Military Technology and Human Loss in Intrastate Conflict: The Conditional Impact of Arms Imports

• Author: Paul W. Thurner,Marius Mehrl
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0022002719893446
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Military Technology

and Human Loss

in Intrastate Conflict:

The Conditional Impact

of Arms Imports

Marius Mehrl

1

, and Paul W. Thurner

2

Abstract

Although often conjectured, there is a lack of empirical evidence whether interna-

tional inflows of military technology render intrastate conflicts more violent. We

address this question and argue that expansions in governments’ ability to fight

aggravate the lethality of intrastate war. However, we expect this effect to be

conditioned by rebels’ military endowments and their choice of tactics. Where

rebels are weak, they avoid open combat, and additional governmental arms imports

have no effect on the number of casualties. In contrast, governmental arms imports

cause human losses to multiply when rebels have achieved military parity or

superiority and, as a consequence, use conventional combat tactics. This hypothesis

is tested on the number of battle-related deaths in intrastate conflict, 1989 to 2011,

using, for the first time, data on governmental imports of both major conventional

weapons and small arms. Results support our propositions and are robust to

instrumenting for imports of both types of weapons.

Keywords

conflict intensity, civil war, military technology, balance of power, arms trade

1

Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom

2

Department of Political Science and Empirical Political Research, Ludwig Maximilians University of

Munich, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Paul W. Thurner, Department of Political Science and Empirical Political Research, Ludwig Maximilians

University of Munich, Oettingenstr. 67, Munich 80538, Germany.

Email: paul.thurner@gsi.uni-muenchen.de

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2020, Vol. 64(6) 1172-1196

ªThe Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022002719893446

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

International transfers of military hardware are frequently covered in the news, and

many reports criticize suppliers for providing arms to governments embroiled in

violent domestic conflict or well known for violations of human rights (see, e.g.,

Knight 2017; Cecco 2018; Wilcken 2018). These normative concerns induce inter-

national organizations to take action, such as the United Nations with the Arms

Trade Treaty (Garcia 2014). A growing literature examines whether multilateral

measures actually constrain governments’ arms transfer decisions (Blanton 2000,

2005; Perkins and Neumayer 2010; Erickson 2013; Schulze, Pamp, and Thurner

2017). Despite the attention to countries’ decision to sell weapons to other govern-

ments, the underlying causal claim that arms imports fuel and intensify violence has

received scant consideration in the scholarly literature. To the best of our knowl-

edge, there is only one quantitative study that examines how the import of military

technology affects the intensity of armed conflict (Moore 2012). We show below

that even these results are not reliable. We thus face a surprising deficit of knowl-

edge about whether and how transfers of military technology increase the casualty

numbers of intrastate conflicts.

In our view, this is due to a lack of theorizing of how—and under which

strategic circumstances—such transfers contribute to intensified fighting.

1

We

argue that a conflict’s general balance of power crucially moderates whether

additional governmental fighting ability in the form of imported arms increases

conflict intensity. Inflows of governmental military hardware are expected to make

conflict more lethal only when rebels are militarily equal or stronger. To detect this

conditional effect, we interact rebels’ relative military strength at time twith arms

imports at time t. We are thus able to separate the effect of the general constellation

of military might from that of additional governmental investments in the ability to

fight and kill.

Theoretically, we build on recent studies that emphasize the effect of technolo-

gies of rebellion on conflict (Kalyvas and Balcells 2010; Balcells and Kalyvas 2014)

to develop the mechanism underlying the expected conditional effect of arms

imports. We focus on how the type of combat observed in a conflict is determined

by the balance of power between the b elligerents. Militarily weaker rebels will

employ guerrilla and terrorist tactics, thus trying to avoid open clashes with gov-

ernment forces, whereas equal and stronger ones will usually also employ conven-

tional modes of warfare. This means that government forces need to counter these

challenges with different tactics and military technology. When facing weaker

rebels, their superior ability to fight is already ensured, and the issue is finding and

identifying enemy combatants. Additional military technology does not help in

doing so and arms imports thus should have no effect on the intensity of conflict.

When rebels are militarily equal or even superior to government forces, arms

imports in contrast provide a relevant boost to the government’s ability to wage

war, allowing it to attack the enemy with increased force and engage in decisive

battles. Therefore, arms imports should increase the intensity of fighting and thus

casualty numbers in these cases. In line with this framework, we expect that a larger

Mehrl and Thurner 1173