Group14 Report
Towards Greater Transparency for the Global Arms Trade
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Contents
Overview
The arms trade is a global issue of concern because of its negative consequences related to armed conflict, wars, and human rights abuses [1]. It emerged as one of the main global issues in the post-Cold War era in addition to problems such as disease, poverty and gender inequality, as arms supplier countries recognized the effect of stockpiling weapon systems on the breakout of armed conflict. 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. SIPRI aims to contribute to greater transparency in the global arms trade to ensure responsible international arms transfers, hence helping to prevent violent conflict, alleviate tensions and warn about potentially destabilizing arms accumulations. Based on the latest publication by SIPRI in 2017, 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 global arms trade industry is continuing to export weapons into for deadly armed conflicts. [2]
The lack of significant improvement in managing the global arms trade, despite implemented global policies and publication of data, prompts us to develop an alternative solution for the exploration and analysis of data published by SIPRI. Our group has developed an interactive application that allows anyone to visually explore and analyse the global arms trade. It is through this that we hope to offer an additional dimension of transparency and accountability that will invite greater scrutiny to this unabating global problem.
Trend in International Arms Transfers,1978 to 2017
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Past Works
A number of applications exist for the visualization of arms trade data and most of the visualisations are mainly static. SIPRI has produced an interactive web platform using data in their published database but the application was only focused on military expenditure instead of arms trade flows (http://visuals.sipri.org/). There has also been no visualisations carried out based for countries with Low Global Peace Index ratings, as these countries are more vulnerable to import arms.
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Our project aims to contribute an application featuring multiple visualizations, each providing a different aspect of exploration. The following sections describe our approach to the problem and how the application was designed and built.
Motivation and Objectives
Based on the Global Peace Index 2018 published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, we have identified the countries with 'Low' and 'Very Low Peace' global peace index ratings. [3]
Our project aims to identify the trends and patterns in the international arms transfers at the regional and country levels for these Low Peace countries and explore the arms trade dependencies of these countries for the period 1993 to 2017. 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 provide students and policymakers a better understanding and holistic view of the global arms trade for the Low Peace countries.
Data Sources
The table shows the data sources for our project. We use the Trend-Indicator-Value (TIV) published by SIPRI to visualise the trends and patterns of arms imports for the Low Peace Countries from 1993 to 2017.
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Design Frame and Demonstration
In this section, we walk through the different sections of our application and how users can explore the interactive visualizations created.
We design our application to have 6 components:
1. Visualizing the 2018 Global Peace Index,
2. Visualizing the Volume of imports for the top 100 importing countries,
3. Visualizing the arms dependencies,
4. Visualizing the arms trade flows over time,
5. Visualizing the relationship between arms imports, foreign direct investment and GDP per capita, and
6. Visualizing the arms trade network.
2018 Global Peace Index
We created a choropleth map to allow users to visualise geographically where the countries with low Global Peace Index (GPI) ratings are located. Countries are coloured by their Global Peace Index rankings with darker shades of red indicating a poor Global Peace ranking or countries considered to be least peaceful. Users can zoom in and out of the map and highlight the country of interest to see the country name and its Global Peace Index ranking. We used the leaflet package in R as it is highly interactive and customizable.
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Visualizing the Arms Dependencies
We use a treemap and chord diagram to visualize the arms dependencies for the 42 Low Peace selected countries.
Chord Diagram
The chord diagram shows the source of arms imports flows for the selected 42 countries, in a given five-year period. It is created using the chorddiag package in R, which allows the creation of interactive chord diagrams using the JavaScript visualization library D3 from within R using the htmlwidgets interfacing framework.
The chord diagram created to visualize trade flows is shown below. Users can filter by region, as well as five-year time period, on the sidebar to explore the total volume of arms imports for countries in the selected region, and the supplier countries. Hovering over a band between two countries highlights the band and reveals the volume of arms imports to the importing country from its supplier.
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Treemap
The objective of creating the treemap is to show for each selected import country, which regions and countries specifically make up the sum of its imports, over five-year periods. The hierarchy of the treemap is the five-year periods as the first hierarchy, followed by the region and then each specific country in the region. The total imports value is represented by the size of each treemap node as well as the colour.
Users can filter by import country to visualize the country’s dependencies on supplier countries for arms in five-year periods from 1993 to 2017. Users can click on a region in the treemap to find out individual countries for the supplier region.
The treemap is created using the treemap package and the functionality of the treemap is combined with the interactivity of the d3.js treemaps though the d3treeR htmlwidget.
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Visualizing the Arms Trade Flows Over Time
The ridgeline plots were incorporated to visualize changes in arms imports over time. The ggplot2 and ggridge packages were used to create the ridgeline plot.The ggridge plot is useful as it can compare the trends in the arms imports of several countries together. Users can filter by region to explore the distribution of import values for countries in the selected region over time.
The facet_grid function is used to form a matrix of panels consisting of the export regions and the five-year time period. With the facetted diagram, users can explore the distribution of import values for countries of the selected region by five-year time periods and by export regions.
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Visualizing the relationship between arms imports, foreign direct investment and GDP per capita
The bubble plot visualises the relationship between arms imports, FDI, GDP per capita and population for the Low Peace countries. Users can select different years to explore how the arms imports change with the social and economic indicators for the selected country.
To create the bubble plot, we use the plotly package as it is an interactive, browser-based charting library built on the open source JavaScript graphing library plotly.js.
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Visualizing the arms trade networkArms Trade Network
The network diagram created to visualize the links between the 42 countries importing countries and their suppliers is shown below. We used the network diagram to provide an additional dimension to trade flows on top of the bilateral trade flows visualized using the chord diagram.
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Discussion
What has the audience learned from your work? What new insights or practices has your system enabled? A full blown user study is not expected, but informal observations of use that help evaluate your system are encouraged.
Future Work
A description of how your system could be extended or refined.
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/
[3] The Institute for Economics and Peace. http://visionofhumanity.org/indexes/global-peace-index/
