2a:T42c,

This article assesses the impact of a new form of defense cooperation – formal weapons cooperation agreements, or WCAs – on the global arms trade. WCAs are bilateral framework agreements that establish comprehensive guidelines on the development, production, and exchange of conventional arms. Substantively, WCAs regulate such core areas as procurement and contracting, defense-based research and development, and defense industrial cooperation. These agreements have proliferated dramatically since the mid-1990s. They now number nearly 700, with 30–40 new WCAs signed each year. Newly collected data are used to analyze the effect of WCAs on import and export of conventional weapons. To control for interdependencies in the formation of WCAs, and to account for the mutually endogenous relationship between WCAs and weapons flows, WCAs are modeled as an interdependent network that coevolves with the individual-level arms trade activity of states. The analysis shows that, over the 1995–2010 period, WCAs have significantly increased weapons flows.

2b:T4ce,

This article argues that similar conflict characteristics form links between crises, which signal the relevant actors – that is, the belligerents and the potential mediator(s) – that a comparable approach in terms of third-party mediation could be suitable across these disputes – even if the relevant parties are not the same. Specifically, demand (antagonists) and supply-side actors (mediators) are likely to employ the heuristic of learning from and emulating the mediation behavior in similar crises. The empirical analysis, using data from the International Crisis Behavior project, shows that comparable patterns in violence, arguably the most visible and salient conflict characteristic, are associated with mediation traveling across crises; other dispute characteristics incorporated into spatial lags are not, however. Hence, particularly as domestic/unit-level (monadic) influences are controlled for, the effect of common exposure is taken into account, and different estimation strategies are used, the results emphasize that there is a genuine diffusion process via common levels of violence in the context of international mediation.

2c:T5b1,