Reconceptualising Arms Control by Neil Cooper David Mutimer

Author:Neil Cooper, David Mutimer [Neil Cooper, David Mutimer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415688833
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2011-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

On the Ordinariness of the Extraordinary

Governments apply extraordinary measures to the trade in conventional defence goods, most usually in the form of a requirement to obtain a special licence for export. In the case of the leading exporters at least, such measures have now been extended to a vast range of military and dual use equipment necessitating substantial bureaucratic routinization. Indeed, as Table 1 highlights, between them officials from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom approved an average of almost 3,000 defence export licences per week in 2008. Despite their association with threat and security, most of these decisions do not attract the attentions of press, public, or even politicians other than those specifically tasked with overseeing such decisions. Even Parliamentary or Congressional committees concerned with defence exports rarely consider more than a tiny proportion of these decisions. They are, therefore, the example, par excellence of decisions taken within a narrow body of security professionals, as part of daily bureaucratic routines. For example, each export licensing officer in the US State Department approved an average of 1,312 export licences in 2008, a figure that excludes the 10,000 applications that were returned without action because the necessary forms were not properly filled in.25 At one and the same time therefore, these decisions occur thoroughly within the terrain of security, dealing as they do with weapons technologies, yet they are normalized, routinized, serial moments of exception operating as part of a day-to-day bureaucracy whose only external audience is usually the company applying for licences. This is security as (almost) an oxymoron: technologies that are not only securitized but militarized, yet dealt with in individual decisions that are, by and large, not even heavily politicized.

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