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Guns and the International Community

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Domestic Gun Control and International Small Arms Control in Africa

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Abstract

This chapter examines the history of small arms control. Although the modern small arms control dates to the 1990s, the chapter traces the underlying notions of humanitarianism and responsibility to the nineteenth century and both the beginning of international humanitarian law and the legal framework for European imperialism in Africa. It shows that, historically, small arms control has drawn a line between “civilized” and “uncivilized” groups with the latter not being deemed sufficiently responsible to have small arms (and excusing violence against them). While the racial underpinnings of this line have diminished, the chapter argues that the distinction between responsibility and irresponsibility endures in the modern small arms control movement centered on the UN Programme of Action and the Arms Trade Treaty.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Slave Trade and Importation into Africa of Firearms, Ammunition, and Spirituous Liquors (General Act of Brussels), signed July 2, 1890, entered into force August 31, 1891. Reprinted in Bevans (1968).

  2. 2.

    The French term used was maux superfluous, which has been translated as both “superfluous injury” and “unnecessary suffering.” The two are functionally and legally the same (Meyrowitz 1994).

  3. 3.

    Convention for the Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition and Protocol, 1919. Reprinted in The American Journal of International Law 15(4), Supplement: 297-313, 121.

  4. 4.

    The four Geneva Conventions address wounded and sick soldiers (first Geneva Convention); the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked at sea (second Geneva Convention); prisoners of war (third Geneva Convention); and the protection of civilians (fourth Geneva Convention). Two additional protocols were adopted in 1977, specifying further the rules for protecting victims of international armed conflict (Protocol I) and the victims of non-international armed conflict (Protocol II). These were adopted in response to the brutal independence conflicts in Algeria and Kenya and elsewhere (see Klose 2011). A third protocol was adopted in 2005 and established a new emblem alongside the established red cross and red crescent. All references to the Geneva Conventions and their Protocols herein are to the texts available on the website of the International Committee of the Red Cross (https://www.icrc.org/en/war-and-law/treaties-customary-law/geneva-conventions).

  5. 5.

    Dowdeswell (2016) points to the 1874 Brussels Peace Conference as an important milestone for the understanding of the “civilian” in the laws of war, which was later encoded in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, but whatever the exact origin of the term, its primary purpose was to protect European non-combatants as opposed to non-combatants in colonial warfare.

  6. 6.

    Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977, available at: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/470.

  7. 7.

    Memorandum re: status of Taliban forces under Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention, 26 Op. O. L. C. 1, 3 (2002).

  8. 8.

    Interview, senior official with UNODA, April, 2010.

  9. 9.

    Interview, senior official with UNODA, April, 2010.

  10. 10.

    Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, adopted May 31, 2001, 236 U.N.T.S. 208.

  11. 11.

    There are of course non-UN processes that attempt to address this issue—in addition to arms export controls adopted by individual countries. For example, in 2008 the European Union adopted Council Common Position 2008/944/CFSP which requires member states to deny export licenses if the weapons concerned are likely to be used in internal repression and, more generally, to consider the receiving country’s human human rights situation, as determined by the UN, EU, or Council of Europe. This presumably binding standard has been criticized for being ineffective, however, as the ambiguous language allows member states sidestep the intent of the standard (Hansen 2016; Oppenheim 2019).

  12. 12.

    Org. of African Unity, Decision on the Illicit Proliferation, Circulation and Trafficking of Small Arms and Light Weapons, at 10, AHG/Dec.137 (XXXV) (July 12–14, 1999), https://au.int/sites/default/files/decisions/9544-1999_ahg_dec_132-142_xxxv_e.pdf.

  13. 13.

    Org. of African Unity, Bamako Declaration on an African Common Position on the Illicit Proliferation, Circulation and Trafficking of Small Arms and Light Weapons (November 30-December 1, 2000), https://www.sipri.org/node/3037.

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    Niklas Hultin

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Hultin, N. (2022). Guns and the International Community. In: Domestic Gun Control and International Small Arms Control in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07738-8_2

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