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Illicit arms transfers to Africa and the prominence of the former Soviet bloc: a social network analysis

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Abstract

Small arms and light weapons are the primary causes of death in the violent conflicts raging today. Although the small arms trade is difficult to track, and the illicit trade doubly so, a wealth of information is available. This article applies some basic tools of social network analysis (SNA) to reveal the high profile of former Soviet bloc countries in the illicit arms trade with Africa. I set up this analysis with a discussion of the features of social networks that allow them to facilitate the transfer of illicit weaponry, and follow the presentation of my findings with some explanations for the prominence of Russia and other post-communist countries in this trade. My discussion focuses on the importance of relationships, their quantity and quality, as providing opportunities for, and constraints on, the flow of material and social resources between the actors and locales that comprise the illicit arms trade network. I also highlight the extent to which the positions of key players may account for their power within the network and their roles in security governance, which in the illicit context requires the maintenance of secrecy and redundancy.

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Notes

  1. On the SALW trade, see [14, 78, 25, 16, 27, 26, 7]. The estimate of the illicit portion of the overall SALW trade is reported in [57]. Although one might want to distinguish between illicit and illegal arms, I do not do so in this paper. But see, for example, [38, 1].

  2. This discussion follows [56].

  3. The Iran-Contra affair involved the Reagan administration’s covert and illegal sale of arms to Iran, which was subject to a U.S. arms embargo by virtue of the country’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. Relevant international law may include the Friendly Relations Declaration (UN General Assembly Resolution 2625, October 1970), which asserts that “no State shall organize, assist, foment, finance, incite or tolerate subversive, terrorist or armed activities directed towards the violent overthrow of the regime of another State, or interfere in civil strife in another State.” The Arms Trade Treaty, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2013, but not yet in force, sets the bar higher, prohibiting arms transfers if the supplying government has reason to believe that “the arms or items would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such, or other war crimes.” Neither instrument singles out illicit arms transfers, though. The Illicit Firearms Protocol to the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2001, does not itself prohibit illicit arms transfers, but directs state parties to adopt legislation criminalizing illicit arms manufacturing and trafficking.

  4. For an analysis of the factors contributing to compliance and noncompliance with arms embargoes, see [61]; [32]. On the role of international norms and arms control regimes in curbing arms supply, see [36]; [31].

  5. On the control of illicit arms transfers, see [40, 83].

  6. This discussion is based on the typology presented in [9]. See also [64, 34, 3, 66].

  7. The concept of social capital is the subject of a large and growing social scientific literature. See, for example, [22, 13, 70, 72, 89].

  8. For a skeptical view, see [63]

  9. See, for example, [73, 59, 6, 52, 76, 67, 53, 30, 60, 43, 84: appendix B]

  10. Economic theories of rebellion posit similar social dynamics. See, for example, [23].

  11. For a discussion of the disadvantages these organizations face, see [29].

  12. The figures and analysis discussed in the following paragraphs were generated from the raw data assembled by Curwen [24].

  13. Clearly, there were more than 38 individuals involved in these four events, so the network that Curwen reconstructs is represents only the most visible (to UN experts) of the real-world network. The study of illicit networks must therefore contend with questions of sampling. See [75, 35]

  14. These results are available upon request.

  15. For a full description of IATD coding procedures, including a complete list of variables and definitions, see [49] The database itself is not yet available to the wider research community. See also [79]

  16. Dealers are those middlemen who buy and sell the arms, in effect taking temporary ownership of the weapons along the way. Brokers are those who facilitate the arms deals. They bring parties together, perhaps helping with financing, and they usually profit from their brokerage, but they do not take possession or ownership of the arms shipment in route. Shipping agents are those who help arrange transportation of the arms, but who do not do the actual shipping. See [88].

  17. Here, “exporter” means the state locale serving as the starting point for a shipment of illicit weaponry arriving in an African country, not necessarily the country that manufactured the weaponry. Also, I am using the terms “prominent” and “central” to describe state locales that served a starting points for shipments of arms to the largest number of the other countries, not necessarily starting points for the largest volume of transferred weaponry. However, I suspect that there is a correlation.

  18. Viktor Bout is a good example, although certainly not representative in terms of business acumen and success. Bout served as an officer in the Soviet Armed Forces—different sources place him in the Air Forces, military intelligence (the GRU), and the KGB (unlikely)—and, after being discharged at the end of the cold war, got his start in arms trafficking by acquiring transport planes. [33]

  19. For a comprehensive overview of Russia’s role in illicit arms transfers throughout the 1990s, see [12]. In addition to the Russian military, Berryman also considers the role of Russian arms manufacturers, but this is considerably less documented. See also [2]

  20. The “Soviet inheritance” has also been used to explain organized crime in former Soviet republics. See [74, 77]

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the workshop, “The New Power Politics: Networks, Governance, and Global Security,” at the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, 1-2 March 2013. My thanks to Nicholas Marsh and David Isenberg for supplying the reports contained in NISAT’s Black Market Archives, and to Deborah Avant, Erica Chenoweth, Oliver Westerwinter, and other workshop participants for comments.

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  1. Hatfield School of Government, Portland State University, 1825 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, 97201, USA

    David Kinsella

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Appendix: Coding Example

Appendix: Coding Example

Coding text-based accounts of illicit arms transfers is a labor intensive task. Researchers have made considerable progress in the development of automated coding algorithms for the creation of events data in other areas of international relations research, which has drastically reduced the time and labor required to generate reliable data suitable for analysis. However, descriptions of arms-transfer events are typically too complex to parse with the software available at this time. But as further progress is made on the machine coding of international events, new opportunities may become available for automated coding of these events as well.

What follows is an example of an article appearing in NISAT’s Black Market File Archive, and descriptors for two arms-transfer events identified from this account and entered into the IATD. The article is from Haarretz, the Israeli daily, and was distributed by the U.S. government’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).

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Kinsella, D. Illicit arms transfers to Africa and the prominence of the former Soviet bloc: a social network analysis. Crime Law Soc Change 62, 523–547 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-014-9531-9

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