Two Approaches To Disarmament: the Legalist and the Structuralist

Johan Galtung
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Johan Galtung: International Peace Research Institute, Oslo

Journal of Peace Research, 1967, vol. 4, issue 2, 161-194

Abstract: The thesis of the paper is that disarmament thinking and particularly disarmament negotiations are governed by a legalist frame of reference patterned after domestic law, based on the ideas of establishment of a set of norms (a treaty), a detection machinery to discover deviance, an adjudication machinery concerned with verification, con viction, and sentences, a system of sanctions, and a validation system (Supreme Courts in domestic law). To the extent this kind of thinking prevails, we are unlikely ever to get disarmament, since distrustful legalists will always find loopholes in the control mechanisms. Besides, it is also probable that many control mechanisms are counter- productive and produce rather than eliminate cheating, and sanctions are almost certainly counter-productive when they are based on the principle of collective guilt in the nation breaking the treaty.Equally dangerous is the tendency that legalistically thinking negotiators will dis regard factors that may stimulate disarmament, because they cannot be accommodated within their paradigm. Such factors are the idea of morality, positive exchange and cooperation between antagonists, positive sanctions to nations that keep the treaty and not only punishment to those who do not, efforts to punish individuals rather than nations if somebody should be punished, inspection by the people of their own govern ment, unilateral steps, tacit agreements, and a dilution of the legalistically dominated environment for disarmament negotiations with people of all other kinds of background. Finally, the thesis is that legal language and legal paradigms provide the parties with a false sense of being able to communicate, when in reality what they do is to understand each other too well, so well that they disregard major possibilities and are led in the direction of major difficulties. Some models for the cooperation between legalists and structuralists are then outlined.

Date: 1967
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