Arms Collaboration: Weapons Interdependence, not Weaponized Interdependence

• In Event: Choose Your Weapon: Political Economy Approaches to Arming

Abstract

As modern armaments become more technologically complex, states—even powerful ones—find it increasingly difficult to sustain the costs and technology necessary for developing advanced weapons platforms. While some states decide to import advanced weapons, others join international development projects to co-develop and co-produce them, creating networks of complex interdependence. Transnational projects such as the Joint Strike Fighter and the Eurofighter are key examples of large state-led international markets with critical political, economic, and security implications (Caverley et al 2019). Powerful key states form the core of these asymmetrical networks, but they require the buy-in of periphery states to provide the investment capital and supply chain contributions in order to achieve market scale. International arms development networks represent a number of empirical and theoretical puzzles. Farrell and Newman (2019) have theorized that asymmetric networks in international relations are ripe for exploitation, or ‘Weaponized Interdependence’ (WI) by powerful states. However, the empirical record of networked weaponization of weapons projects is mixed, requiring more theoretical development of the WI framework and its scope conditions. In this paper, we compare two weaponization attempts: the 2019 expulsion of Turkey from the US dominated F-35 project and the 2019 attempted export stop of the Eurofighter Typhoon from the UK to Saudi Arabia via Germany. A second puzzle generated by the WI framework is why peripheral states join asymmetric networks in the first place, specifically when the threat of weaponization is always present and may be detrimental to the state’s security if enacted as well as why some states decide to join hierarchal networks over flat networks, where all network-members are more equal. In order to evaluate this question, we look at the cases of the early stages of international negotiations over the F-35 and Eurofighter contracts.

Authors

• Kaija E. Schilde, Boston University

• Florian Bodamer, Boston University