Group14 Proposal

Visualising the Arms Imports of the Least Peaceful Countries in the World

Problem Background

Data Preparation

Methodology and Dashboard Design

Insights

Conclusion

Overview

The global arms trade has been a major concern as the international transfer of arms between states could lead to wars, crimes against humanity and contribute to serious violations of international human rights. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) conducts research on arms transfers between regions and states aimed at increasing the fundamental understanding of the impact of arms transfers and to support policymaking. An important aim of SIPRI's research is to contribute to greater transparency as a means of ensuring responsible international arms transfers, thereby helping to prevent violent conflict, alleviate tensions, warn about potentially destabilizing arms accumulations and counter the misallocation of limited resources. Based on the latest publication by SIPRI, a rising trend is observed in the volume of international transfers of major weapons, with the highest volume of arm transfers recorded between 2013 to 2017, since 1990 [1]. Research conducted by SIPRI also shows that the the global arms trade industry is continuing to export weapons into for deadly armed conflicts. [2]

Trend in international transfers,1978 to 2017

Motivation and Objectives

Based on the Global Peace Index 2018 published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, we have identified the top 40 countries with the lowest global peace index.

Our project aims to identify the trends and patterns in the international arms transfers at the regional and country levels for these 40 countries and wish to explore the arms trade dependencies between these countries with other countries. We also aim to explore the major importers and exporters of arms weapons and to find out the relationships between the global arm importers and exporters. Our team is motivated to design a dynamic and interactive dashboard to to provide students, policymakers and officials a better understanding and holistic view of the global arms trade.

Through our analysis, we hope to address the following:

1) To explore the arms imports at regional and country level
We want to observe if there are any unusual trends and find out the countries and regions with the highest arm imports.

2) To explore the arm trade dependencies between countries
We would like to explore the chord diagram and network diagram to find out the exchange of arms transfer between countries.

3) Analyse the top exporters of arms
For a particular region or country, we would like to find out which are the top exporters supplying arms and find out the trends in the arms suppliers across the years.

4) Explore the arms imports with the economic and population indicators
Our group wants to explore if there is a relationship between the economic and population indicators with the arms imports of countries.

Data Sources

Type	Description	Source
Demographics	Detailed Listing of total trend-indicator value (TIV) of a country arms imports or exports, broken down by supplier, recipient	https://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers
Demographics	Detailed listing of World Economic and Population Indicators	https://www.worldbank.org/
Demographics	Detailed listing of Global Peace Index of Countries	http://economicsandpeace.org/

Tools and Packages

• treemap
• d3treeR
• dplyr
• tidyverse
• tidyr
• ggplot2
• tidyr
• rsconnect
• htmltools
• htmlwidgets
• metricsgraphics
• RColorBrewer
• shiny
• flexdashboard
• networkD3
• visNetwork
• plotly
• janitor

References

[1] Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. https://www.sipri.org/research/armament-and-disarmament/arms-transfers-and-military-spending/international-arms-transfers
[2] Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/09/killer-facts-the-scale-of-the-global-arms-trade/