01 March 2009
Jody Williams: Land Mines and Networks
This article appears in the March 2009 issue of eJournal USA, Nonviolent Paths to Social Change (PDF, 783 KB).
Two questions continue to be asked of Jody Williams, winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize along with her organization, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). Is Williams’s most enduring accomplishment the international treaty outlawing antipersonnel land mines? Or is it the model for a global network of dedicated citizens that she helped pioneer — one that has empowered a new generation of organizations committed to nonviolent social change?
Perhaps there can be no clear answer because these achievements are so completely interconnected. What is clear, however, is that Williams and ICBL conducted one of today’s most successful international peace initiatives, and did it in an unbelievably short time.
The power of fast, flexible networks is a truism in today’s broadband Internet era. Williams and the ICBL were among the first to demonstrate just how effective such dispersed global networks could be.
By the 1980s, groups dealing with humanitarian relief, development, and medical care began to recognize that vast swaths of territory -- from the Balkans and the Middle East to Africa and Southeast Asia -- were contaminated and rendered unusable by millions of land mines and explosive ordnance that continued to destroy lives long after the conflicts that led to their deployment had ended.
“The land mine is eternally prepared to take victims,” Williams said in her Nobel address. “It is the perfect soldier, the eternal ‘sentry.’ The war ends, the land mine goes on killing.”
Six nongovernmental organizations founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in 1992. They were shrewd, persistent -- and lucky.
First, they deliberately kept the ICBL a loose coalition of independent groups, without a central office or hierarchy. Instead, they built a powerful communications network that relied on the cutting-edge technology of the time: telephone, fax, and -- only in the campaign’s final year -- e-mail. Next, the ICBL coalition insisted on conducting exhaustive field research so that the facts and figures they cited were as authoritative as possible. Williams herself is the co-author of a detailed study of the economic and social consequences of large numbers of land mines in four countries.
The ICBL’s timing was also fortunate. The end of the Cold War allowed nations to address issues of peace and security from fresh perspectives and empowered citizen groups to demand international action in partnership with government -- and not as either antagonists or subordinates.
The ICBL, Williams later wrote, “galvanized world opinion against antipersonnel land mines to such a degree that within five years a clear and simple ban treaty had been negotiated. Signed by 122 nations in December 1997, the treaty became binding international law more quickly than any such agreement in history. The treaty has, for the first time, comprehensively prohibited a widely used conventional weapon.”
Although not a party to the treaty, the United States remains the world’s largest donor to humanitarian demining and has banned all “persistent” antipersonnel mines. The United States retains only devices rendered inert after a period measured in hours or days, not years.
The ICBL has hardly rested on its remarkable achievement. Under the watchful eyes of its Land mine Monitor Report, which measures compliance with the Mine Ban Treaty, nations have destroyed more than 42 million stockpiled mines, 500,000 alone in 2007. Demining programs painstakingly cleared 122 square kilometers in 2007, according to the report, and mine-related casualties continue to fall year by year.
In an essay on the impact of the Nobel Prize, Williams, now a professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate School of Social Work, wrote, “Our model for change, while under attack at times, continues to be an inspiration to people all over the world who believe that, if we work together -- civil society and government -- we can create a world where human security forms the basis for global security, which in turn will give us the peace, justice, and equality that each and every human being deserves.”
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
