Stigma: The Political Costs of Using Cluster Munitions

Authors

ICBL-CMC, International Campaign to Ban Landmines-Cluster Munition Coalition

Document Type

Other

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Publication Date

2014

Keywords

Advocacy and International Law, Centers and Organizations, ICBL, CMC, Cluster Munitions

Abstract

The movement to end the suffering caused by cluster munitions succeeded not only in establishing a legal ban in the form of the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), but also in decisively reshaping the global perception of these weapons. Over the past decade, the awareness-raising and political mobilization surrounding cluster munitions have led to an understanding among states that any use would be associated with unnecessary human suffering and would most certainly provoke considerable international criticism. In other words, the political movement and legal ban have created a powerful stigma associated with the use of cluster munitions, a stigma that is now strong enough to dissuade most stockpilers from using or transferring the weapon, even those that are not part of the Convention.

This paper lays out the reactions, both by the international community and the user itself, to the relatively few incidents of known or suspected use in the past several years.