Powers of the gun: process and possibility in global small arms control

Abstract

Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) are the mundane material of armed violence. Firearms, for instance, are used in approximately 200,000 killings in crime and conflict each year (Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 2015). ii SALW control is now central to Humanitarian Arms Control (HAC) that include bans on anti-personnel landmines (APM) and cluster munitions and emerging processes concerned with 'killer robots', depleted uranium, and nuclear weapons. Yet SALW control seeks to regulate (often minimally) rather than prohibit these weapons, with the reduction in the illicit trade (rather than the trade or use overall) being the principal aim-most recently emphasised in the inclusion of a target (16.4) of reducing illicit arms flows in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Global SALW control is not as a single unified regime but a 'regime complex' (Greene and Marsh 2012) consisting of numerous agreements at both global and regional levels. While the 2001 Firearms Protocol to the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime is legally binding, it is the politically binding 2001 UN Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects (PoA) and related instruments that is most prominent. These, and many regional agreements, have produced widely varying 'norms' in different areas: with stronger and more detailed forms of action on the management of stockpiles and surplus arms, arms brokering, and marking and recordkeeping than on issues of transparency, and failed attempts to incorporate issues of civilian gun ownership or to ban arms transfers to non-state actors (Garcia, 2006). As it has developed it has forged links with other areas of practice such as Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR), Security Sector Reform (SSR), wider armed

Operations of power in autonomous weapon systems: ethical conditions and socio-political prospects

“…Opposition to such humanitarian endeavours has in most cases also principally lied with 'a handful of weapons-dependent governments' (Johnson, n.d.). To be more specific, roughly the same few have also opposed severe restrictions on APL, CM, small arms and nuclear weapons (Krause 2002, p.256;Marks 2008;Hynek 2018b;Bourne 2019;Johnson, n.d.). The following section will show how structurally disadvantaged actors might be able to overcome gaps in politico-economic power.…”