A critical problem facing the parties to the Biological Weapons Convention is that of providing access to the biological sciences and biotechnology for peaceful purposes while ensuring that states comply with the treaty's prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons. This project, under the sponsorship of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, examines the present barriers to achieving such a balance and approaches to overcoming them.

Since the Third Review Conference of the Convention, held in 1991, efforts of the member states to strengthen the Convention have concentrated on developing a legally binding protocol to the BWC designed to increase confidence in compliance. But progress has been slow. There are strong technical and political disagreements on what can be achieved through verification, extending even to the meaning of verification. Some point to the difficulties in achieving closure on the extent of Iraq's biological weapons program as an indicator of the technical problems posed by any attempt to verify compliance. Some believe these difficulties can be overcome by detailed declarations and an intrusive inspection regime. At the same time, some corporate members of the biotechnology industry urge stringent limits on declarations and inspections on the grounds that transparency endangers intellectual property. Given these apparently contradictory interests, can verification of compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention be made to work? What other approaches to strengthening the BW regime can be taken, outside as well as inside the framework of the Convention?

A further question related to strengthening the BWC concerns article X, which calls upon parties to the treaty to "undertake [to facilitate] the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the use of biological agents and toxins for peaceful purposes." Since the early 1970s when the Convention was negotiated, the development of intellectual property rights in the field of biotechnology has restricted the informal sharing of knowledge, techniques, and samples that characterized the biological sciences in the 1960s. This is the case not only within the industrialized north but also between the industrialized north and the developing south. Does the restriction of access of developing countries to biological resources and equipment remove the possibility of using article X as a source of incentives for supporting a strengthened BW regime?

These questions of political and technical feasibility and incentives signal an important need for reappraisal of the present approaches to strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention. This project aims to bring together scholars in relevant fields (international law, international relations, the biological sciences, medicine, public health, history, economics, area studies, journalism), members of non-governmental organizations committed to disarmament and the peaceful development of the biological sciences, and specialists on the Biological Weapons Convention to address not only the immediate problems facing the BWC but also the larger political, military, and economic contexts of the Convention and how positions on biological disarmament are affected by them. A further major goal is to achieve broad geographical, and especially non-western, representation, and to provide a space where non-western perspectives can be seriously presented and discussed.

In summary, the project aims to understand the present barriers to strengthening the biological disarmament regime and to move beyond them. This may well involve a broad reconceptualization of the present problems and projected solutions.

The project is supported by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New England Biolabs Foundation, and the University of Michigan.