The Small Arms Trade and Networks, Prices, Trafficking, War and Terrorism: New Methods to study an Old Commerce

Abstract

The trade in small arms and light weapons (such as Kalashnikov rifles) has often been blamed for providing the necessary means for warfare, state repression, political violence and violent criminality. The small arms trade is heavily regulated via domestic and international law, and governments exercise control via other means such as state owned production and sales. Illicit markets provide weapons to violent non-state actors and embargoed states; and traffickers utilize porous borders, inconsistent regulation and weak law enforcement agencies. Sometimes government and illicit trade interact, with intelligence services and armed forces being key suppliers of arms to some non-state actors involved in warfare. Despite the policy salience of the small arms trade, the subject has received limited attention from academic research. The papers presented in this panel use innovative methods and sources to study the small arms trade and so generate novel findings concerning the nature and effects of the illicit and licit trade. Methods discussed in the papers include using network analysis, gravity models and machine coding. Papers describe: the relationship between arms exports and conflict; using machine coding to develop a dataset of seizures of illicit arms; using a new dataset of illicit prices to estimate trafficking flows; methods used to research terrorist access to firearms in Europe; and the evolution of the international small arms trade network. The papers address how violence is sustained through licit and illicit cross-border networks that are more or less subject to government control or influence. They are relevant to both how governments attempt to control those international flows of weapons, and to how non-state groups fighting governments evade those controls.