Cluster Munitions and the Global Agenda

Having so many similarities to landmines, and with international civil society just recently successful in their efforts to ban landmines (culminating in the 1999 Ottawa Treaty,) it's no surprise that when the Cluster Munition Coalition was formed in The Hague in late 2003 that the volunteer steering committee was able to attract several big name NGOs. If the issue of cluster munitions wasn't on the global agenda at that point, the inclusion of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Human Rights Watch, and Handicap International, and a number of other NGOs related to disabilities and landmine action on the steering committee made it a very hard issue to ignore.

In the years since, the cluster munitions issue had a very successful stay on the Global Agenda, coming to a peak in 2008 with the Convention on Cluster Munitions, a treaty banning the use and stockpiling of cluster munitions.

The continuum showing how a problem moves to political change and gets picked up as part of the global agenda like this:

Social/Political Conditions > Problem Definition > Issue Definition > Issue Adoption > Advocacy/Campaign > New Global Norms > Political Change.

Arguably with the advent of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the issue should fall firmly between the New Global Norms category and the Political Change category, however, the treaty lacks some backing from key players. The United States, China, Russia, and Israel have not signed onto the text of the treaty. Russia and Israel have both used cluster munitions in recent wars, and the United States is declining to support the ban in favor of advocating for a less restrictive protocol to be added to the Convention on Certain Weapons. So where does this leave the issue? It could be the case that, similar to landmines, the US will not sign onto the treaty, but will voluntarily follow the conventions laid forth in the treaty. This would leave the issue at global norm building stage. However, if the US succeeds, since the Convention on Certain Weapons is binding to all nations it may succeed in creating yet another global norm on the issue. Since the US is such a major player, the fact that they're still at the advocacy stage affects the place of the issue on the continuum.

The cluster munitions issue has the advantage of being adopted by members of the landmine transnational advocacy network, and it shows in the cluster map. However, the map will also show us that cluster mines are a salient issue in their own right, with gatekeeper NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and nations such as Ireland and New Zealand featured as big links in their cluster map.



As we've discussed on the CIVIC blog, CIVIC still has a ways to go before reaching the same level of salience as Cluster Munitions. Creating a new global norm banning the use of cluster munitions has been the latest step in a long process of network building and advocacy. CIVIC is still attempting to enter the issue adoption phase, and may need to revisit their problem and issue definitions to successfully do so. This places them much early on continuum and shows that they still have much work to do.

Edit: Replaced the cluster map with a version that doesn't have Dr. Carpenter's e-mail address on it.