Presenter: Brandon Kinne, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California - Davis 

Title: Bilateral Defense Cooperation and the New Global Security Network

Abstract: The study of defense cooperation has historically focused on formal military alliances, but alliances are dwindling in number and rarely invoked. In contrast, bilateral defense cooperation agreements (DCAs) have proliferated dramatically. At their most ambitious, DCAs coordinate and regulate the entirety of their respective member states' defense-related interactions, covering such areas as defense industrial cooperation, weapons acquisition, mutual consultation, joint exercises, training and military education, research and development, and exchange of classified information. Since 1980, states have signed nearly 2,000 of these agreements. Taken as a whole, they constitute an emerging, hitherto unexamined network of global security cooperation. This project uses newly collected data, covering the period 1980 to 2010, to assess the impact of this network on key outcomes in international defense cooperation, including bilateral weapons flows, joint military exercises, and active bilateral cooperation in militarized disputes and peacekeeping missions. We employ inferential models of network coevolution, which allow us to (1) model dependencies in both the DCA network and in the outcomes of interest, and (2) model the reciprocal or “coevolutionary” relationship between DCAs and those outcomes. The analysis shows that DCAs increase defense cooperation in all areas. These agreements play a fundamental role in the contemporary global security environment and are now at least as influential as traditional military alliances.

Funding for DINR's speaker series for the current academic year has been made possible by a grant from Dartmouth's Neukom Institute and by a generous gift in support of the Quantitative Social Sciences at Dartmouth.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dinr/