Agreeing to arm
| Published date | 01 May 2016 |
| Author | Brandon J Kinne |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343316630037 |
| Date | 01 May 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
Agreeing to arm: Bilateral weapons
agreements and the global arms trade
Brandon J Kinne
Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis
Abstract
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.
Keywords
arms trade, defense cooperation, network analysis, proliferation networks
Introduction
As Cold War tensions waned in the 1980s, trade in
conventional arms declin ed correspondingly (Brzoska,
2004; Garcia-Alonso & Levine, 2007). Yet, arms trans-
fers have remained a persistent feature of the interna-
tional system and are once again coming under
scrutiny, particularly as an area for legal regulation.
Unlike nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, con-
ventional weapons lack a coherent legal framework reg-
ulating their transfer. Treaties such as Hague IV (1907)
and the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons
(1981) regulate the use of particular classes of conven-
tional weapons, but they say virtually nothing about
transfers. The highly publicized Arms Trade Treaty
introduces export and import regulations, as well as
monitoring provisions, but its efficacy has yet to be
determined.
1
The bulk of the scholarly and popular
attention devoted to weapons proliferation, specifically
with regard to legal frameworks, focuses on these multi-
lateral efforts. An important contemporaneous, counter-
vailing trend in bilateral treaty cooperation has been
entirely ignored. Over the last three decades, states have
dramaticallyincreased their participation in bilateralweap-
ons cooperation agreements (WCAs). These agreements
establish long-term cooperative legal frameworks in the
areas of procurement and acquisition, defense industrial
cooperation, and research and development. WCAs are
not simply one-shot arms deals;they instead create general
standards for bilateral cooperation on the design, produc-
tion, and exchange of conventional weapons.
The left-hand panel of Figure 1 illustrates the 30-year
trend in annual arms trade, expressed as country-level
averages of total imports and exports. Unsurprisingly,
arms transfers declined sharply during the last decade
of the Cold War – a consequence of reduced tension
1
The treaty entered into force in December 2014 and has over 60
members, but it remains opposed by a number of countries central to
the global arms trade, including China, Russia, and the United States.
Corresponding author:
bkinne@ucdavis.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2016, Vol. 53(3) 359–377
ªThe Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0022343316630037
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on the European Continent, waning support for distant
prote
´ge
´s, and shifting domestic priorities. Nonetheless,
while current arms trade activity remains below Cold
War levels, the world has seen a relatively steady increase
in weapons flows since the early 2000s (Garcia-Alonso &
Levine, 2007; Holtom et al., 2013). Given current
global instability, this trend is likely to continue. The
right-hand panel of Figure 1 illustrates trends in WCA
accession over the same 30-year period, expressed as the
number of new agreements created in a given calendar
year. The graph shows that, although a handful of WCAs
were signed in the 1980s, they are largely a post-Cold
War phenomenon, having grown in popularity particu-
larly during the mid-1990s.
Comparing the two figures does not reveal obvious
macro-level correlations betw een arms trade a ctivity and
WCA treaty-making. Indeed, the bulkof WCAs were cre-
ated in a period of depressed weapons flows.Yet, increased
arms trade activity is an explicitly stated goal ofthe treaties
themselves. As I detail later, the texts of these treati es
emphasize procurement of weapons, equipment, spare
parts, and all varieties of defense materiel.Also, by promot-
ing bilateral research, development, and defense industrial
cooperation, WCAs encourage improvements in member
states’ domestic defense industries, which, in turn, lead to
cost reductions, higher quality, and an overall increase in
export competitiveness.Importantly, while formalmilitary
alliances have traditionally played a role in proliferation,
and while the study of alliances continues to be a flourish-
ing area of research – as exemplified in this special issue by
Haim (2016), Lupu & Poast (2016), Maoz & Joyce
(2016), and Warren (2016) – WCAs are a novel form of
defense cooperation, with goals and provisions that are
more uniquely tailored to weapons acquisition than most
alliances. In short, by establishing basic standards for pro-
curement, contracting, and industrial cooperation,WCAs
should increase weapons flows.
To empirically navigate the relationship between
WCAs and weapons flows, I conceptualize WCAs as
constitutive of a global network, where states comprise
the nodes in the network and WCAs comprise the edges.
I further conceptualize states’ arms trade activity as an
individual-level attribute, where states vary according to
the extent of their involvement in the global arms trade. I
then model the relationship between these two phenom-
ena as a coevolutionary process, where a state’s position
or ‘centrality’ in the WCA network influences that state’s
arms trade activity, and, in turn, arms trade activity
influences WCA membership.
2
The coevolutionary
framework, which is also employed in this special issue
by Chyzh (2016) and Warren (2016), offers at least two
benefits. First, it allows us to explicitly model the
mutually endogenous relationship between WCAs and
arms trade. While I hypothesize that WCA membership
200
300
400
500
600
1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Average arms trade, TIV millions USD
0
10
20
30
40
1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
New agreements signed
Figure 1. Conventional weapons transfers and bilateral weapons agreements, 1980–2010
Left-hand panel based on country-level sums of imports and exports, SIPRI TIV indicators. Right-hand panel shows number of new weapons
agreements created annually.
2
In principle, the relationship could be modeled in reverse, with
arms trade operationalized as a network and WCA memberships
operationalized as a monadic attr ibute. In the Online appendix I
show that the main results are robust to this alternative approach. I
thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
360 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 53(3)
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