Target 16.4 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals aims to, among other things, ‘significantly reduce illicit financial and arms flows’ by 2030. Indicators have been agreed for measuring the achievement of this target. Data-collection efforts have been launched for arms flows while work continues on finding an agreed definition and measure of illicit financial flows.
This paper focuses on reporting for 2017, the most recent reporting year, as indicative for both the problems of participation and quality.
The third phase of the New Geopolitics of Peace Operations (NGP) initiative seeks to enhance understanding of how peace operations interact with non-traditional security challenges such as terrorism and violent extremism, irregular migration, piracy, organized crime and environmental degradation.
The Horn of Africa is undergoing far-reaching changes in its external security environment. A wide variety of international security actors—from Europe, the United States, the Middle East, the Gulf, and Asia—are currently operating in the region. As a result, the Horn of Africa has experienced a proliferation of foreign military bases and a build-up of naval forces. The external militarization of the Horn poses major questions for the future security and stability of the region.
The Black Sea region is experiencing a changing military balance. The six littoral states (Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine) intensified their efforts to build up their military potential after Russia’s takeover of Crimea and the start of the internationalized civil war in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
This background paper on Russia is part of the Black Sea Regional Security Initiative, a project launched by SIPRI in 2017 to provide independent data and analysis on security developments in the region and to promote transparency around military issues.
A significant number of cooperation and assistance activities have been carried out in recent years aimed at helping states to improve their arms transfer and small arms and light weapons (SALW) controls. Many of these have focused on the implementation of either the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) or the United Nations Programme of Action on SALW while others make no mention of these instruments.
Multilateral peace operations are increasingly confronting a set of interrelated and mutually reinforcing security challenges that are relatively new to them, that do not respect borders, and that have causes and effects which cut right across the international security, peacebuilding and development agendas.
Article 36 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions imposes a practical obligation on states to review the legality of all new weapons, means or methods of warfare before they are used in an armed conflict. To encourage more widespread compliance with the obligation of Article 36 and support confidence building in the area of legal reviews, SIPRI has developed a compendium of existing national Article 36 review procedures.
Additive manufacturing (AM), also referred to as ‘3D printing’, is a rapidly developing technology. AM enables the production of objects of virtually any shape by depositing and bonding together successive layers of material. AM machines are increasingly capable of producing a variety of items for aerospace and missile applications which are subject to dual-use export controls. The increasing capabilities of AM machines—in combination with their reliance on intangible transfers of technology (ITT)—have raised concerns in the multilateral export control regimes.