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Bobby Muller, founder of the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, was also a founder of the movement to ban land mines internationally. He knew he had a hard fight coming, but was up to it, having been seriously wounded in Vietnam. However, he probably did not expect that the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, born in October 1992, would be a landmine in itself. Activist and journalist Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York, details the results, which include a sympathetic senator, conflicting views from the US military, a presidential administration that backed the effort and then refused to sign on, a global treaty banning antipersonnel landmines, and a Nobel Peace Prize. He covers the inside workings of the organizations of all the major players, including the conflicts within the movement itself, and the reasons why it started and ended in America. He closes with an able assessment of why the movement convinced so many, with the exception of Washington DC. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Against all odds, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines helped to enact a global treaty banning antipersonnel mines in 1997. For that achievement it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In this volume, Leon Sigal shows how a handful of NGOs with almost no mass base got more than 100 countries to outlaw a weapon that their armies had long used. It is a story of intrigue and misperception, of clashing norms and interests, of contentious bureaucratic and domestic politics. It is also a story of effective leadership, of sustained commitment to a cause, of alliances between campaigners and government officials, of a US senator who championed the ban, and of the skilful use of the news media. Despite this monumental effort, the campaign failed to get the United States to sign the treaty. Drawing on extensive internal documents and interviews with US officials and ban campaigners, Sigal tells the story of the in-fighting inside the Clinton administration, in the Pentagon, and within the ban campaign itself that led to this major setback for an otherwise unprecedented, successful global effort.Negotiating Minefields will be of interest to students and scholars of military and strategic studies and politics and international relations.
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