The Arms Trade, Corporate Accountability and International Law: A Cumulative Accountability Model for Transnational Arms Transfers

The global arms trade plays a central role in violent conflict around the world, causing lasting harm to individuals, communities and the environment. Those involved in supplying arms should bear some responsibility for these harms, and their accountability matters: morally, legally, and practically. Yet corporate actors — particularly the companies involved in transnational arms transfers — have largely escaped meaningful accountability for their contribution to some of the most serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights abuses of our time.

Why has the international legal system struggled to hold corporate arms suppliers to account — and what would effective accountability require?

This book answers that question through the development and application of the Cumulative Accountability Model. Bringing together rules and standards from across a fragmented regulatory landscape, the model makes visible the global legal and regulatory framework governing corporate involvement in arms transfers. In doing so, it identifies three cross-domain standards that mark the furthest international law has yet reached in articulating corporate accountability and shows how those standards can form the foundation of a more coherent and effective regulatory architecture.

The book offers a new way to understand — and strengthen — the accountability of companies whose arms transfers contribute to some of the most serious harms of our time.