Justice, Sustainability, and Security: Landmine Ban Assessment PDF

Chapter 6 Moral Mission Accomplished? Assessing the Landmine Ban Adam m Bowerr and Richard d Price Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. Introduction: Ethics and the Antipersonnel Landmines Ban The ban on antipersonnel (AP) landmines encapsulated in the Mine Ban Treaty (MBT) is a hard case for international ethics insofar as it directly implicates the security functions of the state and its freedom of action in warfare, which is where we least might expect to see the niceties of ethics make an appearance. Indeed, the treaty and associated moral movement seeks no less than to eradicate a type of weapon in widespread use across the globe—a particularly challenging candidate for international moral change. The skeptical position on the role of ethics generally in world politics, and especially in war and security, of course has a long history. In response to contemporary scholarly research demonstrating the role of moral norms in world politics, this view has nonetheless been rearticulated by some realist scholars: “I would love to live in a world in which state conduct was restrained by strong moral norms, especially regarding the use of force. Unfortunately, that it is not the world in which we live, and we are not likely to any time soon.”1 While few scholars in recent years have gone as far as Desch and deny (in print) any force to moral norms in world politics whatsoever, most skeptics take the more subtle position of acknowledging that social phenomena like morality and legitimacy can be at play in world politics, but maintain that they only reflect more fundamental forces of material power, or in fact just cause conflict rather than resolving it. Thus, efforts to promote effective international moral norms are understood and predicted to rise and fall on the basis of their degree Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 132 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE of support from the most materially powerful actors in the international system.2 Alternatively, ethically skeptical rationalist scholars of IR maintain that such international norms and institutions merely reflect state interests, arguing that they do not involve commitments that states weren’t going to do anyway.3 From these perspectives, the fact that the treaty banning AP landmines emerged out of a nontraditional diplomatic process that ultimately excluded many of the powerful states in the international system would therefore appear to severely undermine the prospects for its exerting substantial influence in world politics.4 Yet there may be greater potential for achieving meaningful ethical outcomes via “non-hegemonic” processes than realist and rationalist scholars recognize.5 At the time of the conclusion of the mine ban and since, other scholarship has sought to account for such an apparent success in generating a new international norm against the wishes of the great military powers, in no small part by changing states’ definitions of their interests.6 Some efforts were attempted to project its likely future impact as well,7 but that literature obviously was not in a position early on to assess the consequences of the landmine ban. Over a decade on, we are now in a better position to do just that. Has the process that produced the AP landmines ban been able to deliver results of ethical consequence? Scholarly work has shown how such moral norms may be promoted in the international system, suggesting mechanisms by which international moral norms may arise and have effects even in the face of formal opposition from prominent states. This chapter will draw from this literature and the literature on norm compliance and effectiveness to assess the extent to which the skeptics’ expectations about power and interests have been borne out over a decade after the campaign to ban landmines succeeded in gaining wide support for an international legal ban, or whether the ban does in fact successfully challenge those skeptical of meaningful humanitarian change in world politics. Before proceeding further, we need to establish just what is the ethical basis of the ban on landmines that we aim to assess. The mine ban norm is rooted in a humanitarian logic that above all seeks to reduce and eliminate the harm incurred by civilian casualties of antipersonnel landmines.8 It is, in other words, a cosmopolitan ethical intervention in world politics. This endeavor has been most famously captured by the transnational civil society movement of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and the resulting multilateral treaty prohibiting the weapon. The MBT can thus be understood as the legal embodiment of a new international moral Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 133 norm prohibiting antipersonnel landmines. However, the moral norm is not simply reducible to its formal legal expression in the MBT, since such a framing would exclude significant actors from consideration. On the one hand, international law is premised on consent, and nonparty states are typically understood to possess no binding obligations to those legal instruments they do not endorse.9 However, constructivist IR theorists have convincingly demonstrated that as expressions of normative reasoning, treaties may come to implicate nonparties as well through broader constitutive shifts in identities and interests.10 On the other hand, non-state actors like rebel groups are generally precluded from joining formal treaties of international law, but to address this significant moral gap, various organizations have sought to enlist insurgents and rebel groups to comply with the objectives of the ban via alternative legal and political mechanisms.11 Despite the imperfect correspondence between the boundaries of legal commitment and ethical action, the treaty does reflect the moral commitment to eliminating the humanitarian consequences of antipersonnel landmines. The formal international legal prohibition is structured to address a variety of dimensions identified as necessary to achieve that overall objective: not just ending the use of landmines, but also ending their production and trade, demining mine-affected areas, and providing victim assistance. An assessment of the moral achievements of AP mine ban must take into account the extent to which states have complied with these humanitarian requirements enshrined in the treaty. Beyond questions of state compliance, the analysis will also include examination of the role of non-state actors, given that they have been among the most prominent users of landmines or similar weapons. Thus, consonant with the norms literature, which has warned that full compliance with a treaty might not be a full measure of norm success or effectiveness insofar as the treaty may have weak obligations that fall far short of ultimate moral aims,12 we will assess the overall humanitarian picture of the AP landmine ban by examining its effect on not only treaty parties but also nonparties, state and non-state, alike. In doing so, this chapter seeks to answer directly one of this volume’s animating questions—namely, the extent to which moral progress is being made in the ongoing struggle for human security. To preview the argument briefly, we find a high degree of compliance with the core injunctions of the MBT, and hence substantial advancement of the moral purpose of the mine ban norm. In this respect the analysis suggests a more hopeful ethical picture than in the case of torture, as developed in Brent Steele’s chapter. Indeed, the two cases present an intriguing and stark Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. 134 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE contrast particularly with respect to US practice that belies overly broad and sanguine conclusions about a steady progressive march of global norms of human security. Like Steele, we are also cognizant of the contingency of normative developments, and demonstrate some important caveats to a teleological view of moral progress in our assessment. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. Assessing Ethical Advancements against Landmines How should we evaluate the influence of a moral norm in world politics? The most obvious metrics are to assess the extent to which the behavior of the relevant actors is in concordance with the norm, and the extent to which that in turn produces or fails to produce the desirable moral outcome. In the case of landmines, that moral outcome can be characterized as reducing and eventually eliminating the humanitarian impact of AP mines.13 For the campaign and resulting treaty, this has meant not just the ending the use of AP mines, and thus reducing casualties, but also demining and the provision of victim assistance. This chapter will focus mostly on the elimination of the use of landmines and the end of landmine casualties as the primary end goals, which if successful, would eventually obviate demining and victim assistance in the long run. Beyond such behavioral indicators of compliance with the ban on the use of landmines and resulting casualties, the literature on norms in International Relations has made the case for the importance of other measures for understanding norm development and robustness. This work has underscored the importance of mechanisms by which norms develop and come to have effects that would not be captured by simple assessments of landmine use and casualties, and that can give us a fuller picture of how robust or thin the global commitment to the landmines norm is to date. For example, there is a difference between a state cynically stating that it abides by a norm but then violating it as a matter of course, and a state that generally abides by a norm but then violates it in an extreme situation, and a state that genuinely has bought into a norm but is in noncompliance with requirements of its legal expression in a treaty solely due to lack of capability (such as inability to complete demining within a required timeline, or failure to meet a disarmament schedule due to lack of adequate facilities or resources for stockpile destruction). A gross indicator solely of behavior—compliance or not—would not pick up such subtle but meaningful differences in how we would regard the robustness of the norm. As a result, as long ago advised by Kratochwil and Ruggie14 Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 135 and followed through in a variety of ways by scholars researching international norms, we need to assess discursive dynamics, such as justifications for various behaviors, to help us understand various stages along the continuum of norm development and contestation, from rejection to mere rhetorical acceptance to internalization.15 Behavior and the Ethical Imperatives of the Mine Ban Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. In order to assess the effectiveness of the ban on antipersonnel landmines, we need to identify and analyze evidence of “behavioural compliance pulls”—changes in state practice in conformance with the core injunctions of the treaty—as well as some sense of improving international conditions.16 In the analysis that follows, we rely extensively on the Landmine Monitor, a product of the ICBL that provides yearly reports with detailed information on state policy and practice with respect to landmines as well as non-state actor behavior. This informal civil society monitoring mechanism not only provides us with a great deal of our data, but is in itself an interesting part of the norm effectiveness story, insofar as the matters of compliance and implementation have not been allowed to languish in shadows of state negligence or secrecy but are rather subject to constant scrutiny and pressure by transnational activists.17 Ban Constituency An important dimension of assessing the status of the mine ban is gauging its community of adherents. In this regard, the norm fairs quite favorably, as the MBT enjoyed early and extensive membership across the international system. The treaty was initially signed by 122 states on December 3–4, 1997, and became fully operational on March 1, 1999, in what is “believed to be the fastest entry into force of any major treaty ever.”18 As of November 2012, 160 states are full parties to the treaty. The extent and pace of ratifications and accessions bodes well for the MBT, since widespread and diverse membership is vital to the health of legal norms. It is also somewhat surprising, given the strategy of the landmines campaign to produce a tight and robust treaty that wasn’t watered down with loopholes to appease the likes of US demands for exceptions: “The large number of States Parties to this demanding treaty has strongly countered conventional wisdom that suggests the more stringent a legal instrument, the more difficult it is to attract adherents.”19 Was the treaty joined mostly by states that had no use for landmines anyway, as per the rationalist theoretical expectation? There Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. 136 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE is no shortage of the likes of Belgium and Jamaica who had no projected need for the weapon, but many parties have less pacified security environments. Importantly, a notable number of states— from Colombia to the Philippines to Uganda—joined the treaty in the midst of violent conflict.20 It is worth reflecting on this phenomenon, since a skeptical reading might expect such states to delay their membership due to a desire to retain a potentially useful weapon, or a lack of capacity to complete the necessary domestic legal and political requirements. The perceived legitimacy and normative authority of the MBT appears to have been instrumental in a number of cases in shifting the political conditions in favor of formal membership. In referring to his country’s accession, the Turkish delegate noted that Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. [t]his was a bold decision. Turkey is situated in an extremely volatile region, with many of its neighbors outside the Convention. Moreover, Turkey was engaged in a struggle against terrorism. Nevertheless, sharing the vision and goals of the Convention Turkey took the leap for a better world. Unfortunately, many of the impeding circumstances back then, continue to exist now. The volatility has turned into turmoil, many of Turkey’s neighbors have not acceded yet to the Convention and the struggle against terrorism continues. However, Turkey remains committed to its obligations stemming from the Convention and continues to exert every effort to fulfil them.21 Thus norms can generate pressures to adopt binding legal restraints even in instances where doing so bears directly on a state’s freedom of action in highly consequential aspects of national policy—namely, national security. On the one hand, then, one significant compliance pull toward the MBT has been its value as a symbolic demonstration of responsible statehood. To that end, Angola, Cambodia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, Mexico, Niger, Peru, Serbia and Montenegro, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, and Timor-Leste joined the MBT shortly after the end of armed hostilities and/or a significant transition of government.22 More recently, the newly created state of South Sudan acceded to the MBT as one of its first acts as an independent political entity, and while border disputes with its northern neighbor continued to generate instability.23 Such processes are suggestive and indeed constitutive of an international standard of appropriate ethical behavior. On the other hand, the continued resistance of many states presents a challenge to the consolidation of the anti-landmine norm and associated claims of moral achievement. At present, 36 states remain outside the Mine Ban regime, including the United States, China, Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 137 Russia, and India. Other nonparties like Egypt, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and South Korea are important regional actors. Moreover, many of the remaining nonmembers are significant past users of AP landmines, and possess the largest stockpiles of the weapons. In terms of their geopolitical influence, then, these states would seem to be highly significant to the realization of an effective moral norm, blunting the impact of the otherwise impressive membership thus far achieved. Universality would obviously represent the morally optimal state of affairs; short of that, however, materially powerful states may not simply represent the only critically relevant constituency in judging the impact of the mine ban as we might expect, given that their compliance or lack thereof would likely have a major impact. In the case of the mine ban norm, a vital constituency would include not just those who may wish to use AP mines, but also those states that have borne the brunt of such policies. In this latter respect, the MBT does substantially capture the relevant community of actors. Of the 72 currently mine-affected states globally, 48 are parties to the MBT.24 Even more substantially, all 13 of the most mine-affected states are now treaty members; this is critical insofar as the treaty obligates parties to completely demine their territory, and this group accounted for approximately half of all mines deployed globally at the time of the treaty’s founding.25 Moreover, the extent of opposition from major powers may not be as uniform as their formal membership status suggests. Indeed, global ethical activism embodied in international treaties may often stimulate behavioral and discursive changes in accordance with norms short of official adherence to a legal agreement via ratification or accession. In this vein, many prominent nonparties recognize the desirability of the ban at some future point, and have frequently altered their behavior to informally conform to treaty norms as will be examined later in the chapter. The role of non-state armed groups (NSAGs) must also be considered, particularly since some see landmines as “weapons of the weak” that are particularly apt to be deployed by insurgent and rebel groups. Landmine Monitor summarizes that a “significant number of NSAGs have indicated their willingness to observe a ban on antipersonnel mines. This has taken place through unilateral statements, bilateral agreements, and the signature of parallel non-legal initiatives like the Deed of Commitment for Adherence to a Total Ban on Antipersonnel Mines and for Cooperation in Mine Action n administered by the NGO Geneva Call, and the Rebel Group Declaration of Adherence to International Humanitarian Law on Landminess developed by the Philippines Campaign to Ban Landmines.”26 Any figure Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. 138 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. regarding the prevalence of NSAG compliance with the ban is difficult to determine with precision, as such groups often emerge, merge, and disband in various combinations over time. However, thus far Geneva Call has registered 42 NSAGs as signatories to its Deed of Commitment, t and this figure represents a significant development over the prior status quo. Non-state actor endorsement of the mine ban norm is significant for two reasons. First, since NSAGs are frequent participants in contemporary armed conflicts, their participation in ethical restraints on the use of force increases the congruence of the ethical norm with real world practice (capturing more of the behavior the MBT seeks to prohibit) and widens the community that embraces the international ethical standard.27 This process can also, in turn, push state actors to adopt the same commitments enshrined in the MBT, by generating pressures to emulate the reputation-enhancing achievements of their non-state adversaries, signalling that the conditions of the conflict have changed and inviting reciprocity, or through the direct integration of former rebel actors into the political and military structures of the state. For example, the decision by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) to sign the Deed of Commitment, t and the subsequent conclusion of the Nuba Mountains Ceasefire agreement with the Government of Sudan in January 2002, helped pave the way for Sudan’s ratification of the MBT. In these respects, non-state armed groups have the potential to play a significant role in the diffusion of international norms. Norm Compliance While state membership in the MBT is an important demonstration of global acceptance of the idea of the mine ban norm, it is of course not sufficient by itself to indicate humanitarian success of the ban movement. A fuller picture of the ethical impact of the landmine ban also requires an assessment of behavior—namely adherence to the obligations of the treaty. In this regard, the prohibition on antipersonnel landmines appears robust. Compliance by states parties as well as nonparty states is the overwhelming pattern; violations have become both exceedingly rare and treated as aberrations by significant actors in the international community. The contrast to other contemporary efforts to establish new international norms—such as climate change or small arms and light weapons—is stark and brings the relative degree of success in a short period of time into sharp relief. The absolute ban on the use of AP landmines sits at the very heart of the normative order created by the MBT. Antipersonnel landmines Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 139 have been regarded for much of their history as uncontroversial weapons, to be employed—within the normal bounds of international humanitarian law—as would other “conventional” munitions like artillery shells, rockets, and personal infantry weapons. The United States Department of State and ICBL have estimated that between 2.5 and 4 million antipersonnel landmines were emplaced annually in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; as of 1998 and the MBT’s genesis, over 70 countries were infested with a total of 60–70 million mines.28 Thus for the AP landmine ban to be considered effective, it must substantially overturn the prior norm by which the use of antipersonnel landmines was a widespread and legitimate feature of warfare.29 The pattern of state use of AP landmines over the past decade is strongly suggestive of a highly consequential moral norm. Since the advent of the MBT, the new deployment of landmines has declined dramatically across the international system. Seventeen state actors were confirmed to have used AP landmines between 1997 and 1999 as the ban movement culminated in a treaty; between 2007 and 2009, only two states—Myanmar and Russia—continued to use landmines as a regular feature of their military operations.30 More recently, however, credible allegations have emerged that the Turkish Armed Forces engaged in a limited deployment of antipersonnel landmines in at least two instances in 2009.31 Violations by states parties would be especially damaging to the health of the ban since it would provide specific challenge to the absolute nature of the anti-use prohibition from among those states supposedly most committed to the norm. Three additional nonparty states—Israel, Libya (under Muammar Gaddafi), and Syria—along with Myanmar are reported to have used antipersonnel landmines during 2011.32 These developments are worrying since they further cut against the broader pattern of substantially declining reliance on the weapons. It remains to be seen whether these acts constitute aberrations from the general trend, or a renewed pattern of mine use. This general decline in the employment of AP mines has occurred despite the persistence of violent conflicts—and especially low-tech civil wars and intrastate conflicts—in which moral skeptics would have to assume AP landmine use as the default expectation.33 On the contrary, prominent past users of the weapons are now engaged in a substantial pattern of restraint, as demonstrated by the absence of mines featuring in the military operations of Western armed forces in the 2003 Iraq War, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, including numerous states who had used landmines in previous conflicts, joined the treaty, and subsequently refrained from landmine use in subsequent Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 140 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE conflicts.34 It is also significant that a variety of states with historically aggressive neighbors—including the Baltic states, Cambodia, Finland, Jordan, Lebanon, and Poland—have not continued to utilize antipersonnel landmines in the defense of their borders. While interstate wars have declined sharply in recent decades, intrastate conflicts—precisely those in which inexpensive and uncomplicated weapons predominate—continue in a number of regions. Yet the use of AP mines by states is now already rare here as well. Indeed, since the advent of the MBT, a host of state actors have refrained from employing antipersonnel landmines in their internal and regional security operations.35 Were it not for their effective stigmatization, we would expect to see AP mine use in a greater number of these conflicts, where the weapons previously featured extensively. The taboo against mine use also extends to states outside the MBT. It is particularly notable that the United States appears not to have used AP landmines in any of its interventions since the 1991 Gulf War. This includes the military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—while there are some allegations that the US used landmines in the former conflict, Landmine Monitor has consistently claimed to the contrary.36 It is interesting to note that the ambiguity here can actually serve to reinforce the normative prohibition: even if true, the fact that this allegation remains unverified speaks at least in part to a desire among US officials to obscure their behavior. This, in turn, reflects a sensitivity to the demands of an international norm, albeit one that the United States does not officially endorse. It is interesting to contrast this finding with the central message of Steele’s chapter concerning United States backsliding on the anti-torture norm, and especially so since the two divergent developments occurred during the same temporal period and with the same political actors. Indeed, that the United States under the Bush administration would have complied with the landmines norm at the same time as violating the torture taboo is likely the opposite of what most might have expected, and indicates the fluidity of what gets defined as meeting thresholds where moral boundaries are overridden. We note that the apparent restraint demonstrated by American forces also can precipitate important compounding effects over time. The international stigmatization of AP mines and recent prominent instances of nonuse has increased the political salience of the issue such that any future decision to resume mine use would involve the most senior decision makers. This has had the effect of reinforcing the exceptional—as opposed to routine—nature of the use of AP mines, thus further raising the threshold for future use. In the big scheme of things, given the lack Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 141 of reluctance of the Bush administration to flout prominent international norms like those prohibiting torture,37 it is quite remarkable that these same actors did not simply proceed to engage in the use of landmines as it may have suited particular tactical purposes in Iraq or Afghanistan, and justify such use as it attempted to do so with “enhanced interrogation” techniques. In many cases, ethical behavioural change—de facto compliance with the nonuse norm— has preceded official endorsement of the legal norm. This has often occurred in situations where armed conflict had previously featured substantial contrary behavior. AP landmine use by non-state armed groups also appears to have declined in the last few years, though detailed accounting is made difficult by the frequent lack of transparency and access to armed groups and conflict zones. The ICBL has identified the use of antipersonnel landmines by non-state armed groups in 28 countries since 1999, with a high of 19 countries in 2001, dropping to a recorded low of 7 in 2009.38 Key questions are how this compares to non-state use before the ban, and the counterfactual of how much use we would expect in the absence of the landmine taboo? Perhaps the most sophisticated study to date found that approximately 40 NSAGs employed victim-activated mines—antipersonnel and anti-vehicle, improvised and factory-made—in the period 2003–2005, but this figure can unfortunately not be considered against detailed reporting prior to the ban or since.39 However, the decline in annual mine-related casualties—from a high of 26,000 to approximately 5,000 now— would fit within a trend line of declining use by both state and non-state actors, and after all is indicative of success in the humanitarian objective of eliminating civilian casualties. This pattern of restraint must however be set against additional actual or alleged instances of mine use. For example, Angola, Ecuador, Ethiopia, and Guinea-Bissau are known to have used antipersonnel landmines as signatories to the MBT and Senegal did so after ratification but before entry into force of the treaty.40 Six states—Burundi, Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan, Turkey, and Uganda— are also suspected of employing mines as signatories or full parties.41 Importantly for an assessment of norm robustness, in all of the cases mentioned above, the state in question has responded to the charges by pledging fidelity to the legal obligations of the treaty, a topic that we explore more fully below.42 While potentially problematic for the robustness of the norm, of course, the manner in which proven or suspected violations have been addressed may actually serve to reinforce rather than degrade the underlying norms. Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 142 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE In sum, the overall pattern is clear that the employment of AP landmines has increasingly become an aberration in international practice over time, a development that comes into sharp relief when compared to the fact that until the mid-1990s, the use of AP landmines was widespread and extensive: that is, “normal” practice. Moreover, the pattern evidenced above cannot be explained away as merely the result of a declining frequency of violent conflict or the irrelevance of the weapons themselves. Rather, the empirical record would suggest the impact of a moral norm against the use of antipersonnel landmines that is endorsed by the overwhelming majority of state actors. The prohibitionary norm has also impacted other relevant forms of practice. Closely associated with the anti-use norm are additional injunctions concerning the production, transfer, and stockpiling of antipersonnel landmines. These are critical to the efficacy of the treaty and broader moral norm because they constitute the enabling conditions for mine use. Here too the record is broadly indicative of an efficacious prohibition. The normative stigma associated with AP mines has had a particularly notable impact in shifting state practice with respect to the production and transfer of the weapons. It is estimated that more than 50 states produced landmines at some point during the past half century; of that total, 38 have now definitively ceased production. “[These] include a majority of the big producers in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s—those who bear much of the responsibility for the tens of millions of mines now in the ground.”43 As of 2011 only three states—India, Myanmar, and Pakistan—are known to be continuing active production.44 Formerly large-scale producers like Egypt, Israel, and Poland—all of whom have yet to join the treaty—have followed suit in officially abandoning the practice.45 Major military powers like the United States and China have also informally halted production activities in recent years.46 The empirical record therefore demonstrates changing practice among treaty members as well as hold-out states—a highly significant pattern as states with past behavior contributing to the landmines crisis are particularly relevant to the consolidation of a social expectation against mine production. A very similar pattern can be discerned with respect to the transfer of AP landmines. No confirmed cases have been recorded since 1997, and the few states suspected of providing mines to foreign entities strenuously deny the allegations.47 To the extent that it endures at all, the “global trade in antipersonnel mines has consisted solely of a low-level of illicit and unacknowledged transfers.”48 This amounts to what the ICBL has termed “[a] de factoo ban on the transfer of antipersonnel mines” and one that “is attributable to the mine ban Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 143 movement and the stigma that the Mine Ban Treaty has attached to the weapon.”49 Where such rare instances have occurred, they have often caused something of a media sensation. For instance, Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. In April 2002, a senior representative of the UK company PW Defence Ltd was recorded offering to supply 500 landmines to a BBC journalist, in contravention of national legislation (the Landmines Act 1998) and the Mine Ban Treaty. Researchers from the UK NGO Landmine Action found PW Defence Ltd (formerly Paines Wessex) promoting the mines at arms fairs in Greece and South Africa.... Local police launched an investigation and David Howell, PW Defence’s Overseas Sales Manager, was “withdrawn from duties” and has since been arrested.50 In this instance, prosecutors determined that there were insufficient grounds for criminal prosecution, but the broader implications of the normative taboo were readily apparent. As with production, states that were deeply implicated in the creation of the humanitarian mine problem are an important constituency for assessing the transformative effects of an international norm. The near-complete absence of AP landmine transfer (with due allowance for the likelihood of much lower-level clandestine transfers) is thus strong evidence for a dramatic change in the way in which the weapons are conceived in international society. On the one hand, formerly prominent producers and exporters like Italy, Belgium, Canada, and the United Kingdom were instrumental to the emergence of the mine ban movement. On the other hand, this rapidly crystallizing legal provision has similarly generated pressures for states outside of the formal legal agreement, most commonly via domestic moratoria.51 Such acts are significant both for their practical effects—reducing the availability of AP mines—and for their symbolic reinforcement of the humanitarian principles at the heart of the mine ban norm. This outcome is a particularly powerful demonstration of the effect of the prohibitionary norm embedded in the MBT. By way of comparison, despite the efforts of civil society campaigners, a similar degree of success in stemming the (illicit) flow of small arms and light weapons has not been realized, not to mention other moral prohibitionary efforts such as those against narcotics and the trafficking of persons. Progress in the destruction of national stockpiles is a further important measure of the humanitarian impact of the mine ban, since the physical elimination of AP landmines is necessary to ensure they do not enter operational use at a later date.52 Here again compliance has been encouraging for treaty proponents: 159 states—including Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 144 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE 6 nonparties—are judged to have no remaining stockpiles, save for those permitted to be retained for training purposes as per Article 3 of the MBT.53 This has made a measurable difference in reducing the threat of future mine use: in total, approximately 45 million AP landmines have been destroyed since 1997. 54 Just as significantly, the elimination of these weapons in the military arsenals of the overwhelming majority of states has reinforced the normative status of the mine ban by placing AP landmines beyond the realm of “normal” military operations. To overcome the force of the injunction would therefore require the more substantial decision to reconstitute domestic production capacities or acquire mines from foreign sources. In this respect, the normative and material effect of the mine ban has been to remove antipersonnel mines from the standard “menu of options” across a large portion of international society. These outcomes consistent with measures supporting the overall moral norm are, however, challenged by the fact that Belarus, Greece, Turkey, and Ukraine all failed to meet their stockpile destruction deadlines, placing them in serious breach of the legal requirements of the treaty. Noncompliance with the provisions of the legal expression of the ban, if wide and persistent enough, surely detract from what can be claimed on behalf of the overall robustness of commitment to the moral norm. Among these states, over ten million AP mines remain to be destroyed.55 Similarly, the retention of some 165 million AP landmines by the 37 nonparties presents one of the most glaring challenges to the ethical purpose of the MBT. In one respect, the vast numbers of weapons present a potential humanitarian disaster in the making as long as they remain in existence.56 The continued existence of large stockpiles also undercuts an assessment that there is a robust and overwhelming consensus stigmatizing mines as “abnormal” weapons as one might argue is in stronger evidence with respect to biological weapons. Indeed, while some prominent nonparties—including China and Russia—have engaged in substantial destruction efforts in recent years, these processes are directed against AP landmines that do not conform to the less stringent requirements of Amended Protocol II to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.57 The object of compliance is thus a differentt source of legal obligation, and one that is derived from a different ethical approach—regulation as opposed to absolute prohibition. In this respect, state behavior of some of the world’s preeminent military powers constitutes a direct challenge to the settled nature of the absolute form of the prohibitionary ethical norm more broadly. Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 145 Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. Discourse and the Socialization of the Mine Ban Norm The empirical record provides substantial evidence that core rules of the MBT are receiving widespread adherence. Yet to assign influence to the norm requires some evidence that compliance is not solely due to other factors such as declining military utility, as skeptics would suggest. To assess actor motivations we need to attend to not just behavior but also discourse as a source of evidence for moral change. Here we examine the official statements of state and non-state actors’ representatives expressing acceptance or contestation of the core humanitarian logic of the mine ban norm. Official statements, of course, have to be taken with a grain of salt, though sometimes telling patterns can emerge over time as norms and their justifications gain or lose broad acceptance. Research of this type tends to be more revealing over greater spans of time—for instance, the radical difference in how states and their decision makers speak about slavery or colonies today from how they did in previous centuries is a powerful indicator of a fundamental moral shift that has occurred in world politics. In explaining their decision to support the MBT, states—both parties and nonparties—have frequently cited the ban’s humanitarian appeal. To cite a typical example, the Philippines—at the time engaged in a protracted internal conflict—summarized well the humanitarian ethos at the heart of its calculus: “It is because we can no longer abide such grievous loss that we have heeded the call of human conscience, and have come here to end any further use, production, transfer and stockpiling of this rogue and shameful weapon.”58 Numerous other states have similarly welcomed the establishment of the ban as a morally progressive development. The expressed sense of moral justification is particularly notable among mine-affected states. Croatia has asserted that “[a]ny country that is faced with having to deal first hand with the scourge of anti-personnel mines will confirm... anti-personnel mines cannot any longer be considered as a legitimate means for guarding national security. All we need do is talk to the landmine survivors... to see the necessity of this claim.”59 This sentiment is echoed widely elsewhere; indeed, numerous states have explicitly identified the humanitarian spirit of the ban in their own political endorsements. Yet state views are not static, and widespread support for the landmine ban did not emerge, fully formed, from nothing. Indeed, one of the important implications of a constructivist view of ethical action is that new obligations both act as a constraint on state policies and, Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 146 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE more deeply, constitute their and other actors’ identities and thus shape their interests. It is to be remembered that before the advent of the mine ban movement, antipersonnel landmines were not identified as especially horrendous weapons. Looking back from the vantage point of today, the acceptability of a prohibition for much of the international community may seem overdetermined. But even states now rightly regarded as key supporters of the MBT were subject to the same transformation in their views. Key to this process was a reconceptualization of landmines as a humanitarian issue lending itself as much to a disaster relief or health crisis kind of response rather than treating it under the paradigm of disarmament or war.60 Once established, this new standard rapidly came to be associated with a new role identity in the international system, wherein adherence to the mine ban became socially desirable as a demonstration of responsible statehood. Price has suggested that the political leaders of like-minded nations “evidently felt it intolerable to be left outside the club of responsible international citizens once they judged that the balance had tipped such that resistance signalled outlier status.”61 A number of states frequently associated with multilateral efforts underwent such a transformative process from skeptical to ultimately supportive parties. Thus “[a]t the beginning of the 1990s, even Canada, eventually among the most strident advocates of a ban, was dismissive of the suggestion that militaries would, should, or could give up their AP landmine stockpiles.”62 Yet within a short period of time, the use of AP landmines came to be widely viewed as an inherently illegitimate act, and a number of formerly ambivalent states endorsed a full ban on the weapons. This new conception of appropriate behavior cut sharply against the existing status quo, and specifically confronted questions of military utility and national interests. Hence Maslen reports that “the United Kingdom (UK) Ministry of Defence believe[d] that in renouncing anti-personnel mines it has lost an operational capability, but it ha[d] accepted to do so because of the humanitarian imperative.”63 Transnational civil society actors and private individuals played a vital role in promoting this new norm, as previous scholarship has detailed.64 The force of the norm is such that it may implicate actors, even retrospectively. In one particularly fascinating example, “[t]he use of landmines by the African National Congress (ANC) during its struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa was specifically criticized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for being indiscriminate in its effects.”65 Yet the subsequent response from the ANC was equally illuminating as to the influence of new role Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 147 conceptions, as the organization suggested that it had abandoned the use of AP mines because the practice “was, according to its own principled humanitarian norms, leading to an unacceptable loss of civilian lives.”66 This embodies how non-state armed groups may be subject to similar ethical calculations as their governmental opponents. Other rebel groups have similarly sought to associate their efforts with international norms, including the landmine ban, as demonstration of their legitimate status.67 This rhetorical endorsement of the ban’s humanitarian aims occurs even where AP landmines continue to be used.68 Surely some such instances are merely the kind of cynical rhetorical exercises skeptics would expect; experience with other norms in the scholarly literature, however, has demonstrated that pleas of exceptional circumstances can indeed turn out to be a step toward greater norm compliance over time rather than simply represent violation and thus invalidation of a norm. That actors could so quickly shift in a foundational expectation is testament to the transformative potential of legal norms and the concerted engagement of civil society actors in reframing the terms of political discourse.69 In some cases—as with Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom—the acceptance of the emergent norm occurred rapidly. In other instances, obligations have accumulated more gradually, as state actors are drawn toward the treaty as part of an evolving role identity within the international system, or may depend upon domestic changes in administrations that may sufficiently care about their international reputation. An ethical assessment of proper conduct will often precede behavioural compliance with specific treaty rules. Norms are often aspirational in nature, and so can accommodate—to a point—some measure of incongruence between current actions and desired ends. Indeed, a number of states—including conflict-prone states like Ethiopia, Sudan, and Turkey—made a point of signalling their support for the humanitarian norms of the MBT, even while arguing that domestic conditions precluded earlier accession.70 Such statements of support are not necessarily mere diplomatic niceties (though of course they often are). Rather, the adoption of normative, including legal, discourse can signal an important transition in the sensitivity of actors to relevant norms. In this case, the normative force of the newly established MBT was instrumental in reshaping a basic expectation of state policy such that adherence to the mine ban is the standard against which other competing interests should be assessed. The deliberate invocation of the humanitarian purpose of the MBT is thus important in demonstrating the sense of legitimacy among the community of treaty supporters. Such cases Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 148 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE powerfully highlight the competing values and interests at play in the formulation of state policy, and suggest that the national interests that states are often purported to prioritize over moral values are not immutable, but are instead subject to significant redefinition over time. These same social pressures to ally with new international norms may also bear on states that continue to remain outside of the treaty. Of the 36 current nonparties to the MBT, 34 have offered some formal indication of support for its core humanitarian purpose, either in official statements or by voting in favor of the Annual United Nations General Assembly resolution promoting universalization of the treaty.71 It is particularly notable that most nonparties have explicitly adopted the humanitarian n discourse promoted by ban proponents, and have identified AP landmines as a significant and enduring threat to civilian populations. Resistant states have frequently endorsed the ethical goalss of the ban as an ultimate objective, while at the same time seeking to avoid the binding effects of legal obligations. Indeed, in the early days of the mine ban movement, then US president Clinton was the first world leader to call for the eventual elimination of AP landmines.72 And while continuing to assert their legitimacy under some contingencies, the United States under the Bush administration emphasized that it was “committed to eliminating the humanitarian risks posed by landmines.”73 Other prominent nonparties, including China, India, Israel, the Republic of Korea, Pakistan, and Russia have accepted the principled basis of the MBT. Such statements provide support for Price’s contention that the emergent global norm has reversed the burden of proof in evaluating the political acceptability of AP landmines: merely being militarily “useful” in the new context often isn’t sufficient to outweigh the humanitarian costs.74 While such rhetorical commitments are hardly impossible to overturn, the norms literature has demonstrated across numerous kinds of issues that even cynical rhetorical acceptance of such a humanitarian commitment can in turn open the door to their further influence, as states face internal constituencies and external pressures of socialization to align their formal policies with declared aspirations. This ethical transformation has left important residues on the practice of international politics. Thus a number of conflicts have featured accusations of mine use among belligerents that had the apparent intention of discrediting the opposing side.75 But such allegations have typically been framed not as more generic violations of the laws of war—for example, by deliberately targeting civilians or using disproportionate military force per se76—but have instead Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 149 centered on a much more particular assumption that AP landmines, as a specific class of weapons in their own right, were illegitimate. These developments only make sense in an international environment in which the specific prohibition concerning landmines has become a prominent international moral standard. An optimistic reading might therefore suggest that antipersonnel landmines have been widely stigmatized, even among prominent nonparties. However, many states do continue to view AP mines as necessary means of defense, and this fact undermines any contemporary assessment that the ban has achieved universal moral consensus. A key question in rendering a more holistic assessment of the ethical status of the mine ban thus concerns how actors view the central “validity claims” of the norm.77 Some current nonparties to the MBT have signalled that their current outlier status is the result of technical and material impediments rather than opposition to the treaty itself. For the Laos People’s Democratic Republic—the state with the most severe concentration of unexploded ordinance anywhere on Earth—an inability to meet treaty obligations, and a concern that these commitments will distract from more pressing tasks, is at the root of its failure to join the MBT. States that lack extensive foreign and security policy institutions frequently find it difficult to stay on top of the myriad formal and informal international commitments present in modern international relations. Yet they do not necessarily object to the obligations inherent in the mine ban or deny the moral legitimacy of the prohibition. In a different vein, and more in line with realist expectations, a number of nonparties have invoked specific security conditions as the cause of their continued ambivalence toward the treaty. For example, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as Cuba, Lebanon, Morocco, Nepal, South Korea, and Sri Lanka have claimed that their particular security environment precludes accession at this time. Until a final resolution of these conflicts can be achieved, antipersonnel mines are held to be a necessary—though perhaps undesirable—means of defense. Yet in most cases claims of special circumstances are coupled with a general recognition of the legitimacy of the mine ban norms and an emphasis on extensive informal compliance. Much more damaging to the integrity of the ban are instances where states continue to envision an expansive role for antipersonnel landmines in the protection of deployed military forces and the defense of national borders. Thus, even as it proclaimed agreement with the humanitarian objectives of the ban, in its 2004 policy review the United States announced that it “will not join the Ottawa Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. 150 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE Convention because its terms would have required us to give up a needed military capability.”78 A similar view is reflected in the discourse of other prominent nonparties. Less powerful states have also argued for the enduring utility of the weapons. Indeed, embedded within the necessity discourse are frequent allusions to the value antipersonnel landmines may have in providing an inexpensive capacity for states with limited technical means. Hence the Chinese government in 1999 endorsed the view that Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. [t]o some countries, especially developing ones, [antipersonnel landmines], as a defensive weapon, [are] still an important military means for safeguarding national sovereignty and preventing foreign invasion. Under the present situation, when international conflicts [pop] up here and there, and foreign interference is on the rise, APLs are still of important practical significance for countries like China, who lack advanced defensive weapons, to defend their national sovereignty and territorial integrity.79 This has been repeated by a variety of smaller states including Cuba, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Mongolia, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam, among others. Within this critique can be found an assertion not only that antipersonnel landmines are acceptable weapons, but equally that the prohibitionary norm enshrined in the MBT may be fundamentally discriminatory. Indeed, some have gone so far as to argue that if the continued use of AP mines avoids employment of other, less discrete forms of violent force, they may result in a more humane outcome.80 Despite the variously expressed content of necessity-based objections, all are ultimately grounded in a commitment to the enduring utility of antipersonnel landmines in at least some circumstances. Still, no states openly argue that antipersonnel landmines should be deployed in an indiscriminate fashion, and virtually all nonparties have endorsed in principle the humanitarian norm at the heart of the mine ban regime. Many MBT opponents reject the central ontological claim of the mine ban movement—that landmines by their design are inherently indiscriminate—and instead profess fealty to the traditional standards of the laws of war that emphasize an obligation to refrain from particular uses of a given weapon that violate humanitarian law, thus legitimizing the right for proportionate and discriminate use as with any other weapon. In announcing its new policy on antipersonnel mines in February 2004, the Bush administration explicitly adopted this framing, and asserted that a reliance Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 151 on self-destructing “smart” mines would alleviate suffering caused by “persistent” mines at a more acceptable cost.81 The key feature of the new US approach was to identify the persistencee of landmines as the source of their humanitarian impact, and thus their impermissibility under existing humanitarian norms. Yet these features could be, it was argued, eliminated via technical changes and were not inherent in the class of weapons themselves. Seen in this light, it is possible to assert the legitimacy of AP landmines as acceptable weapons subject to proper design and use.82 While not necessarily endorsing the technological solution implied by the 2004 Bush policy, a number of states currently outside of the MBT have sought to justify their retention of antipersonnel landmines by contesting the indiscriminacy claim at the heart of the mine ban norm. Fundamental to this alternative view is the assertion that antipersonnel landmines can be employed in ways that respect existing international humanitarian and customary law. In particular, 1996 Amended Protocol II to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (APII) has been endorsed by prominent opponents of the MBT—including China, India, Israel, the Korean Republic, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, and the United States—as the most appropriate means of addressing the threat AP mines pose to civilians.83 According to the Chinese delegation to the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) Review Conference, “These important measures will effectively prevent the irresponsible use of landmines which caused civilian casualties and injuries and reduce the threat of landmines to the peaceful life of civilians.”84 This framing rejects the central validity claim of the MBT, namely that antipersonnel landmines are inherently indiscriminate weapons. In making this assertion, opponents of the MBT rely on the same foundational normative frame as supporters of the mine ban norm—humanitarianism in war—but employ it to assert the inverse proposition, that antipersonnel landmines can n be employed within its bounds. Regulation, in this view, is sufficient to meet the core ethical demands of ban proponents, while still recognizing the prerogatives of military powers. In some respects, embracing a logic of regulation as the United States (among others) has done bears some resemblance to the US strategy on the torture prohibition discussed in Steele’s chapter, insofar as the United States under the Bush administration similarly sought to circumscribe the scope of another absolute prohibition, though in this case by redefining what falls under the scope of prohibited practices. The counterintuitive result was that during this period the formal legal upholding of a complete prohibition (torture) Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 152 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE nonetheless proved more brittle a barrier to violations in practice than did US rejection of a legal prohibitionary norm (landmines) in favor of a doctrine of regulation. What are we to make of this contestation? Is it best seen as a dispute between interests and morals, or between genuinely different ethical positions, and with what implications? As noted above, even resistant states have qualified and narrowed their expectations concerning the legitimate scope of antipersonnel landmines, but has this rhetorical position generated parallel support for the ethical norms in practice? A key way to assess the moral implications of these contesting positions for a purportedly convergent moral aim of eliminating indiscriminate civilian casualties would be to assess the efficacy of the restrictions on (as opposed to abolition of) AP mine use: that is, do opponents of the MBT who support APII in fact use AP mines in a restricted fashion that does mitigate their humanitarian impact, or do they deploy mines in such a way that their ethical avowed alternative would readily be interpreted as a relatively insincere rhetorical move? No clear answer is available to the authors here insofar as detailed evidence in this respect is limited and patchy. The annual reporting measures associated with APII are not widely observed, and reporting states tend to provide only vague information regarding their procedures.85 However, it could be noted that the whole reason for the ICBL’s campaign for an absolute ban in the 1990s was recognition of the utter failure of the CCW approach; since then, the ICRC and Human Rights Watch have continued to express concern with state progress and transparency on a variety of compliance issues.86 In any case, the available evidence does suggest that relying on Amended Protocol II in isolation is unlikely to lead to better humanitarian outcomes than the more rigorous MBT. Currently 98 states are parties to APII;87 this contrasts with the 160 MBT parties. Only ten states are members of APII but nott the MBT. While this list does include the most prominent opponents of the mine ban prohibition,88 the vast majority of APII state parties are subject to the more rigorous standards of the MBT. Since the advent of these dual regimes, six of these same ten states—Georgia, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Sri Lanka—have used antipersonnel mines, at least in some instances under conditions that would violate Article 5(2) of APII. And while many now appear to be compliant with APII’s less stringent terms, it is important to point out that the likes of China and the United States have been informally following the higher standards of the MBT. Moreover, 28 nonparties to the MBT—nearly two-thirds of the total—have also failed to join the less ambitious APII, leaving Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 153 them outside of both sets of legal restraints.89 This latter list includes a number of regional powers such as Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, as well as recent mine users such as Libya, Myanmar, Nepal, and Syria. These latter four states all appear to have deployed mines that would violate the terms of APII. Finally, APII also excludes states that might be most in need of future restraints on behavior including Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Lebanon. Hence it is unlikely that APII would have served as a more effective means of stigmatizing antipersonnel mines in the absence of the MBT.90 Pending more systematic data on compliance, given the failure of past state practice under a regulatory as opposed to prohibitionary regime, it is not difficult to be rather cynical about the ethical justification of APII for some key states as least as not amounting to much more than an insincere rhetorical move. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. Ethical Action and the Impact on Victims: Demining, Casualties, and Victim Assistance The preceding discussion of behavior and associated discourse brings us full circle to a chief purpose of this volume highlighted in the introduction:: to show that moral concerns have indeed influenced the recent behavior and discourse of states and other global actors, but that more is required of everyday citizens and global activists if we are to alleviate the worst global injustices, protect the global environment, and defend human and international security. The MBT appears to have been quite effective at fostering compliance with core treaty rules banning the use, production, and transfer of landmines. How have these changes succeeded in attaining the central humanitarian purposes of the landmines campaign—preventing casualties and aiding existing victims? The record here too is mixed. There is certainly palpable evidence of effective impact, but a great deal more progress is needed to rid the world of the scourge of antipersonnel landmines. To this point, state progress in clearing mined areas has been much less dramatic than with the destruction of mine stockpiles: More than a decade after the Mine Ban Treaty entered into force, a reliable determination of the size of the global landmine problem still does not exist. Early estimates of the numbers of mines laid often proved to be very inaccurate. Similarly, subsequent surveys have often overestimated the size of contaminated areas. Nonetheless, a better understanding has been obtained more recently of the extent of contamination in both mined areas and battle areas, with estimates Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. 154 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. reduced significantly, largely as a result of enhanced land release procedures, including better survey.91 Since the advent of the MBT, approximately 1,700km 2 of mined areas have been cleared, “result[ing] in the destruction of more than 2.2 million emplaced antipersonnel mines, 250,000 anti-vehicle mines, and 17 million explosive remnants of war (ERW).”92 The ICBL now estimates that there remains approximately 3,000km2 of territory to be cleared.93 These efforts have produced real improvements in the lives of civilian populations, and would have been inconceivable without the dedicated efforts of civil society networks and diplomats working to keep mine action on the global agenda. The mine ban movement has raised awareness concerning the humanitarian consequences of AP landmine contamination, and propelled international demining assistance. While we have seen significant gains in countries like Bosnia, Croatia, and Mozambique since the mid-1990s, the ethical goals that motivated the ban movement have yet to be fully realized. By the time the MBT entered into force in 1999, 103 states had already declared themselves to be mine-free; a decade later, the number of states having completed demining has risen to 121. The relatively small increase in fully compliant states, and the fact that more than 70 states remain mine affected, underscores the challenges inherent in effectively addressing widespread antipersonnel landmine contamination.94 In particular, the ICBL has highlighted insufficient survey of suspected mined areas; poor planning, management, and reporting structures; and insufficient resource allocation (both domestically and from international donors) as fundamental impediments to greater progress in mine clearance.95 In most instances, these failings are ultimately indicative of a lack of political commitment and engagement by the states in question and their international donors. A final criteria of ultimate importance concerns the impact of the mine ban movement in reducing innocent casualties. Landmine Monitor reports that there were nearly 4,200 new casualties in 2010 caused by various forms of antipersonnel landmines and other victim-activated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and explosive remnants of war (ERW),96 a massive decline from the widely cited estimate of 26,000 landmine casualties per year as the ban movement began in the 1990s.97 It is difficult to deny the 84 percent reduction of some 22,000 randomly dismembered civilians per year as a considerable moral achievement of the landmine movement. One of the important functions of the MBT is to facilitate international funding Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 155 and technical assistance to states requiring assistance in victim assistance, mine action, as well as other core treaty tasks.98 While pre-1997 figures are difficult to determine with any precision,99 international contributions to mine action have increased substantially since, rising from $132 million (USD) in 1996 to $518 million by 2008.100 National contributions by mine-affected states also appear to have increased over the past decade, albeit more modestly.101 State support for the humanitarian goals of the MBT does not appear to have significantly waned, yet the current level of commitment is clearly insufficient. Efforts have been made in establishing internationally accepted best practices in the field of victim assistance, but this has yet to translate into concrete results. Resources available for victim care have not improved substantially: “Improvements in the quality and accessibility of services for survivors in 2009 were seen in a small number of countries. Unfortunately, nearly as many countries reported a decline in services, due mostly to changed security situations and global economic conditions.”102 In part this is due to the difficulties inherent in providing extensive medical assistance, rehabilitation services, economic opportunities, and physical access in countries with limited social services and degraded infrastructure.103 Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. Conclusion: The Landmine Movement as Humanitarian Model Given its success in attaining a robust treaty that gained widespread adherence, the landmines campaign has since often served as a model for transnational moral entrepreneurs engaged in other issues. In that vein, it would be remiss not to note the contributions to the overall humanitarian objective of the landmines movement—preventing innocent civilians from being blown up by explosive remnants of war—fostered by related ethical initiatives, not to mention the injection to global cosmopolitanism. On the tenth anniversary of the MBT, an international diplomatic meeting was held in Oslo in 2007 to assess the applicability of the landmines movement to the issue of cluster munitions, consecrating a more formal effort to push for a similar convention. This effort has met with some measure of success in the form of the Convention on Cluster Munitions that to date has attracted 111 state signatures and 77 ratifications.104 Efforts to “graft” the landmines model to other security issues have not been successful—notably, little traction has been made on the issue of small arms and light weapons (SALW) that was often cited in the post-MBT environment as a most likely potential follow-on. The extent to which Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. 156 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE the landmines movement has served and will continue to serve as a model of imitation for other global moral initiatives remains to be seen and will be difficult to pin down in any precise way; what probably can be said is that it has provided something of a moral exemplar that, as the evidence in this paper chronicles, decries the most skeptical disavowals that such initiatives of humanitarian moral progress in world politics are so unlikely as to not be worth the effort. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. Notes 1. Michael Desch, “Correspondence: Isms and Schisms; Culturalism versus Realism in Security Studies,” International Securityy 24, no. 1 (1999): 180. 2. Hans Morgenthau, “Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law,” American Journal of International Law w 34, no. 2 (1940): 275; Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, (London: MacMillan, 1962), 10; and Renee De Nevers, “Imposing International Norms: Great Powers and Norm Enforcement,” International Studies Review w 9 (2007): 53–80. 3. This argument is mirrored in much of the rationalist literature on international treaty compliance. See, for example, George W. Downs, David M. Rocke, and Peter N. Barsoom, “Is the Good News about Compliance Good News about Cooperation?,” International Organization n 50, no. 3 (1996): 379–406. 4. Matthew J. Morgan, “A New Kellogg-Briand Mentality? The Anti-Personnel Landmine Ban,” Small Wars & Insurgenciess 13, no. 3 (2002): 97–110. 5. For one recent scholarly treatment, see Stefan Brem and Kendal Stiles, eds., Cooperating Without America: Theories and Case Studies of Non Hegemonic Regimess (New York: Routledge, 2009). 6. Richard Price, “Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines,” International Organization n 52, no. 3 (1998): 613–644. 7. Richard Price, “International Norms and the Mines Taboo: Pulls toward Compliance,” Canadian Foreign Policyy 5, no. 3 (1998): 105–123. 8. “An antipersonnel landmine” is defined in the MBT as: “a mine designed to be exploded by the presence, proximity or contact of a person and that will incapacitate, injure or kill one or more persons.” (Ottawa Convention Article 2.) The key feature of the MBT is its emphasis on the victim-activation feature of traditional AP landmines, which is regarded as the root of the weapons’ indiscriminate nature. This excludes anti-vehicle mines as well as so-called improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that are command detonated, the source of numerous casualties in contemporary conflicts such as in Afghanistan and Iraq. Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 157 9. This view is most famously stated in the ruling of the Permanent Court of International Justice, which in the Lotus Case. Permanent Court of International Justice, The Case of the S.S. Lotus, France v. Turkey. Judgment No. 9, September 7, 1927. Available online at http://www.worldcourts.com/pcij/eng/decisions/1927.09.07_lotus.htm. On this view, see also P. E. Corbett, “The Consent of States and the Sources of the Law of Nations,” British Yearbook of International Law w 6 (1925): 20 and Michael Byers, Custom, Power and the Power of Ruless (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 8, 17. 10. Martha Finnemore, “Norms, Culture, and World Politics: Insights from Sociology’s Institutionalism,” International Organization n 50, no. 2 (1996): 325–347 and Thomas Risse, “International Norms and Domestic Change: Arguing and Strategic Adaptation in the Human Rights Area,” Politics & Societyy 27, no. 4 (1999): 526–556. The concept of nonconsensual forms of international legal obligation is also central to scholarly studies of customary international law. See, for example, Byers, Custom, Power and the Power of Rules. 11. A prominent example in this regard is the NGO Geneva Call. For more information on the organization’s work, see http://www.genevacall.org/ /. 12. For example, the Kyoto Protocol would not stop global climate change even with perfect compliance. In this case, however, the Mine Ban Treaty does contain robust treaty commitments—if fully complied with, the treaty would eliminate the problem of new mine contamination by states, and go a long way to alleviating the devastation resulting from AP landmine contamination. 13. It must be noted that this cosmopolitan moral outcome would have to be balanced against communitarian considerations, namely the possibility that forebearance in the use of landmines by a party to a conflict could increase its own military or even civilian casualties by failing to prevent enemy attacks, as well as the larger resultant moral trade-offs potentially involved with compromising the military mission. In extremis, this could include the defeat of the “just” side in a war, whose moral losses in the end could trump any humanitarian gains from reducing innocent landmine casualties, though these moral trade-offs are ultimately unknown counterfactuals (which does not imply they are not to be taken seriously). 14. Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie, “International Organization: A State of the Art on the Art of the State,” International Organization n 40, no. 4 (1986): 753–775. 15. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” International Organization n 52, no. 4 (1998): 887–917; Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politicss (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Thomas Risse, Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. 158 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE 16. 17 7. 18. 19. 20. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 21. 22. Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Changee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Thomas Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!’: Communicative Action in World Politics,” International Organization n 54, no. 1 (2000): 1–39; and Richard Price, “Emerging Customary Norms and Anti-Personnel Landmines,” in The Politics of International Law, Christian Reus-Smit, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), 106–130. Price, “Emerging Customary Norms,” 122. Mary Wareham, “Evidence-Based Advocacy: Civil Society Monitoring of the Mine Ban Treaty,” in Banning Landmines: Disarmament, Citizen Diplomacy, and Human Security, Jody Williams, Stephen D. Goose, and Mary Wareham, eds. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 49–67. International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor Report 1999: Toward a Mine-Free World d (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 3. Kerry Brinkert, “An Emphasis on Action: The Mine Ban Treaty’s Implementation Mechanisms,” in Banning Landmines: Disarmament, Citizen Diplomacy, and Human Security, Jody Williams, Stephen D. Goose, and Mary Wareham, eds. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 96. The following states ratified or acceded to the MBT during internal armed conflicts, or while their armed forces were engaged in foreign military campaigns: Afghanistan, Algeria, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia, Namibia, Nigeria, Philippines, Rwanda, Senegal, Solomon Islands, Sudan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe. “Statement by the Delegation of the Republic of Turkey on Universalizing the Convention (Agenda Item 11.A),” Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, Eighth Meeting of States Partiess (November 18, 2007). Available at: www. apminebanconvention.org/meetings-of-the-states-parties/8msp /what-happened/day-1-sunday-18-november/ /. Expressions of normative support are difficult to quantify precisely, though there is telling evidence to be found in the formal statements of national delegations. See, for example, H. E. Sam Sotha, Head of Cambodian Delegation, “General Statement of Cambodia,” Fifth Meeting of the States Parties to the Mine Ban Convention (Bangkok, September 15–19, 2003). Available at: http://www.apminebanconvention.org/meetings-of-the-states-parties/5msp /daily-summaries-and-statements/update-day-3/ /. See also “Statement of the Representative of Serbia and Montenegro,” Intersessional Standing Committee Meeting on the General Status of the Convention Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 23. 24. 25. 26. 27 7. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 28. 29. 30. 31. 159 (Geneva, February 9, 2004). “Statement by Mr. Bambang S. Basri, Delegation of Indonesia,” Intersessional Standing Committee Meeting on Stockpile Destruction n (Geneva, February 12, 2004) (Documents on file with Bower). International Campaign to Ban Landmines, “World’s Newest Country Makes Banning Landmines First International Commitment,” November 11, 2011. Available at: http://www.icbl.org/index.php /icbl/Library/News-Articles/South-Sudan-bans-landmines. International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 2011 (Washington, DC, Human Rights Watch, 2011), 17. Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Croatia, Eritrea, Iraq (Kurdistan), Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan. Somalia acceded to the MBT on April 16, 2012. United States Department of State, Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Office of Humanitarian Demining Programs, Hidden Killers: The Global Landmine Crisiss (Washington, DC, The U.S. Department of State, September 1998). Available at: http://www.state.gov/www /global/arms/rpt_9809_demine_toc.html. International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 2009 9 (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, 2009), 8. See www.genevacall.org/resources/list-of-signatories/list-of-signatories. htm. The Deed of Commitmentt is available at www.genevacall.org /Themes/Landmines/landmines.htm. For example, Article 5 of the Deed of Commitmentt states that signatory non-state actors agree “[to treat] this commitment as one step or part of a broader commitment in principle to the ideal of humanitarian norms, particularly of international humanitarian law and human rights, and to contribute to their respect in field practice as well as to the further development of humanitarian norms for armed conflicts.” International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 1999, 4–5 (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, 1999). http:// www.themonitor.org/index.php; United States Department of State, Hidden Killers. Price, “Emerging Customary Norms,” 110; Peter Herby and Kathleen Lawand, “Unacceptable Behavior: How Norms Are Established,” in Banning Landmines: Disarmament, Citizen Diplomacy, and Human Security, Jody Williams, Stephen D. Goose, and Mary Wareham, eds. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 201. The Russian Federation is not believed to have engaged in any new mine use during 2009 and 2010. International Campaign to Ban 0 (Washington, DC, Human Landmines, Landmine Monitor 2010 Rights Watch, 2010), 13. See, for example, United Press International, “Allegation: Turkey Breaking Landmine Ban,” April 16, 2010. Available at: http:// Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. 160 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE 32. 33. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 34. 35. 36. www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2010/04/16/AllegationTurkey-breaking-landmine-ban/UPI-19481271424759. Landmine Monitor’s updated country profile for Turkey contains further details regarding the alleged use. See http://www.the-monitor.org/index.php/cp/display/region_profiles/theme/545. The ICBL has termed this “the most serious and credible allegations of use by the armed forces of a State Party ever.” Statement by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, delivered by Steve Goose, Human Rights Watch, Head of ICBL Delegation. Tenth Meeting of States Parties. Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and Their Destruction n (Geneva, Switzerland, November 29, 2010). Available at: http://www.apminebanconvention.org/meetings-of-the-states-parties/10msp /what-is-happening/day-1-monday-29-november. International Campaign to Ban Landmines, ICBL-CMC Newsletter, 1st ed. November 2011. Available at: http://www.icbl.org/index.php /icbl/Library/News-Articles/08_Contents/ICBL-CMC-NEWS /ICBL-CMC-News-Nov-2011. In 2007, the Human Security Report recorded 32 active “state-based armed conflicts” as well as 18 “non-state armed conflicts,” and 24 “campaigns of one-sided violence.” These data are derived from the Human Security Report Project’s Organized Violence Statistics. www.hsrgroup.org/our-work/security-stats/Organized-Violence.aspx. Definitions of the three categories of armed violence can be found at the same site. This would include the United Kingdom, as well as Albania, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, France, Greece, and Turkey, among others. Based on official figures, 51 states have contributed troops to coalition military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. See, for example, http://www.isaf.nato.int /troop-numbers-and-contributions/index.php; and http://www.centcom.mil/en/countries/coalition/ /. This includes a number of nonparties to the MBT, such as Georgia, the Korean Republic, Singapore, and the United States, all of whom have nonetheless refrained from using AP landmines in these conflicts. Afghanistan (post-2001), Algeria, Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Indonesia, Iraq (post-2003), Lebanon, Liberia, Mexico, Namibia, Nigeria, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. Human Rights Watch Backgrounder, Landmine Use in Afghanistan (October 2001), 4–5. Available at: http://www.hrw.org/legacy /backgrounder/arms/landmines-bck1011.htm. See also Michael Byers, “The Laws of War, US-Style,” London Review of Bookss 25, no. 4 (February 20, 2003), 9–10. Available at: www.lrb.co.uk/v25 /n04/michael-byers/the-laws-of-war-us-style. Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 161 37 7. Of course, members of the administration for the most part argued they did not condone torture but rather legal “enhanced interrogation” techniques, though that debate is well beyond the scope of this paper. 38. The yearly figures of countries experiencing NSAG landmine use are: 13 (1999), 18 (2000), 19 (2001), 14 (2002), 11 (2003), 16 (2004), 13 (2005), 10 (2006), 8 (2007), 9 (2008), and 7 (2009). The full list of countries includes Afghanistan, Angola, Bhutan, Bolivia, Burundi, Colombia, DRC, Ecuador, the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Georgia (including Abkhazia), Guinea-Bissau, Indian, Iraq, Lebanon, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Russia (including Chechnya, Dagestan, and North Ossetia), Senegal, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Turkey, and Uganda. See International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 2009, 7–8. 39. Appel De Geneva, Geneva Call, Armed Non-State Actors and Landmines: Volume I: A Global Report Profiling NSA and their Use, Acquisition, Production, Transfer, and Stockpiling of Landmines. Anti-personnel mines and armed non-State actors. (Geneva: Geneva Call, 2005), 11, 14. http://www.genevacall.org/Themes/Land mines/landmines.htm. 40. The actions in all cases ceased in advance of full membership. 41. Wareham, “Evidence-Based Advocacy,” 54; and note 31 above. 42. Burundi, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sudan, and Uganda have all denied using AP mines. For its part, Turkey subsequently announced the initiation of a formal investigation into the alleged instances of mine use; this announcement was not accompanied by any attempt to qualify or otherwise justify the potential use. International Campaign to Ban Landmines, “Statement of Turkey, Standing Committee on the General Status and Operation of the Convention.” Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and Their Destruction: Intersessional Work Programmee (Geneva, 21 June 2010). Available at: http:// www.apminebanconvention.org/intersessional-work-programme /june-2010/. / 43. International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 1999, 5. 44. The ICBL identifies 12 states as antipersonnel mine producers: China, Cuba, India, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, South Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. However, this list includes all states that have not formally renounced the right to produce mines; the number of states proven or suspected of actively producing landmines is a much smaller subset of this list. International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 2011, 13. Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 162 ADAM BOW ER AND RICHARD PRICE 45. Importantly, these states appear to be clear instances where concerted civil society engagement produced significant political change. Wareham (“Evidence-Based Advocacy,” 59) reports that “[The ICBL] was largely responsible for obtaining formal public statements of policies renouncing production by four [non-party] states (Egypt, Finland, Israel, and Poland), by repeatedly requesting these governments to formalize their position in writing and make it public.” 46. The United States has not produced any form of AP landmine since 1997, and there are no plans to resume procurement. Significantly, two systems currently under development—the XM-7 Spider Networked Munition and the Intelligent Munition System—have recently been modified so as to conform to the requirements of the MBT. Both systems had come under significant criticism from civil society campaigners and the United States Congress due to their proposed victim-activation function. It now appears that both the Spider and IMS have been converted to solely command-detonated systems. For more information on this please see International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 2009, 1131– 1132, 1141–1142 and Marina Malenic, “Vice Chief Tells Senator Army Will Not Procure Victim-Activated Spider,” Inside the Army, May 26, 2008. 47 7. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iraq, Iran, Rwanda, and Yemen. 48. International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 2009, 9 4. 49. Ibid. 50. International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 2002 2 (Washington, DC, Human Rights Watch, 2002), 507–508. 51. The ICBL reports that “Russia has had a moratorium on the export of antipersonnel mines that are not detectable or equipped with self-destruct devices since 1 December 1994. The moratorium formally expired in 2002, but Russian officials have stated, most recently in June 2009, that it is still being observed. Russia is not known to have made any state-approved transfers of any type of antipersonnel mine since 1994.” International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 2009, 1068. The US moratorium was initially enacted via Section 1365(c) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1993 (Public Law 102–484). The moratorium has been extended on a number of occasions, most recently in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008 (Public Law 110–161): 634(j), at page 486. Other former producers like Cuba, Egypt, and Vietnam have announced that they too no longer export—albeit without the backing of a formal legislative decree. 52. See for example the Notes for ICRC Intervention. Standing Committee on Stockpile Destruction n (Geneva: Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Justice, Sustainability, and Security : Global Ethics for the 21st Century, edited by E. Heinze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1330890. Created from kcl on 2024-02-15 09:47:11. M O R A L M I S S I O N A C C O M P L I S H E D? 53. 54. Copyright © 2013. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. 55. 56. 57 7. 163 Mines and Their Destruction, June 21, 2010.) Available at: www.apminebanconvention.org/intersessional-work-programme/june -2010/sd-summary-and-statements/ /. The ICBL reports that this figure “include[es] 87 States Parties that have officially declared completion of stockpile destruction, [and] 64 that have declared never possessing antipersonnel mine stocks (except in some cases for training purposes).” International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor 2011, 4. Ibid.; Cartagena Summit on a Mine-Free World, “Review of the Operation and Status of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Antipersonnel Mines and on Their Destruction: 2005–2009, Part II, Annex III, 26.” Unofficial Version. December 18, 2009, www.cartagenasummit.org /decisions-and-documents/. / As of November 2011, mines were retained in the following quantities: Belarus (3.3 million), Greece (953, 285), and Ukraine (5.9 million). International Committee to Ban Landmines, “Statement on Stockpile Destruction,” 11th Meeting of States Parties to the Mine Ban Treatyy (Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1, 2011), http://www.apminebanconvention.org/meetings-of-the-states-parties/11msp /what-will-happen/day-5-thursday-1-december/. / In June 2011, Turkey announced that it had completed domestic destruction of its mine stockpiles, and had transferred the remaining 22,716 “ADAM”-type mines to Germany for immediate destruction, thus rendering itself compliant with Article 4 of the MBT. “Statement by the Turkish Delegation to the Standing Committee on Stockpile Destruction,” Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti

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