‘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.
Laudable Failure
F Under Secretary of State John Bolton, the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Illegal Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons was a personal triumph. Speaking for less than ten minutes on the opening day, 9 July 2001, he clearly explained that the United States would not tolerate any of the visionary proposals under consideration; nor would it accept any recommendations that departed significantly from the status quo, and it would certainly not permit small arms to become a major issue of concern for the UN. He did not challenge the motives of the conference, however, which he praised as “laudable.” Nor did he dispute that there are over 550 million guns in circulation, that they cause over 300,000 deaths every year, or that their spread exacerbates the dangers of crime, secessionism, and ethnic warfare.1 Instead, he stripped the conference of its agenda, its goals, and any trace of hope. When he stepped down from the speakers’ podium, the conference was, for all practical purposes, completely over. The magnitude of Bolton’s words is even more profound in light of their own triviality. Bolton was delegated to represent the United States because his superiors did not want to waste their
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1