Contemporary scholarship on the arms trade and arms transfer control tends to operate within the realist-liberal-constructivist triangle that dominates the mainstream of the wider discipline. Realist accounts of balancing or threat perception sit alongside liberal accounts of multilateral regimes for arms transfer control and constructivist accounts of the symbolic politics of arms acquisition or human security approaches to normative change and protection of human rights and humanitarian law. Despite their many differences, these approaches all think in terms of relations between states (seen as autonomous from both the arms industry and unscrupulous private brokers as a social force), and between the domestic and the international. This is particularly so because of the privileged claim that the arms trade has on national defence and state sovereignty. Both in scholarship and policy circles, the arms trade is a key bastion of methodologically nationalist claims. The international appears as the sum of its constituent parts, of nation states. What falls out, though, is the North-South dimension, which is probably the most significant dimension of the arms trade as a practice. The South features either in the often blanket and sometimes stereotyped, but usually under-theorised guise of the repressive, authoritarian regime, the conflict-affected zone of disorder, or fragile state. Even in cosmopolitan approaches that probably do most to transcend methodological nationalism, in which the international features in the form of international humanitarian law and universal human rights, the South primarily features as a site of intervention, and we are left with few intellectual or political resources for understanding either the dynamics of the role of the arms trade in repression or conflict, let alone southern resistance to seemingly obvious public goods such as the Arms Trade Treaty.  The arms trade has long been an international, and primarily North-South, phenomenon. The North-South dimension is fairly easy to see: two-thirds to three-quarters of contemporary international arms transfers are to developing countries. In the postwar era, the world’s major arms suppliers have been the USA, West European states and Russia, and the most significant importers have been found in the Middle East and Asia. Yet this remains stuck on the terrain of methodological nationalism: we are still talking about states, even though gesturing towards the hierarchy and asymmetry captured in the notion of tiers. And most data generated on arms transfers is organised in terms of national states as exporters and importers. Whilst the terms “North” and “South” generally map on to other binaries such as “developed” and “underdeveloped”, the arms trade often throws up examples that complicate things and remind us that these are primarily political rather than geographical categories. Israel, for example, is a niche high-tech producer and supplier, integrated into western production networks, engaged in a colonial war with part of its population, and located in a region generally understood as southern. China is now a top five arms exporter and is nurturing asymmetric relations with African states but still sees itself a developing country. The growth of Chinese arms exports should be seen as a return rather than a rise from nowhere – it was a major arms supplier when it supplied weapons to both sides in the Iran-Iraq war; and gunpowder was invented in China as early as the 9th century, troubling Eurocentric accounts of western military superiority. And whilst most accounts of North-South politics focus on the liberal West’s engagement with the South, don’t forget that the USSR, and now Russia and former Soviet states also engage in various forms of core-periphery relations with arms clients.
Contemporary scholarship tends to operate within the realist-liberal-constructivist triangle that dominates the mainstream of the wider discipline Realist accounts of balancing or threat perception sit alongside liberal accounts of multilateral regimes for arms transfer control and constructivist accounts of the symbolic politics of arms acquisition or human security approaches to normative change and protection of human rights and humanitarian law these approaches all think in terms of relations between states (seen as autonomous from both the arms industry and unscrupulous private brokers as a social force) . This is particularly so because of the privileged claim that the arms trade has on national defence and state sovereignty. Both in scholarship and policy circles, the arms trade is a key bastion of methodologically nationalist claims. The international appears as the sum of its constituent parts, of nation states What falls out, though, is the North-South dimension, which is probably the most significant dimension of the arms trade as a practice. The South features either in the often blanket and sometimes stereotyped guise of the repressive, authoritarian regime, the conflict-affected zone of disorder, or fragile state. Even in cosmopolitan approaches that probably do most to transcend methodological nationalism, in which the international features in the form of international humanitarian law and universal human rights, the South primarily features as a site of intervention, and we are left with few intellectual or political resources for understanding either the dynamics of the role of the arms trade in repression or conflict  The arms trade has long been an international, and primarily North-South, phenomenon two-thirds to three-quarters of contemporary international arms transfers are to developing countries In the postwar era, the world’s major arms suppliers have been the USA, West European states and Russia, and the most significant importers have been found in the Middle East and As we are still talking about states, even though gesturing towards the hierarchy and asymmetry captured in the notion of tiers Whilst the terms “North” and “South” generally map on to other binaries such as “developed” and “underdeveloped”, the arms trade often throws up examples that complicate things and remind us that these are primarily political rather than geographical categories Israel, for example, is a niche high-tech producer and supplier, integrated into western production networks, engaged in a colonial war with part of its population, and located in a region generally understood as southern China is now a top five arms exporter and is nurturing asymmetric relations with African states but still sees itself a developing country And whilst most accounts of North-South politics focus on the liberal West’s engagement with the South, don’t forget that the USSR, and now Russia and former Soviet states also engage in various forms of core-periphery relations with arms clients.