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.

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 paper draws a rough sketch of the characteristics of small arms & identifies major trends in their manufacture, acquisition & trade. It also provides a global profile of armed conflicts occurring within States & presents observations with a view to assisting in policy formulation.

During the 1990s the United Nations was called upon to conduct unprecedented peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in order to bring peace to war-torn states. Essential to the resolution of these conflicts was deemed to be the disarmament of the former warring parties. United Nations Disarmament Processes in Intra-State Conflict therefore seeks to identify the most important lessons taught by the UN's experiences in disarmament and constructs an original analytical framework to explain the variation in the UN's success. On this basis Stephen M. Hill proffers recommendations for the UN's present and future disarmament operations.