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This report was prepared pursuant to General Assembly resolution 74/35 . It provides an overview of recent scientific and technological developments relevant to the means and methods of warfare. It examines their broader impacts on security and disarmament and highlights the implications for efforts to limit the humanitarian consequences of armed conflict. The report also describes the relevant intergovernmental processes in which these developments are being addressed. The Office for Disarmament Affairs prepared this enhanced version of the report as part of its efforts to implement Action 24 of the Secretary-General’s Agenda for Disarmament, Securing our Common Future, on raising awareness on the implications of new weapon …

This is the Second Edition of the Aide-Memoire that was originally published in 2018. The content has been updated to reflect the evolution in the Security Council’s practice in addressing weapons and ammunition-related issues from the end of the 1990s through to August 2020. This Second Edition includes a new section highlighting recommendations made by the Secretary-General to support the mainstreaming of weapons and ammunition-related matters in the work of the Security Council derived from previous reports to the Security Council on small arms and light weapons. The main body of the Aide-Memoire (and its supporting Annex 1) is based on a review of more than 650 UN Security Council country-/region-specific and thematic resolutions, and relevant presidential statements issued since the end of the 1990s. A 30-year time frame was used to ensure a broad pool of language options. This time period also corresponds to the establishment of several of the main United Nations peace …

In recent years, the international arms control agenda has become more aligned with that of sustainable development and the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda. As a result, two important synergies have emerged. The first is a focus on disaggregating, assessing, and addressing the various ways in which arms and ammunition impact different stakeholder groups through tools such as gender analysis and the sex disaggregation of data. The second is the need to gender mainstream relevant policies and procedures––that is, to institutionalize meaningful participation in all work processes and structures. The rationale for these approaches is that they will lead to control efforts that are more equitable for those who do the work and more effective and sustainable for beneficiaries. The UN Secretary-General first drew attention to the importance of these considerations in his Securing our Common Future: An Agenda for Disarmament in 2018, and subsequently in his 2019 Report on Small Arms and …

When the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) was established by Security Council resolution 2235 in August 2015, it was given the mandate to identify, to the greatest extent feasible, the perpetrators of the use of chemicals as weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic. The JIM’s mandate for attribution of responsibility was a unique undertaking in the context of past efforts by both the United Nations and the OPCW to investigate allegations of the use of chemical weapons. Accordingly, after the expiration of the JIM’s mandate in 2017, there was interest in conducting a lessons-learned exercise to distill the lessons from the experience of the JIM, as is frequent practice within the United Nations after the conclusions of missions and programmes. UNODA was fortunate to receive support for a lessons-learned project from the Governments of Canada and Switzerland, whose generous financial contributions made the project possible. UNODA is pleased to share the final report of the JIM …

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve the health and well-being of individuals, communities, and states, and help meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.  However, certain uses of AI could also undermine international peace and security by raising concerns about safety and security of the technology, accelerating the pace of armed conflicts, or loosening human control over the means of war. In 2019, the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, the Stanley Center and the Stimson Center partnered in a workshop and series of papers to facilitate a multistakeholder discussion among experts from Member States, industry, academia, and research institutions, with the aim of building understanding about the peace and security implications of AI. This publication captures that conversation and shares assessments of the topic from US, Chinese, and Russian perspectives. It is intended to provide a starting point for more robust dialogues among diverse communities …