Humanitarian Lens on Nuclear Weapons

There is renewed and deep international concern about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from the detonation of nuclear weapons in populated areas. Yet 25 years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence remain central to the security doctrines of a significant number of states. Drawing on a range of perspectives, the volume depicted above explores what viewing nuclear weapons through a humanitarian lens entails, and why it is undergoing such a revival. Recent developments in this respect are examined, as well as what these could mean for nuclear arms control in the near future.

The new publication was launched at UN Headquarters in New York on 16 October 2013.  To read it, use this link.

Tim Caughley and John Borrie, UNIDIR

http://www.unidir.org/NucHumanitarianLens

Conference on Disarmament: a lifeline?

The Conference on Disarmament (CD) has temporarily set aside pursuit of a programme of work and is operating, without dissent, on the basis of a “Schedule of Activities” [CD/WP.571/Rev.1 of 21 May 2012]. The Schedule amounts to a timetable of plenary meetings in accordance with the rules of procedure. In ordinary circumstances, such a schedule would be one and the same thing as a “programme of work”. Indeed the relevant rule (no. 28) explicitly says that such a programme would encompass a “schedule of its activities”.

But some member states insist on differentiating these two terms.  Why? 

Because they want the programme of work to include specific work mandates. Why? Is there anything in the rules that requires such inclusion? No.

Is it typical past practice to include negotiating mandates in the programme of work? No. So why, insist on it?

As noted in an earlier article, it has been speculated that it suits major powers that the CD is tied up in knots. Subtle shifts in the dialogue and dynamics are, however, afoot. Members are aware that with the annual session already at the halfway point, attention will increasingly turn to the meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York in October. The inability of the CD to make any progress, for instance, on its very first agenda item covering nuclear disarmament and a ban on fissile material production, inevitably gives rise to consideration amongst UN member states as to alternative venues for advancing those pressing issues. 

And, as witnessed last month in Vienna at the first meeting of the new NPT review cycle, the unanimous expression by the 2010 NPT Review Conference of deep concern at the “catastrophic humanitarian consequences” of any use of nuclear weapons is developing a momentum of its own among states and civil society. The extent to which this development will divert attention from dealing with a fissile material ban and nuclear disarmament in the CD remains to be seen, but the ball is very much in the Conference’s court.

In this regard, it is significant that the most recent president of the CD, Ambassador Getahun (Ethiopia), in his closing remarks hinted that a “comprehensive” programme of work – i.e., one that is inclusive of mandates – may need re-thinking.  He raised the possibility of “de-linking” some of the agenda items. Individual mandates, he implied, could – if they stood on their own – be invested with greater clarity as to their objectives. These are significant points, even if, in the scheme of things, they do not amount to game-breakers.  But the high quality leadership of all three presidents of the CD to date this year (they also include Ambassador Gallegos of Ecuador and Ambassador Badr of Egypt), and the willingness of members to acquiesce in greater use of the presidential prerogative – e.g., witness the adoption of the Schedule of Activities – provide the makings of a lifeline for the Conference as it enters the second half of its annual session.  More, maybe much more, will be needed to impress delegates to this year’s forthcoming UN General Assembly.  But it's a beginning. Ideas on possible ways ahead are invited from readers, and will in any event be the subject of a further article on this website.

This is a guest post by Tim Caughley. Tim is a Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR – for other comments on the CD see also here.      [Lifesaver image courtesy of Lifesaver clip art by OCAL shared by Clker.com]

Unacceptable harm: Nearing the end of a long run …

As many of this blog’s readers know, I’ve been researching and writing a history of international efforts to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions as part of a project commencing at UNIDIR in March 2008 funded by the Government of Norway.

I’m pleased to say that the total book manuscript of Unacceptable Harm: A history of how the treaty banning cluster munitions was won is now done, and is in the hands of UNIDIR’s copy editor.

Writing a manuscript of 140,000 or more words is not something I’ve done before, and as I mentioned in April (as I was plodding along the long, uphill straight of drafting the book’s eleven chapters), running it can be a bit of a difficult, lonely business:

“It’s quite tricky psychologically to keep myself properly motivated and I, for one, tend to get depressed easily about my lack of pace, especially as deadlines begin to loom. All of this, of course, against the backdrop of story of how cluster bombs were banned that’s complicated, fascinating and ultimately inspiring as an example of how the world’s less powerful states, international organizations and civil society can make a positive difference to human security – I have no real reason for complaint!”

There are still some tasks to be done, including final changes based on the book’s editing. And, I still have to chase up some of the 90 or so people I interviewed in order to check the odd thing. But the end is in sight, and UNIDIR hope to have the book available in print before the end of this year (keep following this blog for updates).

We’re winding down for a summer break here, so the Disarmament Insight blog probably won’t be updated over the course of August. Here’s hoping you all have a pleasant month, and keep reading our stuff after the height of summer.

John Borrie

Warfare: the victims’ perspective

Solferino, 24 June, 1859 : A tiny village in undulating countryside, just south of Lake Garda. Close by, a swirling, intense territorial battle involving troops from Piedmont, Sardinia and France confronting Austria’s army. Ten hours of volleys of cannon fire, cavalry charges and hand-to-hand fighting among almost 250,000 soldiers. The aftermath – more than one-tenth of them dead or wounded.

This bloody event one hundred and fifty years ago has had many consequences. In territorial terms, the Franco-Sardinian victory paved the way for Italian unity and for defining Italy’s northern frontiers from east to west.

In humanitarian terms, the conflict has similarly had a profound and enduring impact. A witness to the distress of the wounded arriving in great numbers in the neighboring village of Castiglione delle Stiviere, was Henry Dunant. Appalled by the lack of medical facilities and relief for the wounded, this Swiss entrepreneur (who was in the area on business) rallied support for them irrespective of their military allegiances. Soon, he was to be instrumental in founding the Red Cross.

Dunant, in effect, drew attention away from a popular perspective of the ‘glory’ of war to a down-to earth viewpoint of the victim. In the words of ICRC historian François Bugnion: ‘But what was important was not his [Dunant’s] personal role in Castiglione, but rather the two ideas he drew from this experience: the creation of voluntary relief societies – the birth of the Red Cross – and a treaty protecting medical staff on the battlefield – the start of the Geneva Conventions’. These treaties also embody Dunant’s spirit of neutrality and impartiality in tending to victims of war.

Red Cross/Red Crescent volunteers from all round the globe gathered in Solferino last week to mark the 150th anniversary of the battle. An estimated thirteen thousand of them, red candles in their hands, symbolically traced steps that the victims had followed in desperate search for medical attention – medical attention that had been both inadequate and unprotected on the battleground on that horrific day in June 1859.

It may be an exaggeration to say that the surge of 13,000 volunteers thronging through the archways of Solferino’s Piazza Castello last Saturday night evoked scenes in that same square a century and a half ago. But it was impossible not to be moved by the commemoration. The terrors and consequences of face-to-face, soldier-to-soldier warfare exhibited in Solferino’s small museum and ossuary – the bayonets, the swords, the chilling array of skulls and bones – speak silently and grimly to us still about mortal combat as they have done in other parts of the world.

And the other victims of conflict: the civilians? The Battle of Solferino, by some accounts, produced a single civilian death. Modern conflicts, however, fought so often in densely populated urban rather than rural areas, take a high toll on civilians. In a survey of people affected by current conflicts published by the ICRC to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Solferino, 44% of the respondents said they had personally experienced armed conflict. Almost 30% of those directly affected by fighting said a close family member had been killed during fighting. 56% of the people directly affected by conflicts had been displaced, over half had lost contact with a family member and one in five had lost their livelihood. These figures are dramatically higher in some countries!

There are many victims of warfare, whether they are civilians or military or the dependents of those killed, maimed or traumatized in battle. Solferino – through Dunant – has been salutary in engendering an approach that views armed conflict through the prism of humanity.

But the humanitarian approach is not only about the promotion of the principles of the Red Cross or international humanitarian law. It is also about the promotion of international norms in support of humanitarian objectives more broadly. This includes prohibitions on the use and production of weapons that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering or, like landmines and cluster munitions, affect civilians and combatants without distinction, and that have wrought so much misery and deprivation on civilians. It means seeing disarmament as humanitarian action and bringing human security perspectives to bear in moving the disarmament agenda forward.

The enthusiasm for the cause of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement that marked the celebrations in Solferino, and its undertone of empathy with the victims of warfare, shows that the lessons of the past are not always forgotten. This is truly an example of Kipling’s ‘Lest we forget’ , in a practical, not a glorifying sense.

This is a guest post by Tim Caughley. Tim is a Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR.

Photo Credit: ‘Perspectives at Piazza Castello, Solferino, 150 years apart’ by Jill Caughley.

References:
- Henry Dunant, ‘A Memory of Solferino’, ICRC, 1986.
- ICRC, ‘Our World: Views from the Field’, Summary Report, Opinion Survey, 2009.

The tip of the iceberg

As regular readers of the blog may have gathered, I've been working this year on a history of international efforts to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions.

This history, to be published before the end of the year, focuses in particular on the Oslo process, which culminated in a Convention on Cluster Munitions in negotiations in Dublin in May 2008. But it also casts an eye much further back to the origins of international cluster munition work, which date from the Swiss Diplomatic Conferences in the 1970s and proposals there by Sweden and others to prohibit "cluster warheads".

Chronologically speaking, the Oslo process, which ran for approximately 15 months from February 2007 until the end of May 2008, was just the tip of the iceberg. There was a lot more under the surface. Concerns had been raised about the hazards cluster munitions pose to civilians both at time of use and post-conflict for many, many years by governments and NGOs. My impression is that this isn't necessarily widely understood when multilateral practitioners think about lessons to be learned (or not) from recent international efforts on cluster munitions. Nor is the question it poses but which is often not raised: why did the Oslo process get traction when previous efforts failed?

The easy thing to do would be to point to the 2006 summer war in Southern Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah and the massive use of cluster munitions there as the catalyst. Others disagree: Virgil Wiebe, for instance, whose posts have graced this blog in the past, feels strongly that the Lebanon conflict was "necessary but not sufficient". Certainly, determination among Norwegian policy makers to get an international process going on a treaty to ban cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians pre-dated Lebanon. And NGOs in the Cluster Munition Coalition had been preparing for a break with the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons' talks in late 2006 unless its five-yearly review conference agreed on more meaningful work to restrict the weapon. So clearly the picture is more complex than it first appears.

The deeper I got into research for the history, the more convinced I became that it's difficult to draw useful lessons about the Oslo process for future 'humanitarian disarmament' endeavours without having this historical context. Fortunately, Eric Prokosch's classic book 'The Technology of Killing: A Military and Political History of Anti-Personnel Weapons' (Zed Books, 1995) is an excellent resource. (This book is unfortunately out of print, but second-hand copies can be scrounged via the internet and second-hand bookshops, and should be required reading for all Geneva multilateral diplomats, in my view.) Eric also has been very kind in sharing his insights in the course of my research about how cluster munition-related concerns evolved from their early days.

Such perspectives are important. Many of the other people I've interviewed and conversed with in the course of writing my book have quite reasonably drawn their own conclusions about what we can learn from international efforts on cluster munitions, but most do so based on their impressions of events this decade. However, if one only looks at the last few years the achievement of the cluster munition ban treaty might have looked simply spontaneous, and even easy - even though it was neither.

The impact of the Ottawa process on anti-personnel mines in the 1990s and the resulting 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention also needs to be considered. There are many similarities between the Ottawa and Oslo processes, and the former's example was at the very least a major inspiration to most of those centrally involved in the Oslo process. But again, context is important. A two-day seminar we convened in November last year with various multilateral practitioners on lessons learned from the Ottawa and Oslo processes underlined that there are divergent viewpoints on what kind of 'model' that the most obvious similarities between the two processes offer, or whether they constitute a model at all. (These similarities include free-standing activity outside traditional UN forums propelled by like-mindedness rather than universal participation, government-civil society partnership, and emphasis on humanitarian perspectives.)

The British historian Hew Strachan recently wrote in the journal Survival with regard to the Iraq war that "As history is turned into political science, it makes a casualty of contingency". It's a phrase I have written on my office whiteboard as a continual reminder. The most elegant international relations theories don't convincingly account (in my mind at least) for the role of individuals in the Oslo process. If anything is really clear to me, however, it's that individuals were key to that success.

I'm pondering all of this as I prepare to write my concluding chapter of the draft manuscript after a week off. Earlier this year, I related the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's comment that writing books is a bit like marathon running. I'm looking for my second wind!

John Borrie

Image credit: photo-montage of an iceberge from Wikipedia.org.

The Value of Diversity in Multilateral Disarmament Work

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 ...

In our third volume, Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations, we explored some of the potential obstacles that are worth considering with a view to improving negotiators' performance that aren't often noticed by many of those in the thick of disarmament work. For instance, obstacles to progress can be the unintended consequences of past practice, or they can stem from the complex challenges those involved must deal with.

It's also likely that aspects of multilateral disarmament practice compound cognitive challenges individuals face in managing their perceptions and interactions with others. This has been an abiding theme of some of the posts on the Disarmament Insight blog, as some readers know.

We were keen to examine some of these aspects in greater depth, and to try to give form to some of the disparate observations and insights we've gathered within the project over the last few years that weren't included in the first three DHA volumes or other published work we produced. And a key catalyst was a workshop we held as part of the Disarmament Insight symposium series in September 2007, when two of our speakers on the topic of complexity and arms control, Philip Ball and Paul Ormerod, discussed Scott Page's book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies.

Page's book contains a lot of useful generic insights about group prediction and problem solving - often in conditions of conflict, as well as cooperation - that prompted Ashley Thornton and I to consider how this might link up to some of the DHA project's research and observations about disarmament negotiating environments.

Drawing on the work of Page and many others from a range of disciplines, our little book makes the argument that while there is no way to ensure success in multilateral disarmament endeavours, practitioners can improve their chances by recognizing and harnessing cognitive diversity (or 'perspective diversity', in Page's parlance). This is effectively what humanitarian perspectives in disarmament processes such as the Ottawa process leading to the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention and the Oslo Process resulting in the CCM have shown.

And progress in multilateral disarmament needn't stop there. The Value of Diversity in Multilateral Disarmament Work discusses practical suggestions to help achieve this.

John Borrie

2008: What a year!

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.

CCM: And the signing count is ...

At close-of-play of the first day of the two Signing Ceremony of the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) at 6 o'clock this evening, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr-Store announced that, so far, 92 countries have signed the treaty.

More will follow tomorrow. Whether the treaty will hit the symbolic 100 mark then is uncertain. But irrespective of whether it does, the fact that more than 90 countries - including the most heavily cluster munition-affected states including Afghanistan, Laos and Lebanon - sends a very strong signal of international support for this new humanitarian disarmament norm.

John Borrie

Learning to adapt and succeed in disarmament as humanitarian action

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...

Cluster Munition Convention: "Disarmament as humanitarian action"

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 many others - especially those involved in multilateral disarmament over the last decade - would agree.

Iceland's representative, a noted international legal scholar, set out his views on interoperability, which will be worth further careful study in the course of implementation of the new treaty, especially its Article 21. Of course, the United Nations, International Committee of the Red Cross and Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) spoke to welcome the new treaty, and the CMC presented its implementation action plan to Norway's Deputy Minister of Defence, who spoke along with Ireland's Minister of Foreign Affairs.

But Norway's working head of delegation and a key figure in the Oslo Process, Ambassador Steffen Kongstad, summed up the feelings of many when he noted that although "a moment of joy and gratitude" in practical terms, implementation of the treaty starts today. Moreover, he described the Cluster Munition Convention, and the Oslo Process leading to it as "disarmament as humanitarian action".

Those of us associated with UNIDIR's project on 'Disarmament as humanitarian action: Making Multilateral Negotiations Work' couldn't agree more. It is an historic day, indeed.

John Borrie

Photograph by John Borrie. Ambassador Dáithí O'Ceallaigh, President of the Dublin Conference, and its Secretary-General Colm Ó Floinn, prepare to open today's closing ceremony.

Disarmament Insight: 2007 in review

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.

Putting Predictions to the Test

As part of it's work, UNIDIR's Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project is currently working on a publication looking at some constraints on multilateral negotiations, and how some of these might be overcome or at least potentially mitigated.

One conundrum for policy makers in general is that it's very difficult to accurately predict outcomes of complex political and economic processes, and this has implications for their work. Multilateral practitioners are no exception.

Meanwhile, it's often very difficult to get a handle on how good "expert" political judgment is. But not impossible. A recent book by Philip E. Tetlock, an American psychologist, has revealed through a careful decade-long study that people who make prediction their business - people who appear as experts on television, for instance, or who are quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses - are, on average, no better than the rest of us.

Tetlock's research team asked various specialists to judge the likelihood of a number of political, economic and military events occurring within a specific timeframe (about five years ahead). Close to 300 specialists offered outcomes representing a total number of around 27,000 predictions. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed in his book, The Black Swan:

"His study revealed an expert problem: there was no difference in results whether one had a PhD or undergraduate degree. Well-published professors had no advantage over journalists. The only regularity Tetlock found was the negative effect of reputation on prediction: those who had a big reputation were worse predictors than those who had none."

Ouch. But Tetlock's study didn't end there. His focus wasn't so much to show the real level of competence of experts, but to investigate how they spun their stories. Tetlock discovered various cognitive mechanisms of generating ex post explanation - mostly in the form of belief defence, or self-esteem protection.

Prominent were phenomena that psychologists call motivational biases, something Ashley Thornton has explored in previous posts on this blog. These include the self-serving attributional bias (the human tendency to blame unfavourable outcomes on external causes but take credit for favourable outcomes) and the confirmation bias (we tend to seek out and process information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs).

The New Yorker put it succinctly: "The experts' trouble in Tetlock's study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong."

Food for thought. More about Tetlock's work in future posts.


John Borrie


References

Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good is it? How Can We Know? (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005).

Nicholas Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York, Random House, 2007).

To read a neat introduction to Tetlock's work in a review of his book in the 5 December 2005 edition of The New Yorker click here.

Picture by F33 retrieved from Flickr.

0800-HOW-IS-MY-DIPLOMACY? Technology and humanitarian action

Regular readers of the Disarmament Insight blog will have gathered that, among many things, we're interested in the impacts of technology on international decision-making. Patricia Lewis, for instance, has offered some of her personal observations about the changes mobile phones and Blackberries have wrought on interactions in multilateral meetings she's attended (See "Zapped! Mobile technology in the conference chamber").

There seems little doubt that continued improvements to wireless communications have radical implications for the coordination of international activities at many different levels.

For instance, The Economist newspaper ran a story on 26 July entitled "Flood, Famine and Mobile Phones". In it, the Economist argued that technology is transforming humanitarian relief - and shifting the balance of power between donors and recipients.

It all sounds great. But the Economist conceded that - beyond anecdotal evidence - there isn't a definitive verdict yet on how much of a difference such new technologies have made in achieving more effective humanitarian aid delivery.

Nevertheless, the evidence has been compelling enough to result in a brace of new initiatives. Non-Governmental Organizations have begun forming consortiums like NetHope, which spreads the cost of satellite communications and internet links. UN agencies like UNICEF and the World Food Programme have taken a particular interest in trying to achieve practical benefits in aid delivery from better communications, activities which should (in principle at least) result in superior coordination.

Meanwhile, even in the poorest parts of the world, technologies like mobile telephony are increasingly widespread. It's likely that such technologies really do have the capacity to transform aid delivery in some disaster situations - if donors and deliverers of aid are willing to listen to feedback from aid recipients and, of course, if the technological infrastructure itself still works or can be made to work in the midst of the disaster (a big "if" indeed, and glossed over by The Economist).

There's also another, deeper, point here. Quite often, there's a temptation to think of disaster victims as passive beneficiaries of aid, who should be grateful for anything they get. This attitude has to change: the ability of affected people on the ground (or in the flood water) to contribute to the information loop and decision making about their own welfare is crucial to improving responses to disasters, whether natural, man-made or conflict-related. Packages dropped to people from relief helicopters are only aid if they're what those people actually need. (The Economist noted the NGO Save the Children's finding that, in some recent humanitarian relief situations, victims would prefer cash help to food hand-outs.)

In other words, accountability is important, even in apparent situations of altruistic giving like disaster relief. Accountability is something we would do well to bear in mind in disarmament and arms control. In a recent book, former British diplomat Carne Ross argued that diplomats are a largely "unaccountable elite", who often don't take into account the interests of those they are supposed to be helping or representing, drawing on his personal experiences in the UN Security Council setting.

It's possible Ross over-states his case in parts. But in multilateral arms control there does sometimes seem to be a considerable distance between negotiators and those affected by lack of multilateral results, for instance on controls on small arms or the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions.

It's a bit like the white van driver who may not care if she drives inconsiderately or even dangerously. The vehicle she drives belongs to the business she works for - it's hard to identify her or make her accountable. So in places like the United States, lots of business vehicles now come with a "how am I driving?" sign on them along with a hotline telephone number. Is 0800-HOW-IS-MY-DIPLOMACY? connected to a television hotline or Parliament maybe?

One question we perhaps need to ask is this: How - beyond their convenience - can new technologies make decision makers more accountable, and therefore more effective in achieving disarmament and humanitarian goals? Domestic electorates know remarkably little about what their diplomatic representatives do on their behalf overseas, and might be surprised at the degree of preoccupation of multilateral practitioners with process. Voices from the field therefore need to be heard and heeded more often.


John Borrie


References

The Economist, "Flood Famine and Mobile Phones", 26 July 2007

Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite, London: Hurst: 2007.

Photo (Namibia: Helicopter rescues people from flood hit areas, Image ID: 20044304) courtesy of IRIN.

"Cognitive Ergonomics"?

In 10 minutes of off-the-cuff concluding remarks from our 25 May Disarmament Insight symposium on ‘Human Security, Human Nature and Trust-building in Negotiations’, John Borrie talked about what he calls “cognitive ergonomics” and the relevance of the concept in thinking about the structures and procedures in multilateral negotiations.

Not to mention Jimi Hendrix, the Who and Formula One and World Rally Car racing ...

You can hear the podcast by clicking here.

Cognitive ergonomics is also discussed in his introduction to the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project's third volume of work, which you can access by clicking on the book with the pink cover at left.

Enjoy!

Facing the facts on cluster munitions

People who live and work in areas where cluster munitions have been used are only too familiar with the horrific humanitarian impact of this weapons system, both at the time of use and for long after the bombs have stopped falling.

NGOs and UN bodies have been documenting this impact for years, in greater and greater disturbing detail. But on Wednesday (May 16), the NGO Handicap International sketched the most complete picture yet of the impact that cluster munitions have on the lives, limbs and livelihoods of the people unfortunate enough to live in their midst. Their report makes for sobering reading. Its key findings include:

- The available data shows that cluster munitions have nearly always been used in or near civilian populated areas against unknown or unspecified targets

- 400 million people currently live among unexploded cluster sub-munitions

- 98 percent of cluster sub-munition casualties are civilians, killed and injured while returning home in the aftermath of conflict or while going about their daily tasks to survive

- The majority of victims are poor, uneducated males, many of them boys under the age of 18

These are just some of the hard facts that will have to be faced by the governments gathering in Lima, Peru, on May 23-25 to take the first step along the path agreed in Oslo in February (see the May 15 and April 24 postings by John Borrie for background on the "Oslo process" on cluster munitions).

The Oslo declaration does not - necessarily - foresee a complete ban on cluster munitions, but rather a ban on those cluster munitions that cause "unacceptable harm" to civilians. The Handicap International report has made it more difficult to claim that some cluster munitions cause harm that is "acceptable" in any humane sense of the word.

To pass the muster of international humanitarian law, the military advantage to be gained from the use of a weapon must be proportional to the civilian casualties and damage to civilian objects caused by the attack. This notion of "proportionality," it seems to me, is closely related to the concept of "unacceptable harm" that will be at the heart of the Oslo process negotiations.

Clearly, a 98 percent civilian casualty rate is neither proportional nor acceptable. It is also difficult to imagine what cumulative military advantage could be worth 400 million people living in daily fear of losing their lives or their loved ones.


Patrick Mc Carthy


References

"Circle of Impact: The Fatal Footprint of Cluster Munitions on People and Communities." Handicap International - http://en.handicapinternational.be/index.php

Photo by Dave Mitchell on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/davemitchell/279352521/. The photo is of a child picking up a fake cluster sub-munition at a Derry Anti-War Coalition demonstration (Northern Ireland).

Tune in, turn on and pod out! Disarmament Insight podcasts go live

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 podcast site:

http://web.mac.com/john_borrie

We hope you enjoy the 3 presentations there:

- David Atwood on limits and possibilities for Non-Governmental Organisations in multilateral disarmament diplomacy;

- Daniel 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".

The site also contains information about how to listen to these audio podcasts online or save them to your computer or music player. Note that you need iTunes and Quicktime Player or other software that plays AAC format files for these pod casts to work. If you don't have them, Mac and Windows versions of both apps can be downloaded free from www.apple.com/itunes.

Feel free to share these audio podcasts with others. Our podcast site is only a few days old and as such may still have a few wrinkles to be ironed out. But in coming months we intend to put more podcasts here on the web, as well as add our site to the iTunes store podcast directory to make them easy to find (don't worry, they'll remain free).

Tune in, turn on and pod out!


John Borrie

Getting the ball rolling in the Conference on Disarmament

I first attended a CD meeting in 2003. I was fresh out of university at the time and assumed, rather naively, that I would require a large sheaf of papers to fulfil my note taking duties. I needn’t have bothered, however, as the meeting began 20 minutes after the stated time closed less than 5 minutes later. What a contrast to the first session of the 2007 year, which ended last week. I’ll forgive the delegates (and interns) for looking a little tired. I’d be too if I had to follow such an unforgiving meeting schedule for 10 weeks.

It’s encouraging to see the CD finally shaking off its apathy. Prior to 2006, delegations would usually meet on a Thursday morning in a formal plenary meeting with private group consultations held at various times through the week while the CD was in session. Often, delegates’ speeches to the Conference lacked focus and direction. Not surprisingly a few capitals began to question the financial and political value of maintaining a full time delegation in Geneva. In many ways these were wasted opportunities for a Conference that allowed delegations to hold up to 10 meetings a week with full translation services and still paid to retain them, despite CD deadlock.

Some analysts have argued that the CD is simply a ‘talk shop’ and that increasing the frequency with which delegates interact with each other on substantive issues is not a wholly valuable way to build trust and enhance cooperation. I believe, however, that increasing the meeting frequency of diplomats over the past 18 months has been a strong factor in the current level of movement in the CD. Why? Because it has given diplomats an opportunity to study their negotiating partners and allowed them to better assess the others’ intentions.

Economist Catherine Eckel and political scientist Rick K. Wilson believe that the ability to read the intentions of others is an important method used by humans in the process of cooperation. One way that humans assess intention, for example, is through facial expressions. Eckel and Wilson argued recently that “Although social cues are culturally derived, the capacity to pick up and process those cues is part of an evolved cognitive structure. The fact that we pay attention to others, that we try to infer intention behind another’s action, and that we conditionally respond, provides new insight into strategic behaviour”. They’ve further argued that “repeated play is crucial, even when identities are anonymous” in order to better assess the intentions of your opponent.

This has important implications for the arms control and disarmament community in Geneva. On average a diplomatic representative there represents his or her country in the CD for a period of 4 years. The question is: how do diplomats know to trust one another? Although altruism comes into play in human behaviour, it’s clear that we don’t act altruistically toward everyone. As we’ve noted in the DHA project, cooperation will fail to thrive if one can’t differentiate between those who are likely and unlikely to reciprocate cooperation over the longer term. Increasing the meeting frequency in the CD may have actually aided the process through which negotiators learn to trust (or not) their negotiating counterparts. Intensified social interaction in the CD has supplemented other contacts between multilateral practitioners in the disarmament community in Geneva, or enabled it between some delegations (say, the U.S. and North Korea) when very little would otherwise occur.

Eckel and Wilson’s paper entitled “Why fairness? Facial expressions, evolutionary psychology, and the emergence of fairness in simple bargaining games” provides some interesting insights into the way we interact with each other and what this mean for international cooperation. They concluded that such perspectives help to conceptualize ‘human decision processes differently from what is usually done in political science’. Seems like another way of “thinking outside the box” in multilateral disarmament to me.


Vanessa Martin Randin


Reference

C. Eckel and R. Wilson (1999) "Why Fairness? Facial Expressions, Evolutionary Psychology and the Emergence of Fairness in Simple Bargaining Games." (paper presented at the 1999 Workshop on the Workshop II conference, Bloomington, IN)

ORG-anising Human Security

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a workshop organised by the Oxford Research Group (ORG). The meeting was held in beautiful Oxfordshire countryside at a place called Charnley House Manor, which reminded me a lot of my home town on the other side of the world in New Zealand.

The workshop's theme was extremely topical, the vote scheduled that week in the British House of Commons on the United Kingdom's Trident nuclear deterrent, and MPs from each of the three major parties in the Commons joined us at the meeting after the vote to explain their positions. The meeting was also a good opportunity for informal trust building, something that in the DHA project we're always banging on about as important. For my part, it was good to be plonked amongst a largely different crowd to that of the Geneva disarmament community.

Mary Midgely was one person at the ORG meeting with insights that impressed me deeply. Mary modestly describes herself as a "free-lance philosopher", but she has many decades of deep thought and experience in pressing issues as diverse as nuclear disarmament and the ethical treatment of animals. On the first evening of the workshop, she was asked to briefly share with us a few of her general observations about human security. The meeting followed the Chatham House rule, which prevents me quoting precisely what she said, but fortunately she furnished me with a couple of different texts that capture the flavour of a couple of the many fascinating points she made. For example:

"There is an immense difference between what may be called the front view and the back view of any weapon. Weapons are not just tools. They are powerful symbols carrying messages that go far beyond the conscious intentions of those who carry them. This is why what is meant as deterrence often turns out to act as provocation. The owner, who is, so to speak, sitting quietly behind his machine-gun sees it merely as a comfortable defensive shield. He just innocently puts it (as it were) in his front window and sits down behind it to read Proust. But the passers-by who come within the range of it don't see it in the same way at all. They tend to assume that, if he has taken the trouble to buy the thing, he probably has a use for it, and that he may already have some idea what that use will be. The owner can, of course, tell them reassuringly that the gun actually doesn't mean anything at all, that it is just a harmless, neutral umbrella of a kind everybody needs. But, in so far as the passers-by believe this they are liable to imitate him. They may then go off and order umbrellas for themselves, thus giving rise to a lot of misunderstanding.

"Part of the trouble here stems from the awkward fact that human beings, unlike other animals, put their threats in permanent form. They use weapons, buildings, written words. Unlike the noises and gestures used by other species, these things don't go away when the occasion of anger is past. They stop around and continue to send out menacing messages to those around them."
(Mary Midgely, "What do we mean by security?")

Understanding the profound importance of the impact others have on our perceptions and behaviour, as well as vice versa, is deeply relevant in a world in which we're told from many quarters of the need for various umbrellas, whether against nuclear attack, ballistic missiles or germ warfare.

Mary highlights the risks involved in environments in which the signals we send and receive take on an institutional dimension. NATO's pain in recent years has been in part due to the challenges in reinventing a role for an institution founded to repel a Soviet invasion during the cold war, when perceptions of threat have since changed so much. It's understandable that Russian suspicions persist.

Moreover, it's doubtful that if nuclear weapons had only been invented recently in a post-cold war world that the powers with this technology would see the need to produce the huge stockpiles the United States and Russia possess today thanks to an earlier superpower rivalry. But these huge stockpiles continue to send threatening signals, and - worse - have become badges of prestige and even bargaining chips.

As someone who has lived in Wellington, one of the windiest capital cities in the world, I'd add the observation that there are situations in which the best umbrellas only provide a false sense of security and are rendered useless by conditions. Or worse, you could find yourself carried Mary Poppins-like, into the air and swept out over Cook Strait.

Maybe, in a turbulent world, umbrellas aren't our best protection.


John Borrie