Matthew Breay Bolton

Thousands of people around the world are maimed and killed by landmines and unexploded ammunition every year. In this travelogue through Iraq, Laos, Cambodia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, South Sudan and New York City, the author searches for solutions to the landmine crisis and emerging autonomous weapons. He tells stories of the deminers, paramilitaries, journalists, mercenaries, diplomats, aid workers, and campaigners in and among the minefields. It is a must-read for those working to alleviate the devastation of war. Foreword by 1997 Nobel Peace Prize Co-Laureate Jody Williams.

This book explores the global politics of disarmament through emerging international relations (IR) theories of discourse and imagination. Each chapter reflects on an aspect of contemporary activism on weapons through an analogous story from literary tradition. Shahrazade, convenor of the 1001 Nights, offers a potent metaphor for the humanitarian advocacy seeking to moderate the behaviour of violent people. The author reads Don Quixote in Cambodia’s minefields, reflects on Lysistrata at Greenham Common and considers how tropes in The Tempest were enrolled in both Pacific nuclear testing and efforts to resist it. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork in communities affected by weapons and disarmament advocacy at the UN and calls for a re-enchantment of IR, alive to affect, ritual and myth.

Offers a defense of an enchanted, qualitative and discursive approach to IR theory and practice at a time when quantitative and positivist approaches are becoming increasingly entrenched

Shows how advocacy organizations and small states can influence the international political agenda on security issues through exercising discursive and symbolic power

Reveals the political agency of actors often overlooked in the analysis of international security, including advocacy organizations, small island states and activists

Occupying Political Science is a collection of critical essays by New York based scholars, researchers, and activists, which takes an unconventional look at the Occupy Wall Street movement through concepts found in the field of political science. Both normative and descriptive in its approach, Occupying Political Science seeks to understand not only the origins, logic, and prospects of the OWS movement, but also its effect on political institutions, activism, and the very way we analyze power. It does so by asking questions such as: How does OWS make us rethink the discipline of political science, and how might the political science discipline offer ways to understand and illuminate aspects of OWS? How does social location influence OWS, our efforts to understand it, and the social science that we do? Through addressing topics including social movements and non-violent resistance, surveillance and means of social control, electoral arrangements, new social media and technology, and global connections, the authors offer a unique approach that takes seriously the implications of their physical, social and disciplinary location, in New York, both in relation to Occupy Wall Street, and in their role as scholars in political science.

In the decade since the signing of the Ottawa Treaty, which banned the production and use of anti-personnel mines, governments have spent over $3 billion on clearing up and mitigating the security threat of mines, cluster munitions and other unexploded ordnance in the world’s current and former war zones. However, this flow of cash into regions dominated by violent social structures raises numerous political issues. Through detailed archival and field research, this book explores the politics behind the allocation and implementation of foreign aid by the US and Norway for demining in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Sudan. It is an essential resource for practitioners and policymakers working in the field of landmine clearance and for students and researchers of Development Studies and post-war reconstruction

The use and testing of nuclear weapons caused transnational and catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences. Legacies of more than 2,000 nuclear detonations in the territories of 15 states persist today, with serious implications for human rights and sustainable development. There is an inadequate global policy architecture for addressing the humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. However, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), adopted by 122 states at the UN in 2017, established obligations to assist victims of nuclear weapons and testing and remediate contaminated environments. Other global policymaking bodies have also mandated action on such concerns. In this review article, introducing a Special Section on ‘Addressing the Humanitarian and Environmental Consequences of Nuclear Weapons’, we provide a global overview of the facts about past nuclear weapons activities in different countries and some of the known and potential ongoing consequences of the blast, heat and radioactive energy released by past nuclear weapons detonations. In doing so, we aim to inform the development of policy around the TPNW and the gathering of further relevant information, enabling efforts to develop global humanitarian, human rights and sustainable development policy assisting communities affected by nuclear weapons.

The 2017 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was negotiated at the UN over the objections of nuclear-armed and -allied states and established a global categorical ban on nuclear weapons framed in terms of humanitarianism, human rights and environmentalism. The TPNW also placed ‘positive obligations’ on states to assist victims of nuclear weapons use and testing and remediate contaminated environments. States and NGOs from the Pacific region advocated for a strong treaty text, particularly its positive obligations. They were influenced by the region’s history as a site of nuclear weapons testing in Marshall Islands, Kiribati and French Polynesia/Te Ao Maohi; the 1985 South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone’s precedent; and earlier diplomatic efforts and activism linking denuclearization with decolonization. In doing so, Pacific and other formerly colonized states flipped the ‘standard of civilization’ script embedded in humanitarian disarmament law and applied it to their former colonizers. The paper demonstrates the agency of small states—the ‘-Pacific’ part of ‘Asia-Pacific’—in multilateral policymaking on peace and security, often overlooked in international relations scholarship. It draws on my participant observation in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning advocacy of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) during the TPNW negotiations.

In July 2017, 122 countries adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) at the United Nations in New York. Establishing a categorical prohibition, the TPNW builds on the nascent taboo against nuclear weapons, placing them in the same legal category as other pariah weapons. The TPNW culminated a global advocacy effort by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for their. ICAN’s leaders were aware of the constructivist, feminist and post-structuralist academic literature on the stigmatization of weapons. They self-consciously adopted a discursive strategy casting nuclear weapons (and those who defended them) as immoral pariahs. ICAN argued that the treaty’s power would not derive from coercive surveillance and interdiction mechanisms, but rather from its normative power (Bolton and Minor 2016; Fihn, Bolton & Minor 2017). This article uses Mary Douglas’ landmark theorization of purity and danger to explore the development of the ‘nuclear taboo’ and ICAN’s creative manipulation of discourses of nuclear pollution.

Anthropological studies of purity reveal how notions of cleanliness influence political and social life. During its 2011 Zuccotti Park occupation in Lower Manhattan, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) contested spatial and symbolic manifestations of neoliberalism by re-inserting Otherness into sanitized and privatized space. But the demonstration provoked reactions from politicians and news media that entwined discourses of cleanliness and productivity (such as Newt Gingrich's riposte to the protestors: “Go get a job right after you take a bath”). This ethnographic study argues that such representations had spatial and political effects. In particular, our account illuminates the plural agency of Occupiers, where resistance to depictions of dirt and idleness existed alongside the use of such discourses to discipline each other. We trace a discursive legacy of these events as notions of productivity and cleanliness have circulated within activist responses to 2012's Superstorm Sandy and the 2014 Flood Wall Street mobilization.

Since WWI, militaries and armed groups have used remote and autonomous explosive traps – landmines, booby traps and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – as a kind of deadly architecture to reengineer terrain inhospitable. Until recently, minefields remained analog, static, and fixed. But technological development and changes in the nature of war have made remote and autonomous violence increasingly mobile, dynamic, and robotic and, rather than being contained in a bounded Cartesian plane, diffused through the very spaces and flows that sustain civilian life. Such “unmanned” weapons are increasingly able to navigate, communicate with each other, identify targets and even kill with minimal human involvement. Mirroring broader changes in the spatial configurations of war, the architectural form of remote and autonomous killing is thus shifting from the two-dimensional minefield to multi-dimensional minespace. This poses challenges to those engaged in humanitarian efforts to demilitarize space. To illustrate these changes, the paper draws on Derek Gregory’s notion of “Everywhere War” and engages in a discursive “archeology” of the minefield as described by US Army mine, booby trap and IED warfare field manuals.

The 2013 Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) offers the first comprehensive, global and legally binding standards on the trade and transfer of conventional arms. The idea for the treaty was conceived not in the boardrooms of weapons manufacturers, nor in the assembly halls of statecraft, but rather by civil society activists and Nobel Laureates – practitioners, academics, survivors and researchers and advocates. And its robust provisions on human rights, humanitarian law and gender were championed by states often marginalized by traditional arms control. The resultant treaty is a sort of ‘platypus’ of international law – simultaneously an arms control regime, an instrument of human rights and humanitarian law and a trade agreement. Given its widespread acceptance and likely rapid entry into force, it could have a wide-ranging impact on global policy making in many issue areas. But as with any new framework of global policy, the ATT represents a compromise, recognizing the legitimacy of states' rights to trade in weapons. This special section on the ATT, written from the perspective of scholars and practitioners associated with the civil society campaign that championed the treaty, reviews the ATT's normative implications, role of NGOs and implementation challenges.

Does the 2013 United Nations (UN) Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) represent what Costa Rica's UN Ambassador called a nascent ‘Spirit of New York’ – a change in the rules of the arms control game in favor of humanitarianism and human rights? Or does it represent business as usual – the ghost of Arms Control past? We are convinced by neither the messianic claims of the ATT's most overheated boosters nor the doom-saying of its most ardent detractors. Rather we argue here that in both the ATT negotiation process and the treaty text, ‘norm entrepreneurs’ like NGOs, Middle Powers and small states have created space for global policy making based on humanitarian and human rights considerations. However, the negotiation and treaty also represent a melding of this ‘maximalist’ human security–civil society approach with UN General Assembly concerns about small arms proliferation and the ‘minimalist’ strategic and commercial interests of the major arms exporters. This hybrid pathway to the treaty's adoption offers possibilities for future global policy making on disarmament and arms control as well as other humanitarian issues.

Civil society – particularly the Control Arms coalition – played a pivotal role in imagining and campaigning for the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the first comprehensive global regulations on the trade and transfer in conventional weapons. To consider this ‘road forward’ for the ATT and civil society’s involvement in it, we have convened a conversation with three activists – from different organizations, different continents and differing points of view – who have been involved in the campaign for a robust treaty for many years.

We show how one of international relations’ founding debates – the causes of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) – offers interesting insights into current political deliberations about killer robots. We then trace how concerns about AWS moved from the margins of academia to the NGO disarmament community and finally into official diplomatic forums. We demonstrate how campaigners have resisted states’ claims to ‘know best’ about security matters, by pushing officials to answer questions about the necessity and risks of killer robots as well as the underlying social norms that guide global security policymaking.

"The philosopher Paul Virilio has said that ‘speed is the unknown side of politics’. If the international presence in Haiti is a kind of governance – providing both security (in the form of UN peacekeeping troops) and ‘social security’ (in the form of aid) – it is an expeditionary governance, at speed and at a distance. The United Nations 'LogBase' literally placed a barrier between ordinary Haitians outside the fence and the international workers who governed the flows of food, water, cash, troops and social services. Airborne meetings removed aid workers above Haitian territory, accelerating quickly away, giving new meaning to the term ‘The Humanitarian Movement.’ Now, as international attention toward Haiti wanes, drawn to other crises, NGOs are cutting staff or even packing up altogether. The complex of NGOs, UN agencies and foreign militaries that governed Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake was not bound by a firm social contract, but rather a fleeting social liaison, a humanitarian one-night-stand, here one day, gone the next. Within this context, human security was not a set of rights and entitlements claimed by citizens, but rather windfalls available briefly for ‘beneficiaries.’ If governance is globalized and fragmented across thousands of public and private entities, the commitment to provide human security becomes informal, resisting codification, backing away, step-by-step, to the ‘Exit Strategy.’

In this chapter, I examine the international aid system in post-earthquake Haiti as a form of governance, considering the implications of its structural shorttermism on human security. First, I will provide a theoretical framework by exploring the implications of Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of ‘Liquid Modernity’ for the global post-modern social contract. Second, I will explain the international aid effort in Haiti and its implications for human security. Then, I will look at several examples of ways ‘structural short-termism’ has played out in housing, education, water and sanitation, technology and volunteerism in Haiti. Finally, I will conclude with reflections on how the liquification and informalization of the social contract eroded human security in Haiti."

We use Actor-Network Theory to show how Occupy Wall Street has struggled against a complex system of dominance, incorporating public agencies, commercial companies, and technologies of social control that have functioned to contain OWS to specific spaces, surveil them, and project violence against them

With co-authors Stephen Froese (a member of the OWS Architecture Working Group during the Occupation), and Alex Jeffrey (a political geographer at the University of Cambridge), we place the Occupation of Zuccotti Park in the context of a long history of political struggle over land in Lower Manhattan. We trace OWS’s struggles to de-gentrify common space while still negotiating the architectural and urban planning challenges involved in creating a radical “micro-city” in an inhospitable environment.

"With co-authors, Emily Welty and Nick Zukowski, we describe
Occupy Wall Street in New York City as a highly diffuse and complex
organization. We show that OWS resists easy classification into simple organizational ideal types and suggest instead the loose metaphor of a “palimpsest”—a document with multiple layers of overlapping, interrelating, and clashing text. Another way OWS has confounded traditional understandings of social movements is in its apparent lack of demands.."

Risk and its management are social phenomena, constructed through dynamic political, cultural, and economic systems. Those wishing to publicize and manage the risk posed by legacy underwater munitions would benefit from an awareness of the political context in which they work. The interaction of various local, national, and global political interests will enable certain kinds of risk management action while also constraining others. This article examines such issues through a case study of politics of underwater munitions in New York City's Gravesend Bay and Narrows. The impetus to deal with these munitions has largely come from their politicization by local civilians: politicians, environmental activists, lawyers, and journalists. By contrast, risk management actions by national-level military institutions have consistently functioned to depoliticize the issue by framing it technocratically. This illustrates a common political tension in risk management. Public mobilization raises awareness of risk but may sensationalize it. Technocrats have the budgetary and technical wherewithal to deal with it professionally but resist politicization of risk and try to channel and defuse mobilization through existing institutions and programs.

This article will show how trends of globalization have transformed both the proliferation of and efforts to control small arms and light weapons (SALW). We first examine how the distribution of small arms has become more diffused, moving away from a state-centric model of ‘arms transfers’ to circulations of SALW through outsourced networks comprising a myriad of public and private actors. We then show how the post-Cold War international environment has allowed progressive norm entrepreneurs like middle powers and NGOs greater voice in determining SALW policy. Simultaneously, however, it has also allowed great power states and defense companies to benefit from the legitimacy of associating with human rights groups, ‘capturing’ the SALW policy process, particularly the Arms Trade Treaty, in a way that protects their interests. Efforts to transfer, exchange and control small arms and light weapons are thus indicative of wider global political processes in which power is diffused through multilayered networks and complexes. Exploring the policy implications, we argue that these networks enable actors to augment their power and capacity through alliances with other agents, but simultaneously constrain their scope of action and ability to control the process. This makes it more difficult for actors representing the public interest to override those acting in private or particularist interests.

On 12 January 2010, Haiti suffered literal state collapse, as thousands of buildings crumbled in the 21st century’s deadliest earthquake. Over 200,000 were killed, 300,000 injured and 1.5 million displaced. Almost 20% of federal government employees were killed. The Presidential Palace lay in ruins and 27 of 28 federal government buildings were destroyed. An estimated 4,000 prisoners escaped from incarceration. In a remaining government building a couple months after the earthquake, one could still see civil servants rolling up bed mats in the morning, as they sought nightly refuge in their offices and the surrounding compounds. One UN official described it as the worst disaster the UN had ever had to confront. In this nightmarish context, to whom should a Haitian turn for protection from violence and ‘downside risks’ ? Into the vacuum left by the implosion of the state apparatus, compounded by a sudden and overwhelming need for physical and social protection, has rushed a vast complex of global public and private actors. Street patrols, food distributions, teacher training, epidemiological surveys and child protective services are being provided by a mix of bilateral, multilateral and NGO agencies. In this paper, I explore and interrogate this emerging political system of global governance in Haiti, particularly regarding its implications for ‘human security.’

Medium-sized wealthy states – middle powers – and global civil society networks are increasingly joining forces to influence the global policy agenda on issues of international law, justice, humanitarianism and development. These middle power–NGO coalitions use the comparative advantages of both state and nonstate actors in synergistic partnerships. States represent the coalitions' interests in international negotiations and conferences, provide donor funding and offer diplomatic support. For their part, NGOs gather on-the-ground research, provide technical expertise, lobby governments, mobilise public opinion and generate media publicity. This article uses the case of the campaign to ban cluster munitions, culminating in the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, to examine the organisation, efforts and impact of such middle power–NGO coalitions.

Contemporary conflicts radically reorganize the political and economic systems of societies, empowering 'clandestine structures' built by covert action, smuggling, war profiteering, black markets and organized crime. This 'underground', eschewing transparency and rule-based politics and economics, poses an enormous danger to international peacebuilding efforts. This essay examines how intervening international agencies interact with such structures, by drawing on fieldwork researching landmine clearance programs in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Sudan. Demining agencies offer telling insights into the nexus between international agencies and clandestine structures because they often employ significant numbers of demobilized soldiers, many of whom may have links to clandestine structures, and require information, access and goods that may be controlled by such networks. Using examples from the
cases, this paper will show various attempted responses to this problem by international demining agencies, including collusion, avoidance, and building alternative structures.

Following international interventions in Bosnia-Herzegovina† and Iraq, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have played a central role in delivering humanitarian relief, encouraging participation in new systems of government, and advocating on behalf of marginalised groups. Although intervening agencies have framed such autonomous organisations as unquestionably virtuous, scholars have increasingly questioned the agency of NGOs, pointing to the constraining effects of funding and regulatory mechanisms. This paper contributes to this body of work by offering a detailed examination of legislation requiring NGOs to register with nascent state institutions. Drawing on case study material from Bosnia and Iraq, it argues that NGO registration should not be dismissed as a technical or legal matter, but that it should be embraced as a significant political practice embedded in relations of power. Registration legislation has increased the transparency of NGO funding origins and institutional practices, yet it has simultaneously acted as a barrier to smaller organisations and led to the transmission of international objectives through civil society entities.

This paper argues for a legal- ly-binding instrument on lethal autonomous weapons systems, such as an additional protocol to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.  There is a need both for a legally-binding prohibition of certain autonomous weapons and for strong positive obligations to ensure meaningful human control of the use of force rooted in International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law. The Alliance for Multilateral- ism has endorsed voluntary Guiding Principles on LAWS. Its Member States should now lead the Principles’ up- grade towards more robust international agreements.

New York City is a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (NWFZ), both as a normative stance and in fact; all nuclear weapons bases within its territory have been decommissioned and the Navy reportedly avoids bringing nuclear-armed and/or -powered ships into the Harbor. This is an impressive achievement, given the City’s role as a key node in the Manhattan Project, as a former base for nuclear missiles and as a nuclear-capable Navy homeport. In 1983, the City Council passed a resolution establishing the City as a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone and prohibiting nuclear weapons from the City’s territory. This background paper provides a historical overview of the development of New York City’s NWFZ and other relevant policy protecting New Yorkers from the humanitarian and environmental consequences of ionizing radiation. It outlines practical efforts taken, including the removal and barring of nuclear weapons from the City limits and remediation of contaminated legacy sites. This is followed by consideration of several challenges facing the NWFZ, including the continued investment of the City’s pension funds in nuclear weapons production, low public awareness of the NWFZ and the Trump administration’s unravelling of constraints on nuclear weapons. Emerging humanitarian, human rights and environmental norms on nuclear weapons offer potential models to reaffirm and revitalize the City’s nuclear-free status, notably the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), adopted by 122 governments at the United Nations in New York in 2017. Pending New York City Council legislation (Res. 976[2019] and Int. 1621[2019]) addresses policy challenges facing the NWFZ by drawing on emerging global norms, including the TPNW.

Between 1957 and 1962, the UK and USA tested 33 nuclear devices at Malden and Kiritimati (Christmas) Islands, now part of the Republic of Kiribati. British, Fijian, New Zealand and American veterans of the testing program and I-Kiribati civilians who lived on Kiritimati claim their health (as well as their descendants’) was adversely affected by exposure to ionizing radiation. Their concerns are supported by independent medical research. However, analysis of the ongoing humanitarian, human rights and environmental impact of nuclear weapons testing at Kiritimati and Malden Islands has been inadequate. The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which Kiribati has signed but not yet ratified, obligates assistance to victims and remediation of contaminated environments, including those affected by the Christmas and Malden Islands nuclear tests. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for the role of its advocacy in achieving the treaty. This report from Pace University's International Disarmament Institute documents the humanitarian, human rights and environmental harm caused by nuclear weapons tests in Kiribati, finding that:

1) 43,000 personnel participated in the UK and US nuclear weapons tests in and around Kiribati; family members and dignitaries also visited,
2) The 500 I-Kiribati civilians living on Kiritimati during the tests received little protection,
3) There are at least 48 first generation survivors in Kiribati, plus 800 children and grandchildren of survivors,
4) Many military and civilian survivors have health problems consistent with exposure to radiation; descendants also report multi-generational health problems,
5) The tests killed thousands of birds and fish. The environmental impact of the nuclear tests has not been adequately analyzed.

The report recommends that Kiribati and the international community should:

1) Sign and RATIFY the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,
2) Assess and RESPOND to the humanitarian needs of survivors, especially at Kiritimati,
3) Survey and REMEDIATE contaminated environments at Kiritimati and Malden Islands,
4) RESPECT, protect and fulfill the human rights of nuclear test survivors,
5) RETELL the stories of the humanitarian and environmental impact of the tests.

Between 1957 and 1958, Fijian soldiers participated in the nine UK nuclear weapons tests at Malden and Kiritimati (Christmas) Islands, now part of the Republic of Kiribati. Test veterans, including Fijians, and civilian survivors claim their health (as well as their descendants’) was adversely affected by exposure to ionizing radiation. Their concerns are supported by independent medical research.  Though the UK government assured coverage of Fijian troops’ service-related health problems during the tests, it has offered them no assistance or compensation. Instead, the Fiji government has stepped in to offer a one-off grant to veterans to support medical and welfare costs in 2015. The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which Fiji has signed but not yet ratified, obligates assistance to victims and remediation of contaminated environments, including those affected by the Christmas and Malden Islands nuclear tests. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for the role of its advocacy in achieving the treaty. This  report from Pace University’s International Disarmament Institute documents the humanitarian, human rights and environmental harm caused by these nuclear weapons tests, finding that:

1) 276 Fijian troops were among the 15,000 personnel who participated in the UK nuclear weapons tests in and around Kiribati; Fijian dignitaries also visited,
2) Fijian soldiers and sailors were often allocated more dangerous tasks, like dumping birds killed or blinded by the tests, and even radioactive waste, into the ocean,
3) Sixty years after the tests there are 32 surviving nuclear test veterans in Fiji, plus surviving spouses, children and grandchildren,
4) Many military and civilian survivors of the Christmas and Malden tests have health problems consistent with exposure to radiation; descendants also report multi-generational health problems,
5) The tests killed thousands of birds and fish. The environmental impact of the nuclear tests has not been adequately analyzed.

The report recommends that Fiji and the international community should:

1) Sign and RATIFY the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,
2) Assess and RESPOND to the humanitarian needs of survivors, including the Fijian veterans,
3) Survey and REMEDIATE contaminated environments at Kiritimati and Malden Islands,
4) RESPECT, protect and fulfill the human rights of nuclear test survivors,
5) RETELL the stories of the humanitarian and environmental impact of the tests.

The development, production, testing and use of nuclear weapons has had catastrophic humanitarian and ecological consequences on people and environments around the world. ‘Nuclear harm’ – the damage caused by blast, incendiary and radioactive effects of nuclear weapons use, testing and production, as well as by other nuclear technologies – poses threats to the pursuit of the  2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Due to advocacy by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), recognized by the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) established ‘positive obligations’ on affected states to assist victims of nuclear weapons use and testing and to remediate contaminated environments. To ensure that the burden does not fall unduly on affected states, the TPNW requires all states to engage in international cooperation and assistance to achieve these and the treaty’s other goals. While the TPNW does not explicitly cover all forms of nuclear harm, and the universalization of the treaty may take some time, its implementation offers the opportunity to build a normative framework and institutional architecture for humanitarian and environmental action to address nuclear harm. In implementing the TPNW’s positive obligations, states should draw on lessons learned from implementing the victim assistance, clearance and risk reduction provisions in other humanitarian disarmament treaties, including the Antipersonnel Mine Ban Treaty (MBT), Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Protocol V on Explosive Remnants of War (ERW Protocol) and the
Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM).

Current negotiations for a nuclear weapons ban treaty have revived the efforts to abolish nuclear weapons. Similar to other types of weapons, it is hoped that the stigmatization and prohibition of nuclear weapons will pave the way towards their elimination.The Draft Convention on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (DCPNW) offers a strong basis for negotiations on a global nuclear weapons ban in June and July 2017. If adopted, it would be the most significant shift in nuclear politics since the end of the Cold War and a policy victory for human security.
While finalizing the treaty text in a timely fashion, states should still seize the opportunity to enhance its human security dimensions, for instance by incorporating references to human rights and environmental law; bolstering the core prohibitions by adding an explicit prohibition on financing nuclear weapons production; and by strengthening positive obligations on victim assistance, environmental remediation and disarmament education. The final treaty should offer nuclear-armed and nuclear alliance states a pathway for engagement with and eventual accession to the agreement.

The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) offers opportunities to address the violent nexus of wildlife poaching and illicit arms trafficking. This report offers specific advice to policymakers and advocates seeking to use the framework of the ATT to assess and mitigate the risk that arms transfers will be diverted to poaching networks or exacerbate the negative impacts of militarizing wildlife protection. Advocating international and regional cooperation, the report also encourages the universalization and rigorous implementation of the ATT, as well as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and other relevant instruments, particularly in States at risk of poaching and other wildlife crime.

The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) creates opportunities to
address the effect of small arms and light weapons (SALW) proliferation on pastoralist communities in The East and Horn of Africa region and elsewhere. Policymakers and advocates can use the ATT to limit the risks of diversion of guns and ammunition to militias, gangs and cattle raiders. The ATT also offers a framework to encourage security forces to follow international human rights and humanitarian law in pastoralist communities.

The 2013 Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), negotiated and adopted at the UN in New York, offers opportunities to limit the potential for conventional weapons to be used to commit crimes against humanity, terrorism, organized crime, violations of human rights and humanitarian law and acts of gender-based violence. It currently has 90 state parties, but some states that were strong champions of the Treaty have not yet acceded to it. Many states that have joined the ATT nevertheless report they need technical assistance and training to implement the Treaty effectively.
Responding to these concerns, Pace University’s International Disarmament Institute in partnership with the Control Arms Secretariat organized the ATT Academy 2016-2017, a year-long program of education, research and training on the Treaty for carefully selected East and Horn of Africa officials and key civil society activists. This project was supported by the UN Trust Facility Supporting Cooperation on Arms Regulation (UNSCAR). In this report on lessons learned in the project, participants report that the ATT Academy provided them with in-depth knowledge of the ATT, enabling them address accession and implementation challenges in the region. Organizers learned that the ATT universalization and implementation effort will require an educational component, to share information, technical expertise and lessons learned. A targeted, intensive, longterm, in-person and contextualized program of training is better than one-off seminars. High-impact pedagogies like simulations and group discussions are often more effective than a lecture format alone.

Le Traité des Nations Unies sur le commerce des armes (TCA) présente d’importantes opportunités pour cibler les conséquences néfastes de la prolifération des armes légères et de petit calibre (ALPC) au sein des communautés pastorales en Afrique de l’Est et dans la Corne de l’Afrique, ainsi qu’ailleurs. Les responsables politiques et les
intervenants locaux peuvent utiliser le TCA afin de limiter le détournement d’armes et de munitions vers les milices, les bandes locales et les voleurs de bétail. Le TCA constitue également un cadre propice pour inciter les forces de l’ordre à respecter le droit humanitaire et les droits de l’homme dans les communautés pastorales.

Le  Traité  sur  le  commerce  des  armes  (TCA)  des  Nations  Unies
offre des  possibilités  pour cibler  le  lien  dangereux  entre  le  braconnage  des  espèces  sauvages  et  le trafic  illicite  des
armes. Ce  rapport  fournit  des  conseils aux  responsables  politiques  et aux défenseurs des espèces sauvages qui cherchent à utiliser le TCA pour évaluer et atténuer le risque que les transferts d’armes soient
détournés  ver s  des réseaux  de  braconnage  ou servent à  aggraver
les  effets néfastes de la militarisation  de  la protection de la  faune.
Tout en  encourageant  la coopération  régionale  et  internationale,  ce  rapport  prône  l’universalisation  et  la  mise  en œuvre  rigoureuse  du  TCA,  ainsi  que  de  la Convention sur  le  commerce international
des espèces  de  faune  et  de  flore  sauvages  menacées  d'extinction  (la CITES) et  d’autres instruments pertinents, tout  particulièrement  dans  les  États exposés  au  risque  de braconnage et d’autres crimes liés aux espèces sauvages.

Le Traité sur le commerce des armes (TCA) de 2013, négocié et adopté au siège de l’ONU à New York, vise à limiter l’utilisation des armes classiques dans le cadre de crimes contre l’humanité, d’actions terroristes, de criminalité organisée, de violations des droits de l’homme et du droit humanitaire, et d’actes de violences sexistes. Il compte actuellement 90 États parties, mais certains des États qui l’ont ardemment défendu n’y ont pas encore adhéré. De nombreux États signataires du TCA ont communiqué un besoin d’assistance technique et de formation pour pouvoir assurer la mise en oeuvre efficace du Traité. En réponse à ces préoccupations, en 2016–2017, l’International Disarmament Institute de Pace University, en partenariat avec le Secrétariat de la Coalition Contrôlez les armes, a mis en place l’Académie du TCA, un programme d’éducation, de recherche et de formation sur le Traité d’une durée d’un an, adressé à des fonctionnaires soigneusement sélectionnés et d’importants militants de la société civile dans la région de l’Est et de la Corne de l’Afrique. Les participants ont indiqué que l’Académie du TCA leur a permis d’acquérir une connaissance approfondie du Traité, et ainsi d’aborder les défis posés par l’adhésion au TCA et sa mise en oeuvre dans la région. De leur côté, les organisateurs ont appris que l’effort d’universalisation et de mise en oeuvre du TCA nécessiterait une composante éducative afin de partager l’information, l’expertise technique et les enseignements tirés. Un programme de formation intensif ciblé, à long terme, en personne et contextuel est mieux adapté qu’une série de séminaires ponctuels. Les pédagogies à impact élevé, comme les simulations et les discussions de groupe, sont plus efficaces que les conférences seules.

aced with recurrent political and inter-communal violence since 1992, the Catholic Diocese of Eldoret in Kenya has responded in numerous ways to alleviate, contain and end the conflicts that have divided local communities. In a new book co-published by the Diocese and Pace University’s International Disarmament Institute, Bishop Cornelius Korir follows up on the success of his 2009 book Amani Mashinani (Peace at the Grassroots), by turning his attention to reconciliation. With co-authors from the Diocese and beyond, Korir shows how reconciliation after violent conflict is a subtle, slow and often difficult process that is not just about ending observable fighting. Drawing on almost 25 years of experience with peacebuilding at the community level, Korir argues that reconciliation requires communities to recognize the worth of other, atone for injustice, heal wounds of the spirit and commit to building a non-violent, equitable and just society. While external actors can support it, sustainable reconciliation requires an intensive focus at the grassroots – maridhiano mashinani – by faith institutions and local civil society to build relationships of interdependence.
The book also offers insight into processes of disarmament at the very local level, often overlooked in global and national policymaking processes on arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament.

A rarely acknowledged irony of the post–cold war era is that it ushered in a moment when the world came closest to achieving "General and Complete Disarmament" (GCD) but, simultaneously, the concept was discursively marginalized and discredited as “unrealistic”. The sort of comprehensive disarmament envisioned by the GCD concept — reducing security forces and arsenals to no more than is needed for national safety—can now be talked about in policy circles only as something that is “done to” a former conflict zone, usually in the Global South. Reviewing the history of GCD reminds us that it was taken seriously by “serious people” and even written into international law. It allows us to pay attention to a concept that haunts the edges of our conventional wisdom about global security policy. The point is not to indulge in nostalgic “what if” counterfactuals, but to have the past challenge our present complacency and reintroduce GCD as a “thinkable thought."

There are few higher education institutions in the United States, or even in much of the world, which offer a rigorous and robust programme of disarmament education. The concept garners little attention in academia. Even within the United Nations General Assembly First Committee, on disarmament and international security, the topic receives little attention from States. Few States submit reports to the United Nations Secretary-General as requested by successive resolutions and there is scant funding available for substantive programming. The still-relevant declaration of the 1980 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Congress on Disarmament Education, which asserted that, to be “effective”, disarmament education had to “be related to the lives and concerns of the learners” and engage with “the political realities within which disarmament is sought”. This chapter provides an overview of the development of disarmament education at Pace University and then offers detail on two undergraduate initiatives: the Model United Nations program and a service learning class on the “Global Politics of Disarmament and Arms Control.” It concludes with brief reflections on making disarmament education more relevant to the “lives and concerns of the learners”, as well as global “political realities”.

This report on Bosnia and Herzegovina documents how millions in international demining funds were channelled to groups associated with indicted war criminals. The report also analyses the performance of private, profit-orientated companies competing for market share with charitable and non-profit demining groups.