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The chapter evaluates the potential of the Arms Trade Treaty to identify and reduce violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law. It assesses the process and the outcome of the negotiation of an Arms Trade Treaty, the first international instrument that makes an explicit link between arms export and its potential consequences in terms of violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law. The chapter presents the negotiation history of the ATT, comparing it to other recent treaty negotiations within humanitarian disarmament, and discusses the association between international law and peace studies. The main aim of the chapter is to present the ATT’s provisions concerning export control and in regulating the situations in which arms exports will be prohibited.

This chapter looks at how anti-arms trade activists develop critiques of the international arms trade. It argues that the overwhelming focus on the sale of arms to ‘repressive regimes’ risks reproducing liberal militarism and racialised discourses of the international, showing how apparently radical anti-militarism can become folded within and circumscribed by militarist discourse. The chapter begins by outlining existing critiques of the Arms Trade Treaty, before suggesting that such critiques might also be directed towards more radical actors like Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). It then sets out how abolitionist actors like CAAT mobilise the ‘repressive regimes discourse’ to critique the arms trade, using this discourse to ground campaigns including ongoing efforts to ‘Stop Arming Saudi’. The chapter shows how, notwithstanding the importance of such campaigns, such discourses can remain troublingly compatible with liberal militarism, and can feed into racialised discourses which are themselves constitutive of militarism. The chapter ends by considering the potential for a more explicit focus on liberal and racialised forms of militarism within the movement.

This introductory chapter presents the framework of the entire study premised on the case of arms trade and its policy controls. For producing states, the arms trade serves as a tool of foreign influence and military power, a source of national security and employment, as well as key to defense industry survival. For recipient states, the arms trade destabilizes fragmented countries, prolongs conflict, and increases the difficulty of postconflict reconstruction. This conflict of interests spurred the passage of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which marked the beginning of restriction of small and major conventional arm trades to human rights violators and conflict zones. The chapter considers the domestic and international motives behind the commitment and compliance of various states with international policy initiatives such as the ATT, by examining the small and major arm export deliveries between years 1981 and 2010.

States are the “natural” target for INGOs, yet how INGOs approach them depends on their authority. In this chapter, we demonstrate how leading INGOs use different strategies to work with states, using the case studies of negotiations over the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) and Financial Transactions Tax (FTT). The two cases are similar in a number of ways: the campaigns took off in the later 1990s, the issues target the practices of the United States and United Kingdom as relevant actors, and both engage issues that have traditionally been challenging for INGOs as “hard politics.” Leading INGOs are more collaborative with states than other INGOs, and prioritize easy target states, rather the most important. In both cases, the entry of leading INGOs accompanied the re-framing of the campaign’s proposals to more reformist positions. This yielded a vanilla victory in the form of the ATT and even less for the FTT.

This final chapter returns to the study’s original motivation: understanding whether, and when, multilateral treaties can serve as an effective means of generating international change under conditions of great power ambivalence. It places the core case studies in their wider context by applying the hypothesized factors developed in Chapter 8 to examples of (a) other non-great power treaties; (b) concessions to great powers in order to secure their participation; and (c) the abandonment of binding agreements in the face of opposition in favour of informal arrangements or none at all. The preceding study has validated the initial interest in non-great power multilateralism, and has offered impetus for further detailed research to help scholars and policymakers alike better understand the promise and perils of this strategy. The chapter—and book—therefore concludes by proposing an agenda for academic research on non-great power institutions more generally.