Since the end of the Cold War several multilateral initiatives aimed at better regulating the legal trade in conventional arms trade have been agreed. Although the language and wording of specific arms transfer agreements differs, the general principle underpinning such restraints is a concern to prevent transfers that are deemed to produce excessive and destabilising accumulations of arms. This project examines the principles and practices employed by Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Switzerland in judging whether proposed arms transfers are excessive and/or destabilising; whether they have an unacceptable impact on three factors: development; actual or potential conflict in a recipient state, and regional stability. The study will then draw on this data to develop a methodology for identifying excessive and destabilising transfers based on these four states’ best practices and also test the methodology against a number of transfer decisions. The results of the study have the potential to influence current policy practice in the four case study states as well as within specific export control regimes more generally. The results of the study also have the potential to provide the basis for a second, larger study, which would include the subsequent development of an annual report that would expand the range of case study countries and regularly evaluate selected arms transfers against the model methodology.

Month: Aug   Year: 2011

The Canadian military underwent a crisis in the 1990s, now called the decade of darkness. There were three spurs to this crisis: the Somalia crisis in 1993; the disbandment of the Canadian Airborne Regiment in 1995, and; a government faced with a large budget deficit and no great commitment to military spending. This project will examine the response of the Canadian Forces (CF) and the Canadian state to the challenges posed by the 'decade of darkness' in order to understand the nature of militarism and the state in Canada. The military is one of the defining features of the modern state, and so the answer to the question of the military’s identity is also a window into the nature of the state as a whole. The project will be guided by four central questions: The first examines the 'transformation' of the CF, both its operational restructuring (particularly through the deployment to a combat mission in Afghanistan); and the restructuring of its Professional Military Education(specifically through the creation of the Canadian Defence Academy in 2002), and asks what sort of military, with what sort of leadership, is being produced through transformation? The second question seeks to tie the transformed military to the broader Canadian state and asks: what does the transformed CF and its leadership structure tell us about the nature of the state? The project will then broaden focus yet again to ask how the nature of the state and its military connects to Canadian identity more generally: how is the military understood in Canadian society, expressed through its popular culture, and how does the transformed CF fit with Canadian's self-understandings of its military and other identity? Finally, the project will bring the answers to the first three questions to examine the nature of the CF and Canada as expressed in the mission in Afghanistan.