Project Aims

The aim of the Global Prohibition Regimes project is a comprehensive comparative analysis of the global prohibition regimes, which are understood as institutionalizations of explicit and implicit norms prohibiting certain activities of both state and nonstate actors and processes by which these norms are enforced. The prohibition regimes conceived are substantive (rather than merely procedural), and global in scale – or at least they contain a globalizing (or totalizing) ambition in order to eliminate “regime leakage” and exploitation of loopholes. 

The overwhelming objective of comparative analysis is to investigate how power operates in these regimes: which forms it takes, when it is manifested and where, that is, which actors and spaces it concerns. Specifically, institutional and security bases of three clusters of global prohibition regimes are examined and compared in intra-cluster and inter-cluster comparison: non-conventional weapons; residual categories of conventional weapons; and internal security and organized-crime issues. 

A comprehensive set of criteria is used for the comparative analysis. This set includes regime formation, regime evolution, compliance, actors and identities, processes and outcomes, ideas and norms, epistémé, deviance/normalization, subject effects, and governmentalities. These criteria are drawn from 'three generations' of international regimes theory: the traditional (liberal) theory, its version as modified notably by the Tübingen School, and the more critical paradigm theoretically anchored in strong constructivism / poststructuralism. 

One of the project’s outcomes is the Global Prohibition Regime online database which contains periodically updated information on the regimes studied in this project and the research produced on those regimes both within the project’s framework and outside.