DISEC: ADDRESSING THE ILLICIT TRADE OF SMALL ARMS AND LIGHT WEAPONS IN CONFLICT ZONES

The Disarmament and International Security Committee — the First Committee of the General Assembly — is responsible for addressing threats to peace that arise from armaments, military competition, and the proliferation of strategic weapons. At BILSEM-MUN 2026, DISEC turns its attention to the category of weapons that, more than any other, defines the texture of contemporary conflict: small arms and light weapons, and the illicit pathways by which they enter and sustain the wars of the twenty-first century. SALW are responsible for the overwhelming majority of conflict deaths worldwide, and their flows feed civil wars, organised crime, terrorism, and the slow erosion of state authority across multiple regions.

Delegates will engage with the UN Programme of Action on SALW, the Arms Trade Treaty and its uneven ratification, the International Tracing Instrument and the gaps in its implementation, the diversion of state-held stockpiles to non-state actors, and the regional frameworks — the ECOWAS Convention, the Nairobi Protocol, the CICAD model regulations — that try to fill the spaces left by global agreements. Reference texts include the Programme of Action, the Arms Trade Treaty, the Firearms Protocol, and the Security Council resolutions on SALW in conflict zones.

DISEC is a committee for delegates who read a treaty for what it does as much as what it says — who understand that disarmament is built clause by clause, certificate by certificate, and that the weapons driving contemporary war are rarely the ones most often photographed.