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.

2009: Learn, adapt, succeed report now out...

Well, we're back for the New Year, and we hope all of our readers had happy holidays.

In November last year, we convened a two-day symposium as part of the Disarmament Insight initiative in Glion, Switzerland, entitled Learn, Adapt, Succeed: Potential Lessons from the Ottawa and Oslo Processes for other disarmament and arms control challenges, which brought together more than thirty individuals from invited governments, United Nations agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross and representatives of civil society.

My quick post about the DI symposium in late-ish November before grabbing my bag for a couple of weeks of travel to the UK, and to Oslo for the Convention on Cluster Munitions signing ceremony, didn't go into much detail about the discussions in Glion. So I'm pleased to say that a summary report of the meeting can now be downloaded in PDF format from the 'Disarmament as Humanitarian Action' project page on UNIDIR's website by following this link. (Click on the 'DI Glion seminar report' link to Open, or right-click to see the Save option, on most computers.)

The symposium was conducted according to the Chatham House Rule, which means that we didn't identify individual speakers or affiliations there. But we hope that the report conveys a sense of what was a very thought-provoking and positive discussion on a range of human security related themes and processes - involving, for instance, ongoing efforts to curb the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons, the Arms Trade Treaty, the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development and, of course, the CCW and new CCM.

This week a certain North American country will inaugurate a new President. His campaign catchphrase - "We can do it" - is already gently lampooned, even among his many supporters. Maybe, along with renewed sense of hope, there is a gnawing collective sense that no person can live it up to such expectations, especially in a country with so varied and even conflicting interests, and the massive challenges before it.

Well, maybe so. But the slogan isn't a bad one: the Ottawa and Oslo processes on anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions respectively, and to some extent progress in other arms control domains like implementing the UN Programme of Action on small arms, do show that positive change and progress on human security objectives is possible at the multilateral level, even in a pretty unpromising political environment over the last few years. It'll be interesting to see to what extent that improves with the new guy.

John Borrie

Picture by 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...

Remote Controlled Killing: Up Close and Personal

The United States’, along with other states’ armed forces have become increasingly reliant on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). UAVs have been used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan and the trend toward employing improved robotics technology and unmanned systems is likely to continue in the near future.

Seated in front of video screens thousands of miles from the theatre of operations, sensor operators and pilots remotely control UAVs by way of a games console or keyboard. Increasingly powerful cameras provide them with good optical pictures of individuals on the ground. The image resolution is high enough to distinguish between a man and a woman. After launching a missile, at the end of their shift, military personnel involved in these operations go home to their families.

Not surprisingly, this way of war-fighting and the high-resolution images of the effects of a UAV attack are taking their toll on the “remote-control warriors,” many of whom suffer from considerable mental stress. One US Colonel explains why:

In a fighter jet, ‘when you come in at 500-600 miles per hour, drop a 500-pound bomb and then fly away, you don't see what happens,’ but when a Predator [a type of UAV] fires a missile, ‘you watch it all the way to impact, and I mean it's very vivid, it's right there and personal. So it does stay in people's minds for a long time.’

High tech, it seems, has brought the reality of war closer to home again. From the perspective of International Humanitarian Law, this is preferable to high altitude bombing insofar as this technology should allow an attacker to better verify whether a target is in fact a military objective and to assess expected incidental loss of civilian lives more accurately.

It also makes war more real and less impersonal for the attacker, a change in perception that may mitigate the dehumanization of the opponent so common in today’s conflicts. Yet, this has nothing to do with the chivalrous concept of face-to-face combat that underlies many of our modern-time rules of warfare – after all, the victim hardly shares the attacker’s sense of proximity.

As to the visualization of weapons effects, both the Ottawa Process leading to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention and the Oslo Process on Cluster Munitions testify to the powerful impact of images on people’s minds. These processes were successful not least because survivors and campaigners effectively and graphically communicated the impact that mines and cluster munitions have on people.

This has led some cynics to observe that only weapons that have recently caused a humanitarian catastrophe can now successfully be banned. The 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons (Protocol IV to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons) is evidence to the contrary. Blinding lasers were banned before they were ever deployed.

Hopefully, we will not have to witness with our own eyes the effects of all emerging weapons technologies before we bring ourselves to outlaw at least those that cause superfluous injury, unnecessary suffering or affect civilians and combatants without discrimination.

Maya Brehm

Photo credit: "Help" by lette_applejuice on Flickr.

Explaining Civil Society Schizophrenia

Tuesday's post on 'civil society schizophrenia' seems to have struck a chord. Apart from some insightful comments, which you can read, I've also received a number of emails from NGOs telling me that they are as puzzled as I am at the different levels of formal integration of civil society into multilateral processes of disarmament and arms control; from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention.

Some have suggested interesting explanations for this phenomenon. For example, Piers suggests that, although the diplomats dealing with all of these issues may generally be the same people, perhaps the NGOs are not. In other words, might not different levels of acceptability (to governments) of issue-specific NGOs explain the different levels of formal civil society integration across these issue-areas? Daniel Feakes points out, however, that the same NGOs that deal with biological weapons issues also tend to deal with chemical weapons issues but that the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is decidedly more restrictive than the Biological Weapons Convention when it comes to granting formal roles to civil society.

An anonymous commentator on Tuesday's post suggested that NGOs are largely excluded from the NPT process because States with nuclear weapons consider them indispensable to their national security. While I would agree with this point as it relates to the NPT, this line of reasoning does not explain why civil society is largely excluded from the CWC process. States Parties to the CWC have renounced chemical weapons and yet NGOs still find it hard to gain access. Daniel Feakes did me the great service of suggesting where the CWC should appear in my Spectrum of Civil Society Integration, on which I now bestow the official acronym 'SCSI' (pronounced 'skuzzy'). The SCSI now looks like this (you should imagine these items stretched out on a single-line scale from left to right. As one moves along the scale from left to right, the level of formal integration of civil society increases):

Conference on Disarmament (CD) -- Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) -- Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) -- Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) -- UN Programme of Action on the Illict Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons (PoA) -- Convention on Certain Convention Weapons (CCW) -- Oslo Process on cluster munitions -- Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (Ottawa Convention)

Now that we have diagnosed civil society schizophrenia as a pandemic afflicting multilateral disarmament diplomats, how can we explain it? I do not think that one simple explanation will do justice to this phenomenon. Instead, I would propose the following set of four tentative explanations that, taken together, might give us a better understanding of what we are dealing with:

WMD vs. Conventional Weapons: A first-cut explanation derives from the blatantly obvious observation that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are located at the left of the scale while conventional weapons are on the right. The Conference on Disarmament deals with non-WMD issues as well, of course, but three of its four current priorities are WMD-related - banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, assuring non-nuclear weapon States that they will not be threatened or attacked with nuclear weapons, and nuclear disarmament. It is surely not a coincidence that the CD, NPT, CWC and BWC all appear next to one other on the left of the scale. Could it be that States 'trust' or see a role for civil society when it comes to conventional weapons issues, but not when it comes to WMD?

Potential vs. Actual Humanitarian Impact: The scale separates out, on the left, WMD with catastrophic potential humanitarian impacts from, on the right, conventional weapons with huge actual (and demonstrable) humanitarian impacts. We should of course never forget that nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have all been used in the past with devastating consequences. Chemical and biological weapons are banned, however, and nuclear weapons have not been used against humans since 1945. Guns, cluster munitions and mines, on the other hand, claim hundreds of thousands of human lives every year. They also maim, impoverish and condemn whole communities and regions to perpetual underdevelopment. Could it be that the more immediate and visible is the humanitarian impact of a weapons system, the easier it is for NGOs to integrate themselves into formal multilateral processes?

Old vs. New: It is interesting to note that, generally speaking, as one moves along the scale from left to right, the issues (or institutions) tend to become newer. The Conference on Disarmament can trace its origins back to the Ten-Nation Committee on Disarmament of the late 1950s. On the opposite end of the scale, negotiations on the Ottawa Convention were completed in 1997. The time scale does not hold for all issues - e.g. the CWC post-dates the BWC by two decades and the CCW is older than the PoA - but a general trend is recognisable. Could it be that the more recently a multilateral process on disarmament and arms control is institutionalised, the more likely it is for civil society to be well integrated?

Geneva vs. the Hague (vs. New York): In his comment on Tuesday's post, Daniel Feakes attributed the difference between civil society integration in the BWC and the CWC to "cultural" differences between Geneva and the Hague. He pointed out that, "in Geneva, despite the restrictiveness of the CD, diplomats are fairly used to interacting with NGOs and with NGOs being around in the Palais [UN building]. In The Hague, most diplomats are bilateralists rather than multilateralists and seem to be less used to having NGOs around." This, in my view, is a very important point. There are also cultural differences between Geneva and New York when it comes to the way in which multilateral disarmament processes are conducted (see our earlier posting on "Is there a Geneva / New York Divide?). Could it be that the place in which a multilateral disarmament process is created and maintained can influence the degree of integration of civil society?

This is just a first attempt to explain why we observe different levels of formal civil society integration across different issue-areas of multilateral disarmament and arms control. None of the above tentative explanations is satisfactory on its own but, taken together, they begin to make sense (at least to me).

Please do let me know, by using the comments function at the bottom of this post, if you can discern any other patterns from the SCSI tealeaves. With your help, we'll crack this one yet.

Patrick Mc Carthy


Photo Credit: 'Schizophrenia' by LILLAjija on Flickr.