Understanding the arms trade

While the arms trade is an important area of academic enquiry, it has been under-researched. After the end of the Cold War, the study of this important sub-field in security studies and international relations in fact fell into decline due to the anticipation of a peace dividend following the end of superpower rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Moreover, the reversion to state sovereignty and high tensions between China and the United States in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020 makes this enquiry even more relevant, given that the underlying dynamics of the arms trade, such as interstate tensions and great power rivalries, remain important. Despite early hopes, the reality has been that arms spending and procurement have continued to increase in the post-Cold War period. Indeed, post-Cold War trends strongly confirm that apart from Europe the rest of the world did not in fact reap any real peace dividend. Instead, the end of the Cold War released states from the straitjacket of superpower competition that had imposed restraints on localised and regional conflicts. Since 1989, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of conflicts, for instance, in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East and Africa. A particularly deadly conflict was the Congo Wars from 1996–2009 that involved several states and the deaths of around 5.4 million people since 1988, making it the deadliest conflict since the end of World War Two 1945.2 This has all happened despite emerging norms, regimes, international laws and institutions that optimistic scholars and practitioners alike hoped would make the world more stable and banish the spectre of conflict and violence. Even as various conflicts broke out after 1989, there was still hope that the international community would get its act together and work collaboratively to intervene and stop conflicts before they became deadly. Thus, following the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 that killed 800,000 people, the international community was finally shamed into adopting the “Responsibility to Protect” principle in 2005, under which “the international community, through the United Nations ... has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means ... to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”3 While internal conflicts still killed millions, interstate conflict also broke out after the end of the Cold War. This was epitomised by the Gulf War in 1990, during which a US-led international coalition of states freed Kuwait from Iraqi invasion and occupation, and restored the status quo. This was followed by the US-led invasion and occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 respectively, following the seminal terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 in the United States. Soon, however, the United States found itself bogged down in insurgent wars in both countries, sapping its strength, morale and capacity for global leadership. The erosion of its post-1945 global legitimacy was accentuated by the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 that was