Reversing The Gun Weapons Case Study Analysis

Case Study Analysis of “Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines”
This paper will examine the case study “Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines” (1998) by Richard Price and try to evaluate, how the co-variational analysis (COV) and the congruence analysis (CON) were applied by the author. Blatter and Haverland’s book “ Designing Case Studies”(2012) will provide the theoretical foundation for this paper.
The case study of Richard Price deals with the central question of how members of a transnational civil society have been able to redefine international norms regarding the issue of antipersonnel (AP) landmines. Furthermore, the processes as well as the conditions for this success
The prediction made for the realist theory is that the utility of AP land mines is a necessary and indispensable criterion for countries to either accept or reject the new norm for the prohibition of AP land mines. Constructivism claims that in international relations significant aspects are historically and socially constructed and not inevitable consequences of international politics (Jackson & Nexon, 2002, p. 81). Therefore, in this study the prediction of constructivism states that there is a fixed framework of how norms are constructed, which implies that a new way of developing a norm would contradict this statement. The observations made are that some countries, like Russia or China, see AP land mines as necessary for their national security, and thus, have rejected the ban of AP land mines. However, some countries, like France or Great Britain, have accepted the ban of AP land mines. This acceptance was achieved in a new way of norm development using transnational civil societies to politicize the issue of AP land mines as a crisis, which requires immediate action from the world. The so-called “Ottawa process” was a new way outside the usual negotiation through a UN Conference that was able to achieve a wide accepted ban of AP land mines in a relative short period of time. Evaluating
COV is more complete than CON, but lacks a visualization of the application of the approach. CON analysis is more intertwined in the case and not easily spotted. It is very implicitly written and therefore seems incomplete. Clearly the focus of this case was more focused on COV than CON. The sources used to gather the data are only secondary sources that lack a critical reference in the case. This factor contributes to the conclusion that even though the case is convincing in general terms, the relative strength of its finding is not very strong, since there are no primary sources used in the case. The case is comprehensible, but the structure challenges the understanding of it, although the flow of each chapter, besides the introduction, is good. In all, the case manages to provide a convincing and comprehensible argument that should be study more in depth and with a better use of the analytical approaches to be able to contribute to the discourse of world