Week 10: AL/EG

Madison D -

Hello everyone! 

We’re getting close to the end of this project so I thought I would show you the final proposal I’ve been working on. I just finished this yesterday so bear with me, it’s my first draft. 

Anyways, the idea was that I would separate my ideas into categories, and then further subdivide those into the actual suggestions. The categories ended up being transparency, verification and national implementation. The transparency section is all about CBMs, improving the current ones, adding new ones, things like that. Verification is all about the suggestions of the Ad Hoc Group, mainly the two which I think are the most sustainable: surveillance of publications and on-site visits and investigations. Lastly, national implementation focuses on improving national action plans and how we can keep state parties aware and prepared. 

I also labeled all of the suggestions as either AL (active legislation) or EG (education and guardrails), although this is subject to change if I decide it’s too informal. The point of those labels is basically to separate the suggestions that would require legal action (and thus take longer to implement) as opposed to those that are ideological or smaller scale.  

The format of the document is like this: 

  1. Transparency (section title) 
    1. (AL/EG) [Suggestion written out] 

Implementation strategies: [Description of suggestion and possible ways to implement it] 

Drawbacks: [acknowledgement of the things that make the suggestion unlikely, basically] 

And that goes on for about 13 suggestions. I might add or drop some within the next week and I’ll definitely be editing their descriptions, but it’s kind of crazy to me that 9 weeks of work has led to this little 15 page document. I’m hoping to have some people (from my site placement, probably) read over it and see if it has any gaping holes, but I’m hoping the conclusions I’ve come to have at least some rationale and bearing on the future of the BWC, at least theoretically. 

For funsies, you guys can have this suggestion example since it’s short. 

  1. National Implementation 
    1. (EG) Disincentivize the use of bioweapons through education initiatives

Implementation strategies: International workshops can lend time to disincentivizing the use of bioweapons by providing education on their implications. The inherent risk presented by bioweapons is the lack of control over them after release, specifically regarding the safety of one’s own citizens. Outside of the socio-technological challenges, which should also be presented, giving state parties the rationale to discourage bioweapon development is a basic yet important initiative state parties could work to undertake.  

Drawbacks: The use of bioweapons may not always be in times of logic or care, and thus education on their destructive, non-discretionary nature may not have any effect on a party that wants to utilize them regardless. 

Thanks for reading this week! 

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Comments:

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    biah_s
    Hi! I imagine it was difficult to consolidate so much information into a set number of suggestions. What were some things you considered when deciding on the thirteen that you landed on?
    April 17, 2025 at 5:24 pm - Reply
    FFM
    This is really interesting! Which one of your 13 suggestions do you believe to be the most important or, perhaps, the most helpful?
    April 19, 2025 at 11:26 am - Reply
    madison_d
    Hello! I looked for suggestions that were the most plausible and that I knew the most about! Ones that were kind of out of the box or didn't seem like they would logistically be plausible I tended to leave out. An example of that is bioweapons attribution, essentially using our ability to assign responsibility for a bioattack to a country as a deterrent. That doesn't really work out when you're talking about terrorist attacks in which assigning blame is actually a part of the attacker's plans and doing so doesn't affect their willingness to carry it out.
    April 19, 2025 at 2:03 pm - Reply
    madison_d
    Hi FFM! In my opinion that would probably be any of the suggestions that I based on the Working Group's Science & Technology (S&T) initiative. The S&T idea was essentially to have a group of experts provide advice to state parties on developing biotechnology so that each country could create a modernized and effective National Action Plan. While the initiative didn't end up going through, I utilized the general idea in a lot of my suggestions, such as advising countries to create their own expert committees and implement comprehensive training initiatives. The final suggestion is also quite literally titled "Use the Working Group’s Science and Technology mechanism to facilitate guidelines for national action plans (NAPs)," so I guess if I had to pick one, it would be that.
    April 19, 2025 at 2:08 pm - Reply
    Murtada A.
    Hey Madison, this was really cool to read. How did you come up with the three main categories? Did they come from your research, or just based on which one made the most sense to you?
    April 21, 2025 at 1:34 pm - Reply
    madison_d
    Hi Murtada! I basically had all the suggestions all laid out and I kind of grouped them based on what made sense. My research also led me to seeing transparency, verification and national implementation as some of the biggest categories (outside of self-regulation) which is why I ended up choosing those. So, a bit of both!
    April 22, 2025 at 4:47 pm - Reply

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