Entrapping Gulliver : the United States and the antipersonnel mine ban
Abstract
In 2014, the Obama administration announced that the United States would almost entirely adopt the global ban on antipersonnel (AP) mines, despite longstanding military and political opposition. To explain this puzzling outcome, I expand upon recent accounts of rhetorical entrapment in which norm-promoting actors seek to compel change in a target actor by exploiting tensions between the target’s words and actions. Tracing US policy change over the past 25 years, I show how transnational civil society and domestic political elites strategically deployed factual and normative claims to draw US officials into an iterative debate concerning the humanitarian harm of AP mines. Successive US administrations have sought to mitigate external critique by gradually conceding to the discursive framing of pro-ban advocates without endorsing the international treaty prohibiting the weapons. These rhetorical shifts stimulated a search for alternative technologies and incremental changes to military doctrine, tactics, and procurement that constrained US policy choices, culminating in the effective abandonment of AP mines despite ongoing military operations around the globe.
Citation
Bower , A 2020 , ' Entrapping Gulliver : the United States and the antipersonnel mine ban ' , Security Studies , vol. 29 , no. 1 , pp. 128-161 . https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2020.1693621
Publication
Security Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0963-6412Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2020.1693621
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