This volume seeks to start a revival of the field of disarmament law scholarship. Law is a fundamental component of disarmament, yet today, most perspectives on the wide range of disarmament issues that exist come primarily from political, diplomatic and public advocacy angles. The aim of this book is to revive the field of disarmament law building on earlier, important and still relevant contributions by international lawyers to the subject. The collection brings together international scholars on various aspects of disarmament. The contributions range across a variety of weapons types, adopt different approaches - doctrinal, historical and critical - to the issues being discussed and taken together, constitute a snapshot of the ideas, concerns and issues that currently occupy disarmament law scholars. The book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the area of disarmament.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine has in many respects set back post-Cold War improved relations between Russia, the United States, and Europe. The continued war in Syria threatens the security and stability of many countries in the Middle East and attacks by ISIS and other terrorist organizations are causing increased fear and instability in Iraq and in neighbouring countries. In many areas negotiations on disarmament and arms control are at a standstill. In Disarmament under International Law, John Kierulf examines and discusses how disarmament, arms control, and non-proliferation of both conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction are regulated in existing treaties and conventions. From his perspective as a former disarmament negotiator, Kierulf explains the United Nations’ disarmament machinery and procedures, and describes the UN’s essential role in promoting disarmament. Underlining the continued and serious threat posed by nuclear weapons, Kierulf appeals for increased and effective international efforts to reduce their number and ultimately eliminate them. Presenting information and analysis on a comprehensive range of issues, Disarmament under International Law is an essential guide for anyone interested in gaining knowledge about the current state of international security.

This book analyses the politics of the humanitarian disarmament community—a loose coalition of activist and advocacy groups, humanitarian agencies and diplomats—who have successfully achieved international treaties banning landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons, as well as restricting the global arms trade. Two campaigns have won Nobel Peace Prizes. Disarmament has long been a dirty word in the international relations lexicon. But the success of the humanitarian disarmament agenda shows that people often choose to prohibit or limit certain violent technologies, for reasons of security, honour, ethics or humanitarianism. This edited volume showcases interdisciplinary research by scholars and practitioners seeking to understand the dynamics and impact of the new global activism on weapons. While some raise concerns that humanitarian disarmament may be piecemeal and depoliticizing, others see opportunities to breathe new life into moribund arms control policymaking. Foreword by 1997 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams.

Considers S. 2180, the Disarmament Act for World Peace and Security, to establish a U.S. Disarmament Agency for World Peace and Security.

This novel and original book examines and disaggregates, theoretically and empirically, operations of power in international security regimes. These regimes, varying in degree from regulatory to prohibitory, are understood as sets of normative discourses, political structures and dependencies (anarchies, hierarchies, and heterarchies), and agencies through which power operates within a given security issue area with a regulatory effect. In International Relations, regime analysis has been dominated by several generations of regime theory/theorization. As this book makes clear, not only has the IR Regime Theory been of limited utility for security domain due to its heavy focus on economic and environmental regimes, but it, too, heuristically suffered from its rigid pegging to general IR Theory. It is not surprising then that the evolution of IR Regime Theory has largely been mirroring the evolution of IR Theory in general: from the neo-realist/neo-liberal institutionalist convergence regime theory; through cognitivism; to constructivist regime theory. The commitment of this book is to remedy this situation by bringing together robust power analysis and international security regimes. It provides the reader with a theoretically and empirically uncompromising and comprehensive analysis of the selected international security regimes, which goes beyond one or another school of IR Regime Theory. In doing so, it completely abandons existing, and piecemeal, analysis of regimes within the intellectual field of IR based on conventional grand/mid-range theorization.

Originally published in 1977, the purpose of this book was to analyse the relationship between the security of two states mutually undergoing strategic disarmament at the time and the need for safeguarding their security by means of a verification system. The book thus studies some of the basic problems in the disarmament debate, issues that had been the subject of great political controversy. Previous studies had been mainly descriptive or historical, lacking in objective political analysis, and tending to political bias, depending on the political school of the author. There was thus some justification for the statement made by some outstanding authorities in the field that 'to date, no systematic analysis has been attempted to determine what disarmament measures would optimally require of verification methods...' Our ambition is to respond to this criticism, at least so far as the strategic context of disarmament is concerned. Chapter 1 introduces us to the enormous range of repercussions caused by a disarmament agreement. Chapter 2 examines the concept of verification, analysing the meaning of the term, presenting various definitions of what verification is and attempting to systematize the concept. It has been noted on many occasions that the verification set up in a disarmament treaty is only one of a number of factors working towards compliance with a treaty. In fact the role of verification in presenting the treaty, and therefore the security of its participants, is to a large extent limited. However, without many other conditions being satisfied verification on its own can do little to preserve the treaty regime. Chapter 3 discusses these conditions. Chapter 4 gives a brief analysis of the concept of national interests in general, and the concept of national security in particular. Among all the elements of 'security', it is military security that plays by far the largest role. Because of this. Chapter 5 considers a specific case of strategic military security, in which security, defined as stable strategic deterrence between two states, is analysed. Finally, Chapter 6 analyses the question of what happens to security based on strategic deterrence when states enter into the disarmament process. More specifically, the role of verification in preserving security in such circumstances is analysed, thereby answering the main problem of the book. The supporting data for Chapter 6 is given in the Appendix.