Light Weapons And Intrastate Conflict

It has become very commonplace to note the shift from interstate to intra-state conflict in the world-civil and ethnic wars whose resolution seems to resist the best efforts of the international community. It is understandable that this international community continues to search for tools that could be used to prevent such conflicts. This search has produced a wide array of methods that focus on both the root causes of conflict - poverty, inequities, ethnic rivalries - and on finding the more short-term steps that will put an immediate stop to the outbreak and acceleration of armed conflict. This report breaks new ground in calling for a renewed focus on the actual tools of violence - small arms and light weapons - that are the means by which hundreds of thousands of people, mostly innocent civilians, are killed and wounded each year. Preventing conflict by focusing on the tools of violence presents some obstacles for an international community still dominated by the ways of thinking about conflict prevention and practices that prevailed during the Cold War. In the face of a fairly intractable ideological rivalry between the two blocs, a focus on the tools of violence proved disappointing in most cases. This is especially true for arms control measures involving major conventional weapons such as tanks, aircraft, and missiles. Currently, most conflicts do not involve this class of weapon. Instead, today's combatants employ light weapons such as automatic rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, and small mortars, all of which are portable, cost less, and are in such abundance that even the seldom successful methods of the Cold War are not applicable.