Biting the Bullet? Assessing the Genuine Advancement of Human Security in the Arms Trade Treaty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Arms Trade Treaty is hailed as a historic achievement in advancing human security by requiring states to put human lives over profit in decisions about conventional arms sales. In this thesis, I critically examine this claim. First, I assess the extent to which the ATT text represents a genuine advancement of human security, and second, I consider whether the ATT's operationalization is likely to change states' priorities in arms transfer decisions. Through a textual analysis of the ATT and case studies of the arms control experiences in the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Canada, I argue that the ATT does not genuinely advance human security and further that it is unlikely to have a positive impact in practice. Although the ATT advances both a human security and state security narrative a dissonance exists between the human security approach in the preamble and legal text. While the preamble takes a maximalist human security approach, the legal text only advances a minimalist human security account in the export controls that only prohibit transfers in cases where the item might be used to commit mass atrocities. The export assessments only ask states to consider the transfer's potential in contributing to "serious" violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law. Second, regardless of the states' rhetorical commitment to human security principles and the existence of national laws to protect against such transfers, domestic backdrops explain why the US, Russia, the UK and Canada alike transfer arms to states that violate human rights. Thus, these domestic factors create a policy practice discrepancy and suggest that the ATT's minimal human security advancements, whether ratified or not, is unlikely to have a positive impact on the practices of states.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".