Mike Bourne

Queen's University Belfast | QUB · School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy

Automated borders promise instantaneous, objective and accurate decisions that efficiently filter the growing mass of mobile people and goods into safe and dangerous categories. We critically interrogate that promise by looking closely at how UK and European border agents reconfigure automated borders through their sense-making activities and every...

Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) are the principal tools of armed violence, but the development of a global ‘regime’ has been a fragmented and fragile process that reinforces sovereignty more than it regulates violence. This article argues that rather than a settled regime, the global processes on SALW is better understood as a ‘global assemblag...

As policing and threats become increasingly transnational and plural, practices of managing risk increasingly use technologies that promise certainty. Drawing on a study of the creation of a new border detection device, and ideas from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that devices deployed as objective tools for risk assessment and managemen...

As policing and threats become increasingly transnational and plural, practices of managing risk increasingly use technologies that promise certainty. Drawing on a study of the creation of a new border detection device, and ideas from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that devices deployed as objective tools for risk assessment and managemen...

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Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) are the principal tools of armed violence, but the development of a global ‘regime’ has been a fragmented and fragile process that reinforces sovereignty more than it regulates violence. This article argues that rather than a settled regime, the global processes on SALW are better understood as a ‘global assembla...

If there is one uncontroversial point in nuclear weapons politics, it is that uninventing nuclear weapons is impossible. This article seeks to make this claim controversial by showing that it is premised on attenuated understandings of invention and the status of objects operative through familiar but problematic conceptual dualisms. The claimed im...

This article critically interrogates how borders are produced by scientists, engineers and security experts in advance of the deployment of technical devices they develop. We trace how sovereign decisions are enacted as assemblages in the antecedent register of device development through the everyday decisions of scientists and engineers in the lab...

This article seeks to provoke a deeper engagement of Critical Security Studies with security's relations to technology and weapons. It explores existing assumptions about these relations in mainstream arms control and disarmament theory, and the way such assumptions are deployed and distributed in the current settlement of arms control and disarmam...

This article argues that Critical Security Studies (CSS), exemplified by Ken Booth's Theory of World Security, has outlined an ethics of security as emancipation of the ‘human’, but also a highly problematic security of ethics. After drawing out how the ethics of CSS operates, we examine the security of this ethics by examining it against a hard ca...

Recent and emerging security policies and practices claim a mutual vulnerability that closely links human insecurity in failed states with the threat to powerful states from illicit flows. This article first examines this ‘emerging orthodoxy’ of transnational security issues that reinforces the securitisation of poverty and the poor. It then subjec...

From tackling illicit flows of small arms to combating nuclear smuggling, the shadow trade has become a central target of attempts to control the means of violence. This article argues that much of this practice and literature is framed in unhelpful terms that posit two distinct worlds, an upperworld and underworld, that separates illicit flow netw...

The current amorphous image of SALW spread implies that any conflict faction can obtain arms in almost any way it wishes, provided that it has the financial resources to pay for them. However, the framework developed and the empirical analyses in the previous chapters indicate that the construction and type of regional political economy of SALW spr...

This chapter examines the existence and construction of distinctly regional legal markets, covert aid, and black and grey markets. The processes and dynamics of each type of flow are examined, and the existence and nature of distinct regional structures of SALW spread is assessed.

This chapter examines the changing nature of extra-regional aspects of SALW flows to conflicts and discerns the structures that have evolved to shape them. Building on the findings of the previous chapter it assesses the extent to which those SALW flows to conflict actors are shaped by those global structures, or reflect distinct illicit market sys...

The aim of this book has been to contribute to better understandings of the nature of SALW spread. When viewed through a reflection on the nature of structures and dynamics of the spread of other weapons — as in Chapter 2 — current understandings of SALW spread are revealed not only as emphasising the relative breadth and complexity of SALW spread,...

The regional level plays two distinct roles within the framework being developed by this book. The first is as an intermediate level between the global level and the conflict-complex in which actors and processes at the regional level play facilitating roles — either facilitating global supplier’s transfers to conflict-complexes, largely through lo...

Understandings of SALW flows to conflict protagonists suffer from a lack of a sense of structure or dynamic. SALW are portrayed as easily available to any and all actors, nefarious or legitimate, the spread of these weapons appears particularly complex but banal, and not so much uncontrolled as uncontrollable. This chapter begins by stepping back....

This chapter analyses the construction of top-down arming patterns. Top-down arming is the acquisition of SALW, primarily from external sources, by a faction’s leadership that are then distributed through internal organisational structures. In particular this chapter examines the construction of the three patterns of top-down arming, as outlined in...

The global level structures and processes of SALW spread are dominated by the legal (authorised) trade. This trade is inadequately understood, due particularly to limited systematic data. However, a lack of research on how this global trade was constructed and has developed has contributed to a lack of a sense of structure or dynamic. Views of the...

The use and misuse of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) are estimated to result in over 500,000 deaths per year, and countless injuries.1 For example, one often cited statistic indicates that in 90 percent of conflicts since 1990, SALW have been the only weapons used in fighting, and have contributed to between 30 and 90 percent of civilian death...

No Biting the Bullet prepared a series of briefing papers on key issues for international agreement which fed into the July 2001 UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All its Aspects. At this conference, UN member states agreed a Programme of Action which is the primary global framework for tackling the proliferation...

In recent years consumers, NGOs, and governments alike have become increasingly concerned about the problem of ‘conflict’ or ‘blood’ diamonds in relation to on-going armed conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Allegations by NGOs, governments and the UN that many conflicts are fuelled by illicit exports of d...

This briefing aims to highlight and clarify the importance of the availability and misuse of small arms and light weapons (SALW), and associated armed violence, for development programming in the areas of governance, security sector reform (SSR), and safety, security and access to justice (SSAJ). By doing so the effectiveness of governance, SSR and...

This briefing aims to clarify and highlight ways in which the spread, possession and (mis)use of SALW and related armed violence issues can be relevant in conflict assessments, and how they can be integrated better within such assessments. It employs the conflict assessment framework set out in DFID’s conflict assessment guidelines, and thus aims p...

This briefing paper seeks to increase awareness of and review the linkages between disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) and small arms and light weapons (SALW) reduction in the context of post-conflict reconstruction (PCR). It is targeted at those working on poverty reduction at both the policy and programme level, particularly those...