Diplomacy in Context:Canada, New Zealand and Australia and humanitarian arms control treaty-making

Since the 1990s, states have negotiated three trail-blazing multilateral treaties on conventional weapons. The 1997 Mine Ban Treaty outlaws anti-personnel landmines. The 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions bans cluster munitions. The 2013 Arms Trade Treaty regulates and increases transparency in arms exports and imports. The negotiating processes that produced these treaties broke new ground in a number of ways. First, they explicitly focused on minimising the humanitarian impact of weapons while pursuing the goal of disarmament. Second, small and medium countries made pivotal contributions. Third, they generated new forms of multilateralism, in which coalitions of states and civil society actors creatively adapted procedural design to combine substantive expertise with lived experiences to reach negotiated outcomes adopted by majorities of UN member states. This thesis examines the significant roles that Australia, Canada and New Zealand played in developing these treaties. In some instances, they helped to strengthen these humanitarian arms control regimes as part of a core group of states championing negotiations. At other times, they played a less engaged role. On occasion, they even slowed progress. The thesis interrogates two research questions that flow from the contributions these three countries made to the treaty-making processes that created these three treaties. First, why do states engage in treaty-making in humanitarian arms control? Second how do they shape negotiating processes? This thesis argues that a variety of factors determine why and how states shape conventional weapons negotiations. These include developments and dynamics in six distinct yet interlinked sites of diplomatic activity. The internal negotiating context draws in three strands of diplomatic activity, radiating out from the negotiating table to activity within negotiating rooms and extending to the corridors of diplomatic venues. Externally, treaty-making occurs against the backdrop of globalised, street-level activism, state-led advocacy by diplomats in multilateral forums, and policy-making in capital cities. In all three countries studied in this thesis, the “in capital” contextual layer proved to be the most significant driver for championing or blocking a conventional weapons negotiation process. Alignment between three dimensions is particularly important in determining a country’s negotiating trajectory, namely political priorities, policy objectives and alliance partners’ preferences. To understand why and how Canada, New Zealand and Australia shaped conventional weapons treaty-making, this inductive thesis adopts a comparative case study approach using process tracing. It analyses the treaty-making practice of each country in relation to the evolution of each treaty. This thesis explores how different layers of context have influenced engagement in treaty-making in these countries. It then focuses on the different diplomatic strategies and tactics that have led towards and away from treaty-making within these countries. Three case study chapters focus on cases of championing by each state, addressing the contextual elements that enabled championing and how this translated into diplomatic activity. The fourth case study chapter examines cases where these states did not champion treaties, identifying changes in contextual factors and in diplomatic activity.

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