Conventional Thinking? The 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons Treaty and the Politics of Legal Restraints on Weapons in the Cold War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although it represented the first treaty to successfully regulate conventional weapons for over 70 years, the 1980 Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects (also known as the Convention on Conventional Weapons – or 1980 CCW) and its Protocols constitute a relatively unloved treaty. Largely forsaken by humanitarians and looked upon skeptically by military lawyers and state actors, the treaty is not on the whole well known (especially compared to the 1997 Ottawa Landmine Treaty) nor is the process by which it came about or through which it is reviewed particularly admired. Why is this the case? This article examines the history of this little known but significant treaty, and how a Cold War context had an impact on its’ negotiation, content and implementation. While there is no doubt that the “humanitarian politics” of weapons negotiations certainly played a role, it is clear that the treaty, negotiated and signed at a highly contentious time between the West, Soviet Bloc and the Non-Aligned Movement, was very much affected by the Cold War environment and the asymmetric wars of the period. The outcome of this process resulted in an agreement that was largely ignored until the 1990s, when it was dismissed by humanitarians as ineffective, and inspired them to create their own NGO-driven process forward which resulted in the 1997 Ottawa Antipersonnel Landmine Treaty.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".