In a press release accompanying their annual update their trade registries database, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported a number of their major statistical findings regarding the global state of weapons transfer. In bold-texted font, the headline read “Global arms trade: USA increases dominance, arms flows to the Middle East surge”, a statement that would seem to make intuitive sense to anyone who is even remotely aware of current events. The press release goes on to report a 7.8% increase in the volume of international arms transfers for the years 2014-2018 compared to 2009-2013 (a 23% increase when compared to 2004-2008). Last year, the United States, Russia, France, Germany, and China claimed the top 5 positions in major arms exporters, whereas countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Qatar, and Iraq all saw marked increases in the number of imports. Venezuela, on the other hand, decreased its arms important by a sharp 83% over the course of the last four years.
Since the release of the data, similarly brief articles on the “ups-and-downs” of national weapons flows have been popping up on the Internet as news blurbs and short articles, oftentimes published on blogs and small news sites. Asides for a listicle from the USA Today on the top 20 arms producers in the world, the US has almost zero media presence in the Google News section when “SIPRI” is used as a search term. The news outlets that do pop up instead are surprisingly diverse: the German website Deutsche Welle, the South China Morning Post, the English-language Indian news site The Print, and the Turkish-language distribution of Sputnik, just to name a few. For someone used to seeing news dominated by CNN, the New York Times, POLITICO, and Fox News, it feels a bit strange to be wandering onto a part of the internet where their silence on an issue like global trends in armament can be so palpably felt.
On the website, the institute suggests a few possible uses for its data, which range from studying how weapons trade relationships between nations have changed over time, where countries in conflict get their weapons, and where potentially volatile buildups of weapons are occuring. Without at all slighting the work that is done by institutes such as the SIPRI, it nonetheless goes without saying that relying solely on publicly disclosed records of weapons transfers very likely only covers a silver of the entire arms trade ecosystem as a whole, given the penchants of militaries worldwide to working in secrecy. From the get go, it is clear with this project that what can be wrangled from data is not “fact”, but instead a mediated representation of a much greater totality.
All of the questions that SIPRI suggested, important and necessary as they, are ultimately questions of quantity. As mentioned previously, most traditional uses of this dataset have been to report trends, as indicated by the fluctuation of percentages and units over time within the dataset. What this project will try to do, then, is to employ the data to inform or give direction to more qualitative findings. In this fashion, the project is rather meta, and can almost be described as providing a close-reading to a dataset that is meant to be a distant-read.What can the data tell us about the material conditions of war? Does it matter what plane model was being used when? Can heavy arms transfer be related in any way to other commodity flows? What kind of impact does weapons flow have on people’s lived conditions?
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