The black market in small arms: Examining a social network

Abstract

In recent years, researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the proliferation of small arms, a transnational trade amounting to over $7 billion in value during 2002. Small arms are difficult to track and are not the stuff of military parades, but they are immensely destructive. As much as $1 billion worth enters the black market annually. I argue that the illicit trade in small arms should be understood not as a market but as a network, one that shares some important properties with networked forms of organization studied by sociologists. I then employ quantitative methods developed for the study of social networks in an effort to show the basic structure of illegal small arms transfers to Africa. The analysis draws from my Illicit Arms Transfers dataset still in development, so the results make use of the most rudimentary information being collected. They are suggestive, however, and the analytical approach promises to shed considerable light on a corner of the global arms trade that is of great interest to the research and activist communities, and of great consequence to those in war-torn regions of the world.

Acknowledgments

A previous version of this essay was presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, March 2005, Honolulu. My thanks to Nicholas Marsh for supplying the reports contained in NISAT's Black Market Archives, to Aaron Karp for suggesting my inclusion in the symposium, and to Michael Ward and others in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington for commenting on this analysis and the larger project.

Notes

1. Small Arms Survey, Small Arms Survey 2003: Development Denied (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Nicholas Marsh, ‘Two Sides of the Same Coin? The Legal and Illegal Trade in Small Arms’, Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol.9 (2002), pp.217–228.

2. R.H. Coase, ‘The Nature of the Firm’, Economica, Vol.4 (1937), p.392; see also Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World's Political Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977), esp. ch.3.

3. For example, see Oliver E. Williamson, ‘The Economics of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol.87 (1981), pp.548–577.

4. Mark Granovetter, ‘Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol.91 (1985), pp.481–510; see also Dennis Wrong, ‘The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology’, American Sociological Review, Vol.26 (1961), pp.183–193.

5. Granovetter, ‘Economic Action and Social Structure’, p.490.

6. Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p.101.

7. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.36; see also Martha Finnemore, ‘Norms, Culture, and World Politics: Insights from Sociology's Institutionalism’, International Organization, Vol.50 (1996), pp.325–347. This argument between realists, liberals, and constructivists fills many pages in the international relations literature. For a shortcut through the debate, see John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’, International Security, Vol.19 (1994/95), pp.5–49, and the follow-on symposium on institutions in the summer 1995 issue of International Security.

8. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, p.215. The individualist orientation of the realist and liberal traditions in international relations theory probably guards against any tendency that constructivists might have to adopt an oversocialized conception of state action. Constructivists' preoccupation with norms, institutions, and identity formation, instead of interstate relationships, is perhaps temporary – due less to the ontology of constructivism than to its newness to the field.

9. Granovetter, ‘Economic Action and Social Structure’, p.506.

10. See, for example, Mary Kaldor, The Baroque Arsenal (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981); Mark C. Suchman and Dana P. Eyre, ‘Military Procurement as Rational Myth: Notes on the Social Construction of Weapons Proliferation’, Sociological Forum, Vol.7 (1992), pp.137–161; Dana P. Eyre and Mark C. Suchman, ‘Status, Norms, and the Proliferation of Conventional Weapons: An Institutional Theory Approach’, in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Alexander Wendt and Michael Barnett, ‘Dependent State Formation and Third World Militarization’, Review of International Studies, Vol.19 (1993), pp.321–347; David Kinsella and Jugdep S. Chima, ‘Symbols of Statehood: Military Industrialization and Public Discourse in India’, Review of International Studies, Vol.27 (2001), pp.353–373.

11. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, sixth edition, revised by Kenneth W. Thompson (New York: Knopf, 1985), pp.86–87.

12. Walter W. Powell, ‘Neither Market nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization’, Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol.12 (1990), p.301.

13. See Keith Krause, Arms and the State: Patterns of Military Production and Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Richard A. Bitzinger, ‘The Globalization of the Arms Industry: The Next Proliferation Challenge’, International Security, Vol.19 (1994), pp.170–198; David Kinsella, ‘Arms Production in the Third Tier: An Analysis of Opportunity and Willingness’, International Interactions, Vol.26 (2000), pp.253–286.

14. David Kinsella, ‘Conflict in Context: Arms Transfers and Third World Rivalry During the Cold War’, American Journal of Political Science, Vol.38 (1994), pp.557–581.

15. On hybrid forms, see Jeffrey L. Bradach and Robert G. Eccles, ‘Price, Authority, and Trust: From Ideal Types to Plural Forms’, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol.15 (1989), pp.97–118.

16. Duffield examines the key features of transborder trade, including the illicit arms trade, in the context of civil war. See Mark Duffield, ‘Globalization, Transborder Trade, and War Economies’, in Mats Berdal and David M. Malone (eds.), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000); also Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), ch.5; Neil Cooper, ‘Warlords and Logo Warriors: The Political Economy of Post-modern Conflict’, in Jurgen Brauer and J. Paul Dunne (eds.), Arming the South: The Economics of Military Expenditure, Arms Production, and Arms Trade in Developing Countries (New York: Palgrave, 2002). Insightful discussions of black market arms transfers also include Michael Klare, ‘The Subterranean Arms Trade: Black-Market Sales, Covert Operations and Ethnic Warfare’, in Andrew J. Pierre (ed.), Cascade of Arms: Managing Conventional Weapons Proliferation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 997); Marsh, ‘Two Sides of the Same Coin?’; Brian Wood and Johan Peleman, The Arms Fixers: Controlling the Brokers and Shipping Agents (Oslo: Peace Research Institute, 1991); and the essays in Lora Lumpe (ed.), Running Guns: The Global Black Market in Small Arms (London: Zed Books, 2000).

17. Paul Collier, ‘Rebellion as a Quasi-Criminal Activity’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol.44 (2000), pp.839–853.

18. The most authoritative and comprehensive guide to the methods of social network analysis is probably Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For a briefer treatment, see John Scott, Social Network Analysis: A Handbook, second edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000). For a comprehensive review of the network analytical literature in multiple disciplines, see M.E.J. Newman, ‘The Structure and Function of Complex Networks’, SIAM Review, Vol.45 (2003), pp.167–256.

19. See Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers, ‘NISAT Black Market Files’, available at <http://www.nisat.org/default.asp?page = /search.asp>.

20. Albert-László Barabási and Reka Albert, ‘Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks’, Science, Vol.286 (1999), pp.509–512; Albert-László Barabási and Eric Bonabeau, ‘Scale-Free Networks’, Scientific American, Vol.288 (2003), pp.60–69.

21. Barabási and Albert, ‘Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks’.

22. There are SNA procedures that work with valued data – in the present context, for example, the total dollar equivalent of arms transferred between actors – but my analysis is based only on binary data indicating the presence or absence of an arms transfer sometime during the 1990–2002 period. Some more elaborate techniques, including some statistical estimators, make use of information about the attributes of actors as well as their links. See Wasserman and Faust, Social Network Analysis, chs.10 and 15.

23. This measure requires two crucial assumptions. First, an actor in j who wants to reach an actor in k is assumed to prefer the shortest path (or paths) linking the two locales. Second, when there are multiple geodesics linking j and k, each has an equal probability of being chosen. Both assumptions are problematic if actors are expected to choose paths based not only on distance, but also on which locales (and actors) lie along the route. That, of course, is a reasonable expectation in the case of the black market arms trade. Nevertheless, I proceed in the hope that these assumptions might be relaxed in subsequent analyses.

24. See, for example, A. Shimbel, ‘Structural Parameters of Communication Networks’, Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, Vol.15 (1953), pp.501–507.

25. Roger V. Gould and Roberto M. Fernandez, ‘Structures of Mediation: A Formal Approach to Brokerage in Transaction Networks’, Sociological Methodology, Vol.19 (1989), pp.89–126.

26. David Kinsella, ‘Changing Structure of the Arms Trade: A Social Network Analysis’, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 28–31 August 2003; available at <http://web.pdx.edu/∼kinsella/papers.html>. See also Chul Woo Kim, ‘The Changing Structures of Global Arms Trade 1987–1994: A Network Analysis on Major Conventional Weapons Trade’, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Jerusalem, 20–24 July 1998.