Leashing the Dogs of War: Arms Control from Sovereignty to Governmentality*

Abstract

The progressive development of measures to control weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s and 1990s moved arms control beyond a sovereign conception, towards a larger logic of governmentality that reaches deep into the domestic affairs of states and involved forms of regulation and control that went far beyond inter-state agreements to regulate their military competition. The article first focuses on the larger historical process of controlling arms, understood as a technology of social and political control designed to manage and channel the use of violence both within and between states. In this sense, the Cold War arms control paradigm represented both a shift in, and continuity with, historical arms control experiences. But by representing itself as a set of instrumentally-rational techniques for managing conflict, arms control throughout the Cold War normalized a particular set of practices as the only proper way of dealing with a subset of the larger issue of how to ‘control and regulate the possession and use of the means of violence’. Many contemporary security-building practices that are not thought of as arms control share its same logic, but move towards a more governmental mode of exercising the control in arms control, focusing as much on institutions and individual wielders of violence as on the instruments of violence themselves.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Silvia Cattaneo and participants in the York University (Toronto) and New York workshops, and the helpful reviewers of Contemporary Security Policy for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

*I borrow the title of this article from Chester Crocker et al., Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in a Divided World (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007).

Hedley Bull, ‘Arms Control and World Order’, International Security, Vol. 1 No. 1 (Summer 1976), pp. 3–16; Patrick Morgan, ‘Arms Control: A Theoretical Perspective’, Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 8 No. 1 (Autumn 1979), pp. l06–14; Stuart Croft, ‘In Defence of Arms Control’, Political Studies, Vol.44, No.5 (1996), pp.888–905.

Although some authors have suggested there is one. See Michael Sheehan, Arms Control: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); see also Eric Heering and Barry Buzan, The Arms Dynamic in World Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1998); and Stuart Croft, Strategies of Arms Control: A History and Typology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

Emanuel Adler, ‘The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control’, International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Winter 1992), pp.101–145. See also Emanuel Adler, ‘Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security: A Thirty Year Retrospective and a New Set of Anticipations’, Daedalus, Vol. 120, No. 1 (Winter 1991), pp.1–20.

See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.87–114, especially 96–102.

As Foucault puts it, governmentality is a form of power one central aspect of which is the ‘institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics … that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument’. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (note 4), p.108.

See, for example, Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending, Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999).

I understand ‘normalization’ in the Foucauldian sense as a practice of constructing an ideal vision of proper conduct against which alternatives forms of behaviour are judged. Hence the concept and practice of ‘arms control’ was a normalizing practice that generated a coherent set of rational ideas of the proper way to understand and to regulate violent (or potentially violent) conflicts. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp.183–4 and passim.

See, for an overview, the historical case studies in R. D. Burns (ed.), Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament, vol. II (New York: Scribner, 1992), pp.537–748; Croft, Strategies of Arms Control (note 2), pp.20–31.

See, for example, Rajesh Basrur, Minimum Deterrence and India's Nuclear Security (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Muthiah Alagappa (ed.), The Long Shadow (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), for discussions of the way in which South Asian states in particular, and Asian states in general, had to develop and publicly articulate a regional ‘deterrence policy’ and national nuclear strategies that were seen as rational and comprehensible (‘normalized’) to other nuclear weapons states.

See Richard Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Andrew Latham, ‘Global Cultural Change and the Transnational Campaign to Ban Antipersonnel Landmines: A Research Agenda’, YCISS Occasional Paper No. 62 (Toronto: York University, October 2000). The full name of the CCW is the ‘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.’

The ban on dum-dum bullets, for example, did not affect the deployment of machine guns; the ban on anti-personnel land mines does not deal with other effective forms of killing (informal explosive devices), and so forth. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

Jonathan Joseph, ‘The Limits of Governmentality: Social Theory and the International’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 16, No. 2 (June 2010), pp.223–4.

The 2010 Protocol to the ‘Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms’ includes, for example, 22 pages of details on the nature and scope of inspection activities. See the document on the US Department of State's website: http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/140047.pdf

Joseph Harahan and John Kuhn, On-Site Inspections under the CFE Treaty (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, On-Site Inspection Agency, 1996), provides a detailed account of exactly what this involved.

Ann Florini, ‘The Evolution of International Norms’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3 (September 1996), p.381.

For details see the United States Chemical Weapons Convention website at http://www.cwc.gov/. For details on UNSCOM and UNMOVIC see respectively: http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/ and http://www.unmovic.org/

As Schelling and Halperin put it, arms control encompassed ‘all the forms of military cooperation between potential enemies in the interest of reducing the likelihood of war, its scope and violence if it occurs, and the political and economic costs of being prepared for it’. Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961), p.2. See also Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race (New York: Praeger, 1961).

John Mueller, ‘Think Again: Nuclear Weapons’, Foreign Policy, 4 January 2010, citing a 1998 Brookings Institution study, at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/think_again_nuclear_weapons. Of course, this rests on a counter-factual that the alternative ‘wish-lists’ of various military bodies, especially in the 1960s would not have been authorized or affordable. Some scholars would defend McNamara's Defense Department as having been more conscious of economic and cost considerations than their opponents.

For a brief discussion of this see Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.109–18.

Jeffrey Larson (ed.), Arms Control: Cooperative Security in a Changing Environment (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2002), p.3. See also Marek Thee, ‘Arms Control: The Retreat from Disarmament, the Record to Date and the Search for Alternatives’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1977), pp.95–114.

For Larsen, for example, ‘Arms control can be defined as any agreement among states to regulate some aspect of their military capability or potential. The agreement may apply to the location, amount, readiness, and types of military forces, weapons, and facilities’. Larson, Arms Control: Cooperative Security (note 20), p.1. See, also Coit Blacker and Gloria Duffy (eds), International Arms Control: Issues and Agreements (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986, second edition), p.3.

It should be pointed out that while the INF treaty eliminated the intermediate land-based missiles, it did not include the destruction of the nuclear warheads and guidance systems. See Lynn Davis, ‘Lessons of the INF Treaty’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Spring 1988), pp.720–34.

See the retrospectives of Robert McNamara, ‘Blundering into Disaster: The First Century of the Nuclear Age’, The Brookings Review, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Spring 1987), pp.3–9; Robert McNamara, ‘Apocalypse Soon’, Foreign Policy, 148 (May–June 2005), pp.29–35.

Barry Blechman and Robert Powell, “‘What in the Name of God is Strategic Superiority’”, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Winter, 1982–1983), pp. 589–602.

This meant that an additional increment of defensive capability had to be less costly than the offensive capabilities that could overcome it. See Strobe Talbott, Master of the Game (New York: Knopf, 1988); Craig Eisendrath, Melvin Goodman, and Gerald Marsh, The Phantom Defense: America's Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), p.16.

Robert McNamara certainly said this publicly, as well as in his writings; see also Barack Obama, ‘Remarks By President Barack Obama, Hradcany Square, Prague, Czech Republic, 5 April 2009’, Speeches and Remarks, (Washington, DC: Office of the Press Secretary, 2009), at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-prague-delivered

Rudolph Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1997).

See, for example, Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1958), on the prospects for limited nuclear war. He later moved away from this position.

See, on this, the debate between ‘proliferation optimists’ and ‘proliferation pessimists’ summarized in David Karl, ‘Proliferation Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers’, International Security, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Winter, 1996–1997), pp.87–119.

See for example, Ray Acheson, ‘The Conference on Disarmament in 2009: Could do Better’, Disarmament Diplomacy, No. 91 (Summer 2009), at http://www.acronym.org.uk/dd/dd91/91cd.htm

For a parallel account, but not one resting on notions of sovereignty and governmentality, see Amanda Moodie and Michael Moodie, ‘Alternative Narratives for Arms Control: Bringing Together Old and New’, The Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2010), pp.301–21.

The language of ‘humanitarian disarmament’ has notably been used by the Norwegians. See Minister of Foreign Affairs Jonas Gahr Støre, ‘Disarmament as a Global Challenge’, speech to the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Berlin, 22 June 2010, at: http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/ud/aktuelt/taler_artikler/utenriksministeren/2010/disarmament_change.html?id=609548. The language has also been used by Europarliamentarians and NGOs. See also John Borrie and Vanessa Martin Randin (eds), Alternative Approaches in Multilateral Decision Making: Disarmament as Humanitarian Action (Geneva: UNIDIR, 2005); Simone Wisotzki, ‘Between Morality and Military Interests: Norm Setting in Humanitarian Arms Control’, PRIF Report no. 92 (Frankfurt: Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, 2010).

Schelling and Haperin, Strategy and Arms Control (note 17), p. 3.

See, for a perfect example, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Anti-personnel Landmines Friend or Foe? (Geneva: ICRC, 1997), especially pp.40–51.

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1994). See also Janice Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extra-territorial Violence in Early Modern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Andrew Linklater, ‘The “Civilizing Process” and the Sociology of International Relations’, International Politics, Vol.41, No.1 (2004), pp.3–35.

Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

See, for a useful overview, Tony Karon, ‘The Bomb-Iran Debate from Hell’, Mother Jones, 24 August 2010, at: http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/08/bomb-iran-debate

Astri Suhrke and Ingrid Samset, ‘What's in A Figure: Estimating Recurrence of Civil War’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2007), pp.195–203.

Robert Muggah, ‘Introduction: The Emperor's Clothes’, in Robert Muggah (ed.), Security and Post-Conflict Reconstruction (London: Routledge, 2009), pp.6–8.

Robert Muggah, ‘Chapter 10: Managing “Post Conflict Zones”: DDR and Weapons Reduction’, in Small Arms Survey 2005: Weapons at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.267–301; Escola de Cultura de Pau, Análisis de los Programas de Desarme, desmovilización y reintegración (DDR) existentes en el mundo Durante 2005 (Barcelona: ECP, Febrero 2006), at: www.escolapau.org/castellano/programas/ddr.htm; Escola de Cultura de Pau, DDR 2008: Analysis of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) Programmes in the World During 2007. (Barcelona: ECP, 2008), at: http://escolapau.uab.cat/english/programas/ddr.htm. For a critical view, see Jeremy Weinstein and Macartan Humphreys, ‘Disentangling the Determinants of Successful Demobilization and Reintegration’, Working Paper 69, Center for Global Development, Washington, DC, September 2005.

E. Zawels et al., Disarmament and Conflict Resolution Project – Managing Arms in Peace Processes: The Issues (Geneva: United Nations, 1996), iii. The project published volumes on Cambodia, Namibia, Haiti, Somalia, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Liberia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.

United Nations, Integrated Disarmament Demobilization Reintegration Standards (IDDRS) (New York: United Nations, 2006), at: http://www.unddr.org/iddrs/framework.php

For further discussion, see Keith Krause, ‘Governmentality without Government: (Re)-establishing the Monopoly of Violence in Post-Conflict Contexts’, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, March 2010.

For a libertarian perspective on this, see David Kopel et al., ‘Human Rights and Gun Confiscation’, Quinnipiac Law Review, Vol.26, No.1 (2008), pp.385–438.

OECD, OECD Handbook on Security System Reform (SSR): Supporting Security and Justice (Paris: OECD, 2007), at: http://www.oecd.org/document/32/0,3343,en_2649_33693550_45884768_1_1_1_1,00.html

Ibid, p.5. The report also claims this as an internationally-established definition.

Didier Bigo, ‘Globalized (in)Security: the Field and the Ban-opticon’, in Laurent Bonelli et al. (eds), Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes: The (In)security Games (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006), p.5.

OECD, OECD Handbook on Security System Reform (note 45), pp. 28–40. A full discourse analysis is beyond the scope of this paper, but the recurrent use of certain language demonstrates the liberal bias. For example: ‘The word “reform” may be alienating to many local partners and can itself be a source of resistance. In order to foster a supportive political environment, talk of “development” or “professionalisation” may be better received. Emphasizing the objective of helping security and justice institutions deliver a better service could also be useful.’ p. 33.

Ibid., p. 33.

See Thomas H. Buckley, ‘The Washington Naval Limitation System: 1919–1939’, in R. D. Burns (ed.), Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament, vol. II (New York: Scribner, 1992), pp. 639–656. France and Italy had an effective ratio of 5:2 in this system.

See, for an overview, Michael Moodie, ‘Beyond Proliferation: The Challenge of Technology Diffusion – A Research Survey’, The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring 1995), pp.183–203.

See Harald Mueller and Mitchell Reiss, ‘Counterproliferation: Putting New Wine in Old Bottles’, The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring 1995), pp.143–155; Brad Roberts (ed.), Weapons Proliferation in the 1990s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). For a brief overview of the preemption debate, see Steven Welsh, ‘Preemptive War and International Law’, Center for Defense Information, 5 December 2003, at http://www.cdi.org/news/law/preemptive-war.cfm

Text from the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs website, hardly an advocacy organ. See: http://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/ArmsTradeTreaty/html/ATT.shtml. The global civil society campaign Control Arms also places emphasis on human rights abuses. See http://www.controlarms.org/en/arms-trade-treaty

For a striking example of this see Sean McFate, ‘I Built an African Army: Now Here's what it Will Take to Build Afghanistan's, Foreign Policy, 7 January 2010. See also Samuel Chan, ‘Sentinels of Afghan Democracy: The Afghan National Army’, Working Paper 128, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore, 1 June 2007.

Brad Roberts, ‘Arms Control and the End of the Cold War’, in Brad Roberts (ed.), Weapons Proliferation in the 1990s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p.247.