Major Conventional Weapons Research Articles

Did CIA interventions increase US arms exports? Evidence from the Cold War (1962–1989)

This letter explores the impact of CIA interventions on US arms exports during the Cold War. Analyzing data from 1962 to 1989, our findings reveal three key insights: (i) CIA interventions significantly increase US exports of both small arms (SALW) and major conventional weapons (MCW) to intervened countries; (ii) The duration of CIA influence is also positively correlated with arms exports; (iii) the impact of CIA interventions on arms exports of other NATO states to intervened countries differs based on the type of weapons.

The Interwar Period International Trade in Arms: A New Dataset

International weapons transfers send military capabilities, make arms production economically feasible, and construct security relations. They influence buyers’ and sellers’ foreign policies, domestic politics, and military spending behavior. However, data availability has limited their study to the bipolar Cold War and unipolar post-Cold War periods. We thus introduce the Interwar Period International Trade in Arms (IPITA) data, covering dyadic transfers of small arms, light weapons, ammunition, explosives, and major conventional weapons in the years 1920–1939. The IPITA data will offer new avenues to study the drivers, dynamics, and consequences of arms transfers, both in past and future multipolar systems.

Sharing rivals, sending weapons: Rivalry and cooperation in the international arms trade, 1920–1939

AbstractStates must navigate the structure of the international system in their relations with other states. One crucial component of this structure are rivalries as they indicate latent threat to states. Rivalries should thus influence how states behave within the given system, but also how they seek to shape and restructure it. Focusing on arms transfers, we clarify how the systemic structure implied by rivalries drives states’ efforts to engage in security cooperation with other states. Intuitively, a rivalry with another country should diminish an exporter’s propensity to transfer weapons there. But what is more, we argue that rivalries outside of this focal dyad matter as a potential importer’s enmity towards other countries will reveal information about its security interests to the exporter. Specifically, sharing rivalries with the same set of countries will signal to the exporter that there is a congruence in security interests and thus facilitate security cooperation. This security cooperation should take the form of arms transfers, at least if exporters value buck-passing and fear entrapment. We test our expectations using original data on Major Conventional Weapons transfers in the Interwar years, a period where this condition likely holds, and inferential network analysis models. Sharing rivals increases two countries’ probability to trade arms whereas a rivalry between countries exhibits no effect. This research contributes to our understanding of security cooperation, the arms trade, and networked international relations.

Explaining destinations and volumes of international arms transfers: A novel network Heckman selection model

What determines the volumes of international weapon transfers? And why do countries establish such arms trading relationships in the first place? We propose an innovative statistical strategy that builds on the gravity approach and combines a Heckman model with a network analysis. This allows us, for the first time, to analyze the impact of network structures on both the extensive and the intensive margins of the international arms trade simultaneously. We argue that the structure of the arms transfer network conveys important information for exporting and importing countries. Therefore, past topological properties of the trade network play a central role in its future evolution. Using data on the trade of major conventional weapons between 1955 and 2018, our estimation results and out-of-sample predictions show that network structures have considerable explanatory power with respect to the creation of trade links. They are far less relevant for the explanation of trade volumes, which are mainly determined by demand factors.

A Dynamic Separable Network Model with Actor Heterogeneity: An Application to Global Weapons Transfers

AbstractIn this paper, we analyse the network of international major conventional weapons (MCW) transfers from 1950 to 2016, based on data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The dataset consists of yearly bilateral arms transfers between pairs of countries, which allows us to conceive of the individual relationships as part of an overall trade network. For the analysis, we extend the separable temporal exponential random graph model (STERGM) to account for time-varying effects on both the network level (trade network) and the actor level (country effects). Our investigation enables the identification of potentially differing driving forces that influence the formation of new trade relationships versus the persistence of existing ones. In accordance with political economy models, we expect security- and network-related covariates to be most important for the formation of transfers, whereas repeated transfers should prevalently be determined by the importers’ market size and military spending. Our proposed modelling approach corroborates the hypothesis and quantifies the corresponding effects. Additionally, we subject the time-varying heterogeneity effects to a functional principal component analysis. This analysis serves as an exploratory tool and allows us to identify countries with exceptional increases or decreases in their tendency to import and export weapons.

Military Technology and Human Loss in Intrastate Conflict: The Conditional Impact of Arms Imports

Although often conjectured, there is a lack of empirical evidence whether international inflows of military technology render intrastate conflicts more violent. We address this question and argue that expansions in governments’ ability to fight aggravate the lethality of intrastate war. However, we expect this effect to be conditioned by rebels’ military endowments and their choice of tactics. Where rebels are weak, they avoid open combat, and additional governmental arms imports have no effect on the number of casualties. In contrast, governmental arms imports cause human losses to multiply when rebels have achieved military parity or superiority and, as a consequence, use conventional combat tactics. This hypothesis is tested on the number of battle-related deaths in intrastate conflict, 1989 to 2011, using, for the first time, data on governmental imports of both major conventional weapons and small arms. Results support our propositions and are robust to instrumenting for imports of both types of weapons.

The 2019 Arms Sales Risk Index

The United States has long been the world’s leading arms exporter. In 2018 the Trump administration notified Congress of $78 billion in major conventional weapons sales, giving the United States 31 percent of the global arms market. Between 2002 and 2018 Congress was notified of more than $560 billion in sales of major conventional weapons to 167 different nations. Although arms sales can play an important role in American foreign policy, the risks involved with sending billions of dollars of deadly weapons to all sorts of places are significant. The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 requires the executive branch to produce a risk assessment to ensure that the risks do not outweigh the potential benefits of selling major conventional weapons. Unfortunately, however, recent history strongly suggests that the risk-assessment process is broken. Over the past decade American weapons have wound up in the hands of the Islamic State and other terrorist groups, sold on the black market in Yemen and elsewhere, have been used by oppressive governments to kill their own people, and have enabled nations to engage in bloody military conflicts. More broadly American arm sales have helped prop up authoritarian regimes, encouraged military adventurism, spurred arms races, and amplified existing conflicts. The reality is that the United States will sell weapons to almost any nation seeking them regardless of the potential risks involved. Concerns about these negative consequences have risen of late. In April 2019, the Senate joined the House in passing a war-powers resolution requiring the United States to stop supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. Although the United States has no troops in Yemen, it has enabled and fueled the war through billions of dollars in arms sales to the Saudis over decades. In the wake of Trump’s predictable veto of that resolution, a bipartisan group of senators introduced the Enhancing Human Rights in Arms Sales Act, designed to ensure that “U.S. manufactured weapons are not used in the commission of heinous war crimes, the repression of human rights, or by terrorists who seek to do harm to Americans and innocent civilians abroad.” To help improve decision-making about arms sales we have created the Arms Transfer Risk Index. By identifying the factors linked to negative outcomes, such as dispersion, diversion, and the misuse of weapons by recipients, the index provides a way to measure the risk involved with arms sales to every nation. Although it is by no means an exact science, the index can help policy makers incorporate the potential risks of arms sales and make better decisions about which nations should receive American weapons.

Arms production, national defense spending and arms trade: Examining supply and demand

Scholars have estimated demand functions for national defense spending and investigated international arms trade for a long time. The relationship between supply and demand for military goods has, however, only been examined on aggregate level or in formal models yet. I investigate how the supply of military goods by arms-producing companies and the demand for military goods by both the national government and foreign governments are related by using a panel of up to 195 arms-producing companies in 21 countries for the period 2002–2016. The results show that if the demand for national defense spending increases by 1%, the arms sales by a country’s largest arms-producing companies increase by up to 1.2%. If exports of major conventional weapons increase by 1%, sales increase by up to 0.2%. Arms imports do not affect domestic arms sales because imported and domestically produced arms are complements, and countries mainly import those arms they do not produce themselves. Country-specific estimation results suggest that differences among countries in geopolitical conditions and international relations determine whether a country’s arms industry serves economic rather than security purposes.

Exploring dependence structures in the international arms trade network: A network autocorrelation approach

In this article, we analyse dependence structures among international trade flows of major conventional weapons from 1952 to 2016. We employ a Network Disturbance Model commonly used in inferential network analysis and spatial econometrics. The dependence structure is represented by pre-defined weight matrices that allow for correlating flows from the network of international arms exchange. Three dependence structures are proposed, representing sender-, receiver- and sender–receiver-related dependencies. The appropriateness of the presumed structures is comparatively assessed using the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). It turns out that the dependence structure among the arms trade flows is complex and can be represented best by a specification that relates each arms trade flow to all exports and imports of the sending and the receiving state. Controlling for exogenous variables, we find that the trade volume increases with the GDP of the sending and the receiving state while the impact of geographical distance, regime dissimilarity and formal alliance membership is rather small.

Network Interdependencies and the Evolution of the International Arms Trade

Since few states are able to produce all of their own military hardware, a majority of countries’ military systems rely on weapon imports. The structure of the international defense technology exchange network remains an important puzzle to understand, along with the factors that drive its evolution. Drawing on a political economy model of arms supply, we propose a new network-oriented explanation for the worldwide transactions of major conventional weapons in the period after World War II. Using temporal exponential random graph models, our dynamic approach illustrates how network dependencies and the relative weighting of economic versus security considerations vary over time. One of our major results is to demonstrate how security considerations started regaining importance over economic ones after 2001. Additionally, our model exhibits strong out-of-sample predictive performance, with network dependencies contributing to model improvement especially after the Cold War.

French Arms Exports and Intrastate Conflicts: An Empirical Investigation

The aim of this article is to evaluate how French Major Conventional Weapons (MCW) exports impact on the conflict intensity of recipient countries. The recent increase in French arms exports seems to contradict the French political discourse on the promotion of regional stability. We run zero-inflated ordered probit model in order to analyze the role of the arms trade on the intensity of civil conflicts in 144 countries from 1992 to 2014, using SIPRI and UCDP/PRIO data. Our results suggest that French MCW exports tended not to exacerbate intrastate conflicts during this period. This finding is robust to changes in the empirical framework. We propose two lines of explanations: France seems to be prone to choosing partners that respect human rights and selling more ‘defense-oriented’ MCW than the rest of the world.

Trading Arms and the Demand for Military Expenditures: Empirical Explorations Using New SIPRI-Data

This paper analyzes the impact of arms imports and exports on national military expenditures. The recent literature on the determinants of military expenditures has mainly focused on countries’ external security environments and their regime type. Based on existing theoretical work, we argue that, in addition to these factors, arms trade flows may have an important role to play. First, we show that rising imports of major conventional weapons do not necessarily translate into higher defense spending. Rather, this relationship depends on political, economic, and contract conditions that influence different choices of financing imports. Therefore, the effect should be very heterogenous. Second, exports may have both a negative or a positive impact depending on regime type and the perceived impact of exports on national security. We empirically test these expectations for 156 countries from 1949 to 2013 using arms trade and new military expenditure data provided by SIPRI. Employing static and dynamic panel data models, we find that the effect of arms imports on defense budgets does indeed differ between regions and time periods. With respect to exports, there is evidence of a strategic substitution effect between military expenditures and arms exports in democratic countries: increases in arms exports are followed by a reduction in military expenditures. For non-democratic societies on the other hand, arms exports do not tend to be associated with lower military spending.

Slowing the Proliferation of Major Conventional Weapons: The Virtues of an Uncompetitive Market

AbstractProliferation of major conventional weapons (MCW) in larger numbers, at greater levels of sophistication, and to more actors is at best a waste of valuable resources and at worst fuel for more and bloodier conflicts. Given a track record of violence, repression, and corruption, norms against exporting weapons to active conflicts and human rights abusers, as well as norms in favor of transparency in weapons transfers, have grown more salient in recent years. Yet international efforts such as the UN Conventional Arms Trade Treaty show little promise for mitigating these ills. This article finds an alternate route toward moderating global arms transfers. It shows, with supporting data, how the United States, pursuing its own political interests, leverages its massive market power to slow the proliferation of dangerous technology, reduce resources spent in the developing world on weapons, stymie the deadweight losses of corruption in the arms industry, and lower the rewards for human rights abusers.

German Arms Exports: Between Normative Aspirations and Political Reality

Deciding on arms exports is a delicate matter in western democracies. Potential economic and security gains have to be weighed against normative and security concerns. This article explores how this tension is solved in Germany, a country that holds strong moral aspirations but at the same time lists among the top arms exporting nations worldwide. Using a newly compiled dataset, we quantitatively analyse German exports of major conventional weapons (MCWs) from 1992 to 2013. Our statistical findings do not support the claim that the human rights situation in recipient countries plays an important role for German arms export decisions. Our two-stage model therefore supports a trading state rather than civilian power reading of Germany, at least when it comes to arms export practices.

Who Gets the Guns? How Conflicts and Politics Drive International Arms Transfers

We study the factors that drive the international trade in major conventional weapons over the time period from 1971 to 2008, and show that conflicts of all types are important determinants in the demand for Arms. External war increases trade primarily along the intensive margin -- by boosting the volume imported by established arms recipients, whereas terrorism and internal conflict have a sizable impact along the extensive margin -- by opening or re-establishing trading relationships. We find important differences in the route followed by American and other Western exports as compared to Russian arms exports. US-sourced transfers favor richer and more distant countries, whereas Russia is more likely to export to geographically-proximate autocracies.When accounting for importer-specific characteristics, Western countries are more likely to begin/resume trading relationships in response to transnational terrorism or internal conflict events, whereas the Soviet Union/Russia is more like to send weapons following domestic terrorist attacks or war involvement. Both countries ramp up exports to frequent trading partners when these partners are at war, and -- in the case of Russia -- when its partners suffer terrorist attacks. Across all income levels, countries which are more exposed to conflict are also more frequent arms importers. However, upper-middle and high income countries do not form new importing relationships in response to transitory conflicts, whereas low and lower-middle income countries do. This is consistent with the broadly-held view that inflows of weapons into poor countries help fuel conflicts and exacerbate development hurdles.

The global arms trade network 1950–2007

Using SIPRI data on all international transfers of major conventional weapons 1950–2007, we study the relationship between differences in polity and arms trade. To study whether states tend to trade arms within their political vicinity we estimate gravity models of the likelihood of trade at the bilateral level and study the evolution of the global network over time. We find a stable negative relationship between differences in polity and the likelihood of arms trade for the duration of the Cold War, but not in recent years. In line with these results, the global arms trade network changes drastically over the sample period in several respects: it grows more dense, clustered and decentralized over time. The differences between the NATO and Warsaw Pact sub-networks that we find corroborate the common perception that the Warsaw Pact was more strongly centralized around the USSR than NATO around the UK, the US and France.

“In a Time of Peace Which Is No Peace”: Security and Development—Fifty Years After Dag Hammarskjöld

It is when we all play safe that we create a world of the utmost insecurity. --Dag Hammarskjold On 5 June 1958, the UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was awarded an honorary doctorate by Cambridge University. In his address, with reference to the work of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber programmatically entitled Walls of Distrust, he stated, meet in a time of peace which is no peace, in a time of technical achievement which threatens its own masters with destruction. We meet in a time when the ideas evoked in our minds by the term 'humanity' have switched to a turbulent political reality from the hopeful dreams of our predecessors. (1) Since then, the arms race has continued and nuclear weapons remain a threat. The volume of international transfers of major conventional weapons is on the rise, 24 percent higher between 2006 and 2010 than for the preceding five years. (2) We produce ever more sophisticated and efficient weapons for mass violence and destruction, which absorb massive investments into the further promotion of technology that serves the purpose to protect through posing a threat. Military-industrial elites nurture a global economics of killing. (3) While it is suggested that military encounters and the number of victims might in overall trends have decreased throughout human history, (4) the language of power has not changed. We remain captives of a mindset that bases a pseudosecurity on the ability to create insecurity, danger, and destruction. Dominant thinking in our age of modernity is guided by an obsession with technological-industrial innovation considered to protect by being able to destroy. Our knowledge and the applied instruments are at best a double-edged sword. Hammarskjold reminds us of this when stating in his Cambridge speech that, through these achievements, doors that were locked have been broken open, to new prosperity or to new holocausts. Warning words about how the of social organization, and how the growth of moral maturity in the emerging mass civilizations, has lagged behind the technical and scientific progress, have been repeated so often as to sound hackneyed and to make us forget that, they are true. ... Deep-rooted conflicts which have run their course all through history and seemed to reach a new culmination before and during the Second World War continue. And destructive forces which have always been with us make themselves felt in new foams. They represent, now as before, the greatest challenge man has to face. (5) But ever more sophisticated armament does not help us to come effectively to terms with the real challenges humanity faces. All arms in the world can be directed to the melting ice caps in the Arctic circles and the melting nonetheless continues unabated. There is no weaponry that can protect us from the effects of climate change or compel nature to halt the environmental degradation that threatens the survival of not only the human species as a result of man-made forces. Ultimately, the most devastating and far-reaching weapon of mass destruction is our so-called modern civilization with its reproduction patterns in the industrialized world and its way of life, which is nowadays a habitual privilege among elites across the globe. Our notion of development is a root cause of a track eliminating forms and varieties of life and bringing us every day closer to extinction. Human and collective security is, in our current world, less threatened by conventional arms than by the effects of an excessively opulent consumerism among the relatively privileged who share the latest communication gadgets and designer brands to be purchased in airport shopping malls from Adelaide to Addis Ababa, from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, and from Copenhagen to Chicago, as the ABC of global jet-set trends could randomly read. This way of life is the flip side to mass poverty, hunger, and destitution. …

Selling to Both Sides: The Effects of Major Conventional Weapons Transfers on Civil War Severity and Duration

Civil wars are primarily fought with small and light arms, but the availability of major conventional weapons to states and rebels can alter the nature of the war being fought. This study explores the impact of major conventional weapons transfers on civil war severity and duration. By using a recipient based approach to arms transfers, I find rebel acquisition of major conventional weapons from international sources leads to conflict escalation and deadlier conflicts. State importation of major conventional weapons is associated with longer conflicts. These findings provide researchers a means to account for rebel capabilities in civil war research and policy makers insight to limit the destructiveness of civil wars.

Democracies, Politics, and Arms Supply

AbstractThroughout the 20th century arms have not only been tradable goods, but also policy instruments. This paper focuses on countries supplying major conventional weapons (MCW), and investigates whether changes in political conditions impact the quantity of MCW supplied to third countries. In particular, it concentrates on democratic exporters and estimates a gravity‐type panel tobit for the years 1975–2004. Results suggest that the exporter's chief executive, being right‐wing, has a positive and significant impact on MCW exports. This may reflect a general right‐wing tendency to support national industry and deregulate heavy industry exports. It is also found that higher concentration of power is associated with lower MCW exports, and that executives which serve the last year of their term and can run for re‐election tend to decrease MCW exports.

Humanitarian Arms Control and Processes of Securitization: Moving Weapons along the Security Continuum

This article undertakes a critical analysis of what have been labelled humanitarian arms control (HAC) initiatives, most notably, recent agreements to ban cluster munitions and landmines as well as efforts to restrict the proliferation of small arms. The article critiques conventional accounts that view such initiatives as illustrating the potential of global civil society to interject human security concerns into the domain of arms regulation through the exercise of bottom-up power. In order to do this, the article first outlines the concept of securitization, particularly Floyd's discussion of positive and negative forms of securitization and Abrahamson's concept of the security continuum. This is used to frame an analysis of contemporary HAC initiatives that locates them in the much longer history of pariah weapons regulation and the way it relates both to the framing of legitimized weapons and changes in the broader regulation of the conventional defence trade in different eras. In contrast to conventional accounts of the HAC agenda, it is argued that initiatives such as those on landmines and cluster munitions were successful precisely because they were consonant with the same discourse used to legitimize both post-Cold War liberal interventionism and the new generation modern high-tech weapons. Moreover, the extra-securitization of landmines, cluster munitions and small arms has been accompanied by the (relative) desecuritization of the trade in major conventional weapons and associated dual-use technologies, a process that has a number of quite negative effects in terms of arms trade regulation. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of the preceding analysis both for thinking about processes of securitization and for arms trade non-governmental organizations (NGOs).