Models and Methods Commons^™

Changing Structure Of The Arms Trade: A Social Network Analysis, David Todd Kinsella

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The global arms trade 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 make this argument and then employ quantitative methods developed for social network analysis in an effort to describe the evolving structure of the arms trade network since the end of World War II. That structure has changed significantly over the past fifty years. It became less dense in the early years of the cold war as newly independent states joined the society of states, but had yet to develop many …