Although a prevalent technology of conflict, the impact of small arms imports on the risk of intrastate conflict outbreak has not been examined so far. This article argues that small arms not only enhance general military capabilities, but also contribute to state capacities necessary for conflict prevention. These two mechanisms are incorporated in a formal model of power shifts. The derived hypotheses are tested on 146 countries for the period 1993–2014. Using split-population and penalized fixed-effects logit models as innovative estimation methods for rare-events data, small arms imports are found to have no or even a risk-reducing impact.
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