Bruce Russett Award for Article of the Year in JCR for 2019

• DOI: 10.1177/0022002720958201
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Subject Matter: Award Announcement

Award Announcement

Bruce Russett Award

for Article of the Year

in JCR for 2019

Paul Thurner, Christian Schmid, Skyler Cranmer, and Go¨ran Kauermann have been

awarded the annual Bruce Russett Award for the Article of the Year published in

Journal of Conflict Resolution during 2019. The winning article, “Network Inter-

dependencies and the Evolution of the International Arms Trade” was published in

the August 2019 issue (JCR 63:7).

Members of the editorial board of JCR participated in a two-stage process in order

to determinethe winner of the award. The first step was for a nominatingcommittee to

recommend theirtop four articles for consideration.In the second step the four articles

that received themost nominations were given to a votingcommittee who were asked

to rank-order each of the articles. The winner received the highest overall rankings

among all thevotes cast. In casting their votesfor the article of the year, thecommittee

was asked to judge the strength of each article in terms of new and important contri-

butions to basic research based on considerations of theoretical quality, methodolo-

gical rigor, and substantive relevance to the field of conflict studies.

In the award-winning article, Thurner and co-authors describe, explain, and pre-

dict the structure and dynamics of the international arms trade network from 1950-

2013. They draw upon a political economy model of arms supply to theoretically

ground their analysis in which economic and security conditions are the main drivers

of the arms trade. This political economy approach is then innovatively incorporated

into a network-oriented model of the international arms trade in major conventional

weapons. Statistical analyses are conducted using cutting-edge exponential random

graph models. The findings reveal a complex array of network processes at work,

including strong path dependencies, the substantial influence of market concentra-

tions among arms suppliers, and the changing relative influences of economic and

security considerations on the arms trade. One of the interesting findings is that

geopolitical alliances were less important as determinants of the arms trade in the

early post-Cold War period but after 2001 regained the ir central influence. The

theoretical and empirical analyses provide evidence of a new international regime

of security cooperation over the past decade and offer new insights into regional

power shifts and conflicts that are shaped by the arms trade.

The editor of JCR would like to extend a special thanks to all of those board

members who served on the nominating and voting committees: William Donahue,

Dan Druckman, Zeev Maoz, Todd Sandler, and Ron Smith.

The award is USD 500.

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2020, Vol. 64(10) 1795

ªThe Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0022002720958201

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