Michael Brzoska

Foreign affairs practitioners and policy analysts claim that international arms embargoes usually fail due to the lack of political will among national governments to implement and enforce these restrictions. This volume confronts this critique directly, first by describing a more nuanced assessment of success, and then by presenting well-informed empirical and case-study chapters that reveal arms embargoes to be more effective than often understood. The chapters in this book examine some of the more complex cases of arms embargoes such as Iraq, Pakistan, Angola, Liberia and the Great Lakes region of Africa. Readers will find data and assessments not available in prior studies, as well as frameworks that can be replicated in future research. The book concludes with policy suggestions for how arms embargoes might be strengthened and their political objectives more readily attained.

The value of major conventional weapons imported by Third World countries between 1971 and 1985 was quadruple that for the previous two decades. This spectacular increase reflects changes in the economic and technological relations between industrialized nations and the Third World, as well as having profound political repercussions. This book gives a comprehensive overview of the flow of major conventional weapons during the period 1971-85. It analyses both the suppliers and the main Third World recipients, describing the inflow of arms and the reasons underlying it. The facts that propel this arms trade are assessed in a concluding chapter which also analyses the structural changes that have occurred in the arms markets and their implications. The detailed statistics and arms trade registers for the period (in some cases from 1951), and the introduction of a new SIPRI price system for evaluating the arms trade, make this a valuable reference work.