Humanitarian disarmament initiatives made significant progress in the post-Cold War era but until now their linkage to disability rights has been weak. Sean Howard and Tammy Bernasky report on a new Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative that demands full and effective participation of people with disabilities at the United Nations and beyond.
Over the last three decades humanitarian disarmament has emerged as a powerful new challenge to militarized status quo theories and practices of international relations. Both seeking and constituting a ‘discursive shift’ from state-centric to human security – flipping the stale script of ‘peace through strength’ – this renovation (if not yet revolution) in diplomatic affairs has some impressive achievements to its credit, notably three prohibition treaties banning particularly inhumane and indiscriminate categories of weapon: anti-personnel landmines, in the 1999 Mine Ban Treaty (MBT); cluster bombs, in the 2010 Cluster Munitions Convention (CMC); and nuclear weapons, in the 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
Each of these treaties are humanitarian in a triple sense: in the prohibitions they codify, and the stigmas, norms and taboos they seek to create and enforce; in the ‘positive obligations’ they contain on victim assistance, environmental remediation, and international cooperation; and in their linkage of assistance to agency, the commitment to empowerment and inclusivity of communities affected by these terrible ravages of war and militarism.
In addition, humanitarian disarmament has generated the 2022 Political Declaration on Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas (EWIPA), currently signed by 86 states, which seeks to drastically reduce the humanitarian costs and consequences of atrociously indiscriminate modern urban warfare. Such a declaration, of course, would not be needed had humanitarian disarmament succeeded in shifting the security paradigm, moving the needle decisively in the direction of the UN Charter’s north star of General and Complete Disarmament (GCD), the creation of a comprehensively post-war world.
Particularly in the context of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s criminally-conducted war in Gaza – and in an age of killer drone-swarms, autonomous weapons, and, coming soon, AI-robots – not only does such a world now seem unimaginable to many, but there is increasingly open talk that, as then UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace prophesied in February 2023, “war is coming” to Europe and perhaps the globe on a scale not seen since 1945.
As frenzied preparations for this calamity kick into high gear – a rampant rearmament funded partly by deep cuts to welfare and international assistance – the humanitarian disarmament regime is in crisis, with Poland and the Baltic states withdrawing from the MBT (and Finland set to follow suit), Lithuania abandoning the CMC, swathes of Ukraine saturated with (Ukrainian and Russian) cluster bombs and landmines, and a queue forming of states eyeing their own and/or other powers’ nuclear weapons.
Disability rights and disarmament
In these desperate times, however, a new effort is underway designed not only to consolidate the hard-won gains of the last 30 years but to introduce a powerful new set of perspectives, voices, and lived experiences – those of persons with disabilities – into the humanitarian disarmament community.
In October 2023, we launched a Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative, based at Cape Breton University in Canada. This initiative is designed to raise the profile of disability issues in multiple venues and processes, with a special focus on the work of the UN First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, the body which adopts and forwards dozens of resolutions to the General Assembly – some mandating negotiations on new treaties – on matters ranging from handguns to H-bombs.
In October 2024 our young coalition organized an historic joint civil society statement to the First Committee, written by a team of scholar-advocates and delivered by Janet E. Lord of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability on behalf of 31 endorsing organizations and individuals. Entitled ‘A Missing Dimension in the Work of the First Committee’, the statement demanded action “to ensure the full and effective participation of persons with disabilities – over one-eighth of the human family – in the Committee’s deliberations”.
Such participation, our group argued, should not only involve references to disability rights in numerous existing resolutions but generate a new resolution dedicated to the topic. And we were keen to stress that while such moves would logically complement references and resolutions related to the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agendas, they would do so not simply as “a logical next step, but one that is long overdue.” Overdue, in fact, since at least 2008, when the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) – now ratified by 191 states – enshrined into international law the insistence that, as our statement noted, “persons with disabilities should be viewed primarily not as victims or patients but rather as critical enablers of change, leaders on the path to a more livable world.” “In the context of international security,” we added, “persons with disabilities are among those groups most disproportionately affected by armed conflict and deserve a much greater say in how systems and machines of violence can be dismantled, disarmed, and replaced.”
The statement was followed by another first, a side event hosted by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a crucial leader in (and coordinator of) the humanitarian disarmament movement. We did not succeed in our bid to inspire a new resolution, or to amend existing resolutions; indeed, only two of the Committee’s 77 resolutions and decisions – on the CMC, and on Women, Disarmament, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control – mentioned disability, whereas we counted 26 texts where references to disability rights could and should have featured. (For a detailed analysis, please see our account in the First Committee Monitor published by the Reaching Critical Will programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.)
We were, though, warmly welcomed into the vibrant and diverse community of civil society organizations working to advance the humanitarian disarmament agenda at the UN and beyond; our coalition continues to grow; and we are confident that disability rights will rise in prominence in future First Committee sessions.
And not just there, but in as many humanitarian disarmament spaces as possible. In early March, we contributed a working paper to the Third Meeting of States Parties (3MSP) to the TPNW in New York on Alignment and Alliance: Disability Rights in the Implementation and Review of the TPNW, arguing that the treaty “was made possible in significant part by the tireless witness of survivors of nuclear violence, many of them survivors with disabilities, and it is imperative that the treaty’s implementation and review be as disability-responsive and disability-inclusive as possible, based on the disability rights movement’s sacrosanct principle, ‘nothing about us, without us.’”
The paper’s title refers to the coalition-building potential of aligning language in the treaty’s declarations and documents with both the CRPD and disability-related language adopted (with increasing frequency and nuance) in meetings of the MBT and CMC. In standing in what we call “substantive solidarity” with persons with disabilities, we argue that the already diverse TPNW community “will be further enriched…and global consciousness of nuclear legacies, realities, and dangers may be raised in ways rendering the case for abolition more compelling.” “Paying due attention to disability,” however, “is not a question of strategy but respecting human rights enshrined in international law.”
In Britain, the United States, and so many other places today, disability rights are under all-out attack, not least in order to divert funds to military spending, and prejudice and stigma seem sharply on the rise (from already high levels). If the paradigm shifts represented by both the CRPD and humanitarian disarmament can be effectively aligned, this frightening and repulsive trend can be better resisted and reversed, to the benefit and well being of our societies and communities as a whole. We ask the Rethinking Security community in the UK to lend its support to our coalition as we work to strengthen these vital, enabling linkages.
Dr Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University, Campaign Coordinator of Peace Quest Cape Breton, and a member of the Canadian Pugwash Group.
Dr Tammy Bernasky is assistant professor of political science at Cape Breton University, and author of Working to End Gender-Based Violence in the Disability Community: International Perspectives (Practical Action Publishing, UK, 2022).
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Tommy Trenchard for NPR. A mine clearance supervisor takes a break near a sign that marks the location of a newly discovered anti-personnel mine in Angola, 2022, twenty years after the end of the country’s civil war. At least 88,000 people in Angola live with injuries caused by mines and other explosive remnants of war.
