Anna Stavrianakis

Small arms control and the reproduction of imperial relations

Small arms feature prominently on the post-Cold War international security agenda as the common factor in a range of forms of organized violence. The dominant mode of understanding is focused on human security and the links between conflict, security and development. Yet small arms control efforts are failing to live up to their promise. In attempting to remedy this, scholars argue that small arms control requires better conceptualization and operationalization. This article engages with the conceptualization of small arms control, arguing that small arms control serves to reproduce imperial relations in a number of ways. It is characterized by four key analytical themes – the blurring of the distinction between state, non-state and civilian actors; the increasingly fuzzy line between conflict and crime; the pacific nature of development; and the desirability of a Weberian monopoly on violence – that are derived from an idealized reading of the European historical experience and applied to the contemporary South. This conceptual Eurocentrism is furthered by the exclusion of wider questions of the world military order and militarism through a geographical and technological selectivity and the absence of a single analytical frame, as well as North—South hierarchies in the institutional formation of policymaking. Overall, small arms control serves to reproduce the South as a site of benevolent Northern intervention, contributing to the mutual constitution of both.

Call to Arms: The University as a Site of Militarised Capitalism and a Site of Struggle

Student protests around the UK against university involvement with arms companies raise the question of the role of the university in contemporary society. This article discusses Bristol University as an illustrative case, focusing on its relationship with arms capital through its pension schemes and the research it carries out for arms companies and the military. It then documents and analyses student resistance to this relationship on the basis of opposition to the corporatisation of higher education in general and the militarisation of science and engineering in particular. The article then discusses universities as sites of social struggle and outlines potential strategies for activist academic practice.

Legitimising liberal militarism: politics, law and war in the Arms Trade Treaty

Abstract Post-cold war efforts to knit together human rights and international humanitarian law in pursuit of tougher arms transfer control reached their apogee in the UN Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). In contrast to dominant accounts based on human security norms, I argue that a key effect of the ATT is to legitimise liberal forms of militarism. During negotiations the US and UK governments justified their arms export practices in terms of morality, responsibility and legitimacy. More broadly their arms transfer practices are explained away by reference to national regulatory regimes that exceed the standards set out in the ATT. Arms transfers to Egypt and intra-Western transfers illustrate the way these justifications and regimes serve to shield US–UK weapons transfers and use from scrutiny and accountability. Rather than signalling the victory of human security, the ATT is better understood as facilitating the mobilisation of legitimacy for contemporary liberal forms of war fighting and war preparation.

Militarism and security: Dialogue, possibilities and limits:

While attention to security has grown exponentially over the last few decades, militarism – the preparation for and normalization and legitimation of war – has not received the widespread and sustained focus it warrants in mainstream or critical circles. Rather than stake a claim for one concept over the other, however, this article – and the special issue to which it serves as an introduction – asks how we are to understand the relationship between security and militarism, both as analytical tools and as objects of analysis. We examine, first, what analytical and political work militarism and security do as concepts, and how they can be mobilized methodologically; second, what the possibilities are of fruitful exchange between knowledges produced about these concepts or practices; and, third, what the limits are of militarism and security. In the process, we address the shifts in the world that international relations and its related subfields study; shifts in the institutional framing and materiality of fields and subfields of research; and shifts in how international relations studies the world. Read together, the contributions to the special issue make the case for a reinvigorated focus on the mutual co-constitution of militarism and security.

(Big) business as usual: sustainable development, NGOs, and UK arms export policy

The UK government claims to exercise a responsible arms export policy and to be committed to considering sustainable development concerns in arms export licensing. Yet in December 2001, it granted BAe Systems a licence for the sale of a £28 million air-traffic-control system to Tanzania, one of the worlds poorest countries. This export failed the conditions of UK export guidelines in three major ways. This article explores why the government ignored its commitments, arguing that the relationship between Labour and the arms industry lies at the heart of UK export policy. A critical analysis of the development agenda shows that the issue is not simply to get the government to stick to its declared commitments, difficult as this is, as the neo-liberal development agenda promoted by the Labour government is itself fundamentally flawed. Assessing the effectiveness of NGO activity on UK arms export issues thus requires an interrogation of their vision of sustainable development as well as their critique of government actions.

When “anxious scrutiny” of arms exports facilitates humanitarian disaster

How is it that the UK government continues to export weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in the war in Yemen, despite an explicit commitment to international humanitarian law (IHL)? And how is it that the High Court recently dismissed a case of judicial review, confirming that the government was ‘rationally entitled to conclude’ that arms exports pose no clear risk to IHL in Yemen? In what follows, I explain how a flexible interpretation of risk, reliance on secret information, and deference of the Court to the executive serve to facilitate rather than restrict arms exports. The judges’ decision provides a stamp of approval to an arms export policy that has directly contributed to the deaths of thousands of civilians in Yemen. Attention to the Saudi/Yemen case shows the political and legal manoeuvring that goes into managing the contradictions in government arms export policy.

Introduction to the annual convention on "Bridging Multiple Divides"

At the annual convention on ‘Bridging Multiple Divides’, ISA President Jack Levy called for enhanced dialogue among the many vibrant research communities within international studies, a pertinent theme for a conference held in San Francisco with its own multiple communities and bridges, both physical and cultural. Whilst nearly a quarter of the conference panels were organised around the theme of bridging multiple divides, our roundtable and this section are aimed at problematising the concept of bridge-building and sounding a hesitant note that takes seriously not only the possibilities but also the limitations, and indeed the possible dangers, of bridge-building. The pieces in this roundtable are all critical, or at least wary, of the metaphor of the bridge. This metaphor, while intuitively attractive, has certain potentially problematic undertones that we should acknowledge and refl ect on seriously. First, the idea of bridging seems to be based on the assumption that two equal partners exist whose perspectives are joined together. Bridging divides also seems to imply that disagreeing sides of a debate simply need to have more conversation between them and that following adequate dialogue two equal sides ‘meet somewhere in the middle’. This is a consensus-oriented, liberal and optimistic metaphor. Missing from this call for increased dialogue is explicit recognition of the barriers to equal conversation or the limitations of such a call. Such barriers or limitations take a number of forms. They can be meta-theoretical, in that there are different forms of knowledge and competing criteria for what constitutes a valid methodological, epistemological or ontological framework, thus precluding agreement on the rules of the game. There are linguistic limitations, the most obvious example of which is when theorists and researchers talk past each other because of differences in vocabulary and conceptual basis, although we should also note the dominance of English as the language of the discipline, which itself is linked to US dominance (and status of the ISA as the ‘International’ Studies Association, as opposed to the US national section of an overarching umbrella ISA). There are sociological limitations too, associated with the social settings in which our interaction happens, contacts are made and ideas are developed. From a sociological perspective there seems to be a trend towards the physical ghettoisation of particular types of panel in the space of conference settings, not to mention the peculiarity of hosting a conference that claims to say something important about the world in a top-class hotel chain in San Francisco, just two blocks from a signifi cant concentration of homeless people. We do not often hear calls to bridge the race, class and gender divides between us as a profession and our wider societies. These limitations or barriers to bridge-building can be understood as being linked to questions of power and political practice. That is, whilst the idea of bridge-building

Playing with words while Yemen burns. Managing criticism of UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia

This survey article examines the ways in which the UK government has attempted to manage criticism of its arms exports to Saudi Arabia. Hitting the headlines since 2015 due to widespread, credible allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law committed by the Saudi-led coalition in the war in Yemen, UK arms sales are now subject to unusual levels of parliamentary, media, NGO and legal scrutiny. The article outlines the governments strategies for managing criticism in order to both deal with domestic dissent and maintain good relations with the Saudi government. Paying attention to such strategies is an important means of analysing how arms transfers are justified and facilitated, and how governments manage the contradictory pressures to both promote and restrict arms exports.