Re-visioning morality and progress in the security domain: insights from humanitarian prohibition politics
Abstract
This article offers a novel understanding and theorization of humanitarian disarmament regimes and their related prohibition politics. In doing so, it utilizes a power-analytical framework and puts in use four conceptions of power: productive, structural, institutional, and compulsory.
Empirically, two potent humanitarian prohibition regimes that have been formed during the last two decades are examined. The ban of anti-personnel landmines (APLs) in 1997 marked a significant shift in humanitarian disarmament.
Consequently, a humanitarian disarmament model emerged, consisting in bypassing permanent arms-control fora ("The Ottawa Process''). The ascent of the model to the arena traditionally dominated by power interests of major powers and ossified lowest-common denominator consensus was confirmed in 2008 when cluster munitions (CMs) were prohibited in a very similar fashion ("The Oslo Process'').
The main contribution to the topic is the application of the power-analytical framework specifically developed to suit an analysis of formation and workings of global prohibition regimes, including heterarchy-of-power discussion of the relationship between states and non-state actors. Then, instead of the usual-and flawed at best-heroic discussions of victories of global civil society in relation to the establishment of regimes, rise of moral International Relations, and supposed progressivist teleology, a more complex picture with many contradictions, artefacts, and their layering inside and about those regimes looms large.