<Para ID="Par1">A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in...</para>

The `long decade of disarmament' between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s provides ample evidence of the effects of a substantial defense downturn. The chapter starts out with a brief discussion of various concepts of conversion, focusing on a resource-reuse perspective. This is followed by...

Military expenditure is difficult to define. Major issues are functional versus institutional approaches to defense, indirect and intangible costs and benefits and current versus comprehensive accounting. Authoritative institutions have adopted standard definitions but national governments are...

Different issues related to arms transfers demand differing arms transfer data. At the moment, there are two sources available that aggregate data on military expenditures: the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). The...

Regionally concentrated post-cold war military spending cuts offer an opportunity to compare regional conversion across countries. The authors briefly lay out the challenge and distinguish regional from national and industrial conversion strategies. Several factors facilitate or impede...

'The money trail' of terrorist activity has become a focus of counterterrorist policy. There has been major success in implementing international standards to prevent and detect terrorist financing. Available evidence suggests that these efforts have contributed to a decrease in transnational...

The structure of arms imports financing has changed considerably in the past. While in the fifties and sixties grants prevailed, in the seventies credits and cash-payments became most important. It is not possible to indicate how much of arms credits were included in available debt statistics....

Strong assumptions about the military sector are often made from weak data. This is as true for military expenditure data as for other data series. This judgement holds true despite the number of well known and highly reputed institutions putting out military expenditure data. These institutions...