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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
160531
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| Summary/Abstract |
Do governments’ military build-ups foster the outbreak of intrastate violence? This article investigates the impact of governments’ arms imports on the onset of intrastate conflicts. There is scant empirical research on the role of the external acquisition of coercive technologies, and even fewer studies explore the respective causal mechanisms of their consequences. We argue that the existing literature has not adequately considered the potential simultaneity between conflict initiation and arms purchases. In contrast, our study explicitly takes into account that weapon inflows may not only causally induce conflicts but may themselves be caused by conflict anticipation. Following a review of applicable theoretical models to derive our empirical expectations, we offer two innovative approaches to surmount this serious endogeneity problem. First, we employ a simultaneous equations model that allows us to estimate the concurrent effects of both arms imports on conflict onsets and conflict onsets on imports. Second, we are the first to use an instrumental variable approach that uses the import of weapon types not suitable for intrastate conflict as instruments for weapon imports that are relevant for fighting in civil wars. Relying on arms transfer data provided by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for the period 1949-2013, we provide estimates for the effect of imports on civil war onset. Our empirical results clearly show that while arms imports are not a genuine cause of intrastate conflicts, they significantly increase the probability of an onset in countries where conditions are notoriously conducive to conflict. In such situations, arms are not an effective deterrent but rather spark conflict escalation.
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| 2 |
ID:
157351
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| Summary/Abstract |
Do norms constrain states’ foreign policies even in the face of strong economic incentives to ignore them? Arms exports provide an excellent opportunity to examine this question more closely. They regularly spark fierce political debates on whether to trade goods that buyers might deploy with devastating effects. We use the case of German arms exports to provide an in-depth statistical analysis of the behavior of a major arms exporter that claims to follow high normative standards. In particular, we investigate to what extent domestic, supranational, and international rules and norms shape German decisions about the destination and volume of major conventional weapon deliveries. Using panel data for the period 1953–2013, we employ a Heckman selection model to capture the two-step nature of the decision-making process. We find that German arms export policies often fail to comply with standards that prohibit exports to countries embroiled in military conflicts, civil wars, or with strong human rights violations. Furthermore, we discover, however, that the country fully complied with multilateral arms embargoes after 1990. We conclude that the noneffectiveness of certain rules and norms stems from both the ambiguity of norms and the opacity of decision-making processes.
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| 3 |
ID:
153088
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| Summary/Abstract |
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.
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