A common feature of conflict in the 1990s is death and suffering from small arms and light weapons. The global diffusion of assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades, which can be easily carried by an individual or transported by a light vehicle, has greatly intensified the violence of conflicts in countries around the world. This book represents the perspectives of the foremost specialists on light weapons, and it surveys the wide range of policy options open to the international community. These include export and import controls, law enforcement strategies to break up black markets, collection and destruction of weapons following the end of conflict, and efforts to illuminate how small arms and light weapons make their way to the killing grounds of the 1990s.

This handbook provides critical analyses of the theory and practices of small arms proliferation and its impact on conflicts and organized violence in Africa. It examines the terrains, institutions, factors and actors that drive armed conflict and arms proliferation, and further explores the nature, scope, and dynamics of conflicts across the continent, as well as the extent to which these conflicts are exacerbated by the proliferation of small arms. The volume features rich analyses by contributors who are acquainted with, and widely experienced in, the formal and informal structures of arms proliferation and control, and their repercussions on violence, instability and insecurity across Africa. The chapters dissect the challenges of small arms and light weapons in Africa with a view to understanding roots causes and drivers, and generating a fresh body of analyses that adds value to the existing conversation on conflict management and peacebuilding in Africa. With contributions from scholars, development practitioners, defence and security professionals and civil society activists, the handbook seeks to serve as a reference for students, researchers, and policy makers on small arms proliferation, control and regulation; defence and security practitioners; and those involved in countering violence and managing conflicts in Africa.

It has become very commonplace to note the shift from interstate to intra-state conflict in the world-civil and ethnic wars whose resolution seems to resist the best efforts of the international community. It is understandable that this international community continues to search for tools that could be used to prevent such conflicts. This search has produced a wide array of methods that focus on both the root causes of conflict - poverty, inequities, ethnic rivalries - and on finding the more short-term steps that will put an immediate stop to the outbreak and acceleration of armed conflict. This report breaks new ground in calling for a renewed focus on the actual tools of violence - small arms and light weapons - that are the means by which hundreds of thousands of people, mostly innocent civilians, are killed and wounded each year. Preventing conflict by focusing on the tools of violence presents some obstacles for an international community still dominated by the ways of thinking about conflict prevention and practices that prevailed during the Cold War. In the face of a fairly intractable ideological rivalry between the two blocs, a focus on the tools of violence proved disappointing in most cases. This is especially true for arms control measures involving major conventional weapons such as tanks, aircraft, and missiles. Currently, most conflicts do not involve this class of weapon. Instead, today's combatants employ light weapons such as automatic rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, and small mortars, all of which are portable, cost less, and are in such abundance that even the seldom successful methods of the Cold War are not applicable.

"Describes weapons, gear, and uniforms used by various military forces during America's biggest wars"--

The issue of small arms and light weapon proliferation has been given widespread international focus in the post cold war era.This is so because these weapons have become the primary tools for both ethnic and internal conflict and other related crimes that pose threat to national, regional and international security.Ultimately, it is important to note that the introduction of true democracy, good governance and transparency in the management of public affairs can help eradicate the scourge of small arms and light weapons.

Since at least the Middle Ages, the laws of war have distinguished between combatants and civilians under an injunction now formally known as the principle of distinction. The principle of distinction is invoked in contemporary conflicts as if there were an unmistakable and sure distinction to be made between combatant and civilian. As is so brutally evident in armed conflicts, it is precisely the distinction between civilian and combatant, upon which the protection of civilians is founded, cannot be taken as self-evident or stable. Helen M. Kinsella documents that the history of international humanitarian law itself admits the difficulty of such a distinction. In The Image before the Weapon, Kinsella explores the evolution of the concept of the civilian and how it has been applied in warfare. A series of discourses—including gender, innocence, and civilization—have shaped the legal, military, and historical understandings of the civilian and she documents how these discourses converge at particular junctures to demarcate the difference between civilian and combatant. Engaging with works on the law of war from the earliest thinkers in the Western tradition, including St. Thomas Aquinas and Christine de Pisan, to contemporary figures such as James Turner Johnson and Michael Walzer, Kinsella identifies the foundational ambiguities and inconsistencies in the principle of distinction, as well as the significant role played by Christian concepts of mercy and charity. She then turns to the definition and treatment of civilians in specific armed conflicts: the American Civil War and the U.S.-Indian wars of the nineteenth century, and the civil wars of Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s. Finally, she analyzes the two modern treaties most influential for the principle of distinction: the 1949 IV Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War and the 1977 Protocols Additional to the 1949 Conventions, which for the first time formally defined the civilian within international law. She shows how the experiences of the two world wars, but particularly World War II, and the Algerian war of independence affected these subsequent codifications of the laws of war. As recognition grows that compliance with the principle of distinction to limit violence against civilians depends on a firmer grasp of its legal, political, and historical evolution, The Image before the Weapon is a timely intervention in debates about how best to protect civilian populations.