533Their field’s own payoff is action---and it wants more than a regulation.
Stavrianakis 25 — Anna Stavrianakis. April. Professor of International Relations at Sussex; researches the arms trade, arms transfer control and the war in Yemen. Global Studies Quarterly, “The Arms Trade and the Transformation of Global Order: A Revitalized Research Agenda,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf033 Clopus
The current era seems an appropriate, indeed urgent, time to call for a revitalized research agenda on the arms trade. Vast and unequal levels of global military spending and international arms transfers continue while austerity measures and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic persist. The hugely asymmetrical wars in Gaza and Ukraine are ongoing, with direct impacts on the politics and economics of other countries and the global economy as well. Meanwhile, less internationally visible conflicts in places as diverse as Sudan, Myanmar, and Ethiopia persist, and there is ongoing gen-
dered and racialized armed violence within states commonly understood to be experiencing peace. The arms trade is a common vector in these very different spaces and forms of armed violence. Examining the political economy of state power and its relationship to arms capital, the dynamics of US dominance alongside the uneven internationalization of arms capital, the global networks of arms production and circulation that contribute to layered imperialisms, and the varied modes of violence that overlap and crash into each other, all speak to the need for a revitalized conversation about and action on global disarmament and arms control. By adopting a perspective informed by feminist, postcolonial, and anti-colonial resources and paying attention to scale and the operation of power at the macro and micro levels, the arms trade and its control can be better understood as a site of contestation, contributing to both the maintenance and transformation of global order—a core concern for IR as a discipline. Two final calls remain for critical IR and its subfields: to engage more deeply with empirical research and civil society researchers and to engage in a more sustained fashion with scholarship from and on the world beyond the United States and Western Europe. Civil society researchers internationally are often leading the way with detailed, critical, investigative empirical research. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are throwing up example after example of things we need to understand better about the arms trade, from the ways that arms production and military spending are being reframed as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) public goods in response to the war in Ukraine to the role of trade unions in demanding increased military spending while members in their rank-and-file demand an end to military cooperation with Israel. In addition, scholarship on and from outside of the United States and Western Europe is rethinking questions of (in)security, political economy, and theory from the periphery rather than the core and engaging in theoretical, conceptual, and methodological innovation as well as empirical research (e.g., Abboud et al. 2018; Kanna et al. 2020; Beinin et al. 2021). Engaging more proactively in these two ways would help IR illuminate the layered imperialisms of contemporary politics and address the world’s injustices, violence, and inequalities through a more radical set of analyses and demands beyond piecemeal regulation, which enables the status quo.
534Their own indictment names its exception---the omission is what they’re after.
Rossdale 25 — Chris Rossdale. April. Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol; works on militarism, policing and direct action against the arms trade. Global Studies Quarterly, “Racial Capitalism Must Be Defended: Reading the Arms Trade through Critiques of Policing,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf032, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf032 Clopus
academic work does acknowledge a relationship between the arms trade and policing, often linking it to the supposed expansion of security concerns following the end of the Cold War and the opportunities and geopolitical calculations of the War on Terror (Stohl and Grillot 2009; Sköns 2010; Hartung 2012, 447–9). NGOs and social movements, by contrast, have brought a more consistent and critical focus on the role of the industry in supplying police and security forces. While a focus on the relationships between martial technology companies and policing is welcome, it is notable that these are frequently drawn in a manner that ultimately sanitizes the concept of policing and obscures more foundational connections between the arms industry and racial capitalism. There are two frames through which this simultaneous exposure/elision operates. The first, a recurrent feature of liberal approaches, is that they tend to focus on technology transfers to police and internal security forces in “repressive regimes,” normalizing policing in “liberal democratic” states. The second concerns the framing of these transfers as “police militarization,” a feature of both liberal and more radical critiques. While arguments about police militarization often identify important shifts in the formation of police forces, they tend to do so while idealizing a (fictitious, ahistorical) nonmilitarized image of the police. The first of these is a manifestation of a broader “repressive regimes discourse,” which challenges arms transfers on the terms that they may entrench authoritarian or repressive regimes, and/or be used to commit human rights abuses (Rossdale 2019, 237–60). For instance, Rachel Stohl, while claiming that “conventional arms have legitimate military, police, and civilian uses,” recognizes the problem of suppliers “willing to arm unscrupulous regimes and nefarious non-state actors” (2017, 1). Similarly, William D. Hartung is concerned that the arms trade provides “repressive regimes with the tools they need to suppress democratic movements and commit human rights abuses” (2012, 442). The repressive regimes discourse is also the dominant mode of critique for NGO and activist groups challenging the arms trade (Stavrianakis 2010). For instance, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) states that British-made anti-protest gear and equipment has been “approved for export to countries with serious records of human rights abuses, such as Libya, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, and Hong Kong” (Weitzberg 2022,
36). The repressive regimes discourse places critical focus on transfers to controversial regimes. It often involves the use of country lists, as demonstrated in the CAAT quote, naming a series of self-evidently problematic actors to demonstrate the malign nature of the industry itself. The repressive regimes discourse is also constituted by a series of silences and omissions. Within the list of condemned regimes, there is a conspicuous absence of certain customers, whose domestic policing operations are not considered categorically troubling (Rossdale 2019, 245–6). Anna Stavrianakis argues that the repressive regimes discourse reproduces the hierarchical structure of the international system: [a]rguing for an end to controversial exports – which are usually exports to the South – without a wider argument about the structure of military power in international relations leaves the military dominance of Northern states intact and does nothing to challenge hierarchical North-South relations. (2010, 59) The result is a “depoliticisation of militarism within the European world” (2010, 111) and the “production of the
South as a site of intervention and its resultant disciplining” (2010, 114). While these arguments have previously been made in the context of the arms trade and militarism more broadly, they have specific resonance for thinking about policing. By making the arms trade problematic on the terms of its excesses, the discourse obscures the quotidian violence of policing in and by states in the global North, and especially within liberal contexts (Duff 2024). Liberal policing is thus positioned as an administrative matter, a mature form of state violence enacted by fundamentally legitimate governments (contra “regimes”). The repressive regimes discourse is always a racializing discourse, tracing and carving a global color line demarking who can be trusted with martial technology and who cannot (Rossdale 2019, 252–6; see also Mathur 2014; Cooper 2018). In this context, it tracks historical discourses that position good policing as a fundamental marker of civilization, a central component of the perceived capacity or incapacity for self-government (Neocleous 2014, 121–37). A suspicion of the policing practices of others has been a productive narrative for colonial governance, helping to license international interventions, counter-insurgency operations, and training programs that have restructured policing around the world in line with imperial ambitions (Schrader 2019). The repressive regimes discourse therefore places critical attention on some technology transfers to policing forces, but in a manner that obscures and normalizes policing in liberal contexts while reproducing racial/colonial categories of the international. The concept of “police militarization” is the second frame through which links are drawn between the arms trade and policing. Claims that traditional boundaries between militaries and police are breaking down have become common-place in both scholarship and public discourse. These accounts point toward “the reconfiguration of civilian police around the principals of militarism” (Gamal 2016, 983), arguing that supposedly civilian police forces have been transformed by an influx of military equipment, tactics, and operational attitudes (Bieler 2016). Much of this work focuses on developments within the United States, paying particular attention to surplus equipment from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan funneled into local police forces, but “police militarization” has been identified in the United Kingdom (Mukhopadhyay 1998), Brazil and South Africa (Stuurman
2020), and Latin America (Flores-Macías and Zarkin 2021). Critics argue that police militarization leads to an increase in police violence and undermines the liberal ideal of policing by consent (ACLU 2014; Weitzberg 2022; WRI 2023a). Movements and NGOs have led in highlighting the arms trade as a driving factor in these transformations in police practices, pointing to the role of companies like BAE Systems selling “advanced technology and equipment to police and security services in the UK and internationally.. .thus helping to bring military-grade technology into civilian policing” (Weitzberg 2022, 39; see also WRI 2023b). They have attended to the growing role of arms fairs in allowing companies to sell military equipment to police, border, and security agencies (Stop Urban Shield Coalition 2016; Weitzberg 2022), and they have tracked the intensive lobbying efforts of these companies as they promote the use of their products by an expanding range of actors (Akkerman 2016, 2019; CAAT 2020). While the evolving practices and capacities of police forces are undoubtedly deserving of careful attention, the conceptualization of these dynamics as the “militarization of police” has been subjected to numerous critiques. These have argued that, while the police militarization thesis pur-
535Cancelling exports cuts producer revenue---enforcement bites hardest at home.
Klomp 24 — Jeroen Klomp. January 3. Economist at the Netherlands Defence Academy studying the effects of arms embargoes. Journal of Policy Modeling, “Targeting profits: The economic impact of arms embargoes on defense companies,” https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpolmod.2024.01.012 Clopus
This study deals with the impact of arms embargoes on the economic performance of defense companies measured by the total sales revenues, total costs, and net profits, The direction of this effect is not clear beforehand. On the one hand, the profits of defense firms are likely to drop as the volume of arms exports is hampered and trading costs rise. On the other hand, the profits are not affected as compliance to arms embargoes is not effectively enforced, or even the revenues increase due to illicit trade and higher prices on the black market in target countries. Embargo busting practices by firms in sending states coupled with a lack of international enforcement are believed to fundamentally undermine embargo success. After testing for the sensitivity of the results reported throughout this study, I can draw several conclusions regarding the business impact of arms embargoes. First, on average, arms embargoes lead to a drop in the total sales revenues by about three percent. However, this drop is primarily visible in countries with a strong enforcement framework. As a result, the profitability of these companies is under downward pressure after the introduction of an arms embargo. Second, the results suggest that the variation in the effect of arms embargoes on the economic performance of defense companies is explained by between-country differences, such as the strength of the political institutions, as well as by within-firm or market-specific characteristics, like the extent of diversification of a company or whether a company has a foreign subsidiary. Third and finally, multilateral sanctions put the economic performance of arms-producing firms substantially more under downward pressure compared to unilateral military sanctions due to more effective enforcement. Multilateral sanctions send a stronger signal of dissociation to a target and are more difficult to bypass. These insights are not only relevant from an academic point of view, but likely to be even more valuable for policymakers and regulators in developing an effective legislative embargo framework. Understanding the golden triangle between implementation, enforcement, and compliance practices is crucial as it ultimately determines the success of arms embargoes. More specifically, the findings reported through this study nuances the inconclusive picture that emerges in the earlier literature focussing on the demand side effect of embargoes. In particular, this research shows that embargoes are still an effective policy tool, at least on the supply side, when the monitoring and enforcement framework is well developed. In turn, the results also show that defense companies can still financially benefit from violating or bypassing arms embargoes when enforcement is weak. This might, for instance, influence their decision to outsource certain supply chain activities. Finally, this study suffers from some critical limitations that are mainly related to the availability and quality of the data used. First, in the empirical analysis, only major defense companies are considered due to a lack of available data for small-scale and medium-sized firms. As a consequence, the results presented might, to a certain extent, be affected by a sample
selection bias. For instance, the impact of arms embargoes might be more or less severe for small-size firms, which in turn will affect the overall effectiveness of embargoes and their business impact. Second, the time period of the analysis is relatively short, creating some empirical issues due to the limited number of observations when including firm-specific intercepts, thereby focussing on the “within firm” effect. Finally, the results indicate that there is a different embargo effect between countries with strong or weak political institutions. However, our sample is rather skewed to the former, which might influence the general conclusions drawn.
536Declaratory arms-trade norms changed nothing---the output was sparse.
Wisotzki 22 — Simone Wisotzki. May 17. Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt on small-arms control. Zeitschrift für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, “Efforts to curb the proliferation of small arms and light weapons: from persistent crisis to norm failure?,” vol. 10, p. 247-271 Clopus
Success stories of sub-regional small arms control can also be found in the Balkan region. One of the reasons for this success is that several institutions have joined forces to implement new provisions and regulations, including the EU, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and SEESAC.Footnote 28 The breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the armed conflicts that followed in the 1990s led to an enormous accumulation of SALW in the hands of state forces and civilians. While in the aftermath of the Bosnian conflict, several rounds of SALW disarmament and disposal initiatives took place, many weapons remained unmonitored in the hands of civilians. These surplus and sometimes also illicit arms pose a threat to the safety and security of civilians in the West Balkans, and also fuel organized crime and terrorism in the EU (Duquet and Goris 2018; Prezelj 2010). A large number of illicit SALW were smuggled from the region into conflict-affected areas. SALW from Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were shipped to Liberia and Congo in 2006, fueling the ongoing conflicts there (Arsovska and Kostakos 2008, p.365). The Small Arms Survey estimates that more than 6.8 million firearms can be traced to the countries of the West Balkans (Carapic and Gassmann 2018, p.5). With the West Balkan Small Arms and Light Weapons Control Roadmap, Member States of the EU and other international organizations, such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), have intensified their efforts to clear the vast surplus and illicit stockpiles of SALW and ammunition from six West Balkan states by 2024.Footnote 29 In cooperation with their partners, each of the six West Balkan partners (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia) initiate national action plans to identify their specific priorities for national SALW control. In cooperation with SEESAC, seven goals in the areas of legislation, export control, collection, as well as physical destruction and stockpile management have been identified and put into practice (Newton 2020).Footnote 30 In contrast to the previous approach of concentrating solely on physical security and stockpile management, this initiative pursues a comprehensive approach focusing on the life-cycle management of SALW, addressing the need to strengthen border cooperation to prevent the illegal proliferation of SALW, and also to enhance the criminal justice framework for illicit trafficking and possession. The SEESAC serves as an important hub of coordination and delegation. The West Balkan SALW Control Roadmap served as a role model for similar efforts in the Caribbean and will also serve as a model for future projects, in the ECOWAS region, for instance. It is exemplary as it addresses a whole sub-region and also focuses on the root causes of supply and demand of SALW. The perspective on regional arms control shows how useful it is to think of norms as clusters and as a world of practice where actors reproduce and also change normative structures in order to adapt them to regional and sub-regional needs and challenges.
The sources of illicit SALW proliferation are manifold and often exceed the capabilities of arms control and disarmament. This article focuses on the external and internal dimensions for the crisis of illicit SALW proliferation. The external causes of the small arms crisis can be traced to the supply and demand side, they result from failures of public and security sector governance, porous borders, organized crime, or structural causes of conflict. SALW control is per se insufficient to tackle these driving factors of illicit proliferation, precisely because these challenges often lie beyond the scope of arms control. The control of SALW remains a complex and long-term undertaking and has to be linked to other issues such as security sector reform and governance accountability. Moreover, disarmament and development are intricately linked, something which has been officially recognized by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Goal target 16.4.Footnote 31 These aims have all been recognized by the numerous Biennial Meetings of States and the three Review Conferences held since 2001 but often remain at the declaratory level and have not been put into efficient policy practices.
In fairness, the challenge of effectively combatting the illicit trade in SALW is enormous. Technological innovations such as 3D printing or modular weapons pose yet another challenge to any arms control effort, and the UNPoA in its current status is ill-equipped for such additional challenges arising from new technologies of this kind. However, despite more than 20 years of gaining knowledge about the complex facets of the legal/illicit/illegal SALW trade, civilian ownership of firearms as well as the overall number of SALW worldwide still seems to be growing. States continue to supply state and non-state conflict parties with SALW and ammunition, as the civil war in Libya demonstrates.Footnote 32 Libya continues to have a bad track record when it comes to illicit trafficking of SALW because state-owned stocks proliferated into the region and fueled the eruption of violence in northern Mali. In the 1990s, Mali had been a role model of SALW control, initiating the ECOWAS Moratorium in the region. Now, however, the country is awash with SALW, which has led to various conflict experts predicting that Mali will be the “next Afghanistan” (Conflict Armament Research 2013).
However, when looking at the internal dimension of the SALW crisis, the UNPoA itself is also partly to blame for the inadequate and ineffective arms control and disarmament efforts. To use the language of arms control, the UNPoA lacks a system of systematic monitoring and compliance. The implementation of the UNPoA is mostly assured through a process of biennial self-reporting by states. While the willingness of the international community to self-report is visibly diminishing, the discrepancy between the polished rhetoric of the reports and arms control efforts on the ground is unmistakable. The UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, which functions as a quasi-secretariat but lacks effective authority and delegation, has, for example, established a Modular Small-arms-control Implementation Compendium (MOSAIC), which seeks to translate the broad norms of the UNPoA into implementable policy practices.Footnote 33 Such standards are decisive, but UN Member States often lack the political will to implement them. Moreover, the internal crisis of SALW control is exacerbated by the continuous norm contestation within the UNPoA framework.
In the more than 20 years of implementing the UNPoA, the output of the Biennial Meetings of States and Review Conference in terms of elaborated outcome documents have been impressive. All these documents have established a comprehensive body of knowledge about the complexity of SALW proliferation, but only partially led to a change in the behavior of states—from a global governance perspective, the output has in fact been sparse. Norm contestation at the states’ conferences has, at best, only partially led to a refinement and adaptation of norms. New agreements, such as the International Tracing Instrument, have also failed to provide an effective solution to tackle the illicit proliferation of arms. At meetings of states, different participants have repeatedly blocked the consensus, such as China, Russia, and the US, but also some G77 states, such as India, Pakistan, or Arab states. The UN negotiation system, governed by the rules of consensus, has also exacerbated the internal dimension of the UNPoA crisis. In order to prevent the global arms control effort from becoming completely meaningless, the voting on individual norms, such as the vote on ammunition during the Review Conference in 2018, might help the UNPoA to regain some legitimacy and establish ways out of crisis.
On the more positive side, more than 20 years of implementation efforts have led to the creation of an enormous volume of research and knowledge about the complexities of SALW proliferation. Arms control and disarmament efforts alone do not suffice but have to be integrated into more holistic approaches of security sector reform and stabilization of fragile statehood. In post-conflict situations, SALW control needs to be an integral part of disarmament, demobilization, reintegration, and rehabilitation. The empirical example of the West Balkan Roadmap also demonstrates that small arms control and disarmament efforts have to be repeated or even sustained in order to be effective. In insecure post-conflict situations, former combatants do not surrender their SALW as they see them as guaranteeing their physical security. Research has also shown the close nexus between levels of violence, the existence of SALW in societies, and lack of development. Therefore, SALW control should—if tailored carefully—also be part of donor countries’ development aid programs.Footnote 34 Last but not least, the ineffectiveness of SALW control is also related to continuous legal arms exports, global military spending, and a dominant militarist policy pursued by states and the arms industry (Stavrianakis 2019). In this regard, critical feminist peace research approaches also point to the problematic state–human security nexus, which fails to take into account the structural and gendered causes of violence (Yadav and Horn 2021; Bernarding/Lunz/Wisotzki 2020).
537The strike record is a systemic failure---bad intelligence, not bad luck.
Ogbozor 25 — Ernest Ogbozor. April 3. College of Arts and Sciences, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; researches Nigerian counterinsurgency and civilian harm. Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, “Counterinsurgency airstrike mishap, intelligence failure and civilian harm in northern Nigeria – 2014 to 2024,” vol. 20, no. 2, p. 193-208 Clopus
The frequency of airstrike mishaps in Nigeria has raised serious concerns regarding the country's airpower capabilities and operational effectiveness. The successful execution of airstrikes in combat situations demands a high level of technical expertise and precision. While some unintended civilian casualties could be deemed understandable if the intended target is hit, it is a much graver operational failure when an airstrike completely misses its mark and causes indiscriminate harm elsewhere (Okoli et al., Citation2024, p. 5). The loss of civilian lives through failure to take adequate precautions in targeting, or through disproportionate military response is against international laws of armed combat.
Nigeria’s recurring pattern of airstrike mishaps reflects operational deficiencies or ineptitude, particularly in its counterinsurgency efforts. These mishaps not only tarnish the reputation of the Nigerian military but also significantly impact its combat proficiency (Okoli et al., Citation2024, p. 6, 7). Consequently, they undermine the military's overall effectiveness and pose a major challenge to the country's counterinsurgency endeavours (Okoli et al., Citation2024, p. 2). There is a need to recognise that accurate intelligence is crucial for the success of airstrikes; it informs target selection, timing, and execution. When intelligence is flawed, airstrikes can miss their intended targets, hitting civilian areas or friendly forces instead. These failures can result from inadequate reconnaissance, faulty data analysis, or communication breakdowns within the military hierarchy. Mutch and Afzal (Citation2023) describe these mishaps as a case of an ‘innocent mistake.’ However, this perspective overlooks the systemic issues within military intelligence operations. Intelligence failures often reflect deeper problems in the planning and execution stages of military operations. For instance, if intelligence reports are based on outdated or incomplete information, the likelihood of an airstrike hitting the wrong target increases. Similarly, if there is a failure in communication between intelligence analysts and military commanders, the airstrike may proceed based on incorrect or misunderstood data. These deficiencies in intelligence, in conjunction with military errors, are significant factors contributing to civilian harm resulting from airstrikes conducted for counterinsurgency operations.
A review of the literature and the analysis in indicate that NAF airstrike mishaps have impacted civilians in the three sub-regions of northern Nigeria. Human Rights Watch (Citation2023a) reported that several civilians were killed by NAF airstrikes intended for bandits or members of the Islamist group Boko Haram but instead hit civilians. SB Morgen Intel (Citation2023) added that since 2017, over 300 people have died in airstrikes by NAF targeting terrorists. shows that in the past decade, at least 450 civilians in 18 communities have been killed by accidental NAF airstrikes. However, casualty numbers vary across sources, suggesting that the actual toll might be higher due to unreported incidents in remote areas (Isamotu, Citation2023). Analysis of the regional distribution of harm to civilians provides additional insight into the incidents spanning from 2014 to 2024.
538...or it forbids naming a harm---but their conclusion is a widening, not a stop.
Rossdale 25 — Chris Rossdale. April. Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol; works on militarism, policing and direct action against the arms trade. Global Studies Quarterly, “Racial Capitalism Must Be Defended: Reading the Arms Trade through Critiques of Policing,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf032, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf032 Clopus
Situating martial technology companies as a component of global policing can also facilitate solidarities between social movements contending with different forms of state and market violence. It is especially productive when thinking across movements against war and the arms trade and movements against policing. Historically, there have often been tensions between movements active on these fronts. Significant elements of peace, anti-war, and anti-arms trade movements in the West have struggled to contend with the role of policing as a violent, racializing, martial force within “the domestic” realm (Manchanda and Rossdale 2021). Movements against policing, often largely comprised of people who have been subjected to imperial and racial violence, have better recognized the intimate entanglements of war and policing (Elliot-Cooper 2021). Still, many have paid limited or no attention to the role of martial technology companies in this nexus. There is force in the refusal to draw firm distinctions between different forms of state and market violence. While such distinctions can build toward precise and important analysis, they can also obscure common political logics. It is here that Seigel’s collapse of different strands of state and market violence into the unifying category of violence work is compelling; it directs attention to both the collective project of reproducing racial capitalism and to the work those categories do in obscuring that collective project (2018). A famous version of this argument is Emory Douglas’ cartoon “It’s All The Same,” printed in the Black Panther newspaper, depicting three martial pigs—the police, the national guard, and the US army (Bloom and Martin 2016,
173). Even as they developed particular analyses of these different forces, the Black Panther Party also insisted on an account that collapsed these avatars of capitalist imperial violence, and developed an internationalist politics that attended to them collectively (Malloy 2017). For the Panthers, this did not mean an internationalism that ignored local struggles, nor a localism that ignored the international; rather, it was a refusal to cede to that dichotomy. It is in this vein that positioning the arms trade as part of global policing is productive. It pushes movements challenging the arms trade to attend to the role of the industry beyond conventional war, and movements against policing to recognize how martial technology companies reproduce a world of patrol, surveillance, and social sorting. For both, it positions companies like Thales as integral to the project of ordering and defending racial capitalism. There are examples of movements working in this direction. In the United Kingdom, CAAT is placing increased focus on how martial technology companies relate to policing around the world (Weitzberg 2022), albeit still within a broad framework of police militarization. In the United States, movements like the Carceral Tech Resistance Network (2020) recognize the intimate entanglements of military and police violence, and the central role of martial technology companies here. In recent years, movements in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle have recognized the arms industry as integral not only to the occupation and genocide but also to the global circulation of policing technologies. Through the occupation, companies have developed and refined weaponry, drones, surveillance, and border control technologies, which are then deployed in broader systems of global order (Halper 2015; Machold 2016). This recognition has fostered powerful expressions of solidarity between movements opposing imperial violence and those challenging policing (Erakat 2020). Since October 2023, Palestine solidarity movements around the world have faced widespread police repression, often while taking action against arms companies; they have been forced to confront the deep entanglements of military and police violence, and the position of the arms industry in relation to both (Dasha et al. 2024; Fekete 2024). By confronting those entanglements, these movements offer visions of global solidarity against the forces of war and policing.
539The postcolonial critique of arms producers ends in preventing the deal.
McEvoy 24 — Bretton J. McEvoy and Jana Hönke. December. Researchers at the University of Bayreuth on the accountability of European arms producers. Zeitschrift für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, “Non-accountability as post-colonial harm: rethinking the responsibilities of arms producers,” vol. 13, p. 427-436 Clopus
Under the current international legal system, there are immediate redress mechanisms available through (national) courts to sanction corporate and state actors for their present contributions to harm. However, these remedial measures are, by and large, not linked to the victims concerned and therefore cannot be considered reparations. The recent EU debate on the CSDDD suggested the potential to include product use as part of arms manufacturers’ due diligence obligations (see e.g., Castellanos-Jankiewicz and Schneider 2023), but the final agreement excluded arms companies from this part of the legislation, closing another door on remedial possibilities.
While the inaccessibility of meaningful avenues to reparation is not an omission exclusive to the global arms sector, the claim to national security and foreign policy exceptionalism (along with corresponding economic interests and corporate secrecy) keeps most of the details out of the public eye. It is high time to lift the exceptionalism on the arms business by bringing into public scrutiny far more transparency about the sales made, the timing of deliveries and the end use of arms, as well as the payments to and identity of agents and middlemen. Greater public awareness will make future reparations a more realistic possibility.
While the need for a reparation mechanism that responds to immediate harms is paramount, the decades of action by South African civil society groups also draws our attention to the productive legacies of past non-accountability. In the early years of post-apartheid democracy in South Africa, and with the encouragement of European arms companies and governments, South Africa spent excessively (US$ 5 billion) on weapons, at a time when its President claimed that the country could not afford anti-retroviral medication for its 6 million people infected with HIV/AIDS (Feinstein 2011). Investigations into European arms companies suggest substantial use of bribes to secure the contracts. Such elite overspending by arms manufacturers reproduces economic and social inequalities that are evidenced in the ‘opportunity costs’ of the country’s disproportionate spending on arms (i.e., preventable deaths due to HIV/AIDS) as well as in the corrupting of democratic institutions. Since many of the same corporate (and state) actors or their successors were involved in both the sanctions-busting during the apartheid era and the suspected corruption in its immediate aftermath, remedying individual harms is insufficient without also recognizing how unremedied harms from the past have created the conditions for ongoing and new harms in the present.
Given the colonial legacies of a profoundly unequal international system and the concomitant shaping of international law, such possibilities for reparations may not be feasible within the limits of current legal constructs. Indeed, the emphasis on criminality in the development of international legal responsibility for non-state actors serves primarily to individualize the terms of responsibility while normalizing the excesses of the arms production and transfer system. There is a risk that individuals and companies will be separated from the structures and from other actors, especially states, that make possible their contributions to violence. In most cases, the attribution of responsibility cannot be exclusively individualistic and requires an independent monitoring mechanism, including at the international level, such as the ATT, with more robust and enforceable provisions. While this may have become more difficult in the context of current transformations of the world order, civil society organizations continue to push for concrete changes in the law.Footnote 6 Alongside their struggles, critically oriented research can help to demonstrate how narrow frameworks of responsibility not only lead to limited opportuities for redress, but also to an environment that fosters subsequent harm.
The case of South Africa highlights the critical importance of rethinking the responsibilities of arms producers, at the very least by making sales more transparent to the accountable public. It also illustrates the great potential that including product use in the arms manufacturers’ due diligence obligations has in order to prevent arms deals that violate international laws and norms. As current public opinion in Europe shifts dramatically towards a more pro-armament stance following the Russian invasion of Ukraine (and the subsequent US withdrawal), it is particularly important that we not forget the lessons of South Africa, namely that a system that promotes sales while demanding minimum transparency and accountability not only strengthens repressive regimes, but also perpetuates economic and political injustices and corrupts democratic institutions in both recipient and supplier countries. A critical look at the limited responsibility-taking by European arms producers operating in (post‑)apartheid South Africa cautions against significant military buildup without careful consideration of (unintended) longer-term harms.
540The frame they reject has never stopped a sale---four democracies, no effect.
Johnson 18 — Richard A. I. Johnson and Spencer L. Willardson. March 21. Political scientist at the University of Strathclyde. Political scientist at Nazarbayev University. International Studies Quarterly, “Human Rights and Democratic Arms Transfers: Rhetoric Versus Reality with Different Types of Major Weapon Systems,” vol. 62, no. 2, p. 453-464 Clopus
Do states follow their own rules limiting arms sales to states that violate human rights? We systematically examined the sale of different types of weapons systems by four mature democracies—United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany—whose rhetoric calls for limiting sales to human rights abusers. We distinguished these types in terms of their varying capabilities and potential for use in repressing population. This is, to our knowledge, the first study to examine these issues for multiple countries at the same time while also accounting for weapons type. Our results indicate that human rights violations by states largely do not affect their opportunity or ability to import major weapons systems from major democratic suppliers. This finding is a bit distressing from a normative standpoint, and differs from the more optimistic results generated by some prior studies.
Knowing that human rights considerations do not appear to meaningfully affect policy outcomes in most cases is an important starting point for more detailed questions about the policy-making process and the considerations of decision makers in states. Is there a simply a wide disconnect between the measures of human rights violations and the decision-making about weapons? Do decision makers in arms exporting countries think about the worst-case scenario for weapons sales, or do they look at the type of human rights violations a state is making and make a calculated risk to provide weapons? If that is the case, what influence do the other factors (economic, political pressure, or existing arms dependence) play when weighing such decisions?
Such questions point to the need for more theorizing about the role that arms play in international relations. The sociological aspect of arms—as symbols in the international arena—as well as bureaucratic blindness on the part of states may play a bigger role in allowing arms transfers to questionable states than simple economic imperatives. The US military, for instance, has a great deal of say in the arms transfer process. Without a theory of decision-making and research that examines these aspects, we are left to making generalizations about patterns. These generalizations may support a pessimistic or cynical view of arms transfers, but they also point in many interesting and potential fruitful directions for future research projects. Such projects should include arms transfer scholars, foreign-policy scholars, and general IR scholars and theorists.
Recently, Erickson (2015a; 2015b) has made further headway on some of these concerns. First, she examines international norms on arms transfers with a particular focus on the European Union (Erickson 2015a). Her research finds that strong states are necessary to diffuse such norms. They act as leaders and, in doing so, share costs of compliance while encouraging others to follow norms. This insight differs from previous literature that argues (often implicitly) that states become norm leaders out of a moral imperative. Leaders can act based on multiple motivations. Erickson’s (2015b) work on the arm trade treaty and the United States shows that, on paper, the US is already a leader in the arms export-control field. She finds the United States lent support to this international agreement—even though it did not affect its current policies (Erickson 2015b, 452)—in order to increase soft power through engaging in multilateral diplomacy.
While our results shed light on the relationship between human rights violations in importer states and the decision of states to export arms human rights violators, we must also acknowledge the limitations of our research. First, the nature of our analysis limits our ability to make casual inferences about what drives sales. For example, the transfer of conventional weapons may indicate that states see conventional weapons primarily as tools for external security. Suppliers may not view the military as the instrument of repression or human rights violation in an importing state, and thus not see their transfers as contributing to human rights abuses.
Second, we only examine the decision to transfers arms while ignoring the size of the transfer. We provide support for this decision with tests in the supplementary files accounting for size. Moreover, Blanton (2005) does not find any significance in the second stage of her tests. Additionally, we question whether the number of weapons transferred matters, given that any sales potentially implicate the exporter in supporting a regime that abuses human rights.
Third, the structure of the data we use prevents the use of fixed effects in the statistical analysis, which means that we cannot completely account for factors that are unit-specific or time-varying. Despite these issues, our statistical analysis of these exporting states offered a systematic look at the relationship between human rights and exports from democratic states.
Changes in the real world have occurred after the range of our data that directly affect international arms transfers—just as they did for Blanton (2005). The biggest change is the adoption of the Arms Trade Treaty. Its adoption could indicate that rhetoric is translating into reality as more formal and international agreements come to limit the arms trade. The other regulatory change is the adoption of the EU Code of Conduct on Arms Export. Our data overlaps with this passage, and the code itself is also examined by Erickson (2011). In the case of the United States, the opening vignette hints that changes in administration and domestic political climate can have an effect on how states prioritize security and human rights in arms transfer decision-making. Clearly this is a ripe area for future research.
541US dominance is the market---and every sale needs Washington’s authorization.
Stavrianakis 25 — Anna Stavrianakis. April. Professor of International Relations at Sussex; researches the arms trade, arms transfer control and the war in Yemen. Global Studies Quarterly, “The Arms Trade and the Transformation of Global Order: A Revitalized Research Agenda,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf033 Clopus
Another key feature of the political economy of the global arms trade is the extent of US dominance. The United States accounts for over a third of global military spending and over 40 percent of global arms transfers, delivering weapons to over 100 states (SIPRI 2024b). This is an order of magnitude more than its nearest competitors, Russia and China. The historical experience of the United States in hot wars in the global South, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, illustrates
that there is no necessary congruence between military dominance and strategic victory (Barkawi and Laffey 2006; Chamberlin 2018), and the contemporary US may be experiencing relative political and strategic decline; nonetheless, its material military dominance remains. A key task for critical scholarship is to think internationally about the significance of the arms trade and to decenter the United States while acknowledging this material dominance. This can be done in two ways: internationalizing our understanding of US and Western power; and looking at other major actors in the arms trade in the context of US dominance of global capitalism. The US state is the world’s largest military spender, and arms sales require the authorization of the US government; yet the US arms industry is also significantly internationalized. For example, Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms company, is headquartered in the United States but has twenty-eight foreign entities situated in nineteen countries across four regions of the world. While US companies tend to have a strong presence in Europe, Lockheed Martin is an outlier with a third of its foreign entities located in the Middle East (SIPRI 2020, 4–5). More generally, the arms industry is internationalizing unevenly, with practices of subcontracting, joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and technology transfer agreements most extensive in Western Europe and the United States. The European industry is the most heavily internationalized, due to its consolidation since the late 1990s as part of an effort to compete with US industry after the end of the Cold War. US- headquartered firms have a strong presence in Europe and also in Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan (SIPRI 2023), cementing the Anglosphere and non-NATO elements of the postwar US empire. This internationalization is changing shape as Middle Eastern arms companies such as the UAE’s EDGE and Saudi Arabian Military Industries serve as local partners for foreign, especially US, firms seeking government contracts (Marshall 2023). Mason describes an “emerging Arab military ecosystem” marked by “trickle-down hardware, ideologically defined military engagement, and mobilization around a unified vision of security and control” (Mason 2024, 9). Meanwhile, the arms industry is much less internationalized in Russia and China due to state ownership and the strong focus on the domestic development of weapons, combined with Western sanctions on Russia and wariness of China. While some countries in South America, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa host foreign entities of the world’s largest arms companies, internationalization is much less pronounced there (SIPRI 2020). The unevenness of internationalization is evident in the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza. While Western arms companies are struggling to keep up with the demand for weapons for Ukraine due to supply chain problems, Russia has massively increased its military spending and domestic military production to support its invasion, while remaining dependent on foreign-made microelectronic components (Byrne et al. 2022). Compared to Western industry, many Asian and Middle Eastern companies have more flexible capacity that can be scaled up more quickly, supported by states with self-reliance goals. This means they have stronger networks of local suppliers that mitigate the challenges to supply chains faced by Western companies (SIPRI 2023). Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza would be impossible without US support and therefore cannot be considered a solely national endeavor. Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US military assistance since World War II and US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) accounts for around 16 percent of Israel’s annual defense budget (Yousif and Stohl 2023).
FMF provides US taxpayer-funded grants to foreign governments to purchase US arms and services. Growing activist interest in arms supplies to Israel in response to its assault on Gaza and the call for an embargo by Palestinian trade unions is taking up the challenge of empirically understanding where weapons are physically made and by whom (Workers in Palestine 2024). Hamas, meanwhile, receives weapons from Iran, uses a variety of Soviet-era weapon designs copied by China and Iran, and makes some weapons within Gaza (Guay 2024). Israel and Hamas both participate in transnational arms networks with different political economies in which the scale of resources and technological sophistication, and the effects of armed violence, are vastly asymmetrical. Uneven internationalization has significant politico-economic and security stakes. Who makes the profits and owns the intellectual property in joint ventures between Saudi or Emirati and US-based companies, for example? Which state’s export controls apply to the transfer of weapons from such joint ventures? These seemingly technical questions have analytical and political significance because of the practice of using overseas subsidiaries to evade controls. For example, South African arms company Rheinmetall Denel Munition has exported weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in the war in Yemen when the home government (Germany) of its majority shareholder (Rheinmetall) had imposed restrictions on selling directly to Saudi Arabia (Open Secrets 2021). Who should be held accountable for arms exports that contribute to violations of international law in such a case? If IR is interested in questions of violence, power, and order, then these empirical questions matter. Such questions also indicate the challenge for IR of producing nonmethodologically nationalist data. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)—the most respected and reliable source of arms trade data—produces statistical data about arms transfers and arms production. This data is organized on the basis of nation states, with the top 100 companies listed by national headquarters, although SIPRI has also led the way in researching the internationalization of the industry (SIPRI 2020), which is a good empirical starting point for such a task.
542Transfers are an executive act---nothing obliges denial and nothing outside the branch binds.
Erickson 23 — Jennifer L. Erickson. February. Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston College; researches arms control, sanctions and the conventional arms trade. Global Policy, “Demystifying the ‘gold standard’ of arms export controls: US arms exports to conflict zones,” vol. 14, no. 1, p. 131-138 Clopus
At the international level, the United States faces few constraints. In general, of course, states are expected to behave in a manner consistent with international law, including in their conventional arms transfer activities. Thus, if US arms transfers contribute to a recipient's war crimes, for example, they could be in violation of the Articles on State Responsibility (Chappell & Benowitz, 2022). Beyond these general legal obligations, however, the United States currently participates only in voluntary ‘non-binding’ conventional arms export regimes. These regimes, like the Missile Technology Control Regime and the Wassenaar Arrangement, have policy guidelines to coordinate national export control systems but contain no legal obligations. The United States does not participate in the Arms Trade Treaty, which articulates criteria (such as recipient conflict) States Parties are legally bound to consider in their arm export decision-making. Although the ATT is modelled partly on US export criteria and allows Parties to continue to make their own export decisions according to their own national legislation, domestic politics have kept (and will likely continue to keep) the United States from ATT accession.
Executive decision-making criteria, legislative oversight and end-use monitoring provide the substantive foundation of the US ‘gold standard’ status. In both its design and implementation, however, the US export control system's built-in ability to curtail the flow of arms to conflict zones is limited. Ultimately, US arms transfer practices are strongly determined by executive branch priorities with at best incomplete assurances that US-supplied weapons will go to and stay with their intended recipients.
First, in its design, the AECA provides flexibility for the executive to accommodate a wide range of US interests connected to conventional arms transfers, not just export restraint in the face of conflict (or other security concerns). Under the AECA, risk of conflict is merely a consideration in arms export decision-making and does not trigger any obligation of licence denial. Thus, the law itself provides the government with room to manoeuvre to suit its interests, allowing conflict considerations to fall by the wayside. In their analysis of US arms exports since 2001, Thrall et al. (2020, p. 102) find that ‘downside risks are rarely considered explicitly or appear to have ever affected the transfer of weapons’. As a result, administrations essentially choose to approve an export deal based on their own political, economic and normative commitments. In turn, priorities other than conflict restraint often win out in US arms export decision-making. Many analyses find that US arms transfer practices tend to be relatively consistent over time and do not tend to be driven by recipient conflict status (e.g. Erickson, 2015b, 2021; Hartung, 1995; Klare, 1992; Thrall & Dorminey, 2018). This mirrors arms export practices by other top exporting states (Erickson, 2015a; Perlo-Freeman, 2021). Indeed, US arms transfer practices are exceptional for the volume of goods transferred, not for their greater or lesser adherence to export restraint in the face of conflict.
Second, Congress does not—and likely cannot—serve as a meaningful check on executive decision-making. Indeed, to date, Congress has ‘never successfully blocked a proposed arms sale by use of a joint resolution of disapproval’ (Kerr, 2021). For Congress to pass legislation to block or amend a deal, it must do so by veto-proof margins. While a simple majority would send the bill to the president's desk for signature, the president—whose office would have already approved or even spearheaded the deal—would certainly veto it. But, so far, a two-thirds veto-proof majority has proved an impossible threshold. Only twice has Congress achieved even a simple majority on such legislation. In 1986 and 2019, Congress did vote to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia but could not override the presidential veto.3 In fact, Congress rarely even debates proposed sales, which tend to enjoy support rather than provoke controversy. Given the close partisan divides of contemporary Congressional politics, passing veto-proof legislation either to block sales or to reform the existing system seems unlikely any time soon.
Informal political constraints are also minimal. With the exception of proposed sales to Saudi Arabia in 2019 criticised due to the Yemen war and the Jamal Khashoggi murder, the US public has paid little attention to the issue over time. In recent years, moreover, the United States has been reducing its arms export reporting and data availability, making it more difficult for the public, media and researchers to track US arms flows, evaluate their impact or hold policymakers accountable to their export decisions (Echols, 2022). Presidents are therefore extremely unlikely to face electoral backlash for arms deals that might be viewed as going against US interests or values (Erickson, 2015a). Members of Congress, too, face few incentives to initiate or support legislation to block proposed deals. This means that presidential administrations have not only considerable legal authority over arms export decision-making but also considerable flexibility in the interpretation of US rules and whether they privilege arms export promotion or restraint.
Third, however well-conceived, US end-use monitoring programmes struggle to accurately and completely track the large volume of US weapons shipments worldwide. The challenge is especially acute in conflict and post-conflict zones, where supply-chain tracking and stockpile security face greater logistical challenges. Record-keeping is often difficult, and staffing shortages or transitions can mean that checks are not carried out in a timely manner or at all (Dalton et al., 2018, pp. 11–12; Brown, 2019; USGAO, 2011). In the case of Blue Lantern, ‘all site visits are deemed optional and are thus unevenly conducted’ (Dalton et al., 2018, pp. 11–12). In FY2018, for example, Blue Lantern performed pre- and/or post-shipment checks on only 1.3% of 35,779 authorised licence applications (Lucas & Vassalotti, 2020, p.25). Golden Sentry's guidelines are thought to be more systematic, but it engages in little public reporting with which to assess its practices. In addition, both programmes tend to focus on who has US weapons and not the actual use of those weapons; they do not monitor ‘the use of U.S. weapons in human rights abuses, violations of international humanitarian law (IHL), and other civilian harm’ (Tolany et al., 2021, p. 2). Of course, most exporter countries do not conduct regular post-shipment checks; this is by no means a US-specific problem. However, it does suggest that the US gold standard on paper is difficult to translate into meaningful practice.
543The silence they indict is about us---the customers left off the list.
Rossdale 25 — Chris Rossdale. April. Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol; works on militarism, policing and direct action against the arms trade. Global Studies Quarterly, “Racial Capitalism Must Be Defended: Reading the Arms Trade through Critiques of Policing,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf032, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf032 Clopus
36). The repressive regimes discourse places critical focus on transfers to controversial regimes. It often involves the use of country lists, as demonstrated in the CAAT quote, naming a series of self-evidently problematic actors to demonstrate the malign nature of the industry itself. The repressive regimes discourse is also constituted by a series of silences and omissions. Within the list of condemned regimes, there is a conspicuous absence of certain customers, whose domestic policing operations are not considered categorically troubling (Rossdale 2019, 245–6). Anna Stavrianakis argues that the repressive regimes discourse reproduces the hierarchical structure of the international system: [a]rguing for an end to controversial exports – which are usually exports to the South – without a wider argument about the structure of military power in international relations leaves the military dominance of Northern states intact and does nothing to challenge hierarchical North-South relations. (2010, 59) The result is a “depoliticisation of militarism within the European world” (2010, 111) and the “production of the
South as a site of intervention and its resultant disciplining” (2010, 114). While these arguments have previously been made in the context of the arms trade and militarism more broadly, they have specific resonance for thinking about policing. By making the arms trade problematic on the terms of its excesses, the discourse obscures the quotidian violence of policing in and by states in the global North, and especially within liberal contexts (Duff 2024). Liberal policing is thus positioned as an administrative matter, a mature form of state violence enacted by fundamentally legitimate governments (contra “regimes”). The repressive regimes discourse is always a racializing discourse, tracing and carving a global color line demarking who can be trusted with martial technology and who cannot (Rossdale 2019, 252–6; see also Mathur 2014; Cooper 2018). In this context, it tracks historical discourses that position good policing as a fundamental marker of civilization, a central component of the perceived capacity or incapacity for self-government (Neocleous 2014, 121–37). A suspicion of the policing practices of others has been a productive narrative for colonial governance, helping to license international interventions, counter-insurgency operations, and training programs that have restructured policing around the world in line with imperial ambitions (Schrader 2019). The repressive regimes discourse therefore places critical attention on some technology transfers to policing forces, but in a manner that obscures and normalizes policing in liberal contexts while reproducing racial/colonial categories of the international. The concept of “police militarization” is the second frame through which links are drawn between the arms trade and policing. Claims that traditional boundaries between militaries and police are breaking down have become common-place in both scholarship and public discourse. These accounts point toward “the reconfiguration of civilian police around the principals of militarism” (Gamal 2016, 983), arguing that supposedly civilian police forces have been transformed by an influx of military equipment, tactics, and operational attitudes (Bieler 2016). Much of this work focuses on developments within the United States, paying particular attention to surplus equipment from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan funneled into local police forces, but “police militarization” has been identified in the United Kingdom (Mukhopadhyay 1998), Brazil and South Africa (Stuurman
544Non-reformist reform is the alternative to rupture---revolution is neither desirable nor viable.
Akbar 23 — Amna A. Akbar. June. Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Law at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law. Yale Law Journal, “Non-Reformist Reforms and Struggles over Life, Death, and Democracy,” vol. 132, p. 2497 Clopus
Drawing from socialist feminist writings of the mid-twentieth century, the Grassroots Power Project uses the phrase “stepping stone reforms” for demands that pave the way to the world the organization and others like it are hoping to build. 67 Across the U.S. left today, such frameworks for thinking about reform toward abolitionist, socialist, communist, or anarchist horizons have proliferated with a focus on undermining neoliberalism, racial capitalism, and the carceral state. A range of terms from the mid-twentieth century are being revived and redeployed—as are larger debates about socialist strategy, reform and revolution, and the theories of social change in which these terms are nested. 68 The terms reflect various conceptions of the horizon for social change, the agential classes or coalitions for agitation and remaking, and the strategies, tactics, and modes of social organization such transformation will require. 69
Most common today is the term “non-reformist reform.” Non-reformist reform is typically associated with a democratic-socialist tradition. But it is being used broadly, including by prison abolitionists, many of whom embrace anticapitalist politics but may or may not claim socialism or communism. The syntax of “non-reformist reform” poses a riddle at the heart of projects that seek transformation, emancipation, or liberation in the face of an unjust system: is it possible for “reforms” to change the essential character of a system rather than to improve it? To foment new social formations that might make the grounds ripe for future revolution? 70 The non-reformist reform framework suggests reform is less about expertise than it is about intervening in the balance of power among
67. Id.; see also JULIET MITCHELL, WOMAN’S ESTATE 73 (1971) (referring to “stepping-stones” as reforms that take women’s oppression seriously on the road to socialism). Katrina Forrester draws on the framework in her superb essay on demands, in particular wages for housework and the socialization of housework. Katrina Forrester, Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework, 116 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 1278, 1283-85 (2022).
68. On strategy, see, for example, SOCIALIST STRATEGY AND ELECTORAL POLITICS: A REPORT (Verso Books ed., 2019); and WE ORGANIZE TO CHANGE EVERYTHING: FIGHTING FOR ABORTION ACCESS AND REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE (Natalie Adler, Marian Jones, Jessie Kindig, Elizabeth Navarro & Anne Rumberger eds., 2022).
69. For a helpful survey of the various terms, from Leon Trotsky’s “transitional demands,” adopted by the Fourth International, to Juliet Mitchell’s “stepping-stones,” see Forrester, supra note 67, at 1281, 1285-86 (2022). See also LEON TROTSKY, THE DEATH AGONY OF CAPITALISM AND THE TASKS OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL: THE MOBILIZATION OF THE MASSES AROUND TRANSITIONAL DEMANDS TO PREPARE THE CONQUEST OF POWER “THE TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM” (Dimitri Verstraeten trans., 2002) (1938) (describing the “transitional program”); MITCHELL, supra note 67, at 73.
70. Any left project of non-reformist reform would reject “the Twentieth-Century Synthesis” of neoliberal law and economics. See Britton-Purdy et al., supra note 11, at 1789-90.
classes. 71 While the framework does not often provide clear-cut differentiations between reformist and non-reformist reforms, it reorients conversations about reform around antagonism, militancy, and building independent organized power. 72 And it rejects default orientations focused on either rights and liberal legalism, or the market and the prison, as adequate responses to inequality and various social problems. It considers the dual nature of reform, as inherently conciliatory to an unequal order and an essential ground for popular struggle. But the framework is not simply an alternative to liberal reformism; it is an alternative to revolution or armed insurrection. The turn to non-reformist reform emerges out of a sense that revolution is neither desirable nor viable. On desirability, it is a rejection of a form of centralism and vanguardism. 73 On viability, the concern is about political repression, as well as the world-historical might of U.S. carceral and military power. The turn is an embrace of the necessity of building democratic majorities to reconstitute power, the state, and society. It is part of a larger return of the left toward mass politics and democratic domains. The framework imagines revolutionary and transformative processes through disruption, repetition, and the building of new democratic spaces.
71. For a powerful push for contending with power, see, for example, Simonson, supra note 4, at 787-88. See also K. Sabeel Rahman & Jocelyn Simonson, The Institutional Design of Community Control, 108 CALIF. L. REV. 679, 682-83 (2020) (examining the prospects of community control as a way to shift power in local governance); cf. Sameer Ashar & Annie Lai, Access to Power, 148 DÆDALUS 82, 83 (2019) (“Access-to-justice approaches that assume the existence of a legal system that dispenses justice obscure the structural and unequal distribution of economic, social, and political power and foreclose opportunities for people to work toward a truly just society.”).
545Militarism isn’t a function of the security state---it grew as the state shrank.
Krebs 24 — Ronald R. Krebs and Robert Ralston. September 27. Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in the Liberal Arts and political scientist at the University of Minnesota. Political scientist at the University of Birmingham. Constitutional Political Economy, “The national security state and the uses of militarism,” https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-024-09448-x Clopus
Given the benefits of militarism, it stands to reason that a broader, deeper, and more extensive national security state would be inclined to promote militarism. However, the fact that powerful actors profit from a particular cultural formation does not mean that they are responsible for that formation’s dominance. Even if we assume that the national security establishment’s defenders were so unified and prescient that they self-consciously and cohesively promoted militarism—a rather large assumption—it remains less clear why they would succeed. Precisely because the stakes are so high, the national security state’s efforts to promote militarism should meet with significant opposition. Moreover, militarism may well undermine democratic control of the armed forces, and civilian politicians should therefore at least be ambivalent about it. Scholars of culture are often rightly skeptical that dominant cultural formations can be traced back straightforwardly to the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Moreover, only further country-level research can establish if the basic observational hypothesis—that large national security states are more prone to militarism—has merit. It is not clear, for instance, that countries with large militaries—in terms of men and women under arms, as a percentage of the population—are more militaristic: we observe militarism in countries that recruit large militaries via conscription—like Russia and Israel—but there are also
This paragraph synthesizes the insights of Kaag and Kreps 2014; Caverley 2014; Kreps 2018; Fazal 2014.
manifestations of militarism in countries with far fewer men and women under arms—like France. It is not clear that militarism emerges as countries’ national security establishments grow: consider that militarism arose in the United States amidst the post-Cold War “peace dividend”—that is, precisely when its Cold War national-security state was under significant pressure. Militarism does not appear to be greater in countries whose militaries formally control significant portions of the economy, like China or Egypt. Militarism is alive and well in liberal democracies where the armed forces are not directly major economic players. If national security states distinguish themselves by active kinetic presences, that would seem to fit global and regional powers, like the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Israel, but China— which announced in 2014 that it would henceforth hold an annual Martyrs’ Day—has not fought a war since 1979. It may not be surprising that Ukraine would establish Defenders Day in 2015—right after the Russian annexation of Crimea and amidst the ongoing Russia-sponsored insurgency in eastern provinces. But consider that South Africa established a new Armed Forces Day in 2012, and Spain started celebrating Veterans Day in 2003, as did the Netherlands in 2005, Denmark in 2009, Indonesia in 2015, and Sweden in 2021. Norway started celebrating Memorial Day only in 2007. Clearly, most of these countries—hardly notable military powers before or since—were not embracing militarism as part of a scheme to weaken public opposition to the use of force. Whether larger and deeper national security states are associated with more militarism is an important research question—beyond the scope of this article. Why manifestations of militarism have, in recent decades, become so common around the world demands further investigation. Yet the fact that we cannot necessarily pin it on the national security state does not alter the fact that the national security state benefits from
militarism. Militarism promotes greater spending on the military and the growth of central state power, undermines democratic civil-military relations and civilian control, and diminishes public opposition to the use of force. Whether the national security state is responsible for militarism is an open question, but the data presented here powerfully suggest that militarism helps sustain the enduring national security state.
546Refusal succeeds a third of the time now---the trend is down, hard.
Chenoweth 20 — Erica Chenoweth. July. Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard’s Kennedy School; built the standard dataset on civil resistance. Journal of Democracy, “The Future of Nonviolent Resistance,” vol. 31, no. 3, p. 69-84 Clopus
Of course, civil-resistance campaigns do not always usher in peace and prosperity. In Syria in 2011, dictator Bashar al-Assad responded to a nonviolent struggle by unleashing military force and even chemical weapons against his civilian population. The resulting conflict has continued for nearly ten years now and has become the bloodiest civil war of the current century, forcing some three-million people to flee the country. In 2011, the U.S.-backed government of Bahrain crushed a nonviolent movement that tried to challenge the monarchy there. And in Ukraine, a people-power movement managed to push Russian-backed kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovych from power in February 2014—but rather than permitting Ukraine to move deeper into the European orbit, Russia seized the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and has fueled an ongoing and deadly war of secession in Ukraine’s east.
Nonviolent campaigns over the past ten years have succeeded less often than their historical counterparts. From the 1960s until about 2010, success rates for revolutionary nonviolent campaigns remained above 40 percent, climbing as high as 65 percent in the 1990s. But success rates for all revolutions have since declined, as shown in Figure 2. Since 2010, less than 34 percent of nonviolent revolutions and a mere 8 percent of violent ones have succeeded.
While governments have had greater success at beating down challenges to their authority, nonviolent resistance still outperformed violent resistance by a 4-to-1 margin. That is because armed confrontation has grown even less successful, continuing a downward trend that has been underway since the 1970s. These caveats notwithstanding, the last decade has seen a sharp decline in the success rate for civil resistance—reversing much of the overall upward trend of the previous sixty years.
The past decade therefore presents a troubling paradox: Just as civil resistance has become the most common approach to challenging regimes, it has begun to grow less effective—at least in the short term.