‘A serious threat to peace, reconciliation, safety, security’: An effective reading of the United Nations Programme of Action
Evaluations of the 2001 Conference on the illicit trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons and the Programme of Action (PoA) which it produced cover the gamut from success to failure. This essay does not seek to explain the success or failure of the Conference, nor does it look forward to the 2006 Conference and beyond to see what possibilities there are for global public policy on SALW. It is concerned, rather, with the topography of the issue which will come to the table in 2006. By means of Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘effective history’, the essay investigates the problem that the PoA has produced. It shows how that problem is constituted around two key features: small arms and light weapons as a particular category of technology, and the division between the licit and illicit trade. It demonstrates both the contingency of this framing and the effects that it has produced. In particular, it shows how this framing makes possible a set of ‘proliferation control’ practices similar to those applied to other forms of military technology, and how it masks forms of gun violence, particularly those directed against women.
Controlling the Shadow Trade
From tackling illicit flows of small arms to combating nuclear smuggling, the shadow trade has become a central target of attempts to control the means of violence. This article argues that much of this practice and literature is framed in unhelpful terms that posit two distinct worlds, an upperworld and underworld, that separates illicit flow networks from the familiar world of state security policy. This implies that the possibilities for controlling the shadow trade are limited or require expansive and expensive controls. The article then examines the formation of illicit flow networks, drawing on examples including narcotics, small arms, nuclear materials, nuclear technology, major conventional arms, dual use technologies, and chemical weapons precursors; and finds that state and hybrid actors rather than extensive private networks are constitutive of illicit networks in many ways. It concludes by reclaiming hope for controlling the means of violence in this hybridity.
A preliminary account of a new tyrannosauroid theropod from the Wessex Formation (Early Cretaceous) of southern England
Abstract A new genus and species of coelurosaurian theropod dinosaur from the Wessex Formation (Early Cretaceous, Barremian) of the Isle of Wight, England, is described and named. Distinctive characters of the premaxilla, its dentition, maxilla and nasals allow it to be diagnosed. The teeth in the premaxilla are D-shaped in cross-section and the nasals are fused. The hands are elongate and slender and the hindlimbs are gracile. Lack of element fusion elsewhere in the skeleton suggests that it is a subadult. Numerous character states are shared with tyrannosaurids but the new taxon appears to be excluded from the group that comprises aublysodontine and tyrannosaurine tyrannosaurids. We conclude that the taxon is a basal tyrannosauroid and as such it is one of the earliest and (with the exception of some teeth and an isolated ilium from Portugal) the first from Europe. Implications for tyrannosauroid biogeography and evolution are discussed. The animal was part of an unusual taphonomic assemblage in which some elements were partially articulated while others were scattered or broken.