Temática y aplicación de técnica

Amnesty International claims that “between one-third and three-quarters of all grave human rights violations and 85 per cent of [reported] killings…over the past decade have involved the use of small arms and light weapons.⁴⁹ The

46 Benjamin Pauker, “Congo: On the Trail of an AK-47,” Frontline World Rough Cut (August 2007), http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2007/08/congo_on_the_trgen.html (accessed December 7, 2007).

47 Ibid.

48 Amnesty International, Dead on Time: Arms Transportation, Brokering and the Threat to Human Rights, ACT 30/008/2006 (Amnesty International: May 10, 2006),

http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engact300082006 (accessed December 12, 2007).

49 Control Arms Campaign, Arms Without Borders: Why a Globalised Trade Needs Global Controls.

United Nations claims that the availability of small arms plays a significant role in

“sustaining conflicts, in exacerbating violence, in contributing to the displacement of innocent populations and threatening international law, and in fuelling crime and terrorism.”⁵⁰ These claims are only further reinforced by a wide body of literature that suggests small arms and armed violence are one of the greatest threats to the peace, stability, and development of Africa.

While Cold-War era military depots have been largely depleted of surplus small arms, rapid globalization and the emergence of new arms producing nations have ensured that supply-side conditions continue to provide sources of weaponry for African conflicts. In fact, many of these emerging exporters are able to provide cheaper weapons which the Small Arms Survey demonstrates to increase the risk of civil war, independent of other conflict risk factors.⁵¹ These conflict risk factors, or root causes of conflict, are often measured through the evaluation of “socio-economic development, effective democracy and a credible law and order mechanism.”⁵²

Small arms alone are rarely attributed as a root cause of conflict, however, they are widely accepted to be a precondition for violence that can exacerbate and increase the lethality of conflict. Presented as an independent variable, therefore, the availability of small arms is a quantifiable element that can be controlled to reduce levels of violence. Economists Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler advance this argument by suggesting that the motivating factors for conflict are tied to measurable conditions of greed and that fighting will only occur with the presence of atypical opportunities to combatants on either side of a

50 UN Security Council, Report of the Panel of Experts appointed pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), paragraph 19, in relation to Sierra Leone, S/2000/1195 (New York, NY: UN, 2000), 31.

51 Small Arms Survey 2007, What Price the Kalashnikov: The Economics of Small Arms (Small Arms Survey: 2007),

http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/files/sas/publications/yearb2007.html (accessed October 10, 2007).

52 Virginia Gamba, “Problems and Linkages in Controlling the Proliferation of Light Weapons,” 38.

conflict.⁵³ Using this context, Collier and Hoeffler developed a model to predict the onset of intrastate conflict based on opportunity as the determining factor to predict the onset or nonoccurrence of armed conflict.

The Collier-Hoeffler Model of Civil War Onset incorporates factors that contribute to atypical opportunities such as the available finances of both incumbent regimes and potential opposition groups. Available capital is thus compared to the overall cost of rebellion and the military advantage of the opposition group to the state security apparatus. The sources of finance can be further divided by the circumstances that generate profitable opportunities to include the exploitation of resources, donations from diasporas, and subventions from external governments.⁵⁴ Availability of finances can buy, among other things, weapons, which further create the conditions of atypical opportunities contributed by the Collier-Hoeffler model to increase the likelihood of civil war.

Considering weapons an a quantitative indicator for the opportunity to rebel, which is demonstrated by the Collier-Hoeffler model as a determining factor for intrastate conflict, provides the rational to focus on intervention strategies of the global supply chain of small arms. The rational is further reinforced by the recent research of the Control Arms Campaign to estimate the economic cost of armed conflict to Africa’s development. Using factors such as the decline in gross domestic product (GDP) for countries at war, the cost of armed conflict for 23 African countries was conservatively estimated to be $284 billion lost between 1990 and 2005. This estimated value, which represents an average annual loss of 15 per cent of GDP, “amounts to an average of $18 [billion] per year lost by Africa due to armed conflict.”⁵⁵ The underlying theme to the Control Arms effort to quantify the cost of armed conflict is to represent a lost

53 Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Nicholas Sambanis, "The Collier-Hoeffler Model of Civil War Onset and the Case Study Project Research Design," in Understanding Civil War (Volume 1:

Africa): Evidence and Analysis, ed. Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis, (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2005), 1-34.

54 Ibid., 6-7.

55 Control Arms Campaign, Africa’s Missing Billions: International Arms Flows and the Cost of Conflict.

opportunity for investment in stability and development initiatives that could have mitigated the complex political, commercial, and socio-economic causes for conflict.

Recognizing that small arms are a precondition for conflict and considering the economic cost to development that can be attributed to armed conflict, controlling the transfer of small arms “is therefore an indispensable element in the effort to make a more peaceful world.”⁵⁶ The final section of this chapter will introduce the reader to the international, regional, and state level efforts to control the illicit proliferation of small arms and hold accountable those individuals, organizations, and states responsible for the repercussions.