Leashing the Dogs of War: Arms Control from Sovereignty to Governmentality*

Abstract

The progressive development of measures to control weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s and 1990s moved arms control beyond a sovereign conception, towards a larger logic of governmentality that reaches deep into the domestic affairs of states and involved forms of regulation and control that went far beyond inter-state agreements to regulate their military competition. The article first focuses on the larger historical process of controlling arms, understood as a technology of social and political control designed to manage and channel the use of violence both within and between states. In this sense, the Cold War arms control paradigm represented both a shift in, and continuity with, historical arms control experiences. But by representing itself as a set of instrumentally-rational techniques for managing conflict, arms control throughout the Cold War normalized a particular set of practices as the only proper way of dealing with a subset of the larger issue of how to ‘control and regulate the possession and use of the means of violence’. Many contemporary security-building practices that are not thought of as arms control share its same logic, but move towards a more governmental mode of exercising the control in arms control, focusing as much on institutions and individual wielders of violence as on the instruments of violence themselves.