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions, which is being hosted by the Government of Austria, as part of the Oslo process.We're aware that there's a lot of interest out there in the progress of the meeting, and we'll try to give you updates over the next few days about what's going on, (hopefully) starting with tomorrow's civil society forum on cluster munitions.Additionally, if there are any questions you want us to try to answer, just drop us a line using the comment function on this blog (see below).John Borrie
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Cluster munitions: Arguments for and against
2007-11-28 12:25:00
Last week's meeting of states party to the Mine Ban Treaty (8MSP) in Jordan provided an opportunity for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) to offer a lunchtime briefing to states on the Oslo Process to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions. Austrian Ambassador Wolfgang Petritsch shared information about next week's Vienna Conference, and CMC Coordinator Thomas Nash talked about campaigning against cluster munitions in general.The briefing was timely: with 8MSP about to wrap up successfully, diplomats were beginning to turn their minds to the recently released "Vienna text" and reflect upon the tactical implications of the CCW's mandate to work on cluster munitions in 2008 agreed on 13 November in Geneva. 8MSP offered a good opportunity for Oslo process outreach with a number of countries party to the Mine Ban Treaty (which has 156 members) who either aren't members of the CCW (which has 103 members) or who are but...
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Landmines: Dead Sea Goals
2007-11-26 12:42:00
The eighth meeting of states parties (8MSP) of the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty met last week on the shores of the Dead Sea in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan - a beautiful, bleak place.A decade ago, when the Mine Ban Treaty was agreed in Oslo, Jody Williams (then coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and 1997 Nobel Prize Laureate with the ICBL) wrote that the agreement was an example of the "the new diplomacy" - one founded upon common humanitarian concerns, rather than traditional national security pre-occupations.Others were sceptical. But the Mine Ban Treaty has been extremely successful. Today it has 156 states parties (Palau announced its accession during 8MSP) and has retained a remarkable and vigorous focus on implementation.Testament to its success is that, although remaining outside the treaty, countries like China, India and Pakistan send observers, and China even speaks now and then. The United States (which didn't attend) fumes from...
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The Power of the President
2007-11-23 09:26:00
What makes for a successful multilateral arms control negotiation? Sufficient political will? Maturity of the issue being negotiated? Pressure from civil society? A critical mass of seasoned diplomats? The list is long and there is no single silver bullet that will ensure success every time.But what about the role played by the President of such negotiations; the Ambassador chosen by the negotiating parties (usually on the basis of regional rotation) and entrusted with the delicate task of guiding negotiations to a successful conclusion? All other things being equal, does the President have the power to tip the balance and conjure success where none seemed possible?Observing Pakistan's Ambassador Masood Khan (picture) in action at the 6th Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) at the end of 2006 would lead one to answer this question in the affirmative. The 6th Review Conference was up against formidable challenges. Years-long efforts to neg...
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