Policy Briefs on Cooperative Security, Arms Control and Disarmament

This Policy Brief provides a distillation of a recent Small Arms Survey report that examines the Arms Trade Treaty (2013) in relation to the Indo-Pacific region. The report focuses on the different attitudes of states in the Indo-Pacific toward the Treaty: it explores how armament dynamics in this region shape states’ perceptions when defining their own security requirements and attitudes toward an instrument that aims to regulate the conventional arms trade. Further, it identifies the main challenges and obstacles to ATT universalisation and compliance in the Indo-Pacific region, and provides insights into opportunities for enhanced engagement with the Treaty by the states in the region.

This report examines the dyadic relationships between the big three in BRICS - China, India and Russia. The XVI. BRICS summit was chaired by Russia in Kazan from October 22 to 24. Over 30 countries expressed an interest in joining the present nine members of BRICS. It can be expected that additional countries will soon join the group. What does this mean for the future of BRICS? Will BRICS become the new voice of the Global South? Or will it remain a loose grouping, a “negating coalition”, that has consensus about what to reject but that lacks a vision? This report argues that rivalries and conflicts among the big three in BRICS (China, India and Russia) prevent a homogenous global governance approach, although the international influence of BRICS is likely to keep growing.

The report addresses what has worked and what is the way forward for the disarmament machinery, when faced with the grim reality that it has been and continues to be undermined by geo-political and economic agendas. For the diplomat or advocate wanting to see progress on disarmament and arms control at this moment, what can be done? Are there routes around the rule of consensus? How can we refocus on protecting civilians and ensure that work in multilateral fora does not replicate a debating society, but instead has an impact on the ground?

This Policy Brief is a reflection on the origins, progress, setbacks, and current status of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the international community’s organising principle for responding to the threat or outbreak of mass atrocity crimes inside sovereign jurisdictions. While the articulation, refinement, institutionalisation, and consolidation of such a norm is one thing, the question remains: has R2P made a difference in practice? This question is addressed by Ramesh Thakur, a former UN assistant secretary-general, and a Commissioner and one of the principal authors of R2P.

This Policy Brief examines nuclear war-fighting preparations and asks whether tensions can be ameliorated by risk reduction and confidence-building measures. Arms control used to be based on an assumption of stabilization of big power relations in order to avoid a war that nobody wants. Today revisionist powers in Europe and East Asia defy stability, and in the US and Russia war-fighting preparations include nuclear as well as conventional and other means, especially at theatre level. China may be moving in the same direction, but there is not enough evidence to say so with certainty. US–China relations are facing the Thucydides trap, and the triangular politics of the three leading nuclear powers is inherently unstable. Except for the Cuban Missile Crisis and the critical state of US–Soviet relations around 1980, the present world is more dangerous than it has ever been in the nuclear age.