ABSTRACT
Introduction In the conflicts with Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Serbia had the advantage of a domestic capability to produce the type of arms most useful in such conflicts. This advantage was a product of two factors. Given the ambiguous position of former Yugoslavia between Soviet communism and Western capitalism the effective price, political and economic, of importing arms was high creating incentives for import-substituting industrialization. Second, for internal geo-political reasons those production facilities were mainly located in Serbia, rather than the other republics. In many other conflicts, the domestic arms production capabilities of the combatants plays a central role. This can be the ability to produce either conventional or unconventional weapons as with Iraq’s ability to produce chemical and biological weapons; India, Pakistan, Israel and White South Africa’s ability to produce nuclearweapons. The possibility of domestic production raises a difficulty for arms export control measures, since embargoes, by raising the effective price of imports, increase the incentive for domestic production. The Carter embargo on arms sales to a number of Latin American countries, adopted for human rights reasons, spurred many of them particularly Argentina and Brazil into developing their own arms industries.
