The United Kingdom and the European Union and their post-brexit trade in heavy conventional weapons

The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union in early 2020 brought new changes and challenges concerning also the heavy conventional weapons trade. Both the UK and the EU now have an opportunity to strengthen their position in the global conventional arms trade and revise territorial structures of their defence industries. The author attempts to analyse the positions of the United Kingdom and the European Union in the global heavy conventional arms trade over the past five years and to outline their future prospects after Brexit. The main source of the paper comes from quantitative data available in world databases monitoring conventional arms transfers as well as the UK’s new defence strategy.

The Human Cost of the Weapons Trade: Small Arms Transfers and Recipient State Homicide

Empirical research has increasingly turned its attention to ways that international phenomena impact the human condition within countries. International influences have been shown to affect human rights, health, and quality of life within societies. They may also impact microlevel phenomena such as violent criminal behavior. In this study, we build on such recent scholarship and research that bridges the theoretical and empirical gap between international relations research and criminology. Our analysis examines the cross-national relationship between interstate small arms transfers and domestic homicide rates. We suspect that some proportion of weapons from the legal small arms trade find their way into the hands of societal actors and that a prevalence of firearms in society may be associated with elevated homicide rates. State strength should mitigate this relationship, as strong states should have greater ability to manage and to control legal arms shipments than their weaker counterparts. Cross-national empirical tests of small arms flows and homicide rates from 2000 to 2014 support our theoretical claims. They also demonstrate that legal small arms transfers impact only certain types of violent crimes.

Sexual ornaments but not weapons trade off against testes size in primates

Males must partition their limited reproductive investments between traits that promote access to females (sexual ornaments and weapons) and traits that enhance fertilization success, such as testes and ejaculates. Recent studies show that if the most weaponized males can monopolize access to females through contest competition, thereby reducing the risk of sperm competition, they tend to invest less in sperm production. However, how males invest in sexual ornaments relative to sperm production remains less clear. If male ornaments serve as badges of status, with high-ranking males attaining near-exclusive access to females, similar to monopolizing females through combat, their expression should also covary negatively with investment in post-mating traits. In a comparative study across primates, which exhibit considerable diversification in sexual ornamentation, male weaponry and testes size, we found relative testes size to decrease with sexual ornaments but increase with canine size. These contrasting evolutionary trajectories might be driven by differential selection, functional constraints or temporal patterns of metabolic investment between the different types of sexual traits. Importantly, however, our results indicate that the theory of relative investments between weapons and testes in the context of monopolizing females can extend to male ornaments.

24. The Weapons Trade

This chapter discusses the international weapons trade. It first provides a historical background on the global arms trade and highlights the ways in which the trade in defence and military equipment has shifted throughout the years until the present day. It then examines contemporary trends in the weapons trade and how weapons are illicitly traded. It also shows how the illicit arms trade is connected to the legal arms market and concludes by describing various attempts that have been made in recent years to control the global arms trade, as well as prospects for its future regulation. Three case studies are presented to highlight the main issues surrounding the international weapons trade: the first relates to the use of man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) in terrorism, the second involves arms broker Victor Bout, and the third deals with the non-governmental organization known as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Resolving the Illicit Trade of Small Arms and Light Weapon through ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Transnational Crime (AMMTC)

This paper analyses the cooperation of states in Southeast Asia within the framework established by ASEAN, that is ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Transnational Crime (AMMTC) to resolving the illicit trade of Small Arms and Light Weapon in the region. Most of existing works on the topic being studied put emphasize on the importance of the existence of norms, the role of institutions and security cooperation in resolving the illicit weapons trade. However, the existing studies have not explained why the existing form of cooperation has not been effective. By the approaching of international regime theory, this article explains the interest based of regime that explain the background of regime formation which could influence state behavior to cooperate and successfully implement the rules of the international regime itself. The research applying qualitative research methods with data sourced from primary and secondary data from ASEAN official documents, books, journals, online news. This article shows that the effectivity of AMMTC to deal with the illicit Small Arms Trade is strongly influenced by the implementation commitment of the state members.

24. The Weapons Trade

This chapter discusses the international weapons trade. It first provides a historical background on the global arms trade and highlights the ways in which the trade in defence and military equipment has shifted throughout the years until the present day. It then examines contemporary trends in the weapons trade and how weapons are illicitly traded. It also shows how the illicit arms trade is connected to the legal arms market and concludes by describing various attempts that have been made in recent years to control the global arms trade, as well as prospects for its future regulation. Three case studies are presented to highlight the main issues surrounding the international weapons trade: the first relates to the use of man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) in terrorism, the second involves arms broker Victor Bout, and the third deals with the non-governmental organization known as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.