Abstract

The effect of international arms transfers on militarized interstate conflicts over contentious territorial issues has not gotten much attention by scholars of international conflicts. However, international arms transfers can affect how countries would deal with the issue conflicts because of the two reasons. First, arms transfer can change the military capabilities of the recipients. Second, arms trading history can affect how countries view one another. In this paper, I demonstrate the varying effects of international arms transfers on interstate conflicts over contentious issues depending on the trait of recipients, and arms trade relationships between countries. For the empirical analysis, I use the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)’s arms transfers database to measure the relative amount of yearly arms transfers of both challenger and target countries in the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) dataset. The empirical results using the binary logistic regression model show that arms transfers to countries have significant effects on the interstate militarized conflicts depending on interests recipient countries. Arms transfers to target countries decrease the probability of militarized disputes of territorial issues. In addition, the effect of challenger arms gains is conditioned to the fact that it has received arms from the target. The arms transfers from target to challenger significantly lowers the effect of challenger’s intention to use military options regarding territorial conflicts. The outcomes show that transferred arms can affect the decisions of recipients to solve the contested territorial issues.