10. The future of Landmines

Against all odds, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines helped to enact a global treaty banning antipersonnel mines in 1997. For that achievement it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In this volume, Leon Sigal shows how a handful of NGOs with almost no mass base got more than 100 countries to outlaw a weapon that their armies had long used. It is a story of intrigue and misperception, of clashing norms and interests, of contentious bureaucratic and domestic politics. It is also a story of effective leadership, of sustained commitment to a cause, of alliances between campaigners and government officials, of a US senator who championed the ban, and of the skilful use of the news media. Despite this monumental effort, the campaign failed to get the United States to sign the treaty. Drawing on extensive internal documents and interviews with US officials and ban campaigners, Sigal tells the story of the in-fighting inside the Clinton administration, in the Pentagon, and within the ban campaign itself that led to this major setback for an otherwise unprecedented, successful global effort. Negotiating Minefields will be of interest to students and scholars of military and strategic studies and politics and international relations.

Anti-Personnel Mines under Humanitarian Law: A View From the Vanishing Point considers in depth the various customary and conventional legal regimes applicable to the use of anti-personnel mines. All involved with the global effort to control and eliminate anti-personnel mines as well as the policy-makers who are concerned about the devastation resulting from the widespread deployment of these arbitrary weapons need to familiarize themselves with the information presented in this timely volume. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

This book examines potential technologies for replacing antipersonnel landmines by 2006, the U.S. target date for signing an international treaty banning these weapons. Alternative Technologies to Replace Antipersonnel Landmines emphasizes the role that technology can play to allow certain weapons to be used more selectively, reducing the danger to uninvolved civilians while improving the effectiveness of the U.S. military. Landmines are an important weapon in the U.S. military's arsenal but the persistent variety can cause unintended casualties, to both civilians and friendly forces. New technologies could replace some, but not all, of the U.S. military's antipersonnel landmines by 2006. In the period following 2006, emerging technologies might eliminate the landmine totally, while retaining the necessary functionalities that today's mines provide to the military.

This anthology of articles collected by a cast of award-winning scholars in the field of public health illustrates that promoting and protecting human rights is fundamental to promoting and protecting health. New issues covered in this volume include: emerging technologies; family and health; responding to violence; and methods and strategies.

East Timor / Taiwan

Minding Evil: Explorations of Human Iniquity brings together fifteen essays, versions of which were presented at the Fifth International Conference on Evil and Wickedness, held in Prague in 2004. The volume examines evil and wickedness from a variety of disciplines, including criminology, cultural studies, gender studies, law, literature, peace studies, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. In so doing Minding Evil keeps in play the doubled meaning of its title: on the one hand, to tend to evil, that is, to oversee, cultivate, and deploy it; on the other hand, to be bothered by evil and so, in learning to identify or recognise it, to try to understand its workings and thus contain or control it and, perhaps, repair or undo it. While the essays taken together work to show the difficulty and at times the travesty of not being able to distinguish between the two meanings, it is this second meaning that remains key. What are the individual and collective responsibilities entailed in minding - being troubled by - evil? This is the central question of this volume.