The Politics of Humanitarian Disarmament: Civil Society and the Cluster Bomb Ban

Abstract

Today’s international community is engaging in a new kind of arms control, which parts ways with past practice to privilege humanitarian concerns and civilian protections over perceived national security interests. Humanitarian disarmament has resulted in multiple multilateral agreements in recent years banning exceptionally injurious or unnecessarily harmful weapons. Existing arguments, which emphasize international pressure or norm diffusion as explicating policy change, cannot fully explain governments’ mixed reception to the humanitarian disarmament approach. They neglect the process by which persuasive action at the domestic level impacts policy-making, that can result in the legalization of new humanitarian norms. Through the examination of four states involved to varying degrees with the cluster munition disarmament process, this dissertation contributes a new theory of this domestic campaign pressure process. It shows that where civil society groups are able to run a well-resourced, organized domestic campaign that increases the issue’s salience and activate public participation in application of political leverage, disarmament policy change is likeliest to occur. States that join agreements as a result of this process do so for instrumental rather than normative reasons, but in self-imposing new weapons bans, reticent governments ultimately contribute to the humanizing of the laws of war.