Disarmament Insight
In March 2007, along with Patrick Mc Carthy from the Geneva Forum, I started the Disarmament Insight blog to help communicate the findings of UNIDIR's project on Disarmament as Humanitarian Action: Making Multilateral Negotiations work (DHA). At that time, I think none of us involved envisaged that more than two-and-a-half years later the blog would still be running, or that it would have covered the myriad of subjects it has - from the Conference on Disarmament to the cognitive constraints on negotiators, from export controls to explosive violence, nuclear disarmament to negotiation theory - in hundreds of posts from dozens of contributors. During that time we've witnessed an almost-complete turn-over of core contributors, with Patrick having shifted to UNDP and Maya Brehm on board at UNIDIR.
Along the way, the blog became one respected source of news and analysis on international efforts to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions, in particular. This emphasis on cluster munitions was only fitting: the UN's Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons talks and the eventual Oslo process that emerged in parallel underlined many of the points we were trying to make in the DHA project's work. The achievement of the Convention on Cluster Munitions in May 2008 was hugely gratifying, and obviously we believe lends weight to some DHA findings.
Another reason was that as a follow-on from the DHA project's work we undertook a new project to tell the story of these efforts on cluster munitions. This project officially commenced in March 2008. A detailed analytical history, entitled Unacceptable Harm: A History of How the Treaty to Ban Cluster Munitions Was Won, which I wrote, was intended to be the main product. This book is now completed, and earlier this week it went to the UN print shop for production. We hope that the book will be available for launch and distribution in December. (During the pretty intense editing and production period in September and October, regular readers may have noticed we weren't posting on the blog, for which I offer our apologies.)
Apart from launch events associated with Unacceptable Harm in December and January, the cluster munition project is now finished. Both Maya and I are taking a break while we wait for word on future funding for an exciting new project. It means that this will be the last Disarmament Insight post for a while.
But keep checking the blog come December, and retain it on your list of RSS feeds as we anticipate news to come of various kinds including more information about Unacceptable Harm when it's out in print.
John Borrie
Although 2008 was a busy year on other fronts, we also completed the final publication of the current 'Disarmament as Humanitarian Action' series, which is entitled The Value of Diversity in Multilateral Disarmament Work.
Although there have been recent stand-out achievements like the new 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), success has been hard to attain in recent years in other areas of multilateral disarmament and arms control work. Political problems exist, to be sure, but they're not the sole problem. Professional diplomatic or journalistic shorthand like "lack of political will" can take on the mantra of an explanation that obscures specific underlying problems - problems that also differ across processes. However, to quote Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (Act 1, Scene 2) in this regard:
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves ...
2008 is drawing to an end. If you're concerned about the humanitarian effects of cluster munitions or you've just been a Democratic Presidential candidate in the United States it's been a pretty good year, but not so if you run a large car manufacturing company, or a bank, or indeed just have a mortgage. Indeed, the Roaring Naughties are well and truly over - with human security implications down the line I'm sure no-one can fathom yet, although already it looks like around a billion people will go hungry in coming months because of rises in food prices, the majority of them in the developing world. Why are people still going hungry in this day and age? Where have our priorities been?
In Geneva we've had a snowy cold snap in the last little while, so while the global financial meltdown continues we can at least snowboard while Rome burns, and watch the newly-bankrupted mega-rich huddle in their fur coats and Jimmy Choo shoes on the rue du Rhone around the Porsche Cayennes they've torched to keep warm.
Just kidding. But the festive season is coming, and so it's time for Disarmament Insight to sign off until January. Below we continue our long-standing tradition (well, okay, the one we started last year) of looking back at some of our main blogging themes of 2008.
It's hard to believe that this time a year ago the Vienna Conference of the Oslo process on cluster munitions was underway. Twelve months on and the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) is a reality after a tough meeting in Wellington, New Zealand in February, and the negotiations themselves over two weeks in May in Dublin, Ireland, not to mention a huge amount of effort from so many people over the last several years. It's been truly inspiring to participate in the Oslo process, and the week before last 94 states signed the treaty in Oslo, Norway, which just capped it all off. Disarmament as humanitarian action, indeed.
Things haven't gone so well in the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) talks in Geneva, which underwent something of a crisis in November as the Danish Chair's attempt to push through a protocol based on his draft text were rebuffed by a group of 26 states. A rather nasty blame game ensued, but the CCW managed to agree to come back for a week or two in the first part of 2009 to have another shot at trying to achieve something acceptable both to those cluster munition user/possessor states who shunned the Oslo process, and the majority of the CCW's membership that support the CCM. With the best will in the world, the CCW will have its work cut out for it in the New Year.
There was an extremely important domestic election for world politics in November. Yes, that's right, Helen Clark's Labour Government in New Zealand were voted out in favour of the centre-right National Party. Oh, yes, and there was that other election...of that Obama guy. Currently the arms control world - particularly inside the Washington beltway - is rife with speculation about what Obama's administration will do after taking up the reins of power in January '09 on nuclear weapons. President Obama pushing for successful U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would be a great start it seems to me: it may not bring the treaty negotiated more than a decade ago into force thanks to the CTBT's international entry-into-force formula, but it would send a very positive signal and further embed the emerging global norm against nuclear testing.
And some leadership and clear momentum is needed right now on nuclear issues, especially if the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) 2010 review conference is to be a success. Issues over Iran and compliance continue to dominate its preparatory process, of course. But more generally there is the sense around that we may be on the cusp of something hopeful with respect to nuclear disarmament. While the last two decades have seen too many missed opportunities for the world to move closer to nuclear abolition, the next couple of years hold considerable promise if some of the new ideas and new coalitions that have emerged over the last year or two are taken up by states and Iran's alleged NPT non-compliance is substantively addressed. Meanwhile, paralysis in the Conference on Disarmament continues.
The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) initiative is evolving too, and an Open-Ended Working Group will meet in 2009. An ATT resolution in the UN General Assembly late this year was opposed by only two countries - the U.S. and Zimbabwe . The prospect of a negotiating process on an ATT seems tantalisingly close...
2008 was also a significant year for work on curbing the effects of small arms and gun violence. In July, Patrick Mc Carthy wrote that the UN small arms process is "back on track" in its implementation of the 2001 Programme of Action following difficulties in 2006 that prevented assessment of the PoA's overall impact and strengthening of implementation. Despite opposition from Iran and Zimbabwe, the 2008 Biennial Meeting of States in New York adopted a substantive and forward-looking final document.
We've had a bunch of other interesting posts on this blog covering all sorts of issues, from piracy to the Mine Ban Treaty to expertise in mediation and negotiation with respect to Zimbabwe, biological weapons and even why the Arcade Fire and Duran Duran are like the Oslo process and CCW. We've also had the odd book review, which have prompted some spin-off blogs.
Meanwhile, we've been very fortunate on the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project at UNIDIR to have had two sterling Visiting Fellows this year, who've provided welcome intellectual argument, lots of coffee and prolific blogs. Maya Brehm came from Copenhagen University for three months and never left, which worked out very nicely for us. Our other visiting fellow, Rocky Horror Picture Show fan Virgil Wiebe, helped us to keep track of the CCW, but finally had to return with his family to tropical Minneapolis at the end of November. Ferney-Voltaire will never be the same again... We've seen some other departures too, with Patricia Lewis leaving UNIDIR and taking up a new role as Deputy Director and Scientist-in-Residence at the Monterey Institute. And Patrick Mc Carthy moved to a new role with UNDP from October concerning the Coordinating Action on Small Arms (CASA). His successor as Geneva Forum Network Coordinator, Silvia Cattaneo, has now come on board, so welcome Silvia, and good luck Patrick!
As 2008 ends, so too the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project draws to a close after five years of research and outreach, four volumes of published work (our final volume will be out very shortly) and numerous articles, meetings and, of course, blog posts. A big thank you is due to our principal donor, the Government of Norway, as well as to the Netherlands along with all of those people who've helped us with input and support along the way (not least our guest bloggers).
However, this is not really the end of DHA. The Disarmament Insight blog will continue in the New Year, and we might run further meetings along the lines of the five symposia we've held with our partner the Geneva Forum, which have been very successful and culminated in our November residential seminar in Glion. And, Maya and I have been carrying out research since March of this year on a spin-off DHA project to research an analytical history of international efforts to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions, to be published in late 2009. The CCM and the Mine Ban Treaty's implementation have shown that humanitarian disarmament is alive and well.
So, it's busy, busy, busy. I hope everyone who reads our blog has a wonderful festive season. Keep reading Disarmament Insight and commenting on it: we'll be back in the New Year.
John Borrie
Picture by John Borrie. We're tired out pussycats too.
The Signing Ceremony for the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) wrapped up at lunchtime on Thursday. (I would have blogged earlier, but I was out celebrating like the hundreds of other delegates present in Oslo. It's a cold city in December, but the welcome was warm...)
As of writing, 94 countries have signed the Convention (a list of 92 is here - add Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea Bissau), and more seem certain to follow in weeks and months to come. There are some surprises among them such as Afghanistan as mentioned in a preceding post.
Some big possessors and users of cluster munitions stayed away last week, of course, such as China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and the United States. Much has been made of this in the media, but it's by now really a non-event as these countries shunned the Oslo Process and so it was no surprise they would be no-show-ers. Instead the U.S State Department's spokesperson asserted from far away in Washington D.C. that "the CCM constitutes a ban on most types of cluster munitions; such a general ban on cluster munitions will put the lives of our military men and women, and those of our coalition partners, at risk." The fact that the majority of those coalition partners were represented in Oslo in order to sign the new humanitarian disarmament norm was omitted, since presumably it is at odds with this opinion.
Brazil, however, attended as an observer, and there are some signs that it may be reconsidering its opposition to joining the CCM - not least because of the support for the treaty from so many of its Latin American neighbours. Brazil's views on joining the treaty matter to countries like its traditional regional rival Argentina (which participated actively in Dublin, but hasn't yet signed the CCM), and vice versa. Let's hope that leaders in the two countries can turn the situation into what scholars call a 'trust game'. Both would be better off in security terms joining the Convention and disposing of their stocks of cluster munitions, rather than keeping them for use against each other.
There was something of a party atmosphere throughout the Signing Ceremony week, especially as so many of those here who had been through the Oslo Process wringer together could now patch up any animosities, clap each other on the backs and have a galactic p*ss-up together. Perhaps some of this bonhomie permeated the party of NATO Foreign Ministers, who arrived en masse on Wednesday afternoon by charter plane from Brussels to make their statements welcoming the Convention and each sign the treaty before flying on to the Helsinki OSCE Summit. David Miliband - the object of British NGO Landmine Action's innovative campaign in Westminster Tube Station to get cluster munitions "Milibanned" - spoke in glowing terms about the new treaty. And French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner's statement was (perhaps to no-one's surprise) the most colourful as he proclaimed (in French) "Yes, we can! We can, and the US can sign this treaty, Russia can, and China can" adding that he'll press American President-elect Barack Obama to sign. Good luck with that.
Of course, all of these signatures to the CCM obscure a more concrete and significant fact: that already four countries of the 30 required to bring the treaty into force internationally have ratified (Ireland, Norway, Sierra Leone and the Holy See). At this rate the CCM may enter into force globally rather soon - it is possible the first Meeting of States Parties will be as early as mid-2010. Laos, usually something of an international recluse and the most seriously affected country from cluster munitions, has come forward to offer to host the First Meeting of States Parties.
And more attention is now turning to how the new CCM will be implemented, which entails settling some big questions about how a regime of doing and not just being a new humanitarian norm will be developed. There is a lot synergy, of course, with the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention and how its implementation regime has developed over the last decade, and many useful lessons were learned that fed in to improving the text of the CCM treaty itself in the Dublin negotiations in May. But there are also some differences. The number of cluster munition affected countries is much smaller than were seriously blighted by anti-personnel mines in 1997, and the overall number of survivors is smaller too. Moreover, some survivors are being assisted already because of the Mine Ban Convention. And of course the Mine Ban Convention has some serious issues of its own such as states missing deadlines for clearance and stockpile destruction, which Maya Brehm and Megan Kinsella discussed in an earlier post.
One big issue for implementation will be to develop a more accurate picture of the dimensions of the cluster munition problem. Neither the mine ban nor cluster ban treaties make specific provision for this beyond their (differing) national reporting requirements for state parties. This led to the emergence of the civil society Landmine Monitor initiative in the context of the Mine Ban Convention, and a key question for NGOs now is how that expertise and experience can be further leveraged for a sort of 'cluster munition' Monitor. This weekend they are mulling over just that in Oslo.
And this touches on one of the biggest challenges of all: to ensure that while momentum is maintained and even increased for entry into force, universalisation and implementation of the CCM, implementation of the Mine Ban Convention doesn't suffer as a result. Indications are that many governments central to the Oslo Process, the UN, ICRC and NGOs like the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munition Coalition are well aware of this.
2008 has been a huge year for international efforts to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions as regular readers of this blog may have gathered from our ongoing commentary on the both Oslo and CCW processes. Indeed, we've followed the Oslo Process from the very beginning on Disarmament Insight.
Everyone now needs a rest (and some still celebrating in Oslo may also need a hangover cure). But 2009 will require continued effort, creativity and hard work to ensure that the CCM makes a difference to people's lives on the ground, even if it's not as immediately sexy and exciting as the negotiating phase we've just been through. Meanwhile, there are still the CCW meetings on cluster munitions to play out in Geneva in the first part of 2009...
John Borrie
Reference
Documents and media related to the Oslo CCM Signing Conference are accessible here.
Picture of Bernard Kouchner giving his statement on 3 December by John Borrie.
This week hasn't seen much Disarmament Insight blogging action, as we've been at the other end of Switzerland's Lac Leman in beautiful Glion (above Montreux), hosting DI's fifth event since the initiative's inception in March 2007 - a two-day residential seminar entitled Learn, Adapt Succeed: Potential Lessons from the Ottawa and Oslo Processes for other disarmament and arms control challenges.
Our seminar drew together more than thirty individuals from invited governments, UN agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross, researchers and representatives of transnational civil society. Consistent with our aims as an initiative, the idea was to create some breathing space from what has been a frenetic year for everyone, in order to foster some initial collective dialogue about whether lessons-learned from recent humanitarian disarmament achievements such as the Oslo and Ottawa Processes have any relevance to other international initiatives in the field of reducing or preventing armed violence. Those other initiatives include (but are by no means limited to) curbing the illicit trade in small arms, the Geneva Declaration on armed violence and development, the Arms Trade Treaty and the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. And, just as importantly, how can experiences from each of these respective initiatives be transferred and capitalized upon? Some of our participants also introduced some new tools for humanitarian dialogue in disarmament and arms control, including in analysing responses to the delivery of explosive force in populated areas.
The seminar was conducted according to the Chatham House Rule. And there isn't space in this post to go into detail about its discussions - especially as participants (like me) are still in the process of digesting the many important and interesting observations raised during the meeting. But if there is one thing I came away with it's that opportunities like this for cross-community dialogue are all too rare, not least because in a wired-up age, day-to-day matters press ever more on multilateral practitioners, and can get in the way of ensuring time for reflection and to listen to other perspectives.
Hopefully the Glion meeting has recharged peoples' batteries a bit, and stimulated some further creative thinking in achieving disarmament as humanitarian action. 2009 is going to be another busy year.
John Borrie
Image credit: 11820013 (cmmorel): Lake Leman by sunset, view from Victoria Hotel, Glion, Montreux, Switzerland downloaded from Flickr. John wishes his photos had turned out this nicely...
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 less experience engaging with NGO activities. The experience of this Review Conference seems to be that a greater number of delegates appear to recognise that NGOs have a useful role to play in the efforts to reduce the global threat from the hostile uses of poisons."It's about time, although, historically, the CWC is by no means alone in the arms control field in resisting diverse inputs. Meanwhile, this time around the CWC didn't have an easy time of it in attempting to achieve a review meeting outcome, which took until the early hours of Saturday morning. A declaration text has yet to emerge publicly, but my understanding is that wording on terrorism (including whether UN Security Council resolution 1540 could be specifically mentioned) and what to do about countries about to miss their treaty-mandated deadlines for destruction of their chemical weapons were at issue. You can read all about it, including Richard's daily reports, on the civil society web resource page Daniel Feakes and his colleagues set up for the Second CCW Review Conference.
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 multilateral disarmament process been more stark to me.
Let's consider my own case, for instance. I carried a laptop of course, equipped with a built-in webcam, wi-fi and a flash card reader, which enabled me to transfer pictures or movies quickly from my digital camera. It also enabled me to save and edit the contents of my digital field recorder (sort of a souped-up dictaphone-cum-portable recording studio). It's also possible, of course, to record interviews and sessions using a laptop and the right audio cable. I saw several delegates doing this, which adds a new dimension to "the diplomatic record" of an international meeting.
While I wrote my daily reports for DI readers nightly, it would have been perfectly feasible to send out pictures, audio, messages and even video almost in real time from the Conference. In fact, like Geneva, New York and many other parts of the world, it's easy to get on-line with a commercial hot spot in Wellington for only a few dollars an hour, and upload to sites like YouTube or, indeed, Disarmament Insight.
Moreover, it's fair to say that digital equipment connected to the internet is transforming the ability of civil society advocates to co-ordinate internationally in order to try to influence government polices - not only with national delegates in the vicinity of the conference room, but indirectly by engaging with authorities in capitals to try to have delegation instructions changed.
Thanks to instantaneous communication, NGO information is sometimes more up-to-date and more comprehensive about negotiating dynamics than those of governments, thanks to the slower reporting cycles of encrypted official cables. Moreover, one Cluster Munition Coalition delegate, a veteran of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty process told me,
"Ten years ago, when we depended on faxes and international calls, we couldn't have afforded this level of co-ordination, let alone been able to sustain it".And government officials themselves are looking more broadly for analysis and information. For many years, independent analysts like those of WILPF and the Acronym Institute have, for instance, published excellent analyses of multilateral processes like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty meetings and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty negotiations. Diplomats take note of these. But such reports were usually not timely enough to feed directly into delegation decision-making cycles, and mainstream media analysis wasn't detailed or engaged enough. That's changing too.
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 mandate in the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons process (CCW). Patrick and I have just returned from an international conference in Vienna last week on cluster munitions as part of the Oslo process. Related reporting and analysis will continue to be feature of the blog in 2008. (I’ll even be in Wellington, New Zealand, to report on that conference and civil society events in February.)
International work on cluster munitions is a practical manifestation of ‘disarmament as humanitarian action’. But there are others, including the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty, work on small arms and the Arms Trade Treaty, and even reframing in the context of nuclear disarmament. In June we were present in Washington D.C. when outgoing British Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett outlined the UK’s policies, including a strong call for a redoubling of effort on nuclear disarmament - in effect signaling to think-tankers there that it’s okay to use the “D” word (disarmament) again. (Some of us never stopped...)
Meanwhile, the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva remains deadlocked, of course, and there are looming challenges ahead for the current review cycle of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) despite its squeaking through to a preparatory meeting result in Vienna in May.
For our part, we’ve been taking our motto seriously about “thinking differently about human security”. Not only is the DHA project about showing how humanitarian perspectives are relevant to making disarmament and arms control work more effective, we’ve also sought to introduce new perspectives to some of the multilateral practitioners in these processes - not only in the context of the Disarmament Insight blog, but in workshops we’ve run near Geneva throughout the year.
In choosing themes and contributors to these events, we and the Geneva Forum sought to mirror a view among researchers on the DHA project that insights from the natural and behavioural sciences can be of help. In May, for instance, the primatologist Frans de Waal spoke at a workshop we held entitled “human security, human nature and trust-building in negotiations”. Any sniggering about monkeys was silenced by Professor de Waal’s fascinating talk on “War and Peace and Primates” and we received numerous pieces of feedback from participants that it had prompted them to think about their negotiating interactions in fresh ways. You can still hear Frans de Waal’s talk as a podcast from our home-brewed podcast site, or by typing “Disarmament Insight” into the search box in the iTunes Store podcast directory (all of our podcasts are free).
Other talks we’ve put online include those by the economist and author Professor Paul Seabright, Quaker UN Office representative David Atwood, and physicist and science writer Philip Ball. Unfortunately a technical malfunction prevented us from also presenting great talks by economist Paul Ormerod from the same workshop in September on complexity and arms control diplomacy and by our very own Aurélia Merçay. But Philip offered a range of cogent and entertaining insights on the physics of social behaviour, and what it may mean for multilateral responses to armed violence. This linked in nicely to some of our own writing on the subject, especially Aurelia’s work on non-linear modeling of small arms proliferation in the third DHA volume.
Looking ahead, one of the threads followed by the DHA project concerns the impact of cognitive constraints on the perceptions and interactions of multilateral practitioners. This has also been a persistent theme on the blog this year. Drawing from the work of psychologists and behavioural economists, we’ve been thinking about how better understanding, for instance of psychological biases, might improve decision making, and how issues like new communications technologies affect negotiations. In the New Year, along with Aurélia Merçay and Ashley Thornton, I hope to complete a small book tying some of our thinking on the subject together. Watch the blog for more news.
Finally, 2007 has also been a year in which we’ve grown accustomed to new faces in disarmament. But along the way we’ve lost some greats such as Randy Forsberg and, in June, my great friend and former ambassador, Clive Pearson of New Zealand. They’re greatly missed.
These are just some of the things we’ve written about on the Disarmament Insight blog in 2007. Best of the festive season to all of our readers, and please keep reading our blog.
John Borrie
Photo by author.
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, the ideas Ball writes about are relevant to multilateral decision-makers and the ways they frame issues.
On 25 September, the Disarmament Insight initiative hosted a workshop near Geneva with multilateral practitioners from diplomatic Missions, international organizations and civil society representatives to engage them on the theme of 'complexity and diplomacy: Understanding the implications for arms control'. The aim is to encourage participants to think differently about human security, and prompt new, constructive responses.
Our speakers included Philip Ball and we recorded his 45-minute talk. We have the pleasure to announce a podcast of his presentation on the physics of social behaviour is available from today. We've also included Dr. Ball's slides in the podcast to aid the listener. These are viewable in iTunes or in Quicktime Player in sync with the audio.
Enjoy!
John Borrie
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 that complex phenomena have particular features. But what's complicated isnt' the same as what's complex. A better understanding among arms control practitioners about what complexity is - and recognising the hallmarks of complex social phenomena - could, we think, help make their work more effective and has implications for human security thinking.
Small arms proliferation and the diffusion of new technologies, like say those in the life sciences that could be turned to hostile use, have many characteristics that indicate they're complex social phenomena. Multilateral negotiations themselves might also even be considered as complex social phenomena. We explored some of these ideas in our third volume of research, Thinking Outside the Box in Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.
Yesterday we were joined by two speakers who've been big influences on our thinking - Paul Ormerod and Philip Ball (pictured above). Philip, a consultant editor at the scientific journal Nature and science writer and broadcaster, is author of a remarkable book, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, which won the Aventis Prize in 2005 and explores the relevance of complexity and statistical physics to the social world. Paul Ormerod is an economist and author of Butterfly Economics and Why Most Things Fail, and is an innovative and creative modeller on a wide range of real-world issues ranging from violent crime in the United Kingdom to the political stability of China.
In addition to the DHA project's own resident physicist and researcher, Aurélia Merçay, Philip and Paul discussed their work, and the relevance of concepts and applications of complexity to arms control efforts. One such application is a conceptual multiple equilibrium model Aurélia developed to examine the mechanisms involved in demand for small arms, in part based on Paul Ormerod's work. And it's clear from discussion with the diplomats and others attending that there are many other potential useful applications.
In coming weeks, after the dust has settled, look out for free podcasts of presentations by Aurélia, Philip and Paul from this site, or for download from the iTunes Music Store by searching there for 'Disarmament Insight'.
John Borrie
References
Ball, Philip, “Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another.” London: Arrow
Merçay, Aurélia & Borrie, John, A physics of diplomacy? The dynamics of complex social phenomena and their implications for multilateral negotiations in Borrie, John & Martin Randin, Vanessa (eds.), “Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.” Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.
Merçay, Aurélia, Non-Linear modelling of small arms proliferation in Borrie, John & Martin Randin, Vanessa (eds.), “Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.” Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.
Ormerod, Paul, “Butterfly Economics.” London: Fontana: 1999.
Ormerod, Paul, “Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics.” London: Faber & Faber: 2005.
