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Abstract
Almost across the board, recent studies of small arms proliferation and policy in Africa seem to have disengaged from historical data and analysis. This article contextualizes current debates on small arms and how they relate to the African continent, by revisiting historical data and analysis. The article draws on the relatively large literature on firearms in African history from the slave trade to early independence to offer new ways of thinking about small arms imports, the impact and prospects for control. Despite the richness of historical studies, they tend to be treated as historical conditions, not assessed for their implications for the current small arms regime. Reflecting on the historical sequence, it appears as if the situation today resembles that of the beginning of the 20th century. Enforcement of local leadership is often weak and the arms trade is relatively large and liberalized. This review finds that historical conditions and structures are built into Africa's current arms control architecture, posing significant challenges for effectiveness and legitimacy. The large scale of old and obsolete small arms frequent in sub-Saharan Africa suggests that weapon destruction programmes, rather than marking, recordkeeping and safe stockpiling of old stocks or recovered weapons, would often be more manageable and offer greater improvements in local security. The positive aspects of external influences on African sub-regional arms control regimes in terms of financial and technical support should be carefully weighed against the risk of reinforcing old patterns.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author thanks the editors at Contemporary Security Policy and the two anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments.
Notes
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43. Ibid., p. 7, p. 9.
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58. Ibid., p. 190.
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88. Cooper, Humanitarian Arms Control (note 16), p. 146; Krause and Macdonald, Regulating Arms Sales (note 73), pp. 711–2.
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94. Ibid., p. 30.
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101. East Africa protectorate No. 348, Government House, Nairobi, British East Africa, 24 June 1911.
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117. Ibid., p. 433.
118. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, The Arms Trade with the Third World (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1971), p. 94.
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123. Daudi Chwa Kabaka we Buganda, Office ya Sabasaja Kabaka, No. 2/3/G/Pt.II, 6 Jan. 1933.
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128. Nene Mburu, ‘Firearms and Political Power: The Military Decline of the Turkana of Kenya 1900–2000’, Nordic Journal of African Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2001), p. 155.
129. Ibid., p. 156.
130. William Brown, The European Union and Africa: The Restructuring of North-South Relations (New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2002), p. 32.
133. Imports to Ivory Coast, all countries, 1995–2012, http://nisat.prio.org/Trade-Database/Researchers-Database/ (accessed December 2014).
134. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, The Arms Trade with the Third World (note 118), p. 16, p. 50.
135. Ibid., p. 52, p. 221.
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137. Wesselin, Divide and Rule (note 80), p. 4, p. 361, p. 364, p. 373.
138. Daniel Bach, ‘Regionalism Versus Regional Integration: The Emergence of a New Paradigm in Africa’, in Jean Gruel and Wil Hout (eds), Regionalism Across the North-South divide (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 157.
139. Craft and Smaldone, Political Violence (note 11), p. 696.
140. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 16.
141. Ibid., p. 18.
142. Bach, Regionalism Versus Regional Integration (note 138), pp. 158–9.
143. Ibid., pp. 161–2.