The CCM is a social construction, meaning that it was brought about through “the process of social interaction and transmission of social meanings. Social
constructions do not exist in nature but have come about through acts of human creation” (Dunne et al., 2010 350). The CCM’s achievement, and the emergence and course of the Oslo process leading to it, reflected changes in the postures and policies of people representing the interests and positions of states, IOs and civil society groups. Thus, the use of labels such as state (for instance, “New Zealand” or “Peru”) or organisation (“ICRC” or “CMC”) encountered in this thesis does not imply they were cognitively unified entities: as will be seen, some often clearly were not. Instead these labels are shorthand in the context of specific situations or environments. Nevertheless, in formal terms treaties are negotiated and agreed by states, and state representatives were prone to the influence of others such as researchers, activists, cluster munition survivors and humanitarian deminers. So, it is necessary to briefly outline the various kinds of actor involved in international efforts on cluster munitions between 2003 and 2008 and the degree of their influence on policy.
The nation-state is the basic unit of multilateral diplomacy, particularly in the domain of security policy in which states may perceive their crucial national interests and even survival to be at stake. This remains true both in the CCW, in which decision making adheres to a consensus practice (one state can thwart an agreement for all), and in the freestanding Oslo process, which adopted procedural rules for the Dublin
negotiations that provided, if necessary, for voting (Smyth, 2010). Only states have a vote over decisions concerning international security treaties.
While in theory the international community encapsulates nearly 200 states, in practice on cluster munitions it meant a sub-set of them. As of early 2011, the CCW framework treaty had 113 state parties, but at the beginning of the period this
dissertation is concerned with it had approximately 100 members, a number that grew slowly. The number of states actively participating in CCW meetings in Geneva was even smaller: at its five-yearly review conference in 2001, for example, 65 member countries attended, along with four signatory states, observed by 18 states not party to the CCW (2001 4). In 2006, participating member states had grown slightly to 76 (CCW, 2006b 9). Attendance at the CCW’s expert groups and annual meetings was usually lower—by roughly 25 percent.
The CCW was not the only inter-state forum in which states could raise cluster munition concerns. The traditional UN regional group system was weak where
conventional weapons were concerned (as compared with the Conference on
Disarmament (CD), or caucuses in the Biological or Chemical Weapons Conventions), and usually only met in the CCW context to nominate regional candidates for positions such as meeting presidents and vice-presidents. However, cluster munitions were
periodically discussed at a working level among national bureaucrats from EU countries at coordination meetings on disarmament and United Nations (CODUN) matters in Brussels. And, after the Oslo process commenced there is evidence that the US used NATO coordination channels to disseminate its concerns to its alliance partners,
bilaterally with military partners not party to NATO, including Australia, Canada and Japan. Later in the Oslo process, regional meetings would be organised, in some cases with the assistance of regional organisations such as the African Union and ASEAN, although these entities played little further role on an issue that tended to divide states within regions rather than offer them something to rally behind.
Unlike the CCW, the Oslo process was, in principle, open to any state to participate in. In practice, however, it began with approximately 46 states (those countries adhering to the Oslo Declaration in February 2007), peaking at nearly 130 at the Vienna Conference the following December. State participation then stabilised, with 111 adhering to the February 2008 Wellington Declaration, a prerequisite for
participation in the Dublin negotiations on the CCM in May 2008.
Attendance at Oslo process conferences thus grew to be numerically greater than the CCW, with many non-industrialised as well as cluster munition-affected countries taking part. This was a key point of distinction: while all of the largest users and
producers of cluster munitions belonged to the CCW, few affected countries bothered to join it. Instead, some—such as Laos and Lebanon—would play active parts in the Oslo process. Many countries, and most Western ones, participated in both the CCW and Oslo process with the notable exception of the US, which shunned the latter.
International organisations (IOs) would play significant roles in multilateral efforts on cluster munitions (Borrie, 2009 227-48). However, neither the UN nor the Red Cross movement were monolithic entities, and their respective internal dynamics help to explain why at some times their views were more influential than at others. The ICRC was at the forefront of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in its
involvement in weapons issues because of its mandate focusing on alleviating the humanitarian effects of armed conflict. As Chapter 4 will show, the ICRC would facilitate many of the earlier international discussions on cluster munitions.
One major obstacle to elevating cluster munitions to be an institutional priority within the ICRC was that weapons issues were viewed in-house as legal matters, and handled as such. The Arms Unit of the ICRC’s Legal Division toiled for several years from the late 1990s to facilitate multilateral progress on dealing with cluster
munitions—largely in the context of ERW. Its efforts really drew attention within the Movement as a consequence of the 2006 summer war in Southern Lebanon, when the ICRC’s pre-eminent Division—Operations—the ICRC President, and national Red Cross societies also grew alarmed about cluster munitions’ humanitarian effects and threw more institutional weight behind dealing with the issue.
If the internal dynamics of the ICRC were complicated, then those of the UN were byzantine in complexity. The UN had experience with cluster munitions at an operational level because of its experience in coordinating post-conflict operations cluster munition-affected places such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Kosovo, Laos and Lebanon. Primary responsibility for policy coordination sat with the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) within the Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). However, a number of UN agencies were involved in activities and programs related to alleviating aspects of the effects of UXO including the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). UN Research bodies such as its Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) conducted research relevant to cluster munitions.
Within the UN Secretariat, there were Offices for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and Disarmament Affairs (ODA). ODA provided secretariat support for the CCW, and was particularly cautious in seeking to protect that multilateral forum from criticism or reputational damage. It meant that uniform UN positions were difficult and time-consuming to achieve within the UN Mine Action Team (UNMAT) mechanism. Sometimes, the field agencies preferred to dispense with system-wide coordination and make their own statements and undertake their own activities concerning cluster munitions—a tension that would eventually come to a head in the UN’s inter-agency process in early 2008 (Borrie, 2009 242-8).
A dilemma for both the ICRC and UN between 2003 and 2008 concerned how to balance their respective commitments to the CCW—a UN-administered IHL and disarmament process—with achieving humanitarian goals on cluster munitions likely only achievable outside it. This was not such an issue for civil society NGOs. In principle, this third class of actor encompassed not only hundreds of humanitarian pressure groups such as HRW, Oxfam and HI individually and as members within the umbrella of the CMC, but others such as business interests and academics. In practice, business interests tended to be brought to bear at a national level (see Chapter 5 for discussion of Belgium), although Textron, an American cluster munition producer, attended the CCW as an observer during the Oslo process, and tried (without success) to become an observer to the Dublin negotiations. Academics tended to line up with the NGOs calling for new humanitarian measures, and some participated in the CMC as NGO representatives.
Despite their greater freedom to speak out strongly and often critically about states’ policies on cluster munitions than IOs, CMC staff and those of its foremost member NGOs faced an ongoing balancing act. The CMC’s goal of an international humanitarian treaty could only ultimately be met by influencing the postures and policies of state representatives, initially in forums like the CCW: harsh criticism could be counter-productive, and lose the Coalition credibility and the trust of government interlocutors. At the same time, campaigners recognised that overly cosy relationships with diplomats and other national policy makers—even in sympathetic states—could detract from holding governments to account on cluster munitions and in devising robust responses to their humanitarian hazards. Partly for these reasons, CMC members in many countries assiduously cultivated their national parliamentarians and domestic media, as means of putting pressure on governments through “naming, framing, blaming and shaming” (Ahmed and Potter, 2006 37).
Moreover, as will be seen in Chapters 4 and 5, in 2003 the CMC was the kernel of a much larger and heterogeneous network of civil society actors that would arise, in particular, in the period from 2006 to 2008 as inter-state work on cluster munitions became a reality. This growth in the Coalition’s membership would be accompanied by growing pains as new NGOs (and new personalities) were integrated and made their perspectives known on the problem of cluster munitions and the most appropriate solutions. Although the personalities leading the Coalition throughout the 2003 to 2008 were a reasonably consistent group, their views and the CMC’s central call and tactics continued to evolve. This is important: the energy and creative thinking of the CMC, along with that of UN entities and the ICRC, would infuse thinking of governments in the Oslo process and, in particular, its steering “core group” of states.