Network Interdependencies and the Evolution of the International Arms Trade

Paul W. Thurner, Christian S. Schmid, Skyler J. Cranmer and Göran Kauermann

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2019, vol. 63, issue 7, 1736-1764

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: trade interdependence; network analysis; network structure; ERGM; arms trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002718801965 (text/html)

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:sae:jocore:v:63:y:2019:i:7:p:1736-1764

DOI: 10.1177/0022002718801965

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().