Changing the world

The book examines the global institutional responses to the peace movement demands after the Cold War. The primary analysis revolves around several international campaigns carried out by coalitions of NGOs and other civil society organizations in the field of human security. Each empirical chapter examines the process towards the signature of a treaty largely from the activists' perspective intertwined with diplomats and UN officials' views. The identification of pathways and determinants of successes and failures in these processes forms the central part of the analysis. The cases of study are the Coalition to Stop the Use and Recruitment of Child Soldiers, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the International Action Network against the proliferation of Small Arms and Light Weapons, and the Coalition to stop Cluster Munitions. The strategic and organizational levels of these networks are examined through their roles in each international negotiation context, such as the Conference of Disarmament, the Convention of Certain Weapons of the UN Program of Action of Small Arms or the Oslo Process on Cluster Munitions.