NGOs, security, and civilian protection

Norms are usually perceived as weak or non-existent in the field of ‘hard security’, where state military capacities are at stake. Whenever NGOs make inroads into that terrain, as with the banning of antipersonnel landmines or cluster munitions, these achievements are often discarded as inconsequential. They make no difference in power politics either because the major military powers, such as the US, Russia, and China, have remained outside of the treaties, or presumably because the bans are on weapons of limited military utility. From both realist and some radical critical perspectives, these initiatives are insignificant at best or pernicious at worst since they contribute to legitimising a hegemonic order of high-tech military violence.

Paradoxically, the US, the biggest military power, benefits directly from keeping its right to use weapons others renounced, and indirectly, from norms that eat away at the legitimacy of using anything but precision-guided violence.Footnote ¹ NGOs have just greased the wheels of hegemonic power by creating the perception of ‘humanised’ military conduct through banishing some means of killing civilians. However, in the process, war itself is legitimised, especially the type of war waged by the US. As pacifist and critical voices have long argued, the just war tradition and international humanitarian law (IHL) do more harm than good.Footnote ² Rather than radically transforming the state- and war-based order, NGOs keep it in place by smoothing its functioningFootnote ³ and legitimate its ‘war-making and war-preparation practices’.Footnote ⁴ Even studies that do not adopt a critical stance point in the same direction. Norms not only constitute identities and regulate behaviour. They also have ‘shadow effects’ – by singling out one particular type of weapon as controversial and carrying a particular stigma, be it nuclear weapons or landmines, the remaining weapons become normalised. The latter category is just acceptable ‘conventional’ weapons, even if they may be no less destructive than those stigmatised.Footnote ⁵ To borrow Robert Cox’s phrasing, the NGO role in security governance is ‘problem-solving’ – it leaves the ‘prevailing social and power relationships’ unquestioned and intact.Footnote ⁶

The article challenges both the realist and, what I would call, the radical and pessimist critical positions. The latter comprises various strands of critical and poststructuralist perspectives, for the most part different from Critical Theory (CT) in security studies as formulated first by Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones drawing on the Frankfurt School tradition.Footnote ⁷ First, in juxtaposition to realist arguments about banning only useless weapons, I show that rather than being an independent causal factor determining the success of weapons prohibitions, perceptions of military utility themselves are socially constructed in the process of weapon stigmatisation. What some take for granted today – that landmines and cluster munitions are obsolete weapons – is actually the result of NGO efforts to redefine political and military considerations of military necessity and usefulness. Second, despite their merits, radical critical perspectives often bracket out the ways in which the indirect legitimisation of war technologies and practices that privileges the dominant power also significantly circumscribes its freedom of action. Radical critics rightly identify the NGOs’ limitations, but do not offer an alternative road that can lead out of the vicious cycle of war legitimation. In this pessimist view, there is no way out, because any emancipatory moves are always already implicated in reproducing the old order and servicing the interests of Western states with the US foremost among them.Footnote ⁸ This position is understandable given the piecemeal nature of NGO initiatives to curb war and its violence. Yet, radical critiques postulate hegemonic legitimation, but neither define it nor show how it works in practice. The fact that an arms control regime is not ambitious enough or fails to constrain state practices is taken as a sign of silencing criticism and legitimising liberal militarism.Footnote ⁹

This argument, that new treaties only delegitimise low-tech violence and turn the spear of liberal militarism towards the South, goes against (mostly) constructivist workFootnote ¹⁰ and some optimist critical writing,Footnote ¹¹ portraying NGO roles in general, and in the field of weapons regulation specifically, as largely progressive and effective, a sign of ‘new diplomacy’Footnote ¹² and a global ‘power shift’.Footnote ¹³ The radical critique thus echoes Foucault’s insight that ‘humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination’. Yet, Foucault still offers a glimmer of hope, for ultimately, ‘the successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules … and redirect[ing] them against those who had initially imposed them’.Footnote ¹⁴

Drawing on constructivism in general and specific aspects from CT and desecuritisation from the Copenhagen School, I present a more optimistic reading of the role of NGOs in arms control through theoretical conceptualisation and empirical research on immanent critique. Indeed, I find theoretical support for such an optimist reading of the transformative potential of NGOs in some poststructuralist thinking and the work of Foucault himself. Thus the article seeks to advance a ‘reconstructive’, but also a bridge-building agenda in critical security studies.Footnote ¹⁵

Specifically, exploring the campaigns to ban antipersonnel landminesFootnote ¹⁶ and cluster munitions, I argue that NGOs appropriate the dominant IHL discourse, orient it from military necessity to civilian protection, and turn it against powerful states – a practical example of immanent, gradual, and ongoing critique that is often dismissed precisely because it is grounded in existing structures of power.Footnote ¹⁷ The hegemon loses legitimacy when it opposes new norms that the majority of states comes to accept as part of the identity of ‘civilized states’. In the process, rather than shoring up consent-based hegemony, the new norms seriously undermine it – the hegemon becomes the ‘rogue’ outside of humanity. The only way to gain its moral credentials back, is to reorient its policies in line with norm requirements. The new norms make space for critique and become pivotal points where critique could be successfully applied. Thus by pointing out inconsistencies in IHL application from within a broadly defined IHL perspective, NGOs engage in a form of immanent critique that opens up possibilities for gradual improvement of the human condition. Similarly, while high-tech violence is indirectly legitimated compared to low-tech, more indiscriminate weapons, the standards for both are elevated in the process. When the military claim to make ‘surgical’ strikes or arms manufacturers to produce ‘civilian friendly’ weapons leaving a ‘clean battlefield’,Footnote ¹⁸ but fail to meet these standards, they open themselves to criticism that can lead to further constraints on how force can be legitimately used. Finally, NGOs fundamentally desecuritise the by-definition securitised realm of national defence and use of force,Footnote ¹⁹ a role that has received scant attention in the existing (de)securitisation literature. They politicise the use of force by bringing into public debate military decisions hitherto generally shielded from public scrutiny. As a result, they shift the referent object of security from the state and its defence interests to human beings and their suffering. This represents an inchoate emancipatory potential to work with, a place where change could start through critique.Footnote ²⁰

NGOs are certainly not a counter-hegemonic movement. The major ones are part of a global governing elite and a trend towards NGO professionalisation can be seen as leading to global corporatism,Footnote ²¹ or stunting development policy in a national context.Footnote ²² Yet, NGO participation in security governance is one of the reasons why they can bring about some palpable, however piecemeal, change. As has been argued, the organisations that shape the transnational advocacy agenda and influence its chances for success are gatekeeper NGOs with resources, visibility, and central network positions.Footnote ²³

At the discursive level, NGOs have started their critique with the core IHL principle – balancing humanitarian costs and military interests that all too often privilege the military side of the equation. In the process, they have gradually tried to extricate themselves from the IHL framework, but so far have not managed to pose a radical challenge to military practices, let alone to the acceptability of war. However, in those cases where they have focused their attention, NGOs have tipped the scales towards the humanitarian side by elevating the importance of civilian protection and diminishing the military and political value of specific weapons. That does not mean that civilian suffering on the whole has lessened or that wars are less likely to occur, only that NGO campaigning has curbed particular uses of force and the suffering they inflict upon civilians. In a world of ‘moral limit and possibility’,Footnote ²⁴ this contribution should not be easily discarded.

In what follows, first I engage with the different critical views about the emancipatory potential of NGOs in security and arms control and outline the theoretical arguments about NGO use of immanent critique as a tool for norm transformation and the processes of (de)securitisation that this involves. Second, a genealogy of the emergence of the idea of weapon obsolescence is presented that traces the discursive practices through which NGOs redefined the balance between humanitarian costs and military gains in the case of cluster munitions and landmines. Then, I examine the impact of stigmatising cluster munitions on US policies and practices and argue that the US has been constrained in important ways despite its opposition to banning those weapons. The conclusion reflects on the contributions and limitations of NGOs as agents of change in security governance.

Immanent critique and NGOs as emancipatory agents: Difference and shared visions in critical approaches

According to Wyn Jones, ‘[r]ather than criticize the prevailing order in terms of some blueprint for an ideal society, critical theory criticizes it on the basis of the unfulfilled potential that already exists within it – that is, through a form of immanent critique.’Footnote ²⁵ Immanent critique implies ‘comparing the justifications of [prevailing security] regimes with actual outcomes’ with the goal of showing how ‘the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms’.Footnote ²⁶ This is possible because all rulers make some universal claims to shore up their legitimacy.Footnote ²⁷ By highlighting ‘the contradiction … between concrete social formations and their ideologies’,Footnote ²⁸ immanent critique seeks ‘to transform legitimations into emancipatory weapons … and mak[e] the ideal real’.Footnote ²⁹ This opens the door to transforming the old order in ways that free human potential and could ultimately lead to human emancipation.

The concepts of immanent critique and emancipation date back to the work of Marx,Footnote ³⁰ and especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and have undergone significant evolution in the thinking of Horkheimer himself and later scholars from the Frankfurt School. In Horkheimer’s early work, emancipation meant freeing humankind from the domination of nature by making proper use of the forces of production. Later the focus turned to emancipation from human exploitation with the proletariat postulated as the agent of such emancipatory change.Footnote ³¹ Following the Second World War, Horkheimer and Adorno came to a rather pessimist conclusion that the rise of instrumental rationality, necessary for the subjugation of nature, had also led to human oppression reaching an apogee in the Nazi concentration camps. Thus there was no longer an immanent emancipatory potential, leading Adorno to conclude that ‘nothing complicitous with this world can have any truth’.Footnote ³² Immanent critique transformed into a form of ‘unrelenting negativity’ and ‘dissent’ as any attempt to ‘suggest alternatives … would immediately be reified and form yet another layer in the already over-determined structures of domination’.Footnote ³³ The intellectuals who were supposed to be the vehicles of emancipation assumed the role of permanent critics, detached from society and as a result the link between theory and praxis and between immanent critique and emancipation was severed. Indeed, in his late work Adorno questioned the very possibility of immanent critique as no standards of critique inherent in an oppressive and totalising society could be found.Footnote ³⁴

Here one finds parallels to the poststructuralist criticism of CT for holding up emancipation as a grand ‘meta-narrative’ that is universally valid.Footnote ³⁵ From a poststructuralist perspective, any attempts towards emancipation are just a cover for domination. Instead, difference is to be celebrated. There are no grounds for immanent critique as any critique that is internal to one discourse is external to another.Footnote ³⁶ Poststructuralist approaches insist that no interpretation is better than another and casting aside one domination just leads to another.Footnote ³⁷ Still, they share common ground with CT by engaging in a form of continuous critique that adherents to both poststructuralist and CT approaches see as emancipatory.Footnote ³⁸

Wyn Jones emphasises that emancipation is not an endpoint, but a process of striving for ‘concrete, realizable utopias’, an ‘always unfinished business’ that requires constantly moving to the next stage of immanent critique.Footnote ³⁹ In Foucault’s late work, one can detect similarities with this emancipatory focus of CT. According to Foucault, ‘[c]riticism … consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits … and the point … is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing-over’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Critique ‘is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom’. Similar to CT’s emphasis on praxis and immanent potentialities for transformation, Foucault argues that critical work has to ‘put itself to the test … of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take’.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, he goes on to say that rather than ‘global or radical’ projects, he prefers ‘the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years’, citing progress in authority and gender relations.Footnote ⁴² The poststructuralist criticism of CT that by being ‘partial and local’, it just reifies structures of dominance is also on Foucault’s mind. And he answers it similarly to Wyn Jones’s take on emancipation as an ‘always unfinished business’Footnote ⁴³ – because ‘the possibility of moving beyond [our limits], is always limited and determined, … we are always in the position of beginning again’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Given Foucault’s focus on discourse as an all-encompassing system of meaning and ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’,Footnote ⁴⁵ his work, and respectively poststructuralist approaches, have been criticised for leaving little scope for agency and emancipatory change.Footnote ⁴⁶ Change in Foucault can happen above all through discourse and its strategic use. This includes ‘the shifts and reutilization of identical formulas for contrary objectives’Footnote ⁴⁷ – one can seize the rules and ‘redirect them against those who had initially imposed them’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus, ‘[d]iscourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Despite predominantly linking agency to discourse, in Foucault we can still discern a notion of intentional agency residing in each and every one working ‘upon ourselves as free beings’,Footnote ⁵⁰ and particularly, among the ‘“specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth”’,Footnote ⁵¹ with Robert Oppenheimer’s efforts to highlight the threat of nuclear weapons given as an example.Footnote ⁵²

This connection between discourse, praxis, and agency is better developed in Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ‘organic intellectuals’ who, according to Wyn Jones, can join forces with social movements working on ‘issues, pertinent to the struggle for emancipation’Footnote ⁵³ and embracing the perspective of ‘“the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” … for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In contrast to the earlier Marxist focus on class struggle and the proletariat as a driving force, Gramsci envisioned a ‘war of position’, led by intellectuals and permeating the whole of society – ‘a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counter-hegemony to take its place’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Whereas in Adorno the role of intellectuals was at best to send a ‘message in a bottle’ without a concrete addressee, Gramsci placed the emphasis on actorness.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is something Booth and Wyn Jones pick up in their writing. Critical security scholars are seen as the ‘organic intellectuals’, while ‘new social movements’ and ‘global civil society’ are envisioned as the active emancipatory forces.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, little has been said about ‘practical transformative politics’Footnote ⁵⁸ and the actual ways in which social movements and NGOs perform those functions. In this article, I seek to illustrate how NGOs can serve as emancipatory agents, including by undertaking immanent critique to undermine military arguments about appropriate use of force. I trace both the discursive practices of NGOs and their results to show, that despite realist and radical critiques, NGOs are neither irrelevant nor always contributing to the legitimation of existing power structures.

The article builds upon insights from CT and securitisation theory to analyse NGOs’ roles in security governance and demonstrate the need to make political choices even if they are never perfect nor immune from critique. It thus charts a role for NGOs in the middle ground between the realist dismissal of NGOs and their rejection by radical critics. While acknowledging the limitations of NGO contributions, the article engages in an evaluation of their contributions grounded in political realities. Radical critiques of NGOs in security share Adorno’s pessimistic outlook and detached stance avoiding any complicity with existing power. The ‘negative or deconstructive critique’Footnote ⁵⁹ has proliferated in security studies, but ‘providing a normative agenda and informing political change’ has considerably lagged behind.Footnote ⁶⁰ Critique itself is certainly political practice and overcoming oppression remains its guiding light. Yet critique alone provides little practical guidance about the way to dismantle oppressive power structures or achieve true peace. The radical critical stance is often easier to adopt than the more reformist, but actively political one envisioned by CT.Footnote ⁶¹ By trying to promote change in this world, one inevitably needs to make choices and compromises. The point is to be aware of the costs that different choices carry and assume responsibility for the choices made. This applies to both critical scholars engaged in advocacy and the NGOs themselves.Footnote ⁶² In the end, even radical critics such as David Kennedy, according to whom ‘law may do more to constitute and legitimate than restrain violence’,Footnote ⁶³ lay their hopes for humanitarianism in practical, political action and assumption of moral responsibility for decisions to ‘kill or let live’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Like purist humanitarians, radical critics use ‘the voice of principle [that] also detaches itself from responsibility’ to stage themselves ‘outside of power’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet, ‘the best international humanitarianism blends … voices, speaking to power and as power’. It is the tension between ethical commitments and ‘cost-benefit calculations, and shrewd participation in statecraft’ that ‘drives [humanitarianism] to renewal’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Critical reasoning remains important,Footnote ⁶⁷ but ultimately humanitarian actors need to accept that humanitarianism is always political, to embrace action, and shoulder responsibility for its consequences.Footnote ⁶⁸

I argue that NGOs have sought to do exactly this – to reconnect abstract IHL principles to ethical and political questions about the limits that should be imposed on violence. Aware of the all-encompassing and constraining nature of IHL, they have used its core principles of distinction and proportionality to open up spaces for change by turning IHL language against its consummate military users. While IHL legitimises certain types of warfare, it has also provided the tools to challenge military practices.

What NGOs manage to achieve will always fall short of their objectives and an ideal of radical transformation of power relations and abolishing violence in war. Yet, to the extent that progress is made and a critical attitude continues to inform NGO work, arguably emancipation is, however slowly, underway. Ultimately the question is, do NGOs ameliorate or make things worse? Is a world with bans on landmines and cluster munitions, or with an arms trade regime, with all their intended and unintended consequences, better or worse than a world without them? Apart from the direct effects on state practice and human insecurity on the ground, does piecemeal change in IHL somehow preclude or facilitate bigger strides in the long term? Or does it have no bearing either way? And then what are the alternative, truly and radically transformative pathways? I argue that modest change through immanent critique opens up new horizons and helps imagining of alternative worlds where violence is less acceptable. The article thus aims at contributing to the ‘reconstructive’ in contrast to the ‘deconstructive’ agenda in critical security studies,Footnote ⁶⁹ while at the same time bridging different strands of critical thinking – immanent critique and emancipation from CT and desecuritisation from securitisation theory.

NGOs as (de)securitising actors

Whereas Booth and Wyn Jones emphasise immanent critique as a tool and new social movements as the agents on the road to emancipatory transformation of security, Jürgen Habermas, another scholar within the Frankfurt School, on whose work critical IR scholars draw,Footnote ⁷⁰ helps to establish a link to securitisation theory. The Welsh (or Aberystwyth) School of Critical Theory stands apart from the Copenhagen School and securitisation theory. However, some of the distinctions between the two can be overdrawn. CT focuses on individual security, while securitisation theory on ‘the middle scale of limited collectivities’ between the individual and humankind.Footnote ⁷¹ Nevertheless, critical theorists have emphasised the security of ‘people (as individuals and groups)’,Footnote ⁷² ‘men and women and communities’,Footnote ⁷³ and the ‘ultimate collectivity of individuals, common humanity’,Footnote ⁷⁴ rather than atomised individuals. The second distinction, that while CT focuses on emancipation, securitisation theory makes no normative claims,Footnote ⁷⁵ on closer inspection does not fully hold up either. After all, the Copenhagen School indicates an explicit preference for desecuritisation as ‘the optimal long-range option’.Footnote ⁷⁶ And as has been noted, desecuritisation – bringing issues back into politics and open discussion – comes close to the Habermasian notion of communicative action as the road to normative agreement and democratic politics.Footnote ⁷⁷

Despite this preference for desecuritisation, the desecuritisation process has been largely underdeveloped in securitisation theory.Footnote ⁷⁸ This has changed with Lene Hansen’s comprehensive overview of the various theoretical premises and empirical applications of desecuritisation, among other works focused on desecuritisation.Footnote ⁷⁹ Hansen identified four major forms of desecuritisation: (1) ‘stabilisation’ (an issue is framed in non-security terms within an otherwise conflictual context that stabilisation placates); (3) ‘replacement’ (an issue is desecuritised, while another issue is securitised in its place); (4) ‘rearticulation’ (the dangerous situation is resolved); and (4) ‘silencing’ (desecuritisation equates depoliticisation, which might obscure existing insecurities).Footnote ⁸⁰ According to Hansen, these four ideal-types provide an exhaustive framework for analysing current instances of desecuritisation, although the lines among them may be blurred and ‘further theorization of the relationship between the three spheres of the securitised, the politicized and the non-politicised’ is needed.Footnote ⁸¹

Given that the ideal types are derived from different theoretical understandings of politics, one can detect a certain division between CT and poststructuralist approaches. CT allows for desecuritisation through stabilisation and rearticulation, while poststructuralism focuses on replacement. Both emphasise the dangers of silencing when desecuritisation has the effect of shrouding causes of insecurity from the public sight.Footnote ⁸² In the first type, desecuritisation aims at and results in stabilising conflictual relations through a slow process of transforming security dynamics. In the second ‘replacement’ type, the function of one securitisation is simply fulfilled by another securitisation. It is not clear, however, if the substituting securitisation is somehow necessitated by the first. In broad terms, all securitisations can be seen as ultimately having the same function of identity stabilisation.Footnote ⁸³ It remains unclear if one securitisation can be dispelled only if another one is proffered as a better fit with a situation or actor interests.

Despite their different theoretical underpinnings, in practice desecuritisation dynamics often blur the boundaries among the ideal-types. Whatever the intended or unintended effects of desecuritisation, on which the ideal-types rest, little is said about their dynamics. I argue that drawing on Habermas’s communicative action and CT’s immanent critique is a fruitful way to conceptualise the discursive dynamics of desecuritisation. The core of securitisation processes is the reification of the inside-outside exclusionary logic.Footnote ⁸⁴ Communicative action underlines the move of issues into the public domain and the process through which the boundaries between ‘us’ and a threatening ‘them’ are renegotiated.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet, the ways in which communicative action takes place are not well defined in securitisation theory.Footnote ⁸⁶ Immanent critique can be one such way to illustrate how actors can unravel the ‘logic of security’.Footnote ⁸⁷

I emphasise four elements in desecuritisation that hold parallels with Habermas’s communicative action before showing how immanent critique can lead to desecuritisation in practice. Although elements of desecuritisation aligning with notions of the public space are highlighted, I do not argue that desecuritisation is all about the ‘better argument’ and persuasion. Indeed, immanent critique is often employed in a strategic manner, seeking to structure the premises of the discursive contest to one’s own advantage. First, desecuritisation implies per definition a move back to the domain of normal and open politics, where debate takes place and different points of view and interests are taken into account. In this take, desecuritisation is a process of politicisation rather than silencing. Second, a larger number of actors who have a stake in an issue are involved, and thus desecuritisation entails democratisation of the political process. Third, the referent object to be protected is redefined or changed, a process that usually involves transcending narrow, exclusionary groups. From the CT perspective, the referent object would be the most insecure and vulnerable groupsFootnote ⁸⁸ or global humanity itself.Footnote ⁸⁹ Fourth, non-military measures are used while issue urgency and politicisation are high.

I start with securitisation theory’s main proposition that there are no intrinsic ‘security issues’. Instead issues are securitised through an intersubjective process that involves a speech act, through which authoritative, securitising actors portray something as an existential threat to a particular referent object, and a relevant audience accepts the legitimacy of that claim, which opens the door for ‘emergency measures … outside the bounds of political procedure’.Footnote ⁹⁰ As a result, the issue is lifted ‘above politics’ and needs to be addressed urgently. If not, survival of the referent object is under question.

The above reflects the basic constructivist idea that security issues are discursively and intersubjectively constituted and that ‘material resources only acquire meaning for human action through the structure of shared knowledge in which they are embedded’.Footnote ⁹¹ Relevant for this study, perceptions of technical features of weapons systems and their military utility are not objective facts insusceptible to interpretation.Footnote ⁹² Whereas securitisation theory focuses predominantly on authoritative state actors, such as government officials or military figures, the article examines the role of NGOs in (de)securitising processes as ‘signifying agents actively engaged in the production … [of] collective action frames’ that help render events meaningful and ‘guide action’.Footnote ⁹³

By drawing on immanent critique grounded in the IHL principles of military necessity, proportionality, and distinction, I demonstrate how NGOs reshaped perceptions of military utility from a wide acceptance of their military necessity and effectiveness to an increasingly common view that they are outdated weapons of limited military utility. In contrast to arguments that only useless weapons or weapons of the weak have ever been banned,Footnote ⁹⁴ I show that assessments of military utility are closely intertwined with and shaped by the NGO campaigns for their prohibition.

In their advocacy for the bans, NGOs undertook a number of framing processes to reorient the discourse on weapons use away from being a strictly military matter of national defence. They used humanitarian ‘frame amplification’Footnote ⁹⁵ – highlighting the humanitarian costs of the weapons and focusing on the victims and their suffering. In addition to drawing the audience’s gaze to the humanitarian side of the proportionality equation, which weighs military interests against humanitarian concerns, NGOs engaged in desecuritisation and concomitant securitisation replacement. However, in this case replacement does not involve conjuring up another security threat to the same referent object, but a replacement of the referent object and the threat. The referent object shifts from the state and its national security to the victims at the receiving end of violence. The weapons are no longer a defensive tool against enemies, but the enemy inflicting disproportionate harm on innocent people (often far away from Western states). Protecting those victims requires giving up the insidious weapons. Herein the security relation is inverted – the threat is the weapon, the threatened are vulnerable people around the world, but especially in the less developed countries ravaged by conflict. While the plight of the latter is politicised and placed centre stage, the process is also largely depoliticised as no direct responsibility for the victims’ suffering is attributed apart from the weapons themselves. The problem is the weapon rather than the ways in which it is used or those who use it.Footnote ⁹⁶ However, the issue is politicised again when those states unwilling to ban the weapons are accused of endangering innocent civilians by preventing the emergence of a global prohibition, irrespective of whether their current military practices cause civilian casualties. ‘Responsible’ use is no longer an option. Instead of some major landmine users, such as guerrilla forces, for example, the main culprit becomes the US as the superpower blocking normative progress.

Relatedly, NGO undertake issue simplification – advocating a ban as a simple and effective solution to the humanitarian problems and placing all types of landmines and cluster munitions in the same category irrespective of their design and functional differences. Thus, on the one hand, highlighting the severity and urgency of the humanitarian problems elevated the salience of the threat the weapons posed. On the other, offering an effective solution to it aimed at generating prompt action. Both processes fell within the logic of securitisation.

Finally, in an attempt to address military concerns and show that they are groundless, NGOs employ what can be called ‘counterframe deflation’ – countering and downplaying the opponents’ arguments or their ‘counterframe’. To the extent that the attack on the counterframe is undertaken based on the opponents’ own ‘interpretive framework’,Footnote ⁹⁷ the process approximates immanent critique. In this case, the counterframe to the humanitarian frame focused on the necessity and utility of landmines and cluster munitions. Deflating it included a double move – questioning the credibility of the military regarding the evidential substantiation of their claims about the weapons’ military effectiveness and at the same time enhancing the NGOs’ credibility by drawing support from high-rank military figures. The latter tactic aimed to increase the social capital of NGOs vis-à-vis the military audienceFootnote ⁹⁸ and was employed in countries where the military strongly opposed the bans, while government officials considered supporting them.

These processes demonstrate the NGOs’ roles as (de)securitising actors and their gaining an influential voice on military matters – something usually overlooked in securitisation theory due to its focus on traditional decision-makers in positions of power.Footnote ⁹⁹ NGOs desecuritise national defence practices by pulling decisions about weapons use out of the domain of national security and military discretion into the open for public discussion of their humanitarian costs and impact on human beings. Thus they politicise the issue and move it into the realm of normal politics.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At the same time, NGOs use the ‘grammar of security’ invoking ‘existential threats’ and need for urgent action.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But they do so to portray weapons as a threat to human lives and development – the opposite of the conventional ‘grammar of security’ in which ‘our’ weapons are part and parcel of state defence and community protection.Footnote ¹⁰² Finally, the measures NGOs advocate are an immediate and comprehensive ban on a category of weapons rather than context-specific rules to manage their use or slowly evolving regulations. It is a prioritisation move calling for resources to solve a humanitarian problem, but without the vestiges of militarisation often inherent in securitisation. Thus, the NGOs simultaneously securitise weapons as threats, secure vulnerable human beings, desecuritise military practices, and reframe as threatening those actors that boycott the bans. The latter reframing focuses in particular on the US, which from a global guarantor of security becomes represented by NGOs as a threat to international norms and innocent victims of landmines and cluster munitions.

In addition to the discursive frames, a few factors facilitate the emergence of NGOs as authoritative speakers on a redefined security issue. As in securitisation theory, these are largely related to the actors’ social capital, although for NGOs it is based on different sources compared to traditional security actors. In the examined cases, they include the NGOs’ legal expertise,Footnote ¹⁰³ humanitarian work on the ground and moral credentials, credibility and expertise as former military soldiers who have dedicated themselves to clearing the remnants of war, and importantly, their close collaboration with diplomats in shaping the international agenda on humanitarian issues and hammering out their solutions. In a cyclical, co-constitutive process, by assuming some of the responsibility for resolving humanitarian problems, such as landmines early on,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ NGOs become authoritative players and gain a say in defining what future human security issues may be. Next, I trace the discursive processes that have been key in elevating NGOs as (de)securitising actors.

A genealogy of weapon obsolescence

A cluster munition (CM) designates a ground-launched or airdropped rocket/dispenser that ‘scatter[s] widely smaller submunitions, which usually number in the dozens or hundreds’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ CMs are area weapons designed to strike anything that comes within their footprint and are used against a large set of targets – troops, soft-skinned vehicles and heavy armour, anti-aircraft missile sites, enemy artillery, or airfields. Two main problems with CMs have been identified. First, they pose immediate dangers to civilians during attacks due to their inaccuracy, large numbers, and wide dispersal patterns. Second, a significant percentage of cluster submunitions fail to detonate upon impact and leave numerous unexploded duds, which when disturbed kill unsuspecting victims years after their use.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Stigmatising weapons and ban opponents: Implications for US practices and legitimacyFootnote ²⁰¹

The US was the first state to acknowledge the CM problem in the wake of NGO criticisms during the NATO Kosovo intervention. However, until mid-2007 it resisted efforts for an international instrument regulating these weapons. Then, it decided to support negotiations on CMs within the consensus-based CCW and started pushing the issue forward. NGO members attributed this U-turn to the Oslo Process that was gathering speed without US participation.Footnote ²⁰² It was also likely motivated by the need to defend the US humanitarian credentials as the policy change came amid statements highlighting the generous US contributions to demining and clearance of explosive remnants of war.Footnote ²⁰³ As The Economist put it, ‘Given the general mood of competition to be virtuous, America had little choice, perhaps, but to signal its own willingness to co-operate in limiting the humanitarian effects of mini-explosives.’Footnote ²⁰⁴ At the CCW, the US kept emphasising its lead in funding cleanup operations and announced the establishment of a quick reaction force to ‘respond globally to short notice and emergent humanitarian operations that require the removal or mitigation of explosive hazards to protect civilian populations’.Footnote ²⁰⁵

Throughout, the US continued to assert the military utility of the weapons and their contribution to saving the lives of American soldiers. Yet, after the Oslo Process adopted the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) in May 2008, the Pentagon issued a new policy, which recognised ‘the need to minimize the unintended harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure associated with unexploded ordnance of cluster munitions’. It instituted that all CMs used by the US after the end of 2018 should result in ‘no more than 1% unexploded ordnance (UXO)’, whereas with immediate effect, it directed that use of CMs exceeding the 1 per cent UXO rate had to be approved by the combatant commander.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Although NGOs characterised the policy as ‘too little, too late’,Footnote ²⁰⁷ it required a high reliability rate under all types of combat conditions.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Because of the difficulty to meet this criterion, since 2005 the US has not produced any new CMs apart from sensor-fuzed weapons.Footnote ²⁰⁹ In addition, according to the policy, by 2019 the vast majority of US CMs (95 per cent) would be scrapped – the same deadline for CM stockpile destruction the CCM sets. The policy remained silent on limiting the area effects of CMs, but it was a step towards addressing the reliability problem and by vesting use authority high in the command chain acknowledged that those were weapons of special concern and should be used with restraint.

However, at the end of 2017, not having managed to develop munitions with less than 1 per cent UXO, the DoD suspended the 2008 policy to end the of use of submunitions that did not meet that criterion in 2019. While it reaffirmed the policy regarding new munition procurement,Footnote ²¹⁰ the new directive is a step back, sharply criticised by NGOs.Footnote ²¹¹ Still, it remains to be seen if it will mark a change in US practice. If the landmine case is any guidance, it will probably not. Despite sliding back from the aspirational goal of developing landmine alternatives and joining the MBT under President Bush in 2004, the US has refrained from using landmines since 1991 (apart from a single mine in 2002), and President Obama ultimately strengthened the US commitment to a ban.Footnote ²¹²

Nevertheless, compared with anti-personnel landmines, the US has been far less willing to consider banning CMs. Although it has repeatedly stated that it is ‘deeply concerned about the humanitarian impact’ of CMs,Footnote ²¹³ after the adoption of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, it declared, ‘we do not support a sweeping ban on cluster munitions. Nor do we view the text negotiated in Dublin as establishing a new, general legal norm concerning the use of cluster munitions; they remain, in our view, a legitimate weapon when used appropriately.’Footnote ²¹⁴

Indeed, future ‘appropriate’ use of CMs by the US in ways that do not cause humanitarian problems could pose a challenge to their stigmatisation. So far this hasn’t happened despite an alleged US use of CMs in December 2009 in a strike against an al-Qaeda camp in Yemen. Amnesty International brought attention to it in June 2010 – the first and only reported US use of CMs since 2003. Despite Amnesty’s report and a call from the CMC that the US confirm or deny the cluster use,Footnote ²¹⁵ no official response has ever been issued. This silence constitutes less than a frontal assault on the new norm. Moreover, the fact that in that strike, reportedly 41 civilians were killed and later four more died and thirteen were wounded by unexploded submunitions,Footnote ²¹⁶ shows again that it is difficult to use CMs ‘appropriately’. Rather than undermining the new norm, this use could be seen as an aberrant case of a controversial practice – one of the first signs that a norm starts exerting influence is that the breaching behaviour is concealed or denied,Footnote ²¹⁷ while those still engaging in it are portrayed as ‘outcasts’.

Furthermore, the US has made some concrete steps that contribute to affirming a norm against CM use. Between 2013 and 2017, the US voted in favour of annual resolutions by the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council condemning the use of CMs by the Syrian government, in 2014 it supported a UN Security Council resolution expressing concern over CM use in South Sudan, and several times voiced concern about CM use in Ukraine.Footnote ²¹⁸

Domestic pressure for US compliance with the new norm has been coming from the US Senate, where senators, including the erstwhile advocate of a landmine ban, Patrick Leahy, have been active on the issue. In December 2008, Senators Feinstein and Leahy introduced a resolution calling on the US to sign the CCM and in 2013 sent a letter to President Obama urging for ratification. Earlier in 2007, they managed to pass with the 2008 Foreign Appropriations Bill a provision banning the sale and transfer of CMs with a tested failure rate of one or more percent and mandating that any country importing US CMs only use them against clearly defined military targets where no civilians are present. In March 2009, the US CM export ban was made permanent and in December, the Consolidated Appropriations Act 2010 was signed into law prohibiting the provision of military assistance for CMs and the sale or transfer of CM technology with the stronger provision that their dud rate should be less than 1 per cent ‘across the range of intended operational environments’.Footnote ²¹⁹ In practice, these Congressional initiatives have halted any US exports of CMs apart from sensor-fuzed weapons that on paper met the reliability standard. Yet, following outcry against Saudi Arabia’s use of American sensor-fuzed weapons in Yemen, President Obama halted their exports in mid-2016,Footnote ²²⁰ and with the growing stigma attached to CMs, the only manufacturer of sensor-fuzed weapons stopped producing them in August 2016, effectively ending all US production of CMs.Footnote ²²¹ Thus, the sensor-fuzed weapon – a high-tech and high-priced munition,Footnote ²²² used for the first time in 2003 was banned by the treaty in 2008 and went out of production in 2016 due to ‘reduced orders, a volatile political environment, and international weapons treaties that negatively affect the “ownability” of its shares’.Footnote ²²³

Apart from being constrained in its practices, the US has also suffered legitimacy deficit because of its active or more tacit resistance to the landmine and CM processes, respectively. In the landmine case, US opposition to the ban treaty process, its demands for exceptions in the treaty to accommodate US interests, and pressure on other states to support its positions turned the US into a target of NGO criticism.Footnote ²²⁴ In the words of the ICBL coordinator Jody Williams, ‘when its arm-twisting failed’, the US ‘decided to stand outside the tide of history’.Footnote ²²⁵ To regain its humanitarian standing, the US then increased its demining funding and ever since has emphasized that it is the ‘world leader in humanitarian mine action’.Footnote ²²⁶ Yet, US opposition to the Mine Ban Treaty (MBT) undermined its diplomatic leverage in the later negotiations of the International Criminal Court, where it was seen as an ‘outcast’ and ‘a deadbeat’.Footnote ²²⁷ The media portrayed it as ‘siding with rogue states’ and ‘developing a worrisome habit of getting on the wrong side of history’.Footnote ²²⁸ The US found itself again isolated and bearing the brunt of criticism for not supporting a strong and independent court,Footnote ²²⁹ clearly losing credibility and legitimacy as an international leader.

The US did not participate in the CCM negotiations. However, given that predominantly American (and British) use of CMs in Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001–03 brought the issue to the fore (before Israeli CM use in 2006 gave momentum to the Oslo Process), the NGO campaign was very much centered around delegitimating American military practices. The US also became the focus of criticism, when during the final negotiation conference, the State Department held a briefing on CM policy. While it emphasised that the US was ‘deeply concerned about the humanitarian impact’ of CMs and highlighted the American lead in battlefield cleaning, it also asserted that if no changes in the convention were made, the US would be unable to participate in peacekeeping or disaster relief operations.Footnote ²³⁰ This stance led to accusations that the US was ‘cynically’ trying to ‘intimidate the countries that are negotiating in good faith’.Footnote ²³¹ The CM ban became one more treaty in a string of examples of US obstructionism to international norms and law that both showed the lack of US legitimacy and further deprived it of such. From a benevolent power with special responsibilities for ensuring international peace and security, the US emerged as a retrograde force and a threat to international norms.

Thus, US policies and practices on CMs show that it has felt the stigma of CMs and taken steps to address their humanitarian effects. Although the US still insists on the legality of CMs, the evolution in its positions has contributed to reinforcing the norm that weapons should be used in a way that does not cause excessive civilian harm. Reinforcing these general IHL principles and applying them conscientiously to the use of CMs in turn makes such use highly improbable and indirectly strengthens the case for a ban.

Conclusion: Transforming war and law from within

According to a prominent critic of IHL, the dominance of its principles of military necessity and proportionality between military and humanitarian costs makes it ‘difficult to image how else one would talk about the use of force’.Footnote ²³² This is a valid critique of the hegemonic legal discourse that has become part and parcel of warfare,Footnote ²³³ and NGO campaigners face a constant choice between buying into the cost-benefit analysis of military and legal thinking and defending civilian immunity without exceptions. However, it does not have to be an either or choice. The landmine and CM cases offer an example of resolving this tension by reshaping understandings of what is at stake in the balancing act. NGOs did so by tilting the scales towards humanitarian considerations, using the legal principles and the military’s own arguments to critique actual military practices, and finally prioritising civilian protection – an ideal only immanent in IHL. Law can thus first inform and then make room for further humanitarian considerations – an example of immanent critique practiced by NGOs in the landmine and CM cases.

The MBT and CCM strengthen the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks and the CCM includes guidelines to ‘avoid indiscriminate area effects and the risks posed by unexploded submunitions’ that could be extended to other practices severely affecting civilians.Footnote ²³⁴ Building upon the two treaties and the IHL principles they embody will not lead to swift or radical changes in state practice. Still, it can serve as a first step on the way to stigmatising methods and means of warfare that cause heavy civilian suffering.

But couldn’t NGOs be more imaginative and effective in transforming arms control and disarmament practices? It is true that ultimately their success depended on depoliticising the issues and distancing themselves from radical movements such as those animated by pacifism and a desire for total disarmament.Footnote ²³⁵ This is a distinction that NGOs involved in banning CMs and landmines often invoke. It is also true that NGOs had to make compromises and calibrate their demands in order to secure state agreement to the treaties and thereby establish the weapon stigmas.Footnote ²³⁶ A comparison of the two campaigns also shows that over time NGOs have become more professionalised, and one might say, tamed. Although the landmine campaign was never a huge grassroots movement, it still used more public advocacy and confrontational politics compared to the CM campaign. NGO members argue that this is natural as gaining access to decision-making for the most part obviates the need for outsider tactics of influence.Footnote ²³⁷ As has been pointed out, the close relationship between leading governments and NGOs does not necessarily mean the cooptation of the latter.Footnote ²³⁸ Instead, it has been key in moving the NGO agenda forward.Footnote ²³⁹ It does mean that some compromises need to be made and that change would sometimes be late to come, would come in fits and starts, and will not lead to an overhaul of the system. In practice, the success of the landmine and CM campaigns rested on not questioning the legitimacy of the use of force in general. But paradoxically, the inherent limitations of professionalised NGOs also give them a chance to make a difference in desecuritising military practices and securing vulnerable human beings.Footnote ²⁴⁰

The landmine and CM campaigns have also been criticised for stigmatising the weapons themselves as the agents causing suffering rather than directing their critiques at the real users and the militarised world order, thus indirectly legitimising high-tech military violence and ‘fix[ing] quite restrictive limits on the range of weapons that might be singled out for prohibition’,Footnote ²⁴¹ namely, a few ‘pariah weapons’.Footnote ²⁴² A look at a current campaign against lethal autonomous weapons, however, reveals other ways in which the previous campaigns are much more directly implicated without necessarily legitimising high-tech weaponry. NGOs made CMs and landmines the ultimate evildoers, but an underlying argument was that they were killing on their own even decades after soldiers used them. There was no human control over the ways in which landmines killed unsuspecting civilians. These were the mines banned by the MBT. Mines used in control mode with human decisions about exploding them remained legal. The same argument about the need for human control over the destructive power of weapons and ultimately human responsibility for life and death decisions animates a campaign against autonomous killing weapons led by many of the same NGOs working on landmines and CMs.Footnote ²⁴³ Although an attempt to fuse agency with the weapons is present in the campaign name, ‘Campaign to Stop Killer Robots’, this is exactly the point – weapons killing on their own should not be allowed. Rather than low-tech weapons, the campaign targets some of the most advanced systems under development in the richest military powers. It is also preventive in character rather than reactive as the landmine, and to a large extent, the CM campaigns were. Although the killer robot campaign leaves the IHL framework unquestioned, arguably it does not legitimise high-tech killing. It remains to be seen how much this campaign would achieve, but so far it has gained some traction despite its much more limited support among NGOs compared to the above cases.Footnote ²⁴⁴ A year after its creation in 2012, the NGO campaign managed to insert the issue in the CCW agenda where informal talks on fully autonomous weapons started in 2014. In December 2016, a formal Group of Governmental Experts was established to discuss the issue in 2017 – a step that has previously led to CCW negotiation mandates on landmines and CMs, although no progress in this direction has so far been made regarding autonomous killing weapons.Footnote ²⁴⁵ By the end of 2017, 22 states had signalled support for a banFootnote ²⁴⁶ and activists have been optimistic that a treaty would be concluded, though it is unclear when or what it would cover.Footnote ²⁴⁷ It is clear, however, that without the path blazed by the previous ban treaties and without the experience campaigners had gained in humanitarian arms control negotiations and the networks they had established, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots would not have been able to make the headway that it has.Footnote ²⁴⁸

Finally, using the precedent of banning landmines and CMs, NGOs ultimately turned their sights towards a total ban on nuclear weapons. In an example of ongoing immanent critique, NGOs have come full circle. At its start, the ICBL distanced itself from a full disarmament agenda and indeed argued that landmines were the real ‘weapons of mass destruction in slow motion’. Twenty years later, the question became, how is it possible that landmines and CMs are banned, but not the most indiscriminate weapons?Footnote ²⁴⁹ Rather than legitimating the weapons of great powers (such as advanced autonomous systems and nuclear weapons), the prior landmine and CM bans have created the conditions for challenging them. A group of NGOs energised by the example of the MBT and CCM and some of the same individuals and organisations involved in the respective campaigns have finally brought about a change in nuclear disarmament by reframing the issue around the severe humanitarian effects of any incidental or intentional explosion of nuclear weapons.Footnote ²⁵⁰ After a UN First Committee resolution to launch negotiations for a ban on nuclear weapons, in July 2017 a treaty banning the production, stockpiling, transfer, and use of nuclear weapons (including the threat of use) was adopted with 122 votes in favor and against the wishes of the nuclear powers and all NATO members.Footnote ²⁵¹ There are considerable doubts and uncertainty about the new treaty’s ethical implications and effects on the nuclear powers,Footnote ²⁵² on the nonproliferation regime,Footnote ²⁵³ and nuclear politics and existing power structures.Footnote ²⁵⁴ However, it is already an achievement in itself that the majority of states committed to negotiating such a treaty in the hopes that it would disrupt the nuclear status quo and add a legal dimension to the normative stigma against the use of nuclear weapons. And in symbolic recognition of the importance of this achievement, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.Footnote ²⁵⁵

Relying entirely on IHL (re)interpretations to move issues forward is not ideal and can become a hindrance at a certain point. Both NGO members and scholars have recognised that fact.Footnote ²⁵⁶ Yet, using the dominant legal frame for humanitarian objectives and ultimately turning it upon dominant powers, has also empowered NGOs and the people facing the threats of armed conflict and dire postconflict situations. As argued, the use of IHL as a departure point for critiques of CMs and landmines has been a form of immanent critique. By critiquing the dominant legal and military order using its own fundamental principles and showing how military practice fails to observe them, NGOs pry open niches for transformation. Such transformations may be modest and leave the core structure intact. Still, they limit the practices and legitimacy of dominant US power and over time cumulate towards a reconsideration not only of the legitimate means, but also of the legitimate use of force.

Exploring the ways in which NGO actors engage in transformative politics grounded in political realities, thus has both theoretical purchase and real life relevance. While it is important to acknowledge and critique the compromises and silences accompanying such attempts at transformation of the ‘prevailing security regimes’,Footnote ²⁵⁷ they cannot be rejected out of hand as either legitimising or strengthening a militarised hegemonic order. By paying close attention to both the discursive processes of banning weapons and their actual effects on the major military power, the article shows that immanent critique can still be a vehicle for freeing vulnerable people from some of the most incapacitating threats in their lives and gradually limiting the violence of war.