Abstract
As the world’s leading weapons user and producer, the United States is often perceived as an unchanging obstacle to the prohibition of inhumane weapons. American participation in negotiating humanitarian disarmament agreements has included defending the utility of US weapons, pressuring allies to water down treaties, and designing international disarmament law that requires little actual disarmament effort. A focus in the literature on ratification of and compliance with agreements obfuscates the behavioral and policy changes that states make in moving toward adoption of international humanitarian law. However, using the case of the cluster munitions ban, this chapter shows that while the US remains an opponent of humanitarian disarmament, American arms control behavior is gradually becoming constrained by increasingly strong humanitarian principles of disarmament.
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Notes
- 1.
Humanitarian disarmament refers to a new class of arms control agreements that place human rights considerations ahead of state interests in their design, as well as to activism that advocates for such agreements. There is not an agreed-upon definition for this phenomenon, although the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs provides the most in-depth description, accessible here: https://www.regjeringen.no/en/topics/foreign-affairs/humanitarian-efforts/humanitarian-disarmament/id2076807/.
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Benjamin-Britton, T. (2020). US Arms Control Dynamics in the Era of Humanitarian Disarmament: A Case Study of the Convention on Cluster Munitions. In: Bolton, M., Njeri, S., Benjamin-Britton, T. (eds) Global Activism and Humanitarian Disarmament. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27611-9_5
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