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Ripples from Dublin
2008-06-05 21:08:00
It was a bit of an anti-climax coming back to Geneva following the historic breakthrough in Dublin last week that led to the adoption by 111 States of a new, legally-binding Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). (This will be opened for signature in Oslo in December and will enter into force as soon as 30 States have ratified it).After the suspense, drama, emotions and celebrations of Dublin, getting back to ?business as usual? in Geneva has not been easy. Not that most Geneva-based disarmament diplomats have had any choice in the matter: On Monday morning it was straight into a week of meetings of the Standing Committees of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. After two weeks of intense negotiations on cluster munitions, a further week of implementation discussions on landmines would not seem to me to be the ideal way to wind down. But the disarmament calendar has no mercy this year it seems.The Conference on Disarmament (CD) also continues to plod along, trying - valiantly but...

Cluster ban treaty: 'interoperability' in context
2008-06-03 16:11:00
There has been a lot of media coverage of last week's agreement in Dublin on a Cluster Munition Convention - a groundbreaking agreement that prohibits cluster munitions that "cause unacceptable harm to civilians".Some of this media coverage has been thoughtful, measured and insightful. Indeed, some journalists, especially a number from Japan (for instance, see here), have followed the Oslo and UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) processes closely for many months now and are well aware of their many nuances. Certain other media coverage has been less thoughtful, and sometimes even misguided.I guess this is to be expected when overworked journos are under pressure to produce copy quickly for the general public, which captures the Dublin negotiation's essential elements. But it's hard to communicate something accurately when you don't properly understand it, especially on the vexed issue of so-called interoperability (Article 21 on "relations with states not parties...
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Cluster Munition Convention: "Disarmament as humanitarian action"
2008-05-30 15:34:00
Today, the new Cluster Munition Convention banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians was adopted by the Dublin Conference at around 10h10. There were no objections expressed from the floor.A great number of delegations spoke to welcome the new treaty, which will enter into force internationally six months after 30 states have ratified or acceded to it. Given the speed at which the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention entered into force internationally almost a decade ago and the energy and commitment expressed in the conference chamber today, this may not take long.The final version of the treaty in English, French and Spanish should be available on the Dublin Conference website shortly, in addition to the Conference's procedural report.A couple of points stood out from the plethora of closing statements. The Ambassador of France said the Dublin Conference had been the most successful diplomatic conference he had taken part of in his career. I suspect...
More About: Action , Humanitarian , Disarmament

Dublin: Done Deal
2008-05-29 11:01:00
In our last post, we anticipated a long evening of negotiations Wednesday to reach agreement on the text, proposed by the President of the conference, of a new Convention prohibiting cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians. In fact, it was all over by 8pm following a remarkable and moving show of support and accommodation by States participating in these negotiations.The President of the Conference, Ambassador Daithi O'Ceallaigh of Ireland, introduced his text Wednesday morning and then immediately adjourned the meeting in order to give delegations a chance to study it and to give himself a chance to consolidate support for his text with regional groups and individual States. The meeting was scheduled to resume at 3pm, plenty of time to scan and detect subtle changes to the now familiar text and to debate theories of how the President would handle the crucial afternoon session.Three o'clock came and went and anticipation mounted. Bilateral and group consult...
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Dublin: read all about it
2008-05-28 13:41:00
This morning, the President of the Dublin Conference on cluster munitions, Ambassador, Dáithí O'Ceallaigh, distributed a new draft convention on cluster munitions as a presidency paper. This paper is available at the Dublin Conference website here.O'Ceallaigh said that about two-thirds of the text of his paper is identical to papers already distributed during the Conference over the last week-and-a-half of work. The rest reflected the outcomes of various consultations - not least an intensive burst of activity during the course of yesterday when the President and his team met with dozens of delegations individually until late into the night.The President told the Committee of the Whole this morning that his text represents his assessment of where the balance of interests lie, and would require compromise on all sides. (This is all boiler-plate language for multilateral negotiations.) Nevertheless, he felt the draft Convention text was extremely ambitious, especially in the scope...
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Dublin: Fitting together the final pieces
2008-05-28 10:35:00
?In war it is not always possible to have everything go exactly as one likes. In working with allies, it sometimes happens they develop opinions of their own.?Winston ChurchillAs previous posts on this blog have foreshadowed, the issue of ?interoperability? proves one of the politically most contentious and toughest to solve. After a week of informal consultations, Switzerland, as Friend of the President (FoP), passed on a text to the President of the Conference on Tuesday, which forms the basis for further bilateral consultations.As the heading of the present draft article indicates, the issue termed ?interoperability? concerns in essence the relationship between States Parties to a future cluster munitions convention and States not parties to it. Challenges of military interoperability can be seen as the result of increasing interstate cooperation in the military field, be it in the framework of a military alliance (e.g. NATO), ?coalitions of the willing?, troop contributions to o...
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Dublin: A spirit of compromise
2008-05-27 10:07:00
Having observed the Dublin Diplomatic Conference on cluster munitions from a distance during its first week, I finally arrived in Dublin over the weekend and observed its sixth full day of negotiations on Monday (a new convention prohibiting cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians is due to be adopted this Friday).As John Borrie?s posts below illustrate, during last week, negotiators made remarkable progress on some complex but less controversial issues on the table ? including, notably, the issue of assisting victims of cluster sub-munition explosions, the draft article which is being hailed here as setting a new international standard in this area. Delegations also used last week, however, to stake out quite divergent positions on some of the more contentious issues that remain to be resolved here this week. These include (1) the definition of a cluster munition (that which is to be prohibited), (2) joint military operations and other forms of cooperation wit...
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Dublin: Treaty negotiations at the half-way point
2008-05-23 17:26:00
Half-way through the two-week negotiations in Dublin on a treaty to ban cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians, where do things stand?As noted in preceding posts, there are a couple of big issues - defining cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm, and military interoperability among them - that are claiming a lot of attention and are tough nuts to crack. Indeed, much of my week has been spent observing meetings working on these topics. But that shouldn't be taken to mean that considerable progress hasn't been made overall. Below I provide a brief article-by-article state of play on the draft Convention text. A copy of the draft Convention text and other official documents can be downloaded here.Article 1 (General obligations and scope of application): this Article contains the treaty's core prohibitions. Over the course of the Oslo Process there have been proposals to amend this article, most for reasons bound up with the interoperability issue. By ge...
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Dublin: No hysteria over criteria (yet)
2008-05-22 14:32:00
As I've noted in previous blog posts, defining a cluster munition is essential to the negotiation of the cluster munition convention because its obligations and general scope are structured in such a way that what is defined as a cluster munition will be banned.The way things seemed to be shaping up yesterday after extensive - some might say exhausting even - discussions of a variety of criteria for exemption is as follows: there is general agreement that no single criterion is enough. Instead, any solution will be comprised of multiple criteria in combination, or what is termed by those negotiating it as the cumulative criteria (sic).Having had a run-through on Monday of elements for discussion a new outline was produced first-thing this morning, which summarised various proposals made in the Oslo Process on 'cumulative lists of criteria' marked from 'A' to 'H'.Very soon, the argument became about whether, for example, a numerical criterion was needed and, if so, what that n...
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Dublin: the bunfight begins
2008-05-21 01:00:00
As Patrick Mc Carthy observed in the preceding post on this blog, the Dublin Conference on cluster munitions commenced yesterday. I'm here in Dublin at the Conference throughout its duration, and a lot is going on - hence this post at midnight, and it's only the second day.Conference proceedings got off to a smooth start on Monday morning. Consistent with Ireland's emphasis on getting down to work as soon as possible on negotiating a treaty to ban cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians, the opening high-level segment was mercifully short. The Irish Foreign Minister, Micheál Martin, spoke. There was a video message from the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. Also addressing the Conference was Ad Melkert, Associate Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), who emphasized the devastating impact of cluster munitions on development and humanitarian action. And President Jakob Kellenberger gave a hard-hitting statement on behalf of the Inte...

All eyes on Dublin to put cluster munitions beyond the Pale
2008-05-19 21:13:00
I found it a bit hard to concentrate in the office today, knowing that a two-week diplomatic conference with the aim of banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians was kicking off in Dublin .The conference is the culmination of the Oslo Process on cluster munitions that began relatively small with a conference in Oslo in February 2007 and has since grown in size and momentum through further global meetings in Lima, Vienna and Wellington to reach where it is today. More than 100 governments have sent plenipotentiaries to Dublin and the scene is now set for tough negotiations on what has the potential to be the most significant disarmament treaty in a decade.For those of us who can't be in Dublin, there are fortunately many good ways of keeping up to date with what is going on there. One, of course, is this blog. My colleague John Borrie is participating in the conference in Dublin and will be posting updates and analysis here during this week. I will be joi...
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NPT: States in the Sin Bin
2008-05-16 10:47:00
It is the poems you have lost, the illsFrom missing dates, at which the heart expires.Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.The waste remains, the waste remains and kills(Missing Dates by William Empson 1999)Sin is a concept that has resonance in most cultures. It is variously described as wrongful behaviour in specific situations or even a state of mind. Immoral, shameful, harmful, or alienating acts (or thoughts) are considered sinful. The designation of immoral and shameful varies from culture to culture, even within a single religion or philosophy.A great deal of attention has been paid to the spectrum of good and bad behaviour. From lesser or venial sins (stealing cookies from the tin, lying to save another?s dignity etc.) to those of the grave or mortal variety (murder, rape, pedophilia and so on) the range of sinful behaviours is broad.The degree of seriousness attached to each type of sin prescribes its future impact on the sinner and the sinned against ? and each e...
More About: Lewis , States

Mind the Gap!
2008-05-14 15:00:00
Last year we blogged about Swedish medical doctor and public health researcher Hans Rosling. Although Rosling is a well-respected teacher of international public health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he's well-known for two other reasons: his role in co-founding the non-profit organisation Gapminder, and a stunning presentation he delivered to the Technology, Entertainment Design (TED) symposium in California, which became an internet sensation.Last evening I had the privilege to attend a lecture by Rosling, co-organised by the United Nations Economic Commission on Europe (UNECE) and the Permanent Mission of Sweden in Geneva. (If there was ever a country to appreciate statistics, it would be Sweden don't you think. Who knew they have a "Swedish Statistician of the Year?" ;-) )If you weren't previously familiar with Rosling's entertaining and slightly 'nutty professor' style of delivery, the attraction of a one hour lecture at the end of the working day on the topic ...
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NPT: Man Friday
2008-05-10 09:13:00
Following the tabling of his draft Chairman?s summary, the mighty Ambassador Volodymyr Yel?chenko of Ukraine (pictured above) held a final meeting of the PrepCom on Friday morning the 9th May. Throughout the two weeks of the PrepCom, Ambassador Yel?chenko had been trying ? with increasing irritation ? to get states to engage in an interactive debate. Not until this last session did the delegations reward his entreaties. The Nigerian representative?s reference to Ambassador Yel?chenko?s smooth performance being akin to how you never see a monkey sweat (because of its thick hair, apparently) was lost on most delegations, although it?s notable that the NPT Chairman does have a some luxurious locks that could just be hiding mild perspiration in the face of the task of getting a successful outcome.The Chairman?s summary (now the Chairman?s working paper as it was not adopted by the meeting) is an attempt to reflect the main points of debate made in the two weeks of meetings. Working pape...

"How arms control's past shapes its future"
2008-05-07 17:06:00
Some of us took a break yesterday from the grind of the second week of the NPT PrepCom to attend a Geneva Forum brown bag lunch featuring University of Michigan historian of science Dr Susan Wright.Susan spoke about some of her recent research, around the topic "how arms control's past shapes its future: biological disarmament as a case study". Originally trained as a natural scientist, Susan has done a great deal of research in American and British archives on how the process that led to the 1972 Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons Convention emerged - the BTWC, usually known as the Biological Weapons Convention.The escalating nuclear arms race after World War Two had led, by the late 1960s, to schools of strategic analysis in both Britain and the US concerning arms control that viewed war as a recurrent but inevitable tragedy. This epistemic community's views were well represented by both the work of economist Thomas Schelling ('Strategy and Arms Control) and Aussie-Brit politi...
More About: Future , Shapes , Past

NPT: Right of reply?
2008-05-01 12:56:00
This week, the second preparatory meeting for the 2010 review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) got off to a smooth start in Geneva, although following on from a pretty rocky PrepCom in Vienna last year.Perhaps the start was a little too smooth considering the release of information last week from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on the Israeli destruction of a Syrian facility last year. The CIA has identified, for public display, the facility as having been a secret reactor similar to those built most recently by North Korea. Not unnaturally, a number of states referred to the CIA disclosures expressing concern and requesting clarification. Syria responded with a ?Right of Reply? statement at the end of the day in which it denounced the CIA?s allegations as lies and falsehoods.On Tuesday, Iran went on the ?full spectrum compliance? attack. Singling out The USA, France and the UK, Iran accused ?certain nuclear weapons states? as being in non-compliance...

All at sea on arms trade controls
2008-04-24 16:58:00
The brouhaha surrounding the attempted Chinese arms shipment to Zimbabwe is likely to die down a bit now that China has said that it has recalled the vessel still fully loaded with its cargo of 70 metric tons of Chinese weaponry (apparently including small arms ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and mortar tubes). The cargo had been destined for landlocked Zimbabwe's armed forces but could not be offloaded in any of Zimbabwe's neighbouring countries due to vehement opposition from unions, churches, courts, civil rights groups and other governments in light of the post-election violence currently gripping Zimbabwe.Before looking into what this episode can tell us about current international efforts to develop a treaty that would regulate the global arms trade (an Arms Trade Treaty), it is worth retelling this remarkable story (at least as it has been presented through news reports):It seems that, sometime during 2007, the Zimbabwe Ministry of Defence ordered the ...

Once more unto the breach ...
2008-04-22 09:42:00
This week is a rare pause in a fairly comprehensive schedule of multilateral disarmament meetings that stretches until June. We've reported on the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons' (CCW) work earlier this month, and last week and this week there were regional events on cluster munitions in Mexico City and Bangkok.While all of this was going on, the second five-yearly review meeting of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) met in The Hague. With the mainly bilateral focus of other diplomatic activity there, those involved in the CWC - not least on the civil society side - sometimes find the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) a bit of a lonely outpost compared with the multilateral hothouse atmospheres in Geneva, New York and even Vienna. In his very useful daily reports on the CWC review conference, researcher Richard Guthrie had this to say:"The Hague remains less NGO-friendly than Geneva, New York or Vienna. A major part of this derives from...
More About: United Nations , Breach , Disarmament Insight

Global Day of Action on cluster munitions tomorrow
2008-04-18 09:51:00
Over the last week, the Disarmament Insight blog has focused on ongoing efforts in the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) to devise a response to the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions. The elephant in the room at the CCW's expert meeting in Geneva last week, of course, was the Dublin Conference. This negotiating conference, to be held from 19 to 30 May, is anticipated to be the culmination of the Oslo Process's efforts to complete a humanitarian treaty on cluster munitions.And there is certainly plenty activity occurring in support of the Dublin Conference. A fortnight ago, African states met near the Victoria Falls in Zambia, and agreed the Livingstone Declaration on cluster munitions, which we understand was endorsed there by Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Comoros, Congo (Republic of), Cote d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ghana, Guinea Conakry, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar...
More About: Action , Global , Tomorrow , Cluster

Cherry Picking at the CCW ?
2008-04-16 14:40:00
While the main cherry blossom season is drawing to an end in Japan, the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Group of Governmental Experts engaged in what was, from a legal point of view at least, something of a cherry picking exercise in Geneva last week. In its capacity as Friend of the Chair, Japan held several informal meetings to identify rules and principles of international humanitarian law (IHL) of particular relevance to the use of cluster munitions, and to elaborate new provisions and best practice guidelines to strengthen IHL implementation in this context. The results of this “fruitful debate� on IHL implementation (as Japan described it) were attached to the meeting’s procedural report as an annex (Annex III), in the form of “draft elements on international humanitarian law� and “draft elements of best practice guide� (this report should be up on the UN's CCW webpage soon).Several states and the ICRC said these draft elements were cause fo...
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Cautious steps around cluster bombs
2008-04-11 15:02:00
Today the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW)'s group of governmental experts wrapped up its second session of work for 2008. Scheduled as the only major multilateral meeting on cluster munitions between the Wellington Conference and culminating negotiations of the Oslo Process on a cluster munition treaty in Dublin in May, this week's CCW shindig was, in effect, also an informal on-the-margins Dublin preparatory meeting. So it's worth briefly taking stock of where things are on international efforts to address the humanitarian effects of cluster munitions.Readers may be aware that last November the CCW managed to agree on a mandate to "negotiate a proposal" on cluster munitions with several weeks of work in 2008 to elaborate exactly what this would entail. It's fair to say that the CCW achieved its mandate because of the momentum the Oslo Process was generating outside it (see previous posts to see how this unfolded). The irony of this is not lost on those invol...
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The Pros and Cons of Precedent
2008-04-08 21:40:00
Diplomats are often risk-averse in multilateral disarmament negotiations. When questions of national security are at stake, which is often the case, there is really no other choice but to be cautious. The consequences of being too ambitious or too trusting is that one's own State could be taken advantage of and so end up at a net security disadvantage.One way of trying to maximise the chances that negotiations will follow a predictable path and not come off the rails before their reach their conclusion is to always do things the way they have been done in the past. While this is by no means a sure-fire recipe for success, relying on precedent does bring with it many advantages; not least a set of practices and standard operating procedures that are recognised and accepted by all parties to a negotiation.But, as I wrote in volume 1 of the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project series (Alternative Approaches in Multilateral Decision Making: Disarmament as Humanitarian Action; the...
More About: Cons

New blog on chemical weapons ban treaty
2008-04-03 16:38:00
For two weeks from Monday 7 April, states parties to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) will convene in The Hague for the treaty?s Second Review Conference. The First Review Conference in 2003 was a low-key affair but was judged a success, although some issues were skirted around rather than addressed directly.The Second Review Conference comes at a significant time in the CWC?s short life. 2007 saw the treaty?s 10th anniversary, while 2012 is the deadline by which states parties possessing chemical weapons are meant to have destroyed their stockpiles.Compared to other arms control events, the Second Review Conference barely registers, even among the wider disarmament community. Even the related Biological Weapons Convention has attracted more attention in recent years, although not always for positive reasons.There are a number of reasons for this. The first is due to where its work is based - in The Hague, the CWC is isolated from the main UN cities of New York, Geneva an...
More About: Blog , Chemical Weapons

Body counting
2008-03-30 14:07:00
The Atlantic Monthly online is running an interesting story in its April issue looking at the on-going - and increasingly nasty - debate over the grim question of how many Iraqis have died as a result of the March 2003 invasion.Estimates of these deaths vary widely, from around 80,000 to as high as a million, according to the article. Estimates out there include a 2006 study in the Lancet, a British medical journal , research by the World Health organisation published in the New England Journal of Medicine and (not mentioned in the article) on-going documentation work by an independent research group based in the UK, Iraq Body Count.Debate about methodologies and numbers is all useful in the name of thorough research (although it seems to have become personally rather bitter over Iraq). But whichever estimate proves to be nearest the mark, we should always remember the shattered human lives and the misery and insecurity behind the statistics - otherwise such concerns take on a tin...
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Cluster Munition Fact Sheet: A view from the field
2008-03-26 09:00:00
Last week, we posted on the blog a U.S. public document on ?Putting the impact of cluster munitions in context with the effects of all explosive remnants of war? issued on 15 February. In this blog post, Andy Smith offers a view from the field.It?s always good to know what the official U.S. Department of State attitude is on a given subject. That said, a recent "Fact sheet" or ?White Paper? seems to me, as a professional in demining, to present only one side of a polemic. The timing of its release seemed clearly intended to counter the Wellington Conference on Cluster Munition s.Having just updated the Database of Demining Accidents, I have found time to respond to several of the points in the U.S. ?Fact sheet??"...For example, there are practically no United States-produced landmines being found by de-miners anywhere in the world today."This is simply not true. U.S. mines are being cleared in large numbers today. For example, the minefield on the border between Syria and Jordan has ...
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Cluster Munitions: Putting impacts (and policies) in context
2008-03-19 11:41:00
On 15 February 2008, the American Department of State distributed a White Paper entitled 'Putting the Impact of Cluster Munitions in Context with the Effects of All Explosive Remnants of War'. In some respects, this document elaborated on U.S. statements in the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) process in June and November 2007.The U.S. document raised many issues, and represented a view contrasting with those of some others on effectively addressing the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions. We're aware that it's generated considerable discussion, both publicly and in humanitarian demining and arms control circles. To that end, we wanted to bring the U.S. White Paper to the attention of our readers and, in the spirit of constructive debate, to invite your comments. We've reproduced the White Paper text (which is in the public domain) in its entirety below for your reference. Where the original text indicated web-links, we've activated these as hyperlinks...
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Worrying the Lords of War
2008-03-13 23:03:00
On 30 August 2007, the UN Secretary-General submitted to the General Assembly a report of a Group of Governmental Experts on "enhancing international cooperation in preventing, combating and eradicating illicit brokering in small arms and light weapons." On 6 March 2008, Thai police arrested Viktor Bout, one of the world's most notorious gun-runners who had eluded capture for years. Coincidence? I think not.If only it were possible to make such a connection without having ones tongue firmly in cheek, assessing the effectiveness of arms control agreements would be a much easier task. Unfortunately, Viktor Bout's arrest had nothing to do the UN expert group report - which, in any case, contains only recommendations on how States can close legal loopholes used by illegal arms dealers.A March 10 editorial in the International Herald Tribune argued that Bout's arrest - or, rather, the length of time it has taken to put him behind bars - should serve as a "wake up call to governmen...
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Gut Feelings
2008-03-11 14:25:00
On the long flight back from New Zealand last week following the Wellington Conference on cluster munitions, I read Gerd Gigerenzer's recent book, Gut Feelings : The Intelligence of the Unconscious.The popular science and pop psychology shelves of book shops are packed with titles purporting to explain the mysteries of decision making, or how to get a leg up in business, love or just making friends and influencing people. Gigerenzer is notable, though, in the sense that he's Director of the Centre for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and was formerly a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. He has academic credibility on these issues and, rather than offering advice, his book seeks to explain how human gut feeling operates and also describes some recent empirical research into how the human mind actually solves problems.Gigerenzer has a knack (no doubt thanks in part to a good editor) for explaining constra...

Shall the geeks inherit the earth?
2008-03-07 10:07:00
Outside the largest conference rooms at UN Headquarters in Geneva, there are several discreet booths containing telephones. Most delegates to UN conferences these days have no idea they're there. Many would be surprised, and probably bemused, to learn that the dusty, disused booths exist for their use, provided they can reach the international operator to authorize their collect calls to capitals.Like certain other aspects of the 'community of practice' to which disarmament diplomats belong, the UN's delegate phone booths are something of an anachronism in today's world of mobile phones, wi-fi laptops and 'push' e-mail devices like the Blackberry. In a post on Disarmament Insight last year, Patricia Lewis shared some observations about how she thought such wireless devices were changing the practice of diplomacy in settings like New York.As readers know, I recently attended the Wellington Conference on cluster munitions. Nowhere have the implications of new technology on a mu...
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Explaining Civil Society Schizophrenia
2008-02-28 17:47:00
Tuesday's post on 'civil society schizophrenia' seems to have struck a chord. Apart from some insightful comments, which you can read, I've also received a number of emails from NGOs telling me that they are as puzzled as I am at the different levels of formal integration of civil society into multilateral processes of disarmament and arms control; from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention.Some have suggested interesting explanations for this phenomenon. For example, Piers suggests that, although the diplomats dealing with all of these issues may generally be the same people, perhaps the NGOs are not. In other words, might not different levels of acceptability (to governments) of issue-specific NGOs explain the different levels of formal civil society integration across these issue-areas? Daniel Feakes points out, however, that the same NGOs that deal with biological weapons issues also tend to deal with chemical weapons issues but t...
More About: Society , Civil , Civil society , Schizophrenia