Arms Import and Civil Conflict Onset: Risk-Set Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, 1960–2022

Anna Balestra () and Raul Caruso ()
Additional contact information
Anna Balestra: Dipartimento di Politica Economica, DISCE, & International Peace Science Center (IPSC), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italy

No dipe0055, DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Politica Economica from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE)

Abstract: Civil conflicts impose massive costs, yet their onset determinants remain contested. This paper examines whether deliveries of major conventional weapons (MCW) precipitate new intrastate violence episodes,using annual panel data for 46 Sub-Saharan African countries (1960–2022). We construct civil conflict onset on an explicit risk set - excluding ongoing-conflict years per McGrath (2015) - and model duration dependence via cubic peace-years polynomials (Carter and Signorino, 2010). The key regressor is inverse hyperbolic sine-transformed SIPRI TIV deliveries (contemporaneous plus lags), capturing realized coercive inflows. Within-country fixed effects models reveal a robust positive association: unusual delivery spikes elevate onset probability. Placebo leads yield no pre-trends; leave-one-country-out diagnostics confirm broad-based effects. Fiscal capacity enters negatively, supporting crowding-out channels. To connect with climate-related stress pathways, we control for lagged climatic anomalies using the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and its square: these aggregate country-year terms are imprecisely estimated and do not display robust direct effects on onset once fixed effects and institutional covariates are included, but their inclusion leaves the arms-onset relationship essentially unchanged. Results survive nonlinear triangulation (logit, PPML, cloglog), wild bootstrap, and permutation inference. Cumulative availability and binned exposures display monotone escalation. Findings advance Pamp et al. (2018) conditional insight - arms amplify hazard selectively in high-risk settings - via risk-set precision and Sub-Saharan identification, while suggesting that climate-conflict links may be difficult to detect in annual national panels where climatic exposure and its institutional mediation are highly heterogeneous. Policy cautions against unconditioned MCW to fragile recipients, favoring capacity-contingent restraint.

Keywords: Civil Conflict Onset; Arms Imports; State Capacity; Climate Stress (SPEI); Sub-Saharan Africa; Risk-set Estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 F51 H56 O17 O55 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38
Date: 2026-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dipartimenti.unicatt.it/politica-economica-DIPE0055.pdf First version, 2026 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctc:serie5:dipe0055

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Politica Economica from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Fabio Montobbio ().