Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW)

Small arms and light weapons (SALW) are the category of conventional armaments most commonly used in contemporary armed conflicts, insurgencies, and organised criminal violence. The UN's working definition, drawn from the 1997 Report of the Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms (A/52/298), distinguishes two tiers:

• Small arms are designed for individual use and include revolvers and self-loading pistols, rifles and carbines, sub-machine guns, assault rifles, and light machine guns.
• Light weapons are designed for use by a crew of two or three and include heavy machine guns, hand-held under-barrel and mounted grenade launchers, portable anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, recoilless rifles, portable launchers of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missile systems (MANPADS), and mortars of calibres less than 100 mm.

Ammunition and explosives are typically treated as a related but separate category.

SALW are politically significant because they are durable, portable, concealable, cheap, and require little training. They account for the majority of direct conflict deaths and are central to violence in settings from the Sahel to Haiti. Their diffusion is fuelled by leakage from state stockpiles, illicit brokering, and craft production.

The main international frameworks addressing SALW include the UN Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects (PoA), adopted in 2001; the International Tracing Instrument (ITI) adopted by the General Assembly in 2005; the UN Firearms Protocol (2001) supplementing the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime; and the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which entered into force on 24 December 2014 and covers SALW under Article 2(1)(h). Regional instruments include the ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms (2006), the Nairobi Protocol (2004), and the Kinshasa Convention (2010) for Central Africa.

In MUN and policy work, SALW issues commonly intersect with DDR (disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration), stockpile management, marking and tracing, and gender-based violence.