Effective Orchestration? The 1540 Committee and the WMD Terrorism Regime Complex
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12719 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Author | Benjamin Kienzle |
Effective Orchestration? The 1540 Committee
and the WMD Terrorism Regime Complex
Benjamin Kienzle
King’s College London
Abstract
In 2004, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1540, the central international tool to prevent terrorism with
Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). In spite of the resolution’s strong mandate, its implementation body, the 1540 Commit-
tee, has remained weak in terms of enforcement powers, budget allocation and human resources. This article addresses this
gap between mandate and implementation capacity. It examines specifically how the 1540 Committee has tried to overcome
its structural constraints to achieve its objectives. This has led to two important findings: first, building upon theoretical
insights from the management of regime complexes, the article shows that the 1540 Committee has resorted to the orchestra-
tion of intermediary actors in the form of other international organizations belonging to the so-called WMD terrorism regime
complex. This demonstrates that –contrary to what the current literature suggests –orchestration is used on a large scale in
high profile cases of international security. Second, the analysis of the performance of the process of orchestration reveals sig-
nificant variation. While a large number of intermediary actors have integrated the provisions of Resolution 1540 in their own
agendas, the coordination of these actors by the 1540 Committee has remained largely ad hoc and lacked the systematic
exchange of relevant information.
Policy Implications
•Orchestration, i.e. the strategic use of intermediary actors to implement an international organization’s objectives, is an
important policy tool for under-resourced institutions in matters of international security, including the United Nations
Security Council.
•Regime complexes with their numerous international institutions with overlapping mandates and membership offer an
ample pool of potential intermediary actors for under-resourced institutions.
•As part of the upcoming comprehensive review of Resolution 1540, the members of the Security Council should increase
the resources of the 1540 Committee to improve its ability to orchestrate relevant international organizations.
•As part of the review process, the Security Council should also empower the 1540 Committee to receive and analyze more
relevant information from other international organizations.
•The Security Council should facilitate and support more explicitly the collaboration between the 1540 Committee and rele-
vant nongovernmental organizations.
•The 1540 Committee should adopt a more strategic approach to orchestration and coordinate the activities of intermedi-
ary actors in a more systematic and comprehensive way.
•The 1540 Committee should facilitate in particular the interaction and coordination among the intermediary actors them-
selves, e.g. by organizing multi-institutional conferences on a regular basis.
The UN security council and the prevention of
WMD terrorism
Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) –chemical, biological
and nuclear weapons and their means of delivery –have
been regulated by a variety of international institutions and
legal arrangements for decades (Knopf, 2016). Traditionally,
international efforts have focused on state actors, in particu-
lar on the prevention of WMD proliferation to nation states.
In the early 2000s, however, two shocks highlighted the real
possibility that nonstate actors might be able and willing to
use WMD in acts of mass impact terrorism: first, the terrorist
attacks in New York and Washington, DC, on 11 September
2001 made clear that terrorist organizations were willing
and able to inflict mass casualties; second, in early 2004, fol-
lowing a persistent US investigation, A.Q. Khan, the lead sci-
entist in Pakistan’s nuclear weapon programme, confessed
to having run an illicit nuclear supply network, thus, reveal-
ing the existence of possible ways to acquire WMD clandes-
tinely (Tobey, 2018). These two events represented a critical
juncture in the evolution of the international regimes regu-
lating WMD (Wan, 2014). For the first time, states agreed on
various international measures to address specifically WMD-
related risks posed by nonstate actors.
Central to the international efforts to prevent WMD terror-
ism was a US initiative that led to the adoption of Resolu-
tion 1540 by the United Nations (UN) Security Council in
April 2004. In many respects, the adoption of the resolution
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12719
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 4 . November 2019
486
Research Article
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