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date: 08 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter evaluates the achievements and limitations of the United Nations (including the Conference on Disarmament) in the field of disarmament, emphasizing the UN’s role as part of broader efforts to control arms as a means to achieve international peace and security. It presents an overview of UN disarmament efforts and discusses specific cases where progress was achieved, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the Arms Trade Treaty, and efforts to tackle the problems of anti-personnel land mines and small arms and light weapons. Finally, it draws out the implications for international relations of the UN experience with formal multilateral arms control, disarmament and security-building processes by evaluating its role as a negotiating forum, a norm setter, an implementing agency, or an instrument of great power security governance.

Keywords: disarmament, multilateralism, arms control, security-building, NPT, CWC, Conference on Disarmament, WMD

Keith Krause

Keith Krause is Professor of International Relations at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and Director of its Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding. Until 2016, he was Programme Director of the Small Arms Survey. He obtained his D.Phil in International Relations from Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His research concentrates on international security, arms control, post-conflict peacebuilding, and security governance. He has published Arms and the State (1992), edited or co-edited Critical Security Studies (1997), Culture and Security (1999), and Armed Groups and Contemporary Conflicts (2009), as well as having authored numerous articles and book chapters.

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