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33 Crime L. & Soc. Change v (2000)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc33 and id is 1 raw text is: LA Crime, Law & Social Change 33: v-vi, 2000. Editorial Over the last few years the illicit arms trade has begun to attract the kind of attention it has always deserved. Increased media exposure and the growing attention of campaigning and human rights groups have informed public opinion and contributed to the issue rising up the policy agenda. In addition, another development has been crucial to this rise; the end of the Cold War has created the political space required for the international community, primarily through the United Nations, to begin to tackle the trade for the first time. As I outline in the opening article in this collection, the nature of the illicit arms trade has changed significantly since the Cold War ended. During the Cold War, study of the illicit arms trade was eclipsed by the study of the high politics of the East-West nuclear balance and developments in nuclear strategy. It was also made problematic by the fact that both sides in the Cold War viewed recourse to the illicit arms trade and the establishment of illicit arms pipelines as a policy option. In this context, the business of arriving at an acceptable definition of what constituted the 'illicit arms trade' became a political act. Given the negative connotations of the term, governments declined to see their involvement in clandestine arms flows (whether, for example, to the PLO or UNITA) as constituting participation in the illicit arms trade. In this, the contest over definitions was similar to the contemporaneous debate over definitions of terrorism. Brian Jenkins' observation regarding the use of the term 'terrorism' applies equally to the term 'illicit arms trade': What is called terrorism thus seems to depend on one's point of view. Use of the term implies a moral judgement; and if one party can successfully attach the label terrorist to its opponent, then it has indirectly persuaded others to adopt its moral viewpoint.1 Hence, acceptance of the term 'illicit' could carry with it the connotation that not only was the means of supply illegitimate, but that so too was the cause being pursued by the recipient group. One solution to this definitional problem was to make a distinction between the 'black' and 'grey' arms markets. The black market was that populated exclusively by privateers, without governmental involvement or acquiescence. The grey market was still characterised by a covert, under-the-counter, trade that did not enjoy the hallmarks of the licit trade - i.e. open delivery, official export licences, genuine end-user certification, delivery to recognised governments. Neither was it necessarily consistent with declared government policy. However, it was officially sanctioned; it represented, at some level, government policy. Hence, the black market was the covert arms trade when outside the scope of state influence or control; the grey market referred to the covert arms trade when utilised in pursuit of policy or broader state interests. While this distinction was useful, it clearly ran the risk of conferring a kind of legitimacy on 'grey' transfers that was absent from 'black' transfers. Given the extent to which the ap- plication of the Reagan Doctrine relied on covert arms transfers to non-state actors involved in efforts to overthrow governments (of varying legitimacy), one effect of this separation of 'grey' from 'black' was to elevate Reagan Administration-related involvement in covert arms flows above non-governmentally sanctioned arms flows, and to bestow on the former a greater degree of legitimacy. For example, the distinction could be taken to imply that arming UNITA

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