Managing the global problems created by the conventional arms trade: an assessment of the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms.

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Managing the global problems created by the conventional arms trade: an assessment of the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms.

One of the first global security problems to emerge in the post-Cold War period was the excessive and destabilizing accumulation of conventional weapons. The only truly global instrument to emerge to cope with this was the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms. This article is an assessment of how this transparency and confidence-building measure has contributed during its ten-year existence to the management and global governance of the negative consequences of the arms trade. The Register has developed an important norm and made arms transfers more transparent. But it still has a long way to go before it can play its inherent role in establishing a cooperative security regime that would address excessive and destabilizing arms buildups. KEYWORDS: conventional arms trade, United Nations, Register of Conventional Arms, transparency, confidence building, cooperative security.

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At the end of the Cold War and throughout the 1990s, the international community began to seriously address an emerging set of global problems--disease, pollution, violations of labor rights, gender inequality, HIV/AIDS, poverty, injustice, inequitable access to resources--that were increasingly understood to be the result of the increasing globalization that accompanied the collapse of the bipolar international system. Phrases such as new world order, global governance, and managing global issues were increasingly being used to describe how the world was organizing to deal with these problems. Like all global social conditions or problems, the negative consequences of the arms trade must be managed. (1)

Surprising to many, this movement toward global solutions also took place in an important dimension of international security: reducing and preventing the negative effects that accompany the proliferation, availability, and misuse of military weapons. Cooperation among states increased in the area of weapons of mass destruction (WMD): the Chemical Weapons Convention was signed in 1993 and entered into force in 1997; the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was indefinitely extended in 1995; the General Assembly, by resolution in 1996, adopted the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; serious negotiations resumed aimed at developing a verification regime for the Biological Weapons Convention; and the International Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation, known as the Hague Code of Conduct, was agreed in 2002. Concomitantly, at the other end of the weapons spectrum, a treaty banning antipersonnel landmines was signed in 1997; the state parties of the Convention on...

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