The Threat And Risk Of Small Arms And Light Weapons Proliferation To The Security Of The Nigerian State

Abstract

The devastation inflicted by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II alerted the world to the threat and risk of humanity being exterminated from the planet's surface by weapons of mass destruction. As a result, numerous organizations, most notably the United Nations, regional groups, and non-state players, have attempted to assure global security. The United Nations formed the International Atomic Energy Agency on July 29, 1957, to combat the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. However, since the conclusion of the Cold War, the world has come to the startling realization that the majority of injuries and deaths documented in internecine wars are caused by Small Arms and Light Weapons rather than weapons of mass devastation. Indeed, current literature demonstrates that, while some research has been conducted on the proliferation of SALWs, nothing has been done on the threat and risk of these weapons' proliferation to Nigerian security. This is the key gap that our study aims to fill. This study employs a qualitative method to data analysis, depends on secondary data sources, and is supported by an argument based on both the realist and liberal theoretical frameworks of analysis. Finally, this article suggests that, while weapons play a key role in exacerbating conflict, resulting in massive human and economic losses, the roots of such conflicts are political, economic, ethnic, and religious imbalances. Lastly, this report discovered that SALWs were never considered strategic to global security or subjected to a systematic traceable transfer process. This was true until the conclusion of the Cold War, when asymmetric conflict in the world's weaker governments threatened to split them apart.

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