Policy Briefs on Cooperative Security, Arms Control and Disarmament

History supplies few examples of successful great power cooperation for preserving peace over long periods. For the emerging multipolar structure, one of the rare templates of successful peace-preserving collaboration has been the Concert of Europe (CoE), which emerged in the course of the Vienna Congress of 1815. The CoE worked for a century; it prevented great power war for two long periods and managed at least to avoid all-out war in the interim period of the Crimea War and the Wars of German and Italian unification). This policy brief examines the achievements and shortcomings of the CoE, and discusses how these insights might be applied in light of current global power relations.

Since the possession of nuclear weapons, India is more awake to the realistic utility of nuclear arms control as an arms race management instrument or a risk reduction instrument. Ongoing developments in nuclear arms control should matter for India, even if these are taking place in the US-Russia bilateral domain. Whether the future trajectory of NAC will result in positive consequences or adverse ones for New Delhi will depend on many factors, including how these are handled. This policy brief highlights four main issues that will have implications at the global and regional levels, for India in particular and offers five ideas for future NAC possibilities.

There is a sense that world order is at a point of transition but we do not know what we are transitioning to. How can we ensure that these processes do not threaten international peace and security? How can we direct the processes of change and transformation to our advantage while avoiding the dangers that they create? What adjustments do we have to make to ensure that the basis exists for cooperative security in the emerging world order? This policy brief considers cooperative security in the rules-based world order and what the future might hold as rules-based order declines. It proposes that a productive approach is to explore a vision of a shared future and concludes with five recommendations.

The process just before, during and after the Stockholm Conference on Confidence- and Security-building Measures and Disarmament in Europe which took place between January 1984 and September 1986 formed part of a wider chain of events, the full importance of which was not widely understood until 1989, or perhaps even much later. The added value of this Policy Brief may be to highlight the potential importance of what many would refer to as associated measures when dealing with the current dangers of nuclear weapons and a renewed arms race with ever more devastating weapons.

Arms control during the years of détente remains almost a legend: it was born in the middle of a dangerous stand-off between two implacable rivals and achieved reasonable successes in substance and the overall atmosphere of cooperation. As the world has entered an unstable and dangerous phase in 2010s, we look back to the 1970s in search of lessons to be drawn and examples to follow. Can that experience be replicated? How can we launch a new arms control effort at the time of worsening and increasingly dangerous geopolitical competition? If two rival superpowers could engage in a cooperative endeavour in the midst of a geo-political conflict, perhaps we could repeat the experience today and mitigate the more dangerous aspects of the conflict that will likely continue for an extended period of time.