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Former Soviet Bloc Locales In Africa's Illicit Arms Trade Network, David Todd Kinsella
Former Soviet Bloc Locales In Africa's Illicit Arms Trade Network, David Todd Kinsella
Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations
Small arms and light weapons are the primary cause of death in the violent conflicts raging today, but the small arms trade is difficult to track, and the illicit trade in small arms is doubly so. Nevertheless, information is available and research institutes like the Small Arms Survey and the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers are at the forefront of efforts to collect and distribute this information. This paper focuses on the illicit arms trade and draws on a database I am developing, the Illicit Arms Transfer Database, which systematizes information contained in journalistic reports on illicit small arms …
The Black Market In Small Arms: Examining A Social Network, David Todd Kinsella
The Black Market In Small Arms: Examining A Social Network, David Todd Kinsella
Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations
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 …