Abstract

States and other organised terrorist non-state actors are emboldened by ratification and verification lacuna in arms control agreements leading to their unabated violation of arms acquisition. This is aggravated too, by the weak enforcement mechanism for the control of arms proliferation in the global system. This paper x-rayed the politics of United Nations arms control and terrorism in the contemporary international system. The appropriation of Kenneth Waltz’s State-centric realism theory was aptly deployed to underpin the arguments. Waltz’s realist thought argues that the highest goal for a state is its existential perpetuation, hence, the need for pro security posture, and less of moral principle in the anarchic international system is underscored. The paper sees the emergence and continuity of terrorism as consequences of state pursuance of hegemonic status in the context of national interests and security even as it identified some pitfalls of the UN’s efforts towards arms control. With logical sequence of data from secondary sources, content analyses were used to analyze the data. It was found that the most critical impediment to arms control, is the politics surrounding compliance and the focus on profiteering which the big5 state actors and private arm manufacturers are complicit and culpable. The paper therefore recommended among other things that to effectively control arms and terrorists spread, the UN should appropriate manufacturers license under its purview of supervision and escalate its watchdog role over the supply chain of weaponry from the point of manufacture to the end user.