‘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.
The Weapons State: Proliferation and the Framing of Security
As the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, biological, and even conventional weapons emerges as a focal point for international security, Mutimer (political science, York U., Canada) argues that both the language used to talk about weapons proliferation and the practices adopted to respond to it, define the problem in ways that promote policy responses doomed to failure. He examines the metaphors that have swarmed to the discourse in terms of the nature of the problems they construct, the various interests they create, and the identity of the actors that are constituted.
Chemosymbiotic bivalves and stable carbon isotopes indicate hydrocarbon seepage at four unusual Cenozoic fossil localities
Four unusual Cenozoic fossil localities are identified here as ancient hydrocarbon seep sites using palaeontological, petrological, and stable carbon isotope data. Late Eocene carbonate-cemented sandstone bodies in the Wagonwheel Mountains in California were previously suspected to represent ancient hydrocarbon seep sites, but the relatively high δ13Ccarbonate values (−12.2 to −5.0‰) suggest oil rather than methane seepage. The Oligocene fauna of the Elmira asphalt mine, Cuba, was previously interpreted as a mix of freshwater and marine taxa, but all species are here identified as belonging to marine groups, including the bivalve families Lucinidae and Vesicomyidae, whose extant members live largely in symbiosis with chemoautotrophic endosymbionts. A carbonate concretion from this site showed δ13Ccarbonate values as low as −32.2‰, which most likely indicates methane seepage. A previously unpublished Oligocene fossil locality in Atlantico, northern Colombia, is dominated by large solemyid, mytilid, lucinid, and vesicomyid bivalves, which most likely lived with chemotrophic endosymbionts. Seepage of biogenic methane without a significant contribution of thermogenic methane is indicated by δ13Ccarbonate values as low as −51.3‰. We confirm that the Pleurophopsis-dominated sites of the Heath Shale and Lomitos Chert in northern Peru are ancient seep sites, although the previous identification of Pleurophopsis peruviana as a vesicomyid is doubtful.