ABSTRACT
The chapter reviews and documents the evolving research agenda on global small arms distribution from the 1980s to the present. Research on global small arms distribution began to accumulate in the 1980s, but it was only with the rise of small arms policy as an international issue in the 1990s that systematic measurement of small arms became important. The year 1995 was pivotal for efforts to map their global distribution. Initial efforts were speculative but suggestive, publicizing numbers that quickly gained ionic status. With the creation of the Small Arms Survey in 2000 and the United Nations (UN) Programme of Action (PoA) in 2001, research on small arms numbers and distribution grew into a large, collaborative international project, a project destined to continue for a long time to come.
