Positive thinking

   Vincenzo Bove, University of Warwick UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia increased by 175% in the first nine months of 2017 according to an investigation by the Campaign Against Arms Trade. Similarly, France and the US are major exporters of arms to the oil-rich Gulf state – in 2017 alone, they were worth around US$2.6 billion. Selling weapons is a lucrative business. As well as the money to be made, the arms trade is also a barometer of the quality of relationships between states and it creates an interdependence that gives current and future recipient governments incentives to cooperate with arms suppliers. Oil dependency is another reason. Sometimes this idea is disregarded as a conspiracy theory , but colleagues Claudio Deiana, Roberto Nisticò and I recently researched the extent to which oil-dependent countries transfer arms to oil-rich countries. It turns out it’s a lot. The international transfer of weapons is one of the most dynamic and lucrative...

Fiona Robertson-Snape, Staffordshire University Two anti-arms trade activists, Sam Walton and Dan Woodhouse, have been found not guilty of criminal damage after they were accused of breaking into the BAE Systems plant in Warton, Lancashire, with the intention of disarming warplanes bound for Saudi Arabia. Their protest has strong echoes of a case in 1996, when four women broke into the same plant and used a hammer to damage a Hawk jet . Known as the “Ploughshares Four”, those women made legal history when they were acquitted despite having admitted criminal damage . The court accepted that their action was lawful because it prevented the greater crime of genocide by the regime of former Indonesian president Haji Mohamed Suharto against the people of East Timor, which was then under an illegal Indonesian occupation . The trial of the Ploughshares Four put defence exports firmly on the political agenda. When Labour came to power in 1997, arms sales became a litmus t...