SIPRI Policy Papers

There is a clear trend in the 21st century for regional organizations to multiply, to become more multifunctional and to devote themselves in whole or part to security goals. Old-style alliances with a defined opponent are now rare, and most groups address themselves to the reduction of conflict (internally or externally) and to transnational challenges such as terrorism. It is no coincidence that regions where these structures are absent or weak are also those with the greatest remaining problems of interstate tension or internal violence.

For most people, the notion of conflict in the North Caucasus—a region within the Russian Federation, as distinct from the independent states of the South Caucasus—is synonymous with Chechnya. In reality, for centuries before the outbreak of the first Chechen war in 1994, this mountainous and economically underdeveloped area had been struggling both with conflict of identity among its local peoples and with the tensions caused by the southward extension of Russian (and later Soviet) sovereign authority.

Since 2003 SIPRI has published in its Yearbook a series of guest-authored chapters on the latest developments in regional security cooperation—or the lack of it—in various parts of the world. The SIPRI Yearbook 2006 contained a chapter by the Institute's Director, Alyson Bailes, and Dr Andrew Cottey of the University of Cork that tried to set out a new, objective analytical approach for assessing both the success and the legitimacy of different regional security ventures.

In the 17 years since the Velvet Revolution ended Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, the Czech military has transformed from a true 'relic of the cold war'—overlarge, rapidly obsolescent, highly politicized and deployed exclusively to confront NATO forces in the West—to a small, professional force that is making valuable contributions to European defence and to multinational operations around the world. On the way it has met and successfully overcome many political, economic, social and structural obstacles, not least the dissolution of the Czechoslovak federation.

This Policy Paper begins by examining in depth the legal meaning and strategic rationale of the whole range of national and interstate measures that may be summed up as 'territorial disarmament'.

On 20 June 2003, Europe's leaders meeting in the Council of the European Union were able to unite in welcoming a first draft of a new Security Strategy for the EU. The document, finally adopted by the European Council of 12–13 December 2003 under the title 'A Secure Europe in a Better World', was (in symbolic terms as well as in substance) a bid to reassert the EU's common strategic vision and to strengthen its common will for action in the realm of security.

On the motley scene of today's security transactions, the private sector, and particularly the arms production industry, is easily typecast as the villain. Considering what strong feelings the question of armaments raises, however, it is remarkable how little researchers—or the public at large—actually know about what is produced and by whom. This problem of transparency is what this Policy Paper focuses on, and it is far from being an abstruse or secondary issue.