Multilateral Diplomacy, Norm Building, and UN Conferences: The Case of Small Arms and Light Weapons. (Review Essay)

United Nations General Assembly, Programme of to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, 20 July 2001. Reproduced in UN document AICONF. 192/1.5. At about 6:00 A.M. on Saturday, 21 July 2001, after two weeks of difficult negotiations and several years of preparation, delegates at UN headquarters in New York agreed on the Programme of to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects (hereafter Programme of Action). (1) Consensus was reached only after the African delegations, in late-night discussions, agreed to abandon attempts to have the draft program include references to the need to regulate the civilian possession of weapons and to restrict weapons transfers to nonstate actors. The final statement by the conference president, Ambassador Camilo Reyes of Colombia, expressed his disappointment over the Conference's inability to agree--due to the concerns of state--on language recognizing the need to establish and maintain controls over private ownership of these deadly weapons, and the need for preventing sales of such arms to nonstate groups. The one was, not surprisingly, the United States. Some called the agreed Programme of Action unprecedented or path-breaking; others concluded that the conference was a failure or a missed opportunity. Press reports and public commentary told a familiar story: the last-minute intransigence of the United States (which almost blocked final consensus), the silent opposition of states such as China, the activism of the European Union (EU) and like-minded states, the persistent resistance of the Arab League to concrete measures, and the impassioned pleas of affected states-this time mainly in Africa. With some modifications, a version of this story could be told about the negotiations leading to the Kyoto protocol on global warming, the International Criminal Court, the Ottawa process leading to the treaty banning antipersonnel land mines, and other, less prominent, issues on the multilateral agenda. But for scholarly observers of the process, these are perhaps not the most interesting parts of the story. In this review essay, I examine the decade-long effort to put the issue of small arms and light weapons on the international security agenda and to develop concrete measures to deal with their deadly consequences in different contexts around the world. I use the UN small arms conference experience and focus on its Programme of Action and related documents to discuss several questions important to students of multilateralism and global governance: (2) * How should scholars understand the documentary record left by UN conferences, and how much can it tell us about multilateral diplomacy in an issue area? * Does participation in conference diplomacy shape state interests, or are such processes better understood as bargaining games between actors with exogenous or fixed interests? * What is the role of nongovernmental actors in such multilateral processes? * To what extent does the UN serve as a site for global norm building? A conventional academic review essay would not analyze the primary source material (documents) that is required to answer these questions, but rather the contributions of the existing literature. With a few exceptions, however, this literature does not yet exist in the area of small arms. For such a literature to develop it will require drawing upon research that is more fully developed in other issue areas (global environmental and human rights policy, for example) and making use of the available primary materials on small arms to advance a coherent research agenda. My focus on the Programme of Action as the centerpiece of multilateral efforts is justified by the central role such documents play in the creation and dissemination of new norms. …

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