|
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...
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...
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...
New podcast - the physics of social behaviour
2007-10-11 13:49:00 How groups of people make decisions, form opinions, and determine social norms has traditionally been the focus of sociology, anthropology and political science. But physics too has a long tradition of studying systems of many interacting components and has developed tools for understanding how such systems can generate collective social behaviours that can't be anticipated by studying their components or their interactions in isolation.One recent book exploring this topic, and how physical understanding of the world is relevant to social problem-solving, is 'Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another'. Its author, Dr. Philip Ball, is a science writer and broadcaster, and consultant editor at the science journal Nature. Critical Mass has inspired our work on the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project, especially two chapters of our third volume of research discussing a "physics of diplomacy" and examining the mechanisms involved in demand for small arms. Quite simply, ...
Complexity and Arms Control Diplomacy
2007-09-26 08:27:00 As part of its work, the Disarmament Insight initiative has hosted a sequence of workshops this year with Geneva disarmament practitioners to encourage them to think out of the box in their work. For example, previous visitors to our site may recall that on 25 May we held a workshop on 'human security, human nature and trust-building in negotiation' with speakers including the primatologist Frans de Waal, economist Paul Seabright and Robin Coupland from the International Committee of the Red Cross. (Podcasts of some of these talks are available by clicking on the podcast panel in the left column.)Yesterday, we hosted another workshop with multilateral practitioners, this time on the theme of 'complexity and diplomacy: Understanding the implications for multilateral arms control'.Diplomats love to talk about the complexity involved in their endeavours. But they usually do it in a rhetorical sense, without realizing that complexity is actually a domain of scientific research and t...
What can our ancestors teach us about building trust?
2007-08-17 08:49:00 The answer is an extraordinary amount based on what I heard at a fascinating workshop held on 25 May on ?Human Security, Human Nature, and Trust-Building in Negotiations?, as part of the Disarmament Insight initiative. Their workshop brought together disarmament diplomats from Missions in Geneva, officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and UN with considerable experience of disarmament negotiations, and researchers specialising in trust issues.The challenge posed for multilateral practitioners in the international security field attending the workshop was to think about how the information presented to them relates to their interactions, and to what extent their current community of practice leverages or impedes trust-building (something which John Borrie described at the meeting as ?cognitive ergonomics?. Hear his podcast here.) Several speakers were invited to address the seminar, including Robin Coupland, the ICRC?s adviser on armed violence and the eff...
New feature: print or save Disarmament Insight postings
2007-08-10 10:50:00 As you?ve probably noticed, we have just included a new option that allows visitors to save Disarmament Insight blog postings in PDF format.It is now possible to have a printer-friendly version of all or just one of the postings on the site.1) To print all postings displayed on the main page:Simply click the button "Save page as PDF".2) To print a single post: Click on the post?s title (this will open a page displaying only this post); Click the button ?Save page as PDF?.Hope you?ll find this useful.Aurélia Merçay
New Podcast ? Warring instincts: what we can learn from behavioural economi
2007-07-24 08:43:00 On 25 May we held our latest Disarmament Insight symposium with disarmament practitioners including diplomats, international civil servants, representatives of civil society groups and researchers, entitled ?Human security, human nature and trust-building in negotiations?.We?re pleased to unveil the latest free podcast we?ve prepared from the fascinating presentations at that event. Click here to hear or download the second part of a talk by the economist and author of The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, Professor Paul Seabright.Professor Seabright's talk investigated "how have human beings tamed our warring instincts?"In the first podcast of two encapsulating his talk, Professor Seabright observed that, at a time when there's mounting concern about violence in modern society, rates of violent death are very much lower now than they were in the past, which he noted may come as a surprise to many.In this second 30 minute podcast, "Warring Instincts: What ...
New podcast: What do we know about levels of human violence?
2007-07-13 12:04:00 Early this year we set up the Disarmament Insight initiative with support from our funders, the governments of Norway and the Netherlands, to help multilateral practitioners think differently about human security, disarmament and arms control.On 25 May, as part of that work, we held a symposium near Geneva with a group of disarmament practitioners including diplomats, international civil servants, representatives of civil society groups and researchers on 'Human security, human nature and trust-building in negotiations'.Among our speakers was Frans de Waal, one of the world's foremost authorities on ape behaviour. On the face of it, this might seem a bit odd. What could primatology offer disarmament negotiators? Quite a lot, as it turns out, and you can download Professor de Waal's talk as a podcast by clicking on this link. It has blown a lot of minds here in Geneva and elsewhere, judging from the feedback we've been getting from diplomats and others.We're now pleased t...
Grapes, apes and the world's fate
2007-06-28 01:58:00 The two-day bunfight that was the 2007 Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference concluded yesterday with a fascinating discussion in the Ronald Reagan Center ampitheatre with Mark Hibbs, the legendary reporter for 'Nucleonics Week'. According to Joe Cirincione and Matthew Bunn, who were tasked with quizzing Hibbs for his insights, he's broken more nuclear stories than anyone else on the planet in his long career.There isn't space here to recount in detail what Hibbs said. But in 3 or 4 weeks from now a transcript of the discussion should appear on the Carnegie Endowment's website (a summary might appear in the next day or two). Hibbs, a North American, has lived in Europe for many years, and has traveled throughout the world in the course of researching and breaking stories related, for instance, to the A.Q. Khan illicit nuclear smuggling network. He was quizzed on this and other subjects.One observation Hibbs made was that, in his view, U.S. standing in the world...
Tune in, turn on and pod out! Disarmament Insight podcasts go live
2007-04-02 15:05:00 The Disarmament Insight initiative held its first workshop with diplomats, NGOs and researchers at the Chateau de Bossey near Geneva on 19 January 2007. The meeting examined what we can learn from recent experience in improving multilateral negotiating practice.Discussions at the workshop were according to the Chatham House Rule. However, wouldn't it be cool, we thought, if we could make the kick-off presentations available on the internet for everyone?Voila! Copying and then pasting the URL into your browser's navigation bar will take you to the Disarmament Insight pod cast site:http://web.mac.com/john_bo-rrieWe hope you enjoy the 3 presentations there:- David Atwood on limits and possibilities for Non-Governmental Organisations in multilateral disarmament diplomacy;- Daniël Prins presenting a diplomat's perspective on engineering progress in multilateral disarmament; and- my own presentation, entitled "Freakomacy: exploring the hidden side of disarmament review conferences".T...
Welcome to Disarmament Insight
2007-03-05 08:39:00 This blog site is aimed at negotiators, policy wonks, activists, researchers and anyone curious about disarmament and human security.Every few days we'll be adding new thoughts about our research, including how it relates to current events, future trends and other things we feel excited about on disarmament-related issues.We'd be interested in your thoughts too about the stuff we post here. Agree? Disagree? Comment away when the mood to blog moves you (so to speak). In fact, that's the whole idea . Basic rules apply - don't be rude, try to be constructive and bear in mind that everything you read here is unofficial and not for further attribution. It's all about the dialogue, man ....!HAPPY BLOGGINGthe Dis Insight team |
|
 |
|
 |
