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Connections
Disarmament as humanitarian action:
Making multilateral negotiations work
University of Sussex, 8-9 January 2007
John Borrie, Project Manager, United Nations Institute for
Disarmament Research (UNIDIR)
Summary
Social connections bind together individuals in society. By considering how and why these
connections come about – and what happens when they break down – we can see common
analytical themes emerge, whether in arms control negotiations, humanitarian action or
development. Some work the DHA project has done to extend this thinking about social
interactions in an armed violence related context – that of small arms proliferation – is briefly
described. Lastly, a few suggestions are offered about what it could mean for international
security work more broadly, for disarmament practitioners’ ways of working, and even
extending it to other areas such as the diffusion of new technologies that could be turned to
hostile use, like those in the life sciences.
2
I’ve been asked to tell you about the project I run at UNIDIR called
Disarmament as Humanitarian Action: Making Multilateral Negotiations
Work.
It occurred to me that you don’t want to be bored by a dry description of
the DHA project: I also think our research is better understood when
considered in the context of the issues that face problem-solvers in the
international sphere. So today I want to explore with you the theme of
social interactions as connections, and why they’re relevant to my
project’s work and thinking about disarmament in general.
When I was a kid, one TV show I really enjoyed was written and
presented by the gentleman you see here, James Burke. The show was
called Connections.1 It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history
of science and invention and showed how various discoveries, scientific
achievements and historical world events built off one another in an
interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of the modern world.
I’ve been fascinated with these themes ever since. Eventually I trained in
history at university and went on to join the New Zealand Foreign
Service, where I ended up involved in arms control negotiations. These
included the BWC protocol, the “New Agenda” coalition and the 2001
small arms programme of action.
One big surprise for me about multilateral diplomacy is that there is a
particular way of doing things, one based heavily on precedent and
experience that sometimes has little space for the kind of thinking that
James Burke showed in his documentaries. Perhaps it reflected my
naivety as a young diplomat trained in history, rather than the law.
Diplomats are accustomed to thinking about connections, but in quite
particular ways – most often in the disarmament context of devising
agreements that set rules about “things” from the top down; regulating
3
nuclear activities, for example, or reducing the number of nuclear
warheads through contracts.
In fact, one way to consider the substance of disarmament and arms
control negotiation as they developed through the 20th century would be
to describe them as generally reductionist.2 All this means is that as
multilateral diplomacy’s community of practice developed, it tended to
do so along lines that broke down complicated problems into their
constituent elements. Specialists were brought into negotiations to deal
with technical or military issues. Oversight at the diplomatic and
political levels was supposed to keep this aligned with broader realities.
Reductionism wasn’t so much a driver in interactions between states in
terms of their security as a means to help them achieve it.
This model was, and continues to be, very powerful. It’s especially
useful in circumstances in which each negotiating actor has the time and
resources to study and understand the postures of its negotiating
counterparts. Then, in theory, they can extrapolate others’ likely
strategies and motivations into a picture of the future on which they can
act. Examples include nuclear reduction measures between the US and
Soviet Union, the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) agreement and
the CWC. These agreements all contain discrete components, lists –
whether of bombers, tanks, nuclear warheads or toxic chemicals – and
were rationally organised to solve concrete problems of identification,
verification and other aspects of arms control.
Sometimes, for practical or political reasons, the reductionist tendency
could only be taken so far, though. Agreements like the 1972 BWC look
very different from the CWC negotiated two decades later. In the BWC’s
case, means of verification lagged behind political commitment to
4
completing its negotiation and so the resulting treaty’s very general in
much of its drafting and lacks a verification system.
The case could be made that at the turn of this century when people like
myself were trying to devise a BWC verification regime through a
protocol resembling the CWC, we were barking up the wrong tree. Make
no mistake: verification will have to be an important aspect of the BWC
regime in the future if it’s to retain credibility. But two big conundrums
were never addressed during the protocol negotiations that have wider
relevance:
1. That new technological developments and the desire for weapons
are ultimately driven by social interactions, including those at the
local level.
2. Traditional approaches to disarmament and arms control can be
confounded when there are too many different but interacting
factors to analyse.3
Based on my experiences in negotiations like the ones I’ve mentioned,
I’m conviced that multilateral practitioners need new tools and
perspectives to help them get their heads around these challenges – to
“think outside the box” – in order to help them be more effective.
Contrary to what you might have heard, multilateral failure isn’t simply
due to lack of so-called “political will”. This isn’t to say that difficulties
in international relations aren’t down to specific, underlying political
differences. Of course, many are. Sometimes conflicting interests just
can’t be reconciled. But invoking some all-pervasive force like political
will can prevent us identifying new ways to lower the transactional costs
of cooperation between negotiating actors to make it of enough perceived
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benefit. Modest gains in this respect – say by modifying the procedural
architecture of a multilateral institution – could have substantial effects.
Searching for more productive ways of working in multilateral
disarmament is what our project has tried to do. Specifically, it has two
major themes:
1. A greater human security focus is relevant to disarmament and
arms control processes. All human security means here is a focus
on individuals and their communities as referent points for
security, not just that of the nation state. The 1997 treaty banning
anti-personnel mines is often held up as the prime example of
bringing human security perspectives into arms control, including
the influence of field-based perspectives from humanitarian
deminers, physicians and those from mine affected communities.
But there are also others, and some of these case studies are
documented in our second volume of research.4
Linked to this is the recognition that if we’re going to treat humanitarian
perspectives as relevant to the substance of arms control work, it’s also
worth considering what being human means for the nature of these
multilateral interactions. We’ve dubbed it the cognitive ergonomics of
negotiating. Ergonomics are important, as anyone who’s used an
uncomfortable keyboard or sat in a cramped airline seat for a long period
of time knows.
Yet, while they spend a great proportion of their time vying over matters
of procedure, multilateral negotiators give little sustained thought to
whether their perceptions, habits of work and structures they work within
might be important to their effectiveness.5 And, in analyzing multilateral
processes from academia, its perhaps easy to overlook the rich – and
6
often private – texture of human interactions and what about it is and isn’t
significant.
2. Our work is concerned with developing practical proposals to
apply this in functional terms to help negotiators. We want to
help disarmament practitioners rethink their assumptions about
multilateral work that often go unquestioned, including their
perceptions and procedures.
Perhaps this sounds abstract, which is why I want to rewind a bit and to
think about what James Burke’s connections might mean for us. Social
connections bind together individuals in society. By considering how and
why these connections come about – and what happens when they break
down – I think we can see a common analytical theme emerge, whether
in arms control negotiations, humanitarian action or development.
↔↔↔
Let’s consider for a moment that cup of tea you drank this morning. As
you’re hearing these words, somebody you’ve never met is working hard
on your behalf. Somewhere, in Sri Lanka or elsewhere, tea is being
grown and harvested to service your tea habit later this year. Eventually
the tea is dried and otherwise prepared and packaged, ready for transport
by other strangers, across the ocean to you here in Britain. For your part,
I doubt you knew the name of the grocery assistant who put the packet of
tea on the store shelf before you bought it, or the checkout operator who
sold it to you.
This morning, when you woke up, you switched on your electric jug.
This device was probably imported, perhaps from Italy or Germany. You
feel so confident in the safety of this device that you go and shower while
it boils. A dam or power station somewhere else, minded by strangers,
7
generated the electricity that heated the water for your shower and your
warm brew.
After breakfast, you get into your car, built perhaps in Sweden or Japan,
and bought at great cost to you from other strangers at a car dealership.
Moreover, a mechanic you barely know serviced your vehicle.
Implicitly, however, you trust that your car won’t break down or suffer a
failure that will result in you dying a fiery death on the way to work. Or,
perhaps you take a bus or train – the principle is the same. The people
who’ve provided these things for you don’t know you. But they don’t
need to, even though your life, your health and your prosperity depend
upon them. You have every reason to be grateful for the intimate links
that tie them to you.
There are also lots of unintentional interactions between you and millions
of other strangers around the world. Some of these are bad. The most
important risk is infectious disease. Throughout history this has been a
much greater threat to life than violence, and it remains true today. The
WHO estimates that roughly 57 million illness or injury-related deaths
were recorded for 2002 – a typical year. Nearly 11 million of these were
due to infectious or parasitic disease. That’s just a little less than 20 per
cent of the total. War and violence killed around 730,000 – a little over 1
per cent.6 Even in periods of major conflict, war has rarely rivalled
disease as a killer: the influenza pandemic of 1918 alone killed more than
20 million people, more than died in World War One.
Let’s consider the statistical risk of violent death at the hands of someone
else. In Europe and the US, such deaths make up only one percent of all
deaths. To put that in perspective, that’s much less than those due to
traffic accidents and a bit more than half of those due to suicide. Even in
Africa, violent deaths at the hands of others make up only a little over 2
8
percent of all estimated deaths. That means that even in on one of the
most violent continents of the world, you’re ten times more at risk from
death by disease than from murder.
Yet these statistics don’t begin to capture the real impact of violence, of
course. First of all, aside from the direct deaths caused by violence,
disease, destitution and environmental damage follow in their wake.
And, the fear of violence exerts a poisonous and disruptive effect on
human relations. For every death at a stranger’s hands there are many
thousands of living victims. For example, travellers have taken many
million fewer airplane journeys since 911. The political and military map
of the Middle East is being redrawn as a result of these events. And, in
London, Tel Aviv, Madrid and Tokyo, people worry if it’s safe to take
public transport.
In Africa, millions of people are condemned to poverty and disease by the
inability of the ordinary institutions of society to function without the
periodic outbreak of violence. As the 2005 Human Security Report
indicates, the measure of the indirect impact of conflict isn’t “simply the
number of deaths, but rather the number of healthy years of life lost as a
consequence of death, disease or other harmful conditions that develop as
a consequence”.7
The economist Paul Seabright (from whom some of the ideas discussed
here today are drawn) has observed that for all of these living victims,
“their newly awakened fear of strangers disrupts the whole web of
relations that bind people together in a healthy modern society and
undermines all the institutions on which such a society depends, from
schools to hospitals, shops, government departments, and the legal
system.”8
9
Trust between strangers is the very fabric of human society. Without it,
most of the things we hold dear and the rights and dignities in the modern
world we hold to be self-evident are impossible. 21st century societies –
whether we envisage New York or shell-pocked Kabul – are, if seen in
this light, very fragile indeed. The “tunnel vision” that enables human
beings to cooperate with strangers, and all of the cultural and social
norms that flow from that, is what stands between us and violent anarchy,
or the need for continual surveillance and repression in order to sustain
cooperation given the complexity of our societies.
These societies are both more fragile and more durable than we might
expect. For instance, the 911 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New
York were horrendous, causing thousands of casualties and billions of
dollars of damage. But terror attacks, even on targets as economically
significant and as symbolically important as these, didn’t rend the fabric
of modern life irreparably. Likewise, despite attacks in Madrid and
London, most people in those places still live their lives pretty similarly
to before, perhaps more nervously.9
But when “tunnel vision” trust does break down seriously, this has
pervasive and debilitating effects for people living in affected societies to
do anything meaningful. Indeed, in the worst cases this breakdown can
undermine social norms and so atomize society itself. What do we do in
situations where we just cannot bring ourselves to trust strangers, for fear
of their intentions against us, and when they feel the same? In these
scenarios, we tend to fall back to our relationships with those we know
well, and especially to those to whom we are related, if we can.
This is precisely what we see in so many societies wracked by armed
violence and under-development. Mechanisms for reliably cooperating
with strangers are disconnected: either they have broken down, or they
10
never developed. From Afghanistan to Somaliland to Kosovo and Papua
New Guinea, security and prosperity is to be found in the family, the clan
and tribe, whether in ethnic or religious terms. These ties have much
strength. Unfortunately, they may also be counter-productive in forming
social cooperation free from nepotism or other forms of corruption.
This much perhaps seems obvious. But I put it to you that thinking about
these situations in this way has profound implications for multilateral
work, whether in responding to humanitarian emergencies, in negotiating
complex multilateral deals, or in planning development programs. Social
interactions matter.
For instance, a very complicated set of conditions need to be met to
successfully rebuild post-conflict societies, but one yardstick could be
how much intervention re-connects the web of trust between ordinary
people, and permits cooperation with strangers. After all, trust, or its
absence, creates a spectrum of differing contingent strategies. In some
circumstances, contingent strategies in the absence of trust can be
violent. Without the re-establishment of “tunnel vision” – the ability of
strangers in a society to confidently interact with strangers – then
international investments in post-conflict humanitarian efforts and
development are simply likely to be money and effort down the drain.
This, for example, is what seems to be happening in Iraq. Almost four
years after the invasion, “liberation” from Saddam has instead seen
spiralling alienation and violence between Iraqis of different ethnicities
and faiths – conflicts suppressed during the decades of his brutal rule. It
seems clear at present that the institutions in society intended to facilitate
trust in the new Iraq such as the police, judiciary, welfare system and
armed forces haven’t yet developed, however attractive the dream,
because ordinary Iraqis don’t yet trust them each other sufficiently. In
11
this sense, the armed insurgency has been highly effective. Perceptions
of insecurity matter, and they’re both driven by social interactions and
drive them.
↔↔↔
This is all very well, but how will that awareness help multilateral
practitioners? Looking at social phenomena as interdependent systems is
a nice idea, and it’s mentioned a great deal in the rhetoric of statecraft.
But it’s often less intuitive than attempting to simplify problems by
breaking them into their constituent parts. Indeed, when diplomats talk
about “complex” phenomena, it seems they often confuse them with
those that are complicated.
But in science there’s a clear distinction between what’s complicated and
what’s complex. Even though it’s very sophisticated, a complicated
system like a watch, a computer or car can’t be considered to be complex.
The pieces can be studied in isolation and reassembled to understand the
whole. The responses of the components and of the whole are fully
determined and the fixed algorithms that rule the system produce linear
and predictable outcomes.
Real-life international security problems are frequently complex rather
than just complicated. We live in a world that’s ever more
interconnected. Changes often don’t occur in the smooth, predictable
linear progressions we intuitively prefer. Instead, they often appear
chaotic or indiscernible until they go through “tipping points” that we
didn’t predict. Nothing much seems to happen, then everything does,
seemingly at once, throughout the system. Examples include:
•
The spread of infectious disease;
•
The diffusion of some new technologies;
•
Refugee flows;
12
•
Trafficking in people, guns and narcotic drugs;
•
Environmental damage.
Policy makers need to move beyond rhetoric about complexity and
interdependence and toward a real conceptual understanding about the
characteristics and implications of these phenomenal, rather than
traditional linear viewpoints that may not reflect what’s really going on.
So, that’s what we tried to provide in a chapter in our third volume
entitled “A physics of diplomacy?” containing a scientifically accurate
“101” guide for diplomats exploring what complexity is about. In plain
language, for instance, it explains the relevance of scientific concepts like
phase transitions, self-organized criticality and complexity and network
theory.10
Next, Aurélia (who is a physicist) constructed a model to use these
concepts and techniques from complexity science to examine a human
social phenomenon – that of the social interactions driving demand for
small arms at a local level. The model isn’t a predictive one (in fact, it
shows that specific predictions aren’t really possible in such a system) but
it illustrates the fundamental mechanisms driving the proliferation of
small arms throughout a population. There are some equations
underpinning this model, but don’t let them intimidate you, as chapter 8
of “Thinking Outside the Box” also contains a plain language
description.11 Let’s very briefly review the model.
↔↔↔
Curbing the spread of illicit guns is a difficult challenge in international
security. Government cooperation in this area is already underway, and
has focused on what is often described as supply-side measures. Broadly,
supply-side measures are steps to control the flows of arms into, and their
availability within, certain settings. Multilateral efforts, as shown by
13
agreements like the Vienna Firearms Protocol and the 2001 UN
Programme of Action on the illicit trade of small arms and light weapons
in all its aspects, have focused on trying, mainly through legal and
regulatory means, to stop weapons being produced, circulated and used
illicitly.
Less well understood are the factors that drive demand for small arms and
how these interact, both with each other and supply-side factors.
Developing such an understanding is important. If policymakers don’t
understand why people want to obtain and use illicit guns—and respond
accordingly—supply-side measures alone are like trying to pump the
water out of a basement without turning off the broken mains-pipe
flooding it.
While supply- and demand-side labels are convenient, they’ve led to
confusion among some multilateral practitioners because of their
association with conventional economic models. The problem is that
these models, which assume that supply- and demand-side factors interact
to achieve market equilibrium, fail to adequately describe many social
phenomena that have epidemic characteristics. This includes the spread
of small arms. In particular, orthodox economic theory assumes that
agents, regardless of how others behave, have fixed preferences and
rationally maximize their “utility”.
Yet we know this to be a poor description of the real world. In many
cases, others do affect our preferences, and this is likely to be especially
true where perceptions of security or insecurity are concerned that might
lead us to want to have a gun. Social interactions matter: our choices tend
to be affected by what those around us are doing—not least if we think
they are armed, or if their fear of those who are armed with illicit guns
influences us.
14
And, armed violence may not be rationally planned or “pre-meditated”
but can be responses to the actions of others or perceptions about other
people’s behaviour.
The model described in our third volume is adapted from work by two
British economists, Campbell and Ormerod, which analyses social
interactions in the dynamics of crime.12 What’s striking about their
analysis is its different methodological approach to understanding the
process by which crime rates increase (or decrease) across populations
over time. The approach they took is similar to that used in mathematical
biology to describe how potential epidemics are either spread or
contained in a population. Key to the model is the simulation of social
interactions, which isn’t taken into account in orthodox economic
explanations.
To see how our adapted approach works, divide a population into three
groups. The first group (called N) is made up of people who aren’t
susceptible to becoming gun owners. We can speculate about who might
be in this group—young mothers, old-age pensioners—but this isn’t the
purpose of the model whose aim is rather to illustrate the dynamics of
flow between the three populations. The second group (called “C”) is
comprised of those possessing guns. The third group (called “S”),
includes everyone who isn’t in one of the two other groups, N or C, and
consists of people susceptible to becoming gun owners. A system of nonlinear differential equations describes the flows between these groups.
Without going into the maths (which in parts are beyond me) there are
essential properties that the model had to preserve in order to be
plausible, which are discussed in Aurélia’s chapter:
•
Our intuition tells us that a higher level of insecurity, or increasing the level of socioeconomic deprivation, should lead to a greater proportion of gun owners in a
population.
15
population.
•
Allowance needs to be made for large variations across time and space of gun
ownership. We know from observing the real world that populations living in similar
contexts may sometimes present huge discrepancies in the number of people
possessing a gun.
•
The model must satisfy concerns about the range of values N, S and G can take.
None can be less than zero, for instance.
What the outcomes tell us, which we can graph, is that two different
levels of gun ownership are possible: one low (corresponding to the lower
branch) and one high (represented by the upper branch).
Let’s consider, for instance, a system situated at the extreme left of the
lower branch. This corresponds to a population living in highly secure
conditions and presenting a low number of people carrying a gun.
Starting from this point, if the level of insecurity is increased little by
little, the system moves along the lower branch and the proportion of gun
owners increases slowly in the population.
It’s interesting to note that even after a substantial worsening in security
conditions, the gun ownership level has increased but in a very moderate
way. However, it doesn’t work like that forever: when the end of the
branch is reached, the system jumps suddenly from the lower to the upper
branch. At this point, a tiny deterioration of the security level can bring
about a tremendous change in the number of gun owners in the
population.
Identically, if the system starts from the right extremity of the upper
branch, improvements in security conditions lead at first to a limited
decrease in the proportion of gun owners. It’s only when the system
reaches the downturn at the end of the upper branch that an abrupt jump
is observed. At that point, a small improvement of security conditions
makes the system switch from a society presenting a high level of gun
ownership to a society with a low number of gun owners.
16
While the core of the model is based on simple assumptions, it produces
results that are far from intuitive for the human brain, which
unconsciously tends to analyse things in a linear way. In reality, complex
social phenomena, like the proliferation of small arms and light weapons,
are all but linear: such a conclusion has important implications for gun
policy. It means, in particular, that theories assuming a direct and linear
relationship between cause and effect may not only fail to describe the
spread of small arms, but may actually be very misleading when used as a
starting assumption for the elaboration of policy prescriptions, like those
made at the multilateral level.
To sum up, rather than making predictions, the model is a striking
conceptual tool that is useful in at least three ways:
• It highlights the core factors influencing demand for small arms in
a manner taking into account the profound effect that social
interactions have on individual decision making;
• It helps to account for puzzling disparities in rates of gun
ownership between apparently similar social systems that each
display phase transition patterns—non-trivial sudden switches
between two very different levels of gun ownership; and
• It potentially offers policy makers the prospect of new policy
options to address aspects of small arms proliferation.
↔↔↔
Our model is a first step, and is an example of how disarmament
problems, and broader challenges of armed violence, can be reframed in
new ways. Key to productive reframing is the recognition that there are
connections to be made between the practice of multilateral work and
other fields including the natural and behavioural sciences.
17
This kind of approach has a couple of big implications. The first is that
the problem of small arms proliferation can be approached quite
differently if considered as a complex social phenomenon. A host of
tools already developed for other disciplines such as population biology,
economics and physics can be deployed. There is nothing new under the
sun, and scholars like Robert Axelrod and Thomas Schelling have known
this for a long time. Indeed, the WHO, for instance, has been examining
firearm violence using epidemiological tools for some years now.13 But a
willingness to make connections and de-compartmentalize our thinking
about disarmament problems has not yet penetrated the world of
multilateral diplomacy very deeply.
Following on from the type of model I’ve described, agent-based
simulations of certain social phenomena would seem a logical next step.
This is something we’ve recently received funding to begin looking at. In
the small arms context, for instance, it would help test assumptions based
on common wisdom held about the spread of small arms. Also, it could
help to test and validate gaps in data collection on gun possession at the
local level.
These kinds of model could also be applied, in my view, to looking at the
diffusion of new technologies like those in the life sciences that could
potentially be turned to hostile use. We only have to look at the nonlinear transformations wrought by the internet, or the penetration of
mobile phones in our societies to appreciate that social interactions drive
technological change and vice versa. In a world in which the life
sciences are becoming information sciences and their footprint in society
is widening, surely these approaches are worth pursuing to better
understand what is going on, and to help policy makers cope with it.
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There is also another way to apply understanding that some social
phenomena are complex in nature, one that also interests the DHA project
greatly. That is, if we care to consider multilateral negotiations
themselves as complex social systems. There is a lot that international
relations theory and the broader social sciences fail to explain
convincingly about what goes on in multilateral work. In particular,
getting beyond the level of political biography in understanding the role
and nature of informal social interactions between negotiators is a
persistent challenge.
For negotiators used to thinking about what’s going on around them –
like all human beings – in linear ways, knowing that unexpected
behaviours may emerge simply as a feature of the system may be very
helpful. It would, at the very least, make them better negotiators because
to be forewarned to be forearmed about the cognitive constraints upon
them in the face of non-linear and counter-intuitive situations. But it
could also lead to sounder recommendations for reform of institutional
structures and procedures that sometimes currently hinder productive
work – the Conference on Disarmament being a case in point. Looking at
the influence of group size, perceptions of reputation and how to promote
informal trust building between negotiators is key, and there is a lot that
new disciplines like behavioural economics can usefully tell us –
information that joins up nicely with other approaches I’ve described
today.
That brings my talk to an end. If you’ve gathered the impression that this
is just scratching the surface then you’re right. The good news is that
there’s a huge amount of information out there that could be useful in
productively reframing multilateral negotiations – not only in how we
19
understand them, but in how headway can be made in reforming them,
the theme of our volume on “Thinking Outside the Box”.
Over the next year, while it will continue its research, the DHA project
will also focus on engaging diplomats and other multilateral practitioners
in various ways, including by exposing them to the ideas I’ve talked
about today. We hope to show them that thinking outside the box doesn’t
have to be a fringe activity, and can really help them in their collective
endeavours. Failure to do so has real human costs.
1
(v.5.1.07)
Burke has also written many books, some of which accompanied his documentary television
programmes. For instance, see James Burke, Connections, London: Little Brown: 1978/1995.
2
See John Borrie, “Rethinking Multilateral Negotiations: Disarmament as Humanitarian
Action” in John Borrie & Vanessa Martin Randin (eds), Alternative Approaches in
Multilateral Decision Making, Geneva: UNIDIR: 2005.
3
For more discussion, see ibid and John Borrie, Thirty Years of the BTWC: ‘Back to the
Future’? in E. Geissler, N. Sims and J. Borrie, 30 Years of the BTWC: Looking Back, Looking
Forward, (Occasional Paper no. 2), Geneva: BioWeapons Prevention Project: 2005.
4
John Borrie & Vanessa Martin Randin (eds), Disarmament as Humanitarian Action: From
Perspective to Practice, Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.
5
See John Borrie, “What do we mean by “thinking outside the box” in multilateral
disarmament and arms control negotiations?” in John Borrie & Vanessa Martin Randin (eds),
Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations,
Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.
6
World Health Organization, 2004 World Health Report: Changing History, Geneva: 2004:
World Health Organization.
7
Human Security Centre, 2005 Human Security Report, Oxford: 2005: Oxford University
Press, p. 126. Moreover, an intriguing statistical analysis produced in 2005 by the Carnegie
Endowment argues that the poorest countries – most of whom are in Africa – lost, on average,
some 40 percent of their economic output because of their much greater involvement in wars
compared with the rest of the world in the last 25 years. See Branko Milanovic, Why Did the
Poorest Countries Fail to Catch Up? (Carnegie Papers no. 62) (Washington D.C., Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, November 2005), p. 25.
8
Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life,
(Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 246-247.
9
While these attacks are awful, psychologically they could be viewed as external and not
seriously damaging to the webs of trust that exist within these societies.
10
Aurélia Merçay & John Borrie, “A physics of diplomacy? The dynamics of complex social
phenomena and their implications for multilateral negotiations” in John Borrie & Vanessa
Martin Randin (eds), Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms
Control Negotiations, Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.
11
Aurélia Merçay, “Non-linear modelling of small arms proliferation” in John Borrie &
Vanessa Martin Randin (eds), Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and
Arms Control Negotiations, Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.
12
For a description, see Paul Ormerod, Butterfly Economics, London: Faber & Faber: 1998.
13
http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/.