Controlling Small Arms

Even though impacts generated by the widespread availability and ongoing use of small arms and light weapons have not reached a magnitude sufficient to radically reorder contemporary world affairs, awareness of the nature and extent of these impacts has compelled some international actors to take decisive action. Damien Rogers examines how the international community has responded to the challenge of controlling small arms and light weapons since the early 1990s. Using a postinternationalist analytic framework, he specifically focuses on the maturing relationships between particular actors of world affairs and the nascent interconnectivity between their strategies for, and approaches toward, controlling these weapons. Furthermore, the book identifies ways in which the captains of small arms industry, arms brokers and chief users of these weapons are able to mitigate, resist or elude the intended effects of those responses.

This edited volume takes stock of the state of research and policy on the issue of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW), ten years after the UN first agreed to deal with the problem. The end of the Cold War originated a series of phenomena that would subsequently come to dominate the political agenda. Perhaps most symptomatic of the ensuing environment is the marked escalation in the scale and dynamics of armed violence, driven by the proliferation of SALW. Events in Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia seared into global consciousness the devastating effects of this phenomenon, and of the necessity to engage actively in its limitation and prevention. This edited volume explores and outlines the research and policy on the SALW issue at this critical juncture. In addition to providing a detailed telling of the genesis and evolution of SALW research and advocacy, the volume features a series of essays from leading scholars in the field on both advances in research and action on SALW. It reflects on what has been achieved in terms of cumulative advances in data, methodology and analysis, and looks at the ways in which these developments have helped to inform policy making at national, regional and international levels. Alongside situating and integrating past and present advances in advocacy and international action, Controlling Small Arms also outlines future directions for research and action. This book will be of much interest to students of small arms, peace and conflict studies, peacebuilding, security studies and IR.

First published in 1999, the papers collected in this volume were originally prepared for four workshops organized by the UN Department for Disarmament Affairs to inform the work of the Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms. These workshops were held during 1995-96. Some of the authors updated their papers for publication in early 1998. Lora Lumpe, senior fellow with the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers in Oslo and Tamar Gabelnick, Acting Director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, DC edited the presentations for this book.

A common feature of conflict in the 1990s is death and suffering from small arms and light weapons. The global diffusion of assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades, which can be easily carried by an individual or transported by a light vehicle, has greatly intensified the violence of conflicts in countries around the world. This book represents the perspectives of the foremost specialists on light weapons, and it surveys the wide range of policy options open to the international community. These include export and import controls, law enforcement strategies to break up black markets, collection and destruction of weapons following the end of conflict, and efforts to illuminate how small arms and light weapons make their way to the killing grounds of the 1990s.

This book critically examines the nexus between arms availability and armed violence.

This book deals with the proliferation of SALW and their unregulated trade and transfer across borders.