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This article investigates the role that the arms trade connected to Hispanic American Independence Wars played in the transformations at the origins of 19th century globalization. It looks specifically at how arms supplies to governments encouraged the early post-mercantilist development of South American commerce, and some of the domino effects of such development. This turning point in economic history is analyzed through the biographical trajectories of merchants who were well positioned between geopolitics and trade, and who had “imperial” functions without being formally involved in imperialist projects. Business and political correspondence, notarial documents, and customs registers from archives in Europe and the Americas reveal the workings of networks and business affairs of global merchants whose companies were major arms importers in Buenos Aires during the years leading to Chile’s liberation. The threads of John McNeile’s (an important but neglected figure) and David DeForest’s networks hook onto the principal economic and political laboratories of the countries from whence most arms were imported: Great Britain and the United States. They reached Chile and Peru from Buenos Aires and remained crucial to the liberation campaigns, encouraging further commercial expansion along the American Pacific coast and toward Asia, and pioneering financial adventures. Relations between commercial houses active in Hispanic America and Asia reveal British and US transpacific networks and ties between Hispanic American and Asian commerce and economies. The article thus shows how, by bringing together fragmented and scattered sources from both sides of the Atlantic, the significance of the arms trade in South America as a driving force of globalization emerges.

We explore the possibilities and limitations of models of the demand for military expenditures, as against additional kinds of cross-country analyses, with an empirical focus on the Indo-Pacific region. Our research bridges a gap between the Defence Economics and International Relations literatures by developing testable security alignment hypotheses and by testing these hypotheses in three ways: with demand modelling on total expenditures, with analyses on estimated stocks of imported armaments, and with qualitative analyses of trends in defence cooperation between states. We find consistent evidence across research methods of an increase in threat perceptions towards China since around 2012 and of balancing behaviour by US allies and by two non-allies. As compared to standard demand modelling, our hypothesis-based mixed methods approach allows for a clearer treatment of samples with mixed and shifting security alignments and of states that stabilise or reduce expenditures in the face of rising threat perceptions.

This master questionnaire is an Appendix to the pre-registrations Rudolph, L., Thurner, P., & Freitag, M. (2020, November 17). The Comparative Legitimacy of Arms Exports. Retrieved from osf.io/fzk52 and Rudolph, L., Thurner, P., & Freitag, M. (2020, November 17). Ordering effects vs. cognitive burden - How should we structure attributes in conjoint experiments?. Retrieved from osf.io/k4fbd

Despite significant politicization and heated public debates in some major exporting countries, systematic research on public support for arms trade is currently lacking. Combining political economic models of arms trade with the literatures on trade preferences and foreign policy attitudes, we expect preferences of citizens over arms trade policy to exhibit trade-offs: economic incentives, as well as expected security risks are pitted against moral considerations. In order to derive the often implicit weighting between different features of the attitudinal object at the level of citizens, we draw on a population-representative survey with embedded experiments (approx. N=6000), fielded in November/December 2020 with a quota-representative opt-in online panel of Kantar. We focus on the cases of two global top-5 exporting countries of major arms: Germany and France. This pre-analysis plan presents an overview on our general theoretical framing as well as the hypotheses and related causal quantities of interest we seek to investigate. Further, the experimental design, operationalizations and sample characteristics as well as power analyses are presented in detail.

Current research on motivational sources of military interventions in civilwars frequently assumes that states intervene due to direct interests in thecivil war country. However, this study argues that there exists a subset ofinterventions in which weaker powers intervene on behalf of interestswhich great powers hold vis-à-vis the civil war country. Using the logic ofprincipal-agent theory in combination with arms trade data allows one toidentify 14 civil wars which experienced the phenomenon of indirectmilitary interventions. This type of intervention features a weaker powerproviding troops for combat missions, whereas its major arms supplier isonly involved with indirect military support. The analysis is complementedwith two brief case studies on the Moroccan intervention in Zaire (1977) andthe Ugandan intervention in the Central African Republic (2009). Both casestudies corroborate expectations as deduced from the proxy interventionframework.

The conventional arms trade is a sensitive topic that is often shrouded in secrecy. As with most aspects of so-called ‘high politics’, processes connected to conventional arms trade habitually take place behind closed doors between a relatively small and tightly knit group of individuals. Gaining access to such people is an enormous challenge for any researcher. Moreover, building rapport with key decision-makers takes a long time, and it requires considerable effort and resolve. This article recapitulates the approach and method of a study done on conventional Swedish arms trade with South Africa. It provides insights into several substantive issues related to such research, in particular, aspects connected to elite interviewing and research ethics. The bulk of the article covers matters related to research design, access to elites, the limitations associated with elite interviewing, and the interview process that was adopted during fieldwork. The discussion on research ethics is closely, but not exclusively, connected to elite interviewing, and here the article reflects on various ethical considerations as well as the harsh reality of researching sensitive topics, such as conventional arms trade.

Illicit procurement networks often target industry in developed economies to acquire materials and components of use in WMD and military programs. These procurement networks are ultimately directed by elements of the proliferating state and utilize state resources to undertake their activities: diplomats and missions, state intelligence networks, and state-connected logistical assets. These state assets have also been utilized to facilitate the export of WMD and military technologies in breach of sanctions. While used in most historic proliferation cases, their role has seen limited consideration in the scholarly literature. This article seeks to systematically contextualize state resources in proliferation networks, arguing that their use lies between state criminality and routine activity in support of national security. Considering the competitive advantages of these assets compared to similar resources available in the private sector, the article argues that nonproliferation efforts have caused states to change how they use these resources through an ongoing process of competitive adaptation.

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter is a survey of the economic literature on conflict studies and related to the next chapters of the thesis. I discuss the literature concerned with these two questions “Why do economists should involve in studying the determinants of war? Are there economic factors that cause the war?” I also study the different theories that explain the shifts to the distribution of power in the international system and the influence of these power shifts on conflict. Natural resources have been the focus of economic literature on conflict studies, hence, I devote a section to economic resources, energy, and conflict. The final topic of this chapter is on the arms trade, its determinants and its relationship with conflict which closely is relevant to study the third chapter of the thesis. In the second chapter, “Uncertainty of Oil Prices and Interstate Conflict”, which is co-authored by Professor Paola Valbonesi and Professor Massimiliano Caporin. We empirically study the relationship between oil price uncertainty and inter-state conflict incidence by using different Vector AutoRegressive (VAR) models, also augmented with Heterogeneous (VHAR) components. We build two measures for oil price uncertainty and investigate the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) interstate conflict data. Our results show that uncertainty in the oil market increases the incidence of conflict in the region. By further decomposing the model for OPEC and non-OPEC members of the region, we found that while the OPEC members immunise themselves against conflict, oil price uncertainty affects the conflict in non-OPEC members positively. The last chapter, which is my job market paper, presents theoretical and empirical models to investigate the effect of citizen’s internet access on the governments’ decision on arms import. The citizens have the opportunity to oppose the government’s decision and the government seeks to receive foreign rent through buying arms from an external arm producer ally (policy orientation toward importing arms). The strength of the government policy (i.e. buy arms from a foreign ally) is its own private information. 6 The media outlets, by sending informative signals to citizens on how strong the government policy is, facilitate the decision to participate in collective action against the government. The aggregate participation of citizens with respect to the strength of policy determines whether the policy is changed or not. Theoretical predictions are tested by empirical analysis. My empirical findings show that internet access magnifies the effect of political participation rate on arms imports. These empirical results are gained by developing a cross-sectional data analysis of 70 countries from 1993 to 2017. A negative and significant coefficient for the interaction of internet access and political participation shows that higher internet access and higher political participation leads to lower imports of arms.

This study investigates the contents of key documents of international rank regulating the transfer of weapons and military technologies in order to mark the principles that rule this kind of state activity. The following principles have been pointed out: the principle of minimizing the consumption of the world’s human and economic resources for armaments; the principle of respect in the transfers of weapons and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations; the principle of transparency in the transfer of weapons and military technology; the principle of limitation of armaments as a factor constituting a threat to peace and national, regional and international security; the principle of the regulation of transfer of weapons in the domestic law of states; and the principle of respect for humanitarian law and human rights in international military transfers.

© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016. This article assesses the impact of a new form of defense cooperation – formal weapons cooperation agreements, or WCAs – on the global arms trade. WCAs are bilateral framework agreements that establish comprehensive guidelines on the development, production, and exchange of conventional arms. Substantively, WCAs regulate such core areas as procurement and contracting, defense-based research and development, and defense industrial cooperation. These agreements have proliferated dramatically since the mid-1990s. They now number nearly 700, with 30–40 new WCAs signed each year. Newly collected data are used to analyze the effect of WCAs on import and export of conventional weapons. To control for interdependencies in the formation of WCAs, and to account for the mutually endogenous relationship between WCAs and weapons flows, WCAs are modeled as an interdependent network that coevolves with the individual-level arms trade activity of states. The analysis shows that, over the 1995–2010 period, WCAs have significantly increased weapons flows.

В сфере поставок вооружения в страны СНГ со стороны России (учитывая безусловное лидерство последней в вопросах поставок вооружения) имеется ряд проблем как со стороны внутренних противоречий стран СНГ, так и со стороны геополитических притязаний основных экспортеров-конкурентов вооружения в Содружество (в первую очередь это относится к США и НАТО). Оценку военно-техническому сотрудничеству России со странами СНГ и тем более входящими в ОДКБ — Арменией, Беларусью, Казахстаном, Киргизией, Таджикистаном — в геополитическом контексте корректное рассматривать через призму целей и принципов их сотрудничества в оборонной сфере, которые четко определены статусом межгосударственных организаций и союзническим характером отношений между странами. Методология исследования: метод ключей, метод исторического сравнения и метод экономического анализа., In the field of supplies of weapons to the CIS countries from Russia (taking into account the unconditional leadership of the latter in matters of arms supplies) there are a number of problems from both the internal contradictions of the CIS countries and the geopolitical claims of the main exporters. military rivals in the Commonwealth (this applies primarily to the United States and NATO). The military-technical cooperation of Russia with the CIS countries and, moreover, those of the CSTO Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan in the geopolitical context should be correctly estimated through the goals of the principles and principles of their cooperation in the defense sphere, which are clearly defined by the status of interstate organizations and the allied nature of relations between countries. Research methodology: key method, historical comparison method, and economic analysis method.

1 The Gravity of Arms Abstract The aim of this paper is to investigate the determinants of international arms transfers in a gravity model framework . By distinguishing between the decision to export arms (extensive margin) and the value of the arms exported (intensive margin), while also considering its interdependence, is what differentiates this paper from previous research . A theoretically - justified gravity model of trade augmented with political and security motives is estimated using a two - stage panel data approach for 104 exporting countries over the period from 1950 to 2007. In addition to the usual gravity variables related to the economic mass of the trading countries and the trade cost factors, the model is extended with political and security factors. T he level of democracy in both trading partners , political differences between trading partners and voting similarity with the United States in the UN General Assembly of the countries engaged in trade are the main political factors , whereas the existence of conflicts, military pacts and embargoes are taken as security motives . The key result indicates that both political and security motives are an important determinant of an arms trade , but their effects on the extensive margin of exports (the decision to order a transfer) differs from their effect on the intensive margin (average value of exports) . Moreover , the relative importance of the fa ctors under study has changed since 1989 . In the post - Cold War period , countries that are less democratic are more likely to export arms , military pacts are less relevant and embargoes play a role .

When Ed Fast, Canadian Minister of International Trade under Stephen Harper, announced the largest advanced manufacturing contract in Canadian history on February 14, 2015, it was spun as a political masterpiece. A brilliant economic achievement on paper, the 14-year, $14.8 billion deal promised to directly benefit 500 Canadian companies, and continue an important trade alliance with a strategic partner. This single contract was projected to keep 3000 Canadians employed for the next 14 years, primarily in London, Ontario where the General Dynamics Land Systems Canada (GDLS-C) manufacturing plant is located. The only catch was that the deal was to manufacture a military weapons system, namely Light Armored Vehicles (LAVs), and the ‘strategic partner’ was the repressive theocracy of Saudi Arabia. Canadians have long been ambivalent (perhaps unaware) about their country’s participation in the global arms trade. It is easy to welcome the jobs and capital provided by military exports, and such deals have proven critical to Canada’s military industrial base by sustaining and subsidizing military production. On the other hand, the presence of Canadian military goods in conflict zones around the world has cast a dubious shadow over the industry and its governmental enablers. Since the Second World War, Canadian exports have found their way directly or indirectly to both Iranian and Iraqi forces during the Iran-Iraq War, the American forces in Vietnam, the apartheid-era government in South Africa, the British forces in the Falklands/Maldives conflict, Israeli forces in Lebanon, the governments of El Salvador and Honduras during the insurrections, and now Saudi Arabia during the current regional instability. In 2016, largely due to the LAV deal, Canada became the second-largest exporter of military goods to the Middle East. The Canadian policy of pursuing economic advantage through military export has always conflicted with its political and ideological commitment to human security and global development, but rarely has the discordance been so jarring. This paper will analyze three recent attempts to justify the LAV deal to the Canadian public through a press release, an op-ed, and a declassified memorandum. It will use the structure of the press release as an organization framework, and highlight the historical premises behind the arguments made in each document. In doing so it will show that the current Liberal government is misrepresenting the scope of its ‘restrictive’ weapons export policy, in practice transforming the policy into a convenient rhetorical shield rather than a rigorous evaluation. It will further show that the government is primarily concerned with the economic implications of the Saudi-LAV deal, secondly with the strategic consequences, and only thirdly with its military export and human rights commitments.

This article assesses the impact of a new form of defense cooperation – formal weapons cooperation agreements, or WCAs – on the global arms trade. WCAs are bilateral framework agreements that establish comprehensive guidelines on the development, production, and exchange of conventional arms. Substantively, WCAs regulate such core areas as procurement and contracting, defense-based research and development, and defense industrial cooperation. These agreements have proliferated dramatically since the mid-1990s. They now number nearly 700, with 30–40 new WCAs signed each year. Newly collected data are used to analyze the effect of WCAs on import and export of conventional weapons. To control for interdependencies in the formation of WCAs, and to account for the mutually endogenous relationship between WCAs and weapons flows, WCAs are modeled as an interdependent network that coevolves with the individual-level arms trade activity of states. The analysis shows that, over the 1995–2010 period, WCAs have significantly increased weapons flows.

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Using a large dataset covering all trade in military equipment over the period 1950-2007, we address the relationship between differences in polity and arms trade from a novel empirical perspective. We provide evidence on the determinants of link formation at the bilateral level by estimating gravity specifications and study the evolution of the arms trade network at the global level. Throughout the analysis, we exploit the exogenous shift in preferences implied by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to discriminate between different hypotheses about the underlying incentives for arms trade. We find a stable negative relationship between differences in polity and the likelihood of arms trade for the duration of the Cold War, but in recent years any negative effects of political differences on the likelihood of arms trade that we find can be entirely accounted for by exporter and importer fixed effects. Our findings thus suggest that democracies have not, on average, discriminated against autocracies when trading arms in the post-Cold War era. The results from the net-work analysis reveal that the network as a whole changes drastically over the sample period in several respects. In addition to comparing the network to other empirical networks, we are able to document important differences between the workings of the NATO and Warsaw Pact sub-networks prior to 1991.

This chapter is a review of our empirical knowledge regarding arms trade offsets. Extant evidence suggests that offset arrangements do not yield net benefits for a country’s economic development. As a general rule arms trade offset deals are more costly than off-the-shelf arms purchases, create little by way of new or sustainable employment, do not appear to contribute in any substantive way to general economic development, and with very few exceptions do not result in significant technology transfers, not even within the military sector. As of 2009, the United States and the European Union have taken official government positions against offset deals. Nonetheless, arms trade offsets are a flourishing practice.

Sales of arms are a significant component of international trade and raise a range of pressing policy issues. After a short review of the market, this paper provides a formal model of the trade which allows for competing, forward-looking suppliers whose welfare depends on both the economic benefits from the sales and the security repercussions of recipient behaviour. The recipient's behaviour depends on their military capability which is a function of the stock of arms they have acquired. We first examine myopic recipients, whose behaviour depends on current stocks, then forward-looking recipients for whom questions of the time-consistency and the credibility of supplier threats to embargo, or promises to resupply become crucial. Finally, we examine the impact of supplier cooperation of the sort currently being discussed in the UN Security Council.

The international trade with weapons and its effects on the Third World are rarely mentioned in papers on international trade. This is not really surprising, given the fact that military affairs are kept very secret. Of all social science data it is probably that of the military sector which is the most scarce and unreliable. Despite these difficulties the author of the following article describes some recent trends in the international trade in major weapons and analyses their negative effects on Third World countries.

This paper focuses on an economic aspect of the disarmament question: the international market of armaments. I shall explore the thesis that arms trade is an increasingly important factor in North-South economic relations, that it affects not only international trade patterns, but also through trade, domestic patterns of economic development. Research assistance for this work was provided by Michael de Mello at Columbia University. In addition to the statistical sources in the references I shall be drawing as well on the results of a UNITAR study on technology, domestic distribution and North-South relations. (1)

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.

China and Russia share a geopolitical world view and a preference for a multipolar world. How their relationship evolves and how they understand their respective positions in the international system are vital for the development of global affairs. The purpose of this report is to analyse the relationship between China and Russia from a political as well as an economic perspective. In this context it compares how the two countries perceive themselves and their role in the world. The report provides an overview of the national foreign policy elements and the economic ties between the two countries. China and Russia cooperate and compete in many areas and their interests and ambitions are exemplified by their policies in Central Asia and Asia-Pacific. Throughout the report the role of the United States as a competitor and a partner to both countries is discussed. The partnership with China offers Russia an opportunity to conduct a multivector foreign policy and thereby to counterbalance the hegemony of the West. For China it supports the efforts to offset the US influence in the Asia-Pacific. Economic interdependence between the countries is limited, but arms trade and technology transfer are vital elements and energy cooperation is developing. China’s gradual economic reforms have created an economic superpower that will soon be overtaking the United States as the largest economy in the world, while Russia’s economy is stagnating. A weakness in the relationship is the fact that relations with the United States are the most important for both China’s and Russia’s foreign policy. The United States is China’s only real strategic partner, which adds to the weakness of the partnership with Russia. The Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 is found to be a defining moment for the Sino-Russian relationship. Kina och Ryssland delar en geopolitisk världsbild och vill se en multipolär värld.Hur deras relation utvecklas och hur de upplever sina positioner i detinternationella politiska systemet har stor betydelse för den globala utvecklingen.Syftet med rapporten är att analysera förhållandet mellan Kina och Ryssland frånett politiskt och ekonomiskt perspektiv. Den jämför också hur länderna ser på sigsjälva och sin roll i världen. Länderna samarbetar och konkurrerar inom olikaområden. Deras intressen och ambitioner exemplifieras med deras politik i Centralasien och Stillahavsregionen. Genom hela rapporten belyses USAs rollsom konkurrent och samarbetspartner till båda länderna. Partnerskapet mellan Kina och Ryssland gör det möjligt att föra en multipolärutrikespolitik och balansera Västs inflytande. För Kina utgör det stöd för attmotverka USAs inflytande i Stillahavsregionen. Det ekonomiska beroendetmellan Kina och Ryssland är begränsat, men samarbetet inom energiområdet kanutvecklas och vapensamarbete med teknologiöverföring är viktiga moment förbåda parter och energisamarbetet ökar. Kinas gradvisa ekonomiska reformer harskapat en ekonomisk supermakt som inom kort kommer att gå om USA som denstörsta ekonomin i världen, medan Rysslands ekonomi stagnerar. Den kinesiskautrikespolitiken skapar förutsättningar för ekonomiskt samarbete vilket har varitframgångsrikt i konkurrensen med Ryssland i Centralasien. En svaghet ipartnerskapet är att USA är den viktigaste relationen för båda länderna. USA ärKinas enda egentliga strategiska partner, vilket försvagar partnerskapet medRyssland. Rysslands aggression mot Ukraina 2014 har resulterat i försämraderelationer till Väst vilket innebär att partnerskapet med Kina har fått en nydimension.