History of Global Arms Transfer, 4 (2017), pp. 3-15

Small Arms as a Global Public Policy
Challenge:
A View from a Participant-Observer
By KEITH KRAUSE1
This article draws upon more than 15 years of ‘participant-observation’ with international efforts to regulate the global trade in small arms and light weapons to
examine: the overall trajectory, major successes, and shortcomings of international efforts to deal with the negative consequences of the proliferation and misuseof small arms and light weapons; and the role, scope, and impact of expert knowledge and policy-relevant research in shaping ‘global public policy’. By focusing
on the specific role and experience of the Small Arms Survey project, a research-based NGO that played a high-profile role in these efforts, it outlines thegeneral conditions that shape the prospects for academic research and analysis toinfluence global public policy both through agenda setting and framing, andthrough highlighting policy solutions. It also underscores the constraints upon the
uptake of policy-relevant research, including epistemic uncertainty and governmental receptiveness. It concludes with some observations on the overall role ofexpert knowledge in the shaping of global public policy, and on the trajectory ofinternational efforts to tackle small arms proliferation and misuse.
This article draws upon more than 15 years of direct and personal engagement as a‘participant-observer’ with international efforts to regulate the global trade in small arms
and light weapons. From 1997 and the earliest phases of preparation for the 2001 United
Nations conference to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms andLight Weapons in All Its Aspects, up until today, the diplomatic and political machinery of
the United Nations, like-minded states and civil-society coalitions, have concentrated on
developing and deploying policy initiatives and programmes to mitigate the harmful effectsof the proliferation and misuse of small arms and light weapons. Throughout this process I
was not just a passive spectator (as is usually understood by scholarly ‘participantobservation’) but an active participant who, together with a team of researchers, attempted
to shape the agenda of small arms and light weapons. Such an active orientation is rare forscholars or professors (and viewed suspiciously by many), but it did provide important
insights into how multilateral processes of negotiation and implementation work, beyond
the issue of small arms and light weapons themselves.
So in this brief article I want to examine two things:•• the overall trajectory and major successes and shortcomings of international efforts todeal with the negative consequences of the proliferation and misuse of small arms andlight weapons; and•• the specific role, scope, and impact of expert knowledge and policy-relevant research
1 Author affiliation: Keith Krause, Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development
Studies, Geneva, and Director of its Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding.

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KEITH KRAUSEin shaping ‘global public policy’, and in particular the role of the Small Arms Survey,
a research-based non-governmental organization (NGO) that I founded and directeduntil January 2016.
I will weave these two points together in a narrative that addresses both the evolution of
the issue of small arms on the international agenda, and the specific role of the Small Arms
Survey. I should note, however, that it does not make sense to look at the origins, work androle of the Small Arms Survey in isolation, since its particular significance only makes
sense once we understand the political and diplomatic ecosystem in which the issue ofsmall arms and light weapons regulation was situated. In the conclusion I will draw out
some of the broader lessons concerning the role of academic and policy-relevant research,and how the two may fit together.

I
In the mid-1990s, and somewhat before the successful campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines that culminated in the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, a handful of scholars, activists andofficials in a few governments, started to look at the issue of small arms and light weapons
proliferation. Their perspective was mainly that of the arms control and disarmament
community, and they regarded the issue as the last frontier of arms control, after weaponsof mass destruction and major conventional weapons had been dealt with in a series oftreaties that culminated in the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Conventional Forcesin Europe (CFE) treaty at the end of the Cold War.2 Of course, there was nothing new about
the proliferation and misuse of small arms and light weapons, which have been around fora few centuries and responsible for most of the deaths in contemporary warfare. But theend of the Cold War was perceived to have released a flood of surplus weapons onto theinternational market that fuelled and exacerbated regional conflicts, conflicts in which
civilians had increasingly become the major victims.
The most concrete result was that in July 2001 the United Nations convened aninternational conference on ‘The Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All its
Aspects’ – one of those major conferences like the Rio conference on the environment,
Cairo conference on population, or the Beijing conference on women. This conference was
the fruit of more than five years of efforts from within the United Nations, and by a loose
coalition of states and non-governmental actors, and it resulted in a Programme of Action
to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All
Its Aspects.3 Already controversy loomed in the title, with the phrase ‘in all its aspects’representing a victory for those who wanted to examine the problem beyond a strict ‘arms
control’ focus on combatting the illicit trade between states, to include such issues as thediversion of arms from domestic sources, their misuse within states, and the legal tradeitself.
As a footnote, Japan played a particular and interesting role in this process, mainly via theperson of Ambassador Mitsuro Donowaki, who was a major figure in promoting the issue
within the UN, and chaired the first panel of Governmental Experts.4 This was interesting,since Japan is not directly affected by the issue of small arms and light weapons – levels of
2 See Boutwell et al., Lethal commerce, and Singh, ed., Light weapons.
3 For the Programme of Action, see: https://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/salw/programme-of-action/(Last accessed on 30 April 2017) For a discussion of the Programme of Action see Small Arms Survey, ‘Reachingconsensus’.
4 UN General Assembly ‘Report of the panel of governmental experts’.

－4－Small Arms as a Global Public Policy Challenge: A View from a Participant-Observer
firearms violence in Japan are extremely low, gun ownership is rare, Japan does not export
small arms and light weapons, and Japan’s exposure to the negative consequences of arms
proliferation and use in conflict or post-conflict zones is very limited. But Japan’s interest
was consistent with its broader support of United Nations arms control and disarmament
initiatives.
Since then, countless national, regional and international initiatives have been launchedand hundreds of millions dollars have been spent on dealing with an issue that in the early
1990s was considered as a ‘given’ – as something that just ‘was’ and about which nothingpractical could be done. So the first puzzle is: ‘how and why did this agenda-setting
exercise succeed?’ To begin, it did not come about as a result of a dramatic change inmaterial circumstances in the world: small arms and light weapons had already accounted
for the overwhelming majority of conflict deaths since 1945 yet remained off theinternational security agenda until the 1990s. There was also no solid and systematic
evidence on which to base policy prescriptions concerning the nature and scope of the
problem: in the mid-1990s, analysts simply did not know whether the magnitude of the
problem (however defined) had increased, and whether any of the alleged consequences ofsmall arms and light weapons proliferation were real. Most of the assumptions that
informed policy (such as the increase in illicit weapons trafficking from the former Eastern
bloc, or the rising percentage of civilian victims of conflict) where not in fact backed up by
any evidence, and were actually misleading. In addition, no major powers – certainly not
the US, Russia, China, India or other regional powers – were advocates of action on theissue of small arms and light weapons proliferation.

II
What then, catalysed the agenda-setting process? Two factors seem to have been important.
First, it was in part the result of the explicit invocation of the issue by UN SecretaryGeneral Boutros Boutros-Ghali in his 1995 Supplement to the Agenda for Peace. In its
section on arms control, he encouraged the international community: to concentrate on
what might be called ‘micro-disarmament’ ... practical disarmament in the context of theconflicts the United Nations is actually dealing with and of the weapons, most of them light
weapons, that are actually killing people in the hundreds of thousands. The contemporary
significance of micro-disarmament is demonstrated by the enormous proliferation of
automatic assault weapons, anti-personnel mines and the like. 5 Within a year of theSecretary-General’s statement, the first UN panel of governmental experts had been
convened, and one of its recommendations was that the UN should consider aninternational conference on the ‘illicit arms trade in all its aspects’. A second panel wasconvened in 1997 and reported in 1999, and the conference itself was set for July 2001.
This constituted a significant ‘agenda-setting act’ by a multilateral institution, and it
somewhat confounds those accounts that see institutions such as the UN as mere
instruments of great powers that do not have any independent scope of action to shape themultilateral agenda. Parenthetically, the impetus within the United Nations came in partfrom an increase in the scope and scale of UN peacekeeping and ‘blue helmet’ operations,which exposed the UN system to greater risks (and awareness) of the widespread
5 UN General Assembly Security Council, ‘Supplement to an agenda for peace’, para 60. This was followed by
the convening of a seminar by the UN Center for Disarmament Affairs (CDA) on ‘Micro disarmament: A New
Agenda for Disarmament and Arms Control’ in New York in November 1995.

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KEITH KRAUSE
proliferation of small arms and light weapons in conflict zones.6
A second key catalyst of the policy process was the role of a small number of key
individuals working in partnership with diplomats from a handful of governments,
including Japan, Norway, Colombia, South Africa, Finland, and Canada.7 The compositionof the two expert groups also included individuals from these states (among others) who
continued throughout the following decade to play a key role in the development of policy
initiatives and processes, often by chairing the United Nations (or regional) conferences.
These non-governmental policy/political entrepreneurs seized an opportunity to advance anissue that had not yet taken hold at any national or regional level, and they bridged the gap
between expert community analyses and formal diplomatic policy initiatives. Related tothis was the desire among some states, notably Canada, Switzerland, and Norway, tocapitalize on the success of the campaign to ban anti-personnel land mines that had resulted
in the Ottawa Treaty – and to tackle the next big issue that had a serious negative impact onhuman security worldwide.8

III
Once the international process had been catalysed, and the UN Programme of Action
negotiated and approved at the 2001 conference, the question of ‘what is to be done’
loomed large. The Programme of Action itself promoted a large array of national, regional,
and global measures, touching all aspects of small arms and light weapons proliferation,
stockpiles, transfers, and use, including:•• enhancing national legislation and regulation on production and transfer of small arms
and light weapons;•• ensuring that manufacturers mark all weapons (and keep appropriate records) to allow
identification and tracing of seized weapons;•• promoting increased transparency in small arms production and trade;•• improving the system of end-user certificates to reduce diversion and illicit
trafficking;•• encouraging the destruction of weapons seized in criminal investigations, collected in
post-conflict disarmament programmes, or deemed surplus to national requirements;
and•• increasing the physical security of stockpiles to prevent leakage from national
holdings.
Some important issues were excluded in the negotiating process, in particular references
to the regulation of civilian possession of weapons (a National Rifle Association (NRA)
red-line), a prohibition on arms transfers to non-state actors, and a mandate to negotiate an
instrument to constrain the activities of arms brokers.
6 Two other smaller catalysts included the efforts of Mali, spearheaded by then-President Alpha Oumar Konaré,at post-conflict weapons collection in 1994, and Colombian sponsorship of a series of resolutions designed totarget the illicit trafficking of weapons in the early 1990s.
7 Key individuals included Edward Laurence, a former official in the US Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency and professor at the Monterey Institute, Herbert Wulf, director of the Bonn International Center for
Conversion, Virginia Gamba (then at UNIDIR), Swadesh Rana (UN Department of Disarmament Affairs) andothers such as Michael Klare, Lora Lumpe (FAS), Owen Greene (Saferworld) and Brian Wood (Amnesty
International). They acted as formal or informal advisors to some of the governments noted above.
8 For example, Ed Laurence was the consultant to the first UN panel of governmental experts and drafted thereport; he also advised the Canadian government on the issue in 1998-99. Virginia Gamba and the Institute for
Security Studies in South Africa spearheaded the development of a common African position on small arms at an
OAU conference in Bamako in 2000.

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Small Arms as a Global Public Policy Challenge: A View from a Participant-ObserverMore importantly, however, the Programme of Action did not identify precise points forpolicy development or set any particular priorities. It also did not rest upon a strong base ofevidence or information and analysis about the scope and scale of the problem that was its
focus. At this moment major opportunities for policy-relevant research and knowledge
creation appeared, and institutions such as the Small Arms Survey (alongside other nongovernmental organizations such as Saferworld, the Bonn International Center for
Conversion, the Institute for Security Studies, Viva Rio, and others), found their role andniche, and were able to have a direct impact on policy development. Before I explain what
specific role the Small Arms Survey played, let me explore the conditions that shape thecircumstances under which academic research can have an impact on policy processes, asubject that has been explored in great detail by other authors.9

IV
If one looks at the state of knowledge about small arms and light weapons proliferation andmisuse in the late 1990s, it is rapidly evident that scholars and analyst knew next to nothing
about the phenomenon. Although there existed a small body of ‘expert knowledge’(academic and NGO) on small arms, mainly sponsored by major national and internationalNGOs such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British-American Security
Information Council (BASIC), Human Rights Watch, Pugwash, and the UN Institute for
Disarmament Research, most of its works were devoted to documenting the negative
consequences of the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in conflict zones such as
Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, Somalia, Colombia, Rwanda, or Southern Africa. Thereexisted no general or widely accepted knowledge that could serve as a foundation forbroader policy-making, and analysts and policy makers did not have clear knowledge of:•• the global distribution of small arms and light weapons: how many weapons were in
circulation, in whose hands, in which countries and regions;•• the annual volume of the legal trade: who were the major producers, exporters, andimporters, and the scope and nature of global small arms production;•• the particular pathways of illicit trafficking, including major main sources of supply,
common trafficking routes, and destinations; and•• how weapons were used and misused – which guns in whose hands in which places
were the most destructive, and what the direct and indirect human, social andeconomic costs of armed violence were.
Beyond this, there existed no analysis of the relevant causal linkages: if one imagined a‘chain of proliferation’ stretching from initial production of small arms and light weapons
to distribution through exports and transfers to final user (and retransfers or diversion):what points in this chain posed the biggest challenges, or represented the most promising
points for intervention to stem the illicit trafficking and use of small arms?10
In light of this, it is more interesting that the issue of small arms and light weapons
became subject to policy analysis at all, except as the result of a widespread and general
sense that there was something ‘bad’ going on, in particular that a perceived flood of
weapons from the states of East-Central Europe to the global South, and to non-state armed
groups, was exacerbating conflicts. Initial attention also focused, in a headline-grabbing
9 See, for example, Stone, ‘Non-governmental policy transfer’, and Stone, Knowledge actors.
10 On the importance of diversion from legal to illegal circuits, see Small Arms Survey, Deadly deception, andVranckx, Containing diversion.

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KEITH KRAUSE
way, on the negative role of arms brokers, operating at the margins of the law in multiple
jurisdictions.11 But this lack of reliable knowledge and evidence on which to base policy
actually provided an opening for expertise, and for a relatively large role for the nascentepistemic community around small arms and light weapons.12
It was in this context that the Small Arms Survey project was born. The first step in its
founding was triggered by the Foreign Minister of Switzerland, who pushed his officials tofind a way for Switzerland to play a significant role in the emerging small arms process at
the UN, especially after Switzerland successful cooperation with Canada, Norway, Austria,
and others on the Ottawa Treaty process to ban anti-personnel land mines. This took placein 1998. Several months later, at an off-the-record two-day workshop with government
officials from about ten countries, and civil society representatives from roughly a dozenorganizations, the idea to fill the ‘knowledge gap’ on small arms proliferation and misuse
was born.13 This was in 1999. Funding was quickly committed by Switzerland, the Small
Arms Survey was established as a research centre in Geneva at the Graduate Institute ofInternational and Development Studies – where I am a Professor – and the plans for the
first few research studies and reports were laid. This was in 2000. In the summer of 2001,
the first edition of the Small Arms Survey Yearbook was launched at the UN conference
that developed the Programme of Action on Small Arms.14
The Small Arms Survey began relatively small – with a core staff of about six persons,and ambitions to publish an annual yearbook and a few research reports. But demand for its
work – and available funding from a wide range of governments – meant that it expanded
rapidly, both in terms of staff and the scope of its work. Schematically, one could
summarize the evolution of its work in three phases: first, gathering and analysing existing
information and data on small arms and light weapons; second, generating new data
through in-depth research at the country level (often involving household surveys,
extensive key informant interviews, triangulation studies, and focus groups); third,developing the evidence base for specific policies and programmes, sometimes at therequest of implementing agencies. Specific long-term projects were ‘spun-off’ from thecore work on small arms proliferation, including the Geneva Declaration on Armed
Violence and Development, and the Human Security Baseline Assessment (HSBA) for
Sudan and South Sudan, both of which ran for many years with multiple outputs.15
By 2016, the Small Arms Survey had conducted field research in more than 50 countries
around the world, and the outputs from this research included book-length yearbooks,
edited volumes and reports, smaller research studies and working papers, briefing notes,
handbooks, and multimedia podcasts. More than 150 such publications have beenreleased.16 More importantly, the Survey actively undertook to make sure that the policy
11 See Peleman and Wood, The arms fixers, and Lumpe, Running guns. The 2005 Hollywood film Lord of War
also captured this sentiment.
12 On epistemic communities and the conditions that allow them to exercise policy influence, see Haas,
Epistemic communities.
13 The policy opening was made clear in a small meeting with the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs, Flavio
Cotti, and a group of non-governmental experts, including the author, as well as David Atwood of the Quaker
United Nations Office in Geneva. The workshop was subsequently organized by the Quaker UN Office in
Geneva. The initial proposals for a feasibility study and start-up funding were drafted by the author.
14 Small Arms Survey, Profiling the problem.
15 The Geneva Declaration process was launched by Switzerland and UNDP in 2006; research on ‘measuringand monitoring armed violence’ resulted in the publication of three editions of the Global burden of armed
violence (Geneva Secretariat, Global burden, Geneva Secretariat, Lethal encounters, and Geneva Secretariat,
Every body counts), the latter two published by Cambridge University Press and accessible at http://www.
genevadeclaration.org/ (Last accessed on 30 April 2017)16 All of the publications are available on the Small Arms Survey website at: www.smallarmssurvey.org (Last－8－

Small Arms as a Global Public Policy Challenge: A View from a Participant-Observer
relevant information in these studies was available for policy makers around the world –translating publications into local languages, holding events around the world, providing
off-the-record briefings, and in general engaging in active outreach. All of this depended onlarge-scale support from governments, UN and multilateral organizations, and occasionallyother sources such as foundations.17 And of course, a team of about 20 full- and part-time
staff in Geneva and around the world.
What were the underlying conditions and circumstances that made the Small Arms Survey
project so relatively successful in such a short time period? At least two conditions seem
important, one external and one internal. Externally, the state of knowledge in the late
1990s regarding the challenges of the proliferation of small arms and light weapons thatwas described above created a situation in which knowledge brokers could play a crucialrole. A knowledge broker ‘sits in between knowledge producers, [such as] scientists … andthose who use knowledge, such as policymakers, the general public, or people working in
the health domain. Knowledge brokers try to bridge the gap that can exist between those
two worlds and build connections’.18 Knowledge brokers also serve to provide a ‘frame’ or
set an agenda for a specific policy domain by providing evidence to support policy, and inproviding answers to some of the questions sketched above, and in drawing out thepractical and policy implications of these findings. The Small Arms Survey emerged
exactly in this context, and its work gathered support – financial and political – from a
range of governments that recognized the ‘knowledge gap’ that existing in the policy areaof small arms and light weapons.
The second condition, internal to the Small Arms Survey project, was its positioning as an
objective, neutral, and non-partisan source of information that was publicly available for all
stakeholders, including governments, International Organizations, and civil society actors.
Its formal mandate was not as an advocacy organization, and thus it was not a member in
the international NGO activist coalition (International Action Network on Small Arms IANSA). More importantly, as a research programme of the Graduate Institute, the Small
Arms Survey project possessed the authority of an academic institution – and theaccompanying responsibility to conduct research to high scientific standards. In this regard
it occupied a niche similar to that of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), theStockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) or the Bonn International Centre
for Conversion (BICC), all of which have close links with the academic and scholarly
world. This can be contrasted with more activist-type organizations such as Saferworld orInternational Alert, both of which perform valuable and solid analysis, but seldom originalor basic research.
An ancillary element of this claim to expertise was directed towards civil society and theresearch community, and it involved the development and dissemination of toolkits andcapacity building initiatives to promote best practices in research to ensure high standards
and scientific reliability.19 This was especially important since most civil society actors
relied on anecdotal or partial evidence and did not have adequate training in such things ashousehold survey techniques, statistical analysis, or even how to properly conduct key
informant interviews and field research in conflict zones.
accessed on 30 April 2017)17 Core support – approximately half of the budget – was provided by Switzerland. Other contributing
governments (for various times) included: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the European Union, Finland,
France, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
18 Meyer, M., quoted in Holgate, ‘Emerging professions’, para 2.
19 A list of toolkits, handbooks and training tools can be found at: http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/tools.html(Last accessed on 30 April 2017)－9－KEITH KRAUSE
Research by itself does not automatically guide or shape policy or programming. The
Small Arms Survey (and other similar organizations working on the issue) thus adopted aconscious strategy to ‘embed’ its work – and occasionally its researchers – directly in thepolicy process, in order to influence how policy-makers responded to the small arms issue
and how particular states carved out distinctive niches for their own activities. This took
several forms, the most prominent of which was the provision of an expert staff member asa consultant to assist the Chair of every UN conference after 2001, as part of the Chair’s
diplomatic drafting and negotiating team.20 This also applied to other processes such as thedevelopment of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)
Handbook on best practices (in which the Small Arms Survey drafted one contribution on
behalf of a participating state), the work on the UN International Small Arms Control
Standards (ISACS), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s(OECD) report on armed violence prevention and reduction, and as expert members ofnational delegations at UN conferences.21 Several former Small Arms Survey staff members
have also served on UN special panels investigating arms embargoes and arms flows toconflict zones.
For those governments that contributed to and made use of Small Arms Survey research,
the partnership between government and NGO was regarded as a ‘force multiplier’, able togenerate expertise beyond that within their foreign ministries (which were often quite
small). More broadly, however, their political culture and system needed to be one in which
civil society organizations were not universally regarded as antagonistic to government
policies or suspicious of politics (although some elements of civil society could be). This
sort of openness was the hallmark of more ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (including Scandinavian)political systems, and certainly was not universal. The result was that the Small Arms
Survey became a sort of ‘hybrid’ organization, in two ways. First, there was no separation
between basic and applied research: the generation of research knowledge went hand inhand with attempts to shape the development of policy, in the sense that there was no‘independent’ process where basic science was performed outside of or prior to the policy
process. The generation of knowledge was explicitly commissioned by major stakeholders,
who had a direct interest in using the results to shape their policies and programmes.
Second, the Small Arms Survey was intellectually and scientifically independent – no one
has ever attempted to determine in advance what the findings of any given research project
should be – but at the same time, dependent for funding support on governments who haveparticular interests and policy focuses. This required at times a delicate balancing act, inwhich researchers needed to be conscious of the limitations of their own work, and inparticular of the areas in which independent research could not be conducted.

V
I can offer two (from many) clear illustrations of how this processes unfolded in order toshow how research could shape the debate and the policy responses to the problem of smallarms and light weapons proliferation and misuse. First, in terms of weapons flows to
20 The consultant’s role was to ensure that the documents adopted were consistent with – or stronger than –previously agreed commitments, and coherent with other multilateral agreements.
21 Individual staff members at different times served as members of the Australian, Swiss and Germandelegations. Other countries such as Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom also had NGO experts on
their delegations at various times. For the OECD and OSCE reports see, for example: OECD, Armed violence
reduction, and OSCE, Handbook of best practices.

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Small Arms as a Global Public Policy Challenge: A View from a Participant-Observer
conflict zones, the belief in the late 1990s was that weapons were flooding from the Northto the South, or more correctly from post-Cold War Eastern Europe to parts of Asia andAfrica, and that the primary ‘choke points’ for stemming this flow would be found in suchpolicy initiatives as regulating international arms brokers or improving internationalsanctions mechanisms.22 As more and more field research was conducted in conflict andpost-conflict zones such as Sierra Leone, Burundi, Northern Uganda, South Africa, Papua
New Guinea, Brazil, and elsewhere, it became increasingly clear, however, that theweapons used by non-state armed groups and large-scale criminal syndicates were mostly
being sourced locally. The arms were stolen, bought, and smuggled from local owners or
local sources, and only rarely acquired through large-scale international trafficking network(there were exceptions of course, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
People’s Army (FARC) or the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola(UNITA)). Of course, ultimately the weapons came from major producers, but they mostoften had been legally sold to legitimate users (usually governments or state organs) many
years prior to their diversion into illegal circuits.
The differing policy implications of this were clear: if the challenge is weapons beingtransferred directly from major arms producers, then a policy focus on the illicit trade isimportant – and the North is ‘responsible’ and the South is the victim – broadly defined.
But if the problem is more local, then the issue is more focused on the diversion of
weapons from legal to illegal circuits. The solutions to the problem of diversion involve a
focus on such things as physical stockpile security, marking and tracing of weapons,
destruction of surplus stocks, and broader issues of security sector governance.23 This lattermessage presented an entirely different policy agenda, one that represented a much greater‘intervention’ into the internal affairs of affected states. This knowledge was thus notneutral, but it required a fairly deliberate strategy (‘where are the guns coming from’) inorder to generate an evidence base that could shape an emerging policy debate, and it wascertainly not led by a preconceived set of interests that dictated which knowledge would be
useful and to whom.
A second illustration concerns the role of ammunition. Until systematic research was
conducted on the small arms and light weapons market, it was not clear that at least half ofthe volume (by dollar value) of the annual global market in small arms and light weapons,parts and components, and ammunition was accounted for by ammunition: approximately
4.26 billion United States dollars (USD) of an annual transfer total of 8.5 billion USD. 24
More importantly, although intuitively obvious, it was not clear whether or not ammunition
supplies represented a ‘choke point’ for the market that had policy implications. Yet
research showed that in some cases the value and price of weapons in the black market
depended on availability of ammunition, not the intrinsic value of the weapon itself, andthat in some cases availability of ammunition (or its absence) could shape the tactics of
non-state armed groups, making them less likely to ‘waste’ ammunition and in particular to
attack civilians indiscriminately. 25 This obviously has direct policy implications forregulation of ammunition, and one result of the creation of new knowledge was thecatalysing of a policy process (spearheaded by the German government) to address theissue of ammunition controls multilaterally. More broadly, a specialized research group(Conflict Armament Research - CAR) was spun off from the Small Arms Survey, and
22 See Peleman and Wood, The arms fixers, and Lumpe, Running guns.
23 See Bevan, ‘Arsenals adrift’, and Small Arms Survey, ‘Diversion of arms’.
24 Small Arms Survey, ‘Piece by piece’.
25 Florquin, ‘Price watch’.

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KEITH KRAUSE
focuses almost exclusively on tracking and tracing weapons and ammunition flows within
conflict zones.26
There are many other examples that could be offered of how research not only responded
to specific policy concerns, but also served an agenda-setting role in identifying new orunder examined areas for policy development. These cases demonstrate that public policy
research does not always follow a ‘standard model’, in which a set of specific questions isframed and formulated by policy-makers, and the role of public policy research is todetermine instrumentally the best (usually measured in efficiency terms) possible choice toachieve pre-ordained goals. In some cases, identification of the goal itself is part of theresearch process. More importantly, the ‘knowledge brokers’ – including those who worked
with the Small Arms Survey and similar organizations – were well aware of the structuraland political constraints they faced, had limited and realistic expectations or ambitions forthe influence they could exercise, and strove to ‘push the envelope’ with policy-relevant
research. In other words, they saw themselves both as knowledge generators and as policy
entrepreneurs, occupying dual and not separate roles. Their authority and legitimacy,
however, depended on a specific claim to expert knowledge and analysis, much like climate
scientists or environmental researchers bring research findings to bear on policy issues
such as global warming, protection of fish stocks or endangered species, and so forth.27

VI
Over the past fifteen years, the research and policy focus of the Small Arms Survey, andthe small arms policy community as a whole, has evolved in several ways. To begin, theinitial narrow focus on the ‘arms control and disarmament’ dimensions of small arms – theproduction, trade and stockpiling of small arms – was broadened to include three specificaxes of research:•• the negative consequences and impact of the proliferation and misuse of small arms,
including in particular the relationship between violence and insecurity and arms
availability, and the relationship between violence and development;•• the specific role of ‘armed actors’ – in particular non-state armed groups as weapons
carriers, and as vectors for the proliferation and misuse of small arms; and•• the evaluation of the effectiveness and ‘success’ of particular programmes that dealt
with small arms and light weapons, including post-conflict disarmament,
demobilization, and reintegration; marking, tracing, and record-keeping, securestorage of national and individual weapons, and different types of civilian regulationof arms ownership.
All of these issues have been tackled in different ways by the Small Arms Survey (andmany other researchers), with the specific goal of going beyond a narrow focus on weaponsand embedding the issue of the proliferation and misuse of small arms in a larger social,economic, and political context.
But this expansion of the research agenda has not always been followed by an increasing
interest on the part of policy-makers. Like any other issue area, small arms had its momentin the limelight, when it was an attractive issue for policy makers to pursue as‘entrepreneurs’ and its ‘normalization’ when it became a regular part of the multilateral
agenda, through bi-annual conferences and five-year Review Conferences. The small arms
26 See Conflict Armament Research at http://www.conflictarm.com/ (Last accessed on 30 April 2017)27 See, for example, Streck, ‘Global public policy networks’.

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Small Arms as a Global Public Policy Challenge: A View from a Participant-Observerissue has no doubt slipped down the policy agenda, although the problems that it tackles
are still widespread. This has had negative consequences in at least two areas. The first was
the diminished presence of large-scale activist NGO mobilization at the international level,with the shrinking of funding for the International Action Network on Small Arms
(IANSA).28 The second, parallel, development was the general reduction of financing for
research and knowledge creation, and the narrowing of its focus to specific programmaticand policy areas. In short: funding is less easily available and less flexible for researchers,
and the opening for research to contribute to framing and setting the agenda for policy andprogramming has been reduced.

VII
Beyond the case of small arms and light weapons, what broader conclusions can be drawn
about how research can inform policy and ‘make change’? What role does information andanalysis play in the process of shaping global public policy, and programming, and what
have we learned from the experience of the 15 years of practical work on the proliferationand misuse of small arms and light weapons? These are large questions, and despite having
worked in this issue area for more than a decade I still have only tentative answers to them.
To begin, I can say what does not make change. Academic researchers often have the ideathat the books and articles that they publish and disseminate through the usual scholarly
journals or outlets are somehow going to trickle down or be diffused into the policy world.
This is not true, for at least two reasons. First, policy-makers, NGO activists, and civilsociety at large, do not read academic journals. And academic articles are not intended tobe read by policy makers, since they are almost always written in an obscure style, or do
not present timely findings. Second, and more importantly, most scholars do not make adeliberate attempt to translate their findings into what policy-makers and NGOs call‘actionable’ knowledge by engaging directly with the messy and complex world of public
policy.
What then, are the prospects and potential for research and analysis to influence public
policy? The case of international action to deal with different dimensions of theproliferation and misuse of small arms and light weapons may not be representative of allinternational peace and security issues, but neither is it unique. It represents a ‘global
public policy’ issue, and in this sense it is like a wide variety of other contemporaryinternational security issues, ranging from efforts to stem transnational criminal activity
and financial crime, to the fight against terrorism, to attempts to restrict the transfer ofdual-use goods, to post-conflict peace-building initiatives and security sector reforms. So
let me conclude with four observations. First, the spread of the idea of ‘evidence-based
policy-making’ from the public health and medical field sciences to other areas of public
policy has created a greater demand for high quality research and analysis to inform
decision making.29 This has been an important development of the past two decades thathas created a situation where academic research in the social sciences can potentially have
28 IANSA remains active, however, but mostly at the national level and with limited global organization oroutreach. See IANSA at http://www.iansa.org/home (Last accessed on 30 April 2017). For an overview of how
NGOS helped shape the development of norms regarding small arms and light weapons proliferation and misuse
see Garcia, Small arms and security. For an analysis of the role played by pro-gun NGOs (mainly spearheaded by
the National Rifle Association), see chapter five of Bob, The global right wing.
29 For an overview see Sanderson, ‘Evaluation, policy learning’. For examples from international development,
see Banerjee and Duflo, Poor economics.

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KEITH KRAUSE
greater impact. Second, most multilateral policy issue clusters are not just about regulatingstate interactions, but are all about internal or domestic politics, and they reach deeply into
the internal governance arrangements of states, often attempting to reshape the security
relationship between states and their citizens. The goal, in short is to shape national policies– what governments do – through the diffusion and transmission of best practices andinstitutional arrangements from different contexts. In the case of small arms proliferationand misuse, most of the concrete initiatives – to constrain civilian possession of weapons,
to reduce their availability for non-state actors, to improve the security of national
stockpiles of weapons, or restrict exports to states with a good record on conflict andhuman rights issues – go well beyond a narrow arms control agenda, and are deeplyinterventionist. In such a situation, researchers and analysts have to be extremely carefulthat their findings are robust and reliable, applicable to specific and very different contexts,
and do not cause harm through their unanticipated consequences.30
Third, policy impact from research is most likely in a situation of uncertainty, when there
is no clear understanding of the nature of the problem to be solved, the causal processes
that are involved, or of the solutions that will work. Finally, and perhaps more
pessimistically, if the world is in fact moving towards an era of ‘post-truth politics’ inwhich policy decisions are shaped by emotional appeals and sometimes outrightdemagoguery, rather than facts and analysis, then the role of knowledge, science, research,and evidence is going to be in jeopardy, and the trend towards evidence-based policy
making will be reversed. At this moment in history, as scholars and researchers, I think
therefore that we have a responsibility to engage with the important policy issues of ourtime, regardless of our discipline, and regardless of how difficult this may be, in order toensure that the voice of reason and knowledge is heard above the din.
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