| Summary/Abstract |
This paper contributes to the literature on norms, arms regulation, humanitarian arms control, and arms control as governmentality by examining the different “Matryoshka dolls” of arms trade governance as they operated in the late nineteenth century. I suggest that analysis of practices in this era has relevance for debates about contemporary arms governance. The innermost doll is represented by a specific regulatory initiative, in this case, the 1890 Brussels Act, which represented an attempt to graft a regulatory arms trade norm onto an established and constitutive anti-slavery norm. The Act was also located within the second matryoshka doll, the broader approach to arms trade prohibition adopted in an era. Despite representations of the period as one of free trade in arms, I highlight extensive efforts to restrict the transfer of firearms to colonial subjects. Finally, I examine the third matryoshka doll, the way in which mechanisms of prohibition and permission constitute the practices of arms control as governmentality—the effort to define and manage which gradations of people can legitimately own, trade, and use which gradations of weapons in what contexts. Overall, the paper challenges the optimistic literature regarding humanitarian arms control and arms trade norms with three concluding implications: the merging of humanitarianism and arms control can reflect both good and bad norms; such a confluence is not necessarily incompatible with colonialism, racism, or imperial violence; and, such a merger is consonant with the maintenance of liberal militarism.
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