Julien Malizard, a researcher at the Chair, publishes an article in Defence and Peace Economics. This article is entitled « French Arms Exports and Intrastate Conflicts: An Empirical Investigation »and co-written with Cécile Fauconnet (ENSTA Paristech) and Antoine Pietri (IRSEM) and will be published in the magazine's special issue on French issues.
Summary:
France is one of the world's leading exporters of war materiel. These exports are seen as a an essential complement to public procurement for the French defence industry, but also as an important foreign policy leverage.
The aim of this article is to study the consequences of french arms exports on the intensity of civil conflicts in buyer countries. The most recent literature on conflicts is used. A difficulty arises in the statistical treatment of periods of peace: it may be complete for countries that have never experienced conflict, but it may also be incomplete when a period of peace is observed between two periods of conflict.
The results obtained are in line with previous studies. French arms exports are tending to reduce the intensity of civil conflicts while exports from the rest of the world have the opposite effect. This result is robuste to specification changes of the model. Two explanations have been put forward: the relatively rigorous selection of French customers and the type of equipment, which is more defensive in nature.
