The content below comes from pages 8 to 12 of the pdf of this issue.
SIPRI YEAR BOOK 2018: A REVIEW BY HELEN GAVAGHAN
Armaments, Disarmament and International Security.
ISBN: 978-0-19-882155-7.
Published by Oxford University Press.
Price £100.00.
Print: 565 pages including index and three annexes.
Annex A. Arms control and disarmament agreements: universal, regional and bilateral.
Annex B. International security bodies.
Annex C. Chronology 2017.
A short list of acronyms.
The book is available online also.
In the hardback copy there is a short errata section making a few small corrections to dates.
Though the year book is predominantly about events in 2017, its content spills over into early 2018.
www.sipriyearbook.org
Internal evidence suggests this book was published in early 2018, however the publishers (Oxford University Press -O.U.P.) have not responded to the reviewer's request for clarification of the exact date of the book's first publication.
Central and South America:
Cartels, Homicide and Narcotics in 2017.
... in several countries in Central and South America the
levels of political and criminal violence were high enough to place them on a
par with 'traditional' armed conflicts, even though they could not necessarily
be defined as such.
P34 (56 of 592 in the reviewer's PDF) SIPRI 2018 Year Book
In December, 2017 Mexico passed a law which, among other things, authorised the government to deploy armed forces to areas under the control of drug gangs, write Marina Caparini and José
Alvarado Cóbar in their chapter reviewing Armed Conflict in the Americas (P40, which is P62 of 592, ref. 40 in reviewer's PDF). See: See: https://www.dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5508716&fecha=21/12/2017 Accessed 20.12.2018.
The pull quote at the start of this article gives context for that legislation and sums up the authors'
analysis of the nature, meaning and context of conflict in Central and South America. Additionally, Caparini and Cóbar give short case studies of El Salvador, Mexico and Paraguay.
Referencing The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the
Development Bank of Latin America and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean the authors say that in Central and South America,
"Power grabs by sitting presidents, endemic corruption, elevated levels of violence and weak judicial systems have resulted in impunity and low confidence in public institutions."
END OF PAGE 8 OF THE PDF
PAGE NINE OF PDF
Many people in 2017 fled to the US from political and criminal violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico and Honduras.
Intelligence from Salvadoran National Police says that in their country the biggest organised crime groups are "Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)" and Barrio-18. Together with some smaller groups MS-13 and Barrio-18 have some 600 operational cells and are responsible for the majority of crime in the
country. In 2017 MS-13 sought a "peace" process which included possible disbanding of the gang. However two years earlier El Salvador's Constitutional Court had designated gangs as terrorists, and that meant gang members could not be immune from prosecution.
In Mexico the "most serious conflict trend" was "narcotics-related crime". In 2017 Mexico recorded 29,168 homicide, exceeding by nearly 2000 the number killed during the 2011 drug war. Sipri 2018 Yearbook says the increase results from a struggle for control of drug production areas and
competition over trafficking routes (P38, which is P60 of 592 in the PDF of the reviewer's copy). In this climate anyone with money to spare buys protection from police or private security. The poor have formed private militias in self protection, and cartels have infiltrated some of those groups which act as vigilantes with effective impunity. Opportunistic crime against migrants had in 2017 crept into that situation, taking advantage of official weakness or complicity. Only 4.5 percent of reported crime resulted in conviction, reports the 2018 SIPRI Yearbook. Hence need for the legisla-tion reported at the beginning of the article, which the Mexican Congress passed to strengthen the role of the military in fighting organised crime. Abuses have not only been by drug traffickers, report the authors, but also by State actors such as some police and soldiers.
The price of drugs at dinner parties and on the streets
SIPRI Yearbook 2018 reports that the border between Brazil and Paraguay "continues to be afflicted by drug trafficking and gang violence". Paraguay is the second largest producer in central and south America of marijuana, while the junction between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina is "an important transit corridor for cocaine produced in Bolivia, Peru and Columbia".
Referencing a April 2017 InSight Crime report the Yearbook writes that Brazilian gangs are thought to be fighting for control of drug trafficking routes, and to be expanding into Paraguay.
This drug related activity in Paraguay seems inextricably linked with inequity of land distribution and failures in agrarian reform for the rights of farmers. As of the end of 2017 there was an undismantled left-wing guerrilla group in Paraguay, with some 40 percent of people living below the poverty line
despite booming agriculture.
According to an article in "Global Risk Insight" the Paraguayan government favours big agribusiness, especially Soya production, and ignores small and medium sized farmers and indigenous groups, displacing them to towns (Footnote ref.51).
Against this backdrop the left-wing guerrilla group, asserts the SIPRI 2018 Yearbook, murders,
kidnaps, takes a cut from local landowners and is "allegedly" increasingly involved in narcotics
trafficking. Lack of co-ordination within a task force established by the Paraguayan Government to combat lawlessness is blamed for failure to dismantle the left-wing guerrilla group. HG.
END OF PAGE NINE OF PDF
PAGE TEN OF PDF
NORTH KOREA (Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea - DPRK)
By Helen Gavaghan
Shannon N. Kile and Hans M. Kristensen write in the SIPRI 2018 Yearbook that the DPRK maintains a "highly active" but "highly opaque" nuclear programme.* Much the same could be said about other Nuclear Weapon and Non Nuclear Weapon States, both those which are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and those like Israel, India and Pakistan which are not.
See:
http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/npt (Parties to the NPT, a UN document, accessed 19.12.2018).
Much of the discussion of the DPRK's holdings of highly enriched uranium or plutonium for warheads is qualified with words such as "might be", "indicates that". What will be unarguable, though, to Western intelligence agencies such as MI6, because of seismology networks around the world, is whether or not the DPRK's declaration of having conducted underground nuclear weapons tests is true. Explosions have shape, not only raw power.
Kile and Kristensen write, based on a Korean Central News Agency report, that such a test took place on 3 September, 2017 and,
"Following the explosion, the North Korean Nuclear Weapons Institute
announced that the event was a successful test of a hydrogen bomb that
could be delivered by an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)."
(P280, P302 of 592 in reviewer's PDF)
Kile and Kristensen write, too, there is debate about the nature of the explosion: the difficulty being an alleged absence of radionuclide evidence.
On 6th March, 2018 Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, director of the US Defence Intelligence Agency briefed the US Senate Armed Services Committee on regional threats, telling senators that North Korea was the US's "Hardest collection target". On the record Ashley continued, "North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has pressed his nation down a path to develop nuclear weapons and deliver them with ballistic missiles that can reach South Korea, Japan, and the United States." See: http://www.dia.mil/News/Articles/Article-View/Article/1459039/dia-director-briefs-senate-armed-services-committee-on-worldwide-threats/ Accessed 19.12.2018
It was against this backdrop that in June 2018 President Trump sought demilitarisation of the Korean Peninsular. See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/historic-summit-north-korea-tremendous-moment-world/ Accessed 19.12.2018.
For an article on forensic seismology and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty see: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.earth.36.031207.124143and http://blacknest.gov.uk/ UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. Accessed 19.12.2018.
*The SIPRI 2018 Year Book was published near the beginning of 2018, and so for the most part is based on knowledge from 2017 and earlier. In all circumstances it is worth evaluating its content in the light of later UN Security Council and General Assembly Resolutions and in context of open information published by Foreign Ministries. All urls in this short report were searched for and accessed by Helen Gavaghan, editor of Science, People & Politics.
END OF PAGE TEN
PAGE ELEVEN
ARMS CONTROL FORTCOMING EVENTS
A review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is due in 2020. Preparation is underway, and can be followed here on the website of the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA): https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt-review-conferences/
The NPT came into being in 1968. It is known formally as The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Its aim is for Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) to divest themselves of nuclear armaments, and for Non Nuclear Weapon States (NNWS) not to acquire nuclear weapons.
The ninth review conference of the Biological Weapons Convention will take place in 2021, and a number of intersessional events are planned from this year up to 2020. Central to preparations is how to strengthen the Convention given current rapid developments in science and technology.
The director general, Fernando Arias, of the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) told delegates at the organisations annual meeting in The Hague this November that the organisation must adapt to prevent the re-remergence of chemical weapons. See: https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2018/11/opcws-strategic-course-be-set-during-conference-states-parties-and-review and https://www.opcw.org/our-work/preventing-re-emergence-chemical-weapons. Accessed 19.12.2018.
The OPCW will meet next in November, 2019. HG
END OF SIPRI ARTICLES, BUT PAGE ELEVEN OF THE PDF ALSO HAS THE QUIZ QUESTIONS
PAGE TWELVE OF THE PDF
Armed conflicts
António Guterres became UN Secretary-General at the beginning of 2017 on a platform of reducing armed conflict. Given the impact armed conflict has on food insecurity, famine and forced displace-ments of people it is hard it is hard to see what better theme Guterres could have adopted.
The SIPRI 2018 Yearbook reports that in 2017 armed conflict was active in at least 22 States, and that at the beginning of 2017 there were 65 million displaced people. Food insecurity was rife in Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, the Central African Republic, the Congo and Afghanistan as a result of armed conflict, with at least a quarter of the people in those countries experiencing crises of food insecurity.
In sub-Saharan Africa the Yearbook reports two broad themes. First there are overlapping and transnational conflicts among overlapping States and regions. The author, Ian Davis*, writes these conflicts are attributable to violent Islamist groups, criminal networks and other armed bodies. In the Sahel and Lake Chad regions, in particular, the armed conflicts are linked to extreme poverty. UN Security Council Resolutions, such as UN SC Resolution 2349 of 31st March 2017 have sought to formally address the complex problems. Davis also notes there appears to be a growing internationalisation of counter-terrorism activities in the region, led by the US and France.
Of the tragedy in Syria Davis writes half the population (figures from 2017) are internally displaced or refugees, while the other half are experiencing or at risk if severe food shortages.
Ian Davis is Executive editor of the SIPRI Yearbook.
BOX ON PAGE TWELVE OF THE PDF
CONTENTS OF THE YEARBOOK
The book contains 10 parts, with each part broken into chapters contributed by a variety of authors.
Part 1 is Dan Smith writing an introduction covering the sub headings of: Nuclear weapons and international politics; International tensions and shifting dynamics of power; Human security and insecurity; and prospects for international institutions.
The following sections cover
2 - armed conflicts and peace processes.
3 - peace operations and conflict management.
4 - military expenditure.
5 - in international arms transfers and developments in arms production.
6 - world nuclear forces.
7 - nuclear disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation.
8 - chemical and biological security threats.
9 - conventional arms control.
10 - dual-use and arms trade controls.
There is a brief bio in the print version about each of the contributing authors.
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