Attachments
By John Ramming Chappell and Stefan Bakumenko
In recent years, global attention to the role of international arms transfers in harming civilians has soared. Much of this attention stems from the United States’ and other countries’ exports to Israel despite overwhelming evidence that Israel is using those weapons to kill civilians and destroy civilian infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian territory and the wider region. Similar relationships exist between China, Russia, and the ruling junta in Myanmar and, allegedly, between the United Arab Emirates and the Rapid Support Forces armed group in Sudan.
These transfers are emblematic of how arms-exporting states have increased their tolerance for transferring arms to actors and contexts where there is significant risk of those arms being used Simultaneously, various actors have regressed in adhering to different international norms and commitments governing the arms trade, the conduct of hostilities, and the use of prohibited weapons like cluster munitions and antipersonnel landmines.
These trends are making threats to civilians in conflict environments deadlier, more pervasive, and more difficult to address. As such, member states committed to the protection of civilians must also be standard bearers for international and national commitments related to the arms trade.
Mitigating the Risk of Arms Transfers Harming Civilians
Risk management lies at the center of arms trade regulations. Multilateral and national arms transfer frameworks use risk thresholds as a mechanism to prevent the transfer of weapons likely to contribute to violations of international and domestic law. Today, ascertaining these risks is easier than ever, with open-source intelligence, investigative capabilities, and citizen journalism aiding civil society and media in identifying weapons used to harm civilians. However, despite their own robust intelligence capabilities, the world’s leading arms-exporting states lack effective end-use monitoring frameworks to track when arms originating in their country are used to kill civilians or violate international law and, critically, to inform processes to restrict transfers accordingly. While the May 2025 update to the European Union’s common position on arms exports includes improvements to end-use monitoring standards, it still does not require the monitoring of weapons use that results in civilian harm or international law violations.
The high-level political-strategic nature of arms transfers frequently supersedes commitments to human rights and international law. As such, even those arms-exporting states with formal oversight mechanisms have often adopted inconsistent standards and permissive interpretations of law that treat these commitments as bureaucratic hurdles rather than binding obligations and good-faith policy. Their policies and processes may nominally adhere to the letter of the law, but arms continue to flow in a perpetual state of exception.
When arms-exporting states deprioritize international law and domestic oversight in their arms transfers, there are tangible effects on civilians. States and private companies have continually exported weapons to armed actors, inflicting widespread civilian harm in the Middle East, Sudan, Myanmar, and other contexts. The ease with which armed actors can acquire of weapons and materiel effectively greenlights violations against civilians and perpetuates hostilities. The unconditional provision of arms can signal approval of an armed actor’s conduct, and the subsequent insistence that these transfers and their use do not violate the law further damages norms and normalizes violations. Simultaneously, the continual flow of arms undermines international efforts to protect civilians and negotiate peace by disincentivizing actors from changing their armed conduct or foregoing military solutions.
Reversing Regression on Global Norms
Relatedly, armed actors are regressing in their adherence to certain norms that states and civil society have spent decades creating. The 1990s and 2000s witnessed the emergence of strong norms against the production, use, or transfer of antipersonnel landmines and cluster munitions due to their indiscriminate, lasting harm to civilians. Landmines can lie dormant for years, perpetuating harm and impeding post-conflict reconstruction and return. Cluster munitions are indiscriminate when used in populated areas, containing submunitions that scatter widely and often fail to detonate on impact. Those unexploded “bomblets” injure unsuspecting civilians who step on them or pick them up, especially children who mistake them for toys. The Mine Ban Treaty (1997) and Cluster Munitions Convention (2008) prohibit the production, use, or transfer of these weapons while requiring state parties to undertake clearance, destroy stockpiles, assist victims, and raise awareness of risks.
Yet adherence to these treaties is regressing. Both antipersonnel landmines and cluster munitions have been widely used in the conflict in Ukraine, and the governments of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia jointly announced their intention to leave the Mine Ban Treaty in April 2025. Additionally, in March 2025, Lithuania withdrew from the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the first withdrawal ever from a humanitarian disarmament treaty. This erosion of humanitarian disarmament norms may portend greater reliance on antipersonnel landmines and cluster munitions in warfare to devastating effect for civilians.
Meanwhile, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for military targeting has quickly outstripped the nascent policy frameworks and norm setting required to protect civilians from automated violence. The use of AI in targeting is already posing serious threats to civilians. Examples abound across numerous contexts of cognitive biases, incomplete information, lack of contextual understanding, and other factors resulting in the misidentification of civilians during targeting. It is exceptionally difficult to assemble training data for these systems without being affected by ingrained human errors. The speed of target generation powered by AI risks supercharging harm. Without timely and robust international regulation, AI-based targeting may come to echo the early 21st century’s rapid proliferation of armed drones, with states and non-state armed groups freely using low-cost, easily-transferable technology in ways that increase harm to civilians.
Ultimately, a world that regresses toward more antipersonnel landmines and cluster munitions while irresponsibly moving toward autonomous targeting is a more dangerous world for civilians.
Reining in Rearmament
This regression in norms around arms transfers coincides with a new arms race being waged by some of the top arms-exporting states. Across Europe, states are boosting defense spending and increasing weapons production in response to the war in Ukraine and indications that the United States will reduce its military commitments to NATO. The Trump and Biden administrations have both publicly emphasized their commitment to growing and strengthening the “defense-industrial base,” and recent resource reallocations at the US Department of Defense are fueling an increase in funding for munitions. A home-grown weapons industry is also quickly growing in China, which is relying less on imports from Russia. Russia itself has been progressively expanding its military industrial complex since its invasion of Ukraine.
Many common weapon types are durable, functioning for decades after their manufacture and outlasting changes in politics or conflict dynamics. After conflicts subside, illicit arms transfers often surge. Although acceleration in armament may respond to a specific threat, arms manufacturers can be reluctant to draw down production when the threat subsides due to the difficulty of establishing new production lines. These companies subsequently export their surplus, seeking new markets and continuing the cycle of proliferation. States’ rearmament thus creates incentives for further arms exports, which further drive the risks and regression discussed above.
The Centrality of International Law: Pathways and Pitfalls for Multilateral Action
The lack of good governance, safeguards, due diligence, prevention, and accountability in the global arms trade is fundamentally a question of political will. Though regulatory gaps remain, the multilateral system has built an extensive arms-related infrastructure through years of committed advocacy and negotiation. This includes the Biological Weapons Convention (1972), Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (1983), Chemical Weapons Convention (1992), Mine Ban Treaty (1997), International Tracing Instrument (2005), Firearms Protocol (2005), Cluster Munition Convention (2008), and, crucially, the Arms Trade Treaty (2014). Just as it took political will to finalize these commitments, member states must once again exercise their political muscle, individually and collectively, to recommit to the existing infrastructure for mitigating the arms trade’s harm to civilians. Member states committed to the protection of civilians must champion these arms-related mechanisms, reinforce norms in public fora, and build joint positions to improve implementation.
Member states urgently need to defend and reinforce the Mine Ban Treaty and Cluster Munitions Convention. NATO member states, in particular, should reinforce norms against the use or transfer of anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions and cooperate to identify alternatives. The defense of norms depends on the willingness of member states to consistently and publicly express their disagreement with decisions that weaken humanitarian disarmament frameworks.
The Arms Trade Treaty is the only international legal instrument addressing the full scope of arms transfers. It also requires the conduct of risk assessments and the implementation of mitigation measures to prevent weapons transfers from contributing to violations of international law or atrocity crimes. However, implementation of the treaty’s provisions related to the risk of atrocity crimes has proven inconsistent. Furthermore, some of the world’s top weapons exporters are not party to the treaty. The treaty offers a framework that should serve as a consistent benchmark and reference point for conversations about the regulation of the arms trade.
The Political Declaration on Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas is the newest multilateral instrument on arms and civilian protection. To effectively implement it, member states should incorporate its commitments into national law or policy, including arms transfer policy. As the secretary-general proposed in the 2024 Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict report, “Arms exports or transfers to parties could be conditional on implementation of the Declaration’s provisions and respect for international humanitarian and human rights law.” The declaration’s champions should actively promote this recommendation to ensure its effectiveness as the use of explosive weapons in populated areas continues to ravage populations.
International legal frameworks are effective tools to coordinate action among states, but they require good-faith domestic implementation to meaningfully protect civilians from the scourge of war. As the world watches in horror as harm to civilians persists and proliferates, this is a pivotal moment to rally the political will to rein in the arms transfers that undergird this violence.
Stefan Bakumenko is an independent researcher based in Washington, DC, and a North America and Africa Senior Research Assistant at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED). John Ramming Chappell is an Advocacy & Legal Advisor in CIVIC’s US Program.
Originally Published in the Global Observatory.