Politics, Power, and Influence: Defense Industries in the Post-Cold War

Abstract

The post-Cold War era is placing the defense industry at a crossroads. If, on the one hand, it is under great pressure to guarantee warlike efforts around the world, with tight budgets and uncertain lead-times, on the other hand, it is seen as a central instrument for national sovereignty and foreign policy. The purpose of this research is to report the state-of-the-art of the existing literature and explore the most relevant research areas in order to provide the conceptual basis for further empirical research. To do so, this study uses a preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis (PRISMA), which is an adequate technique as it allows one to discover concepts, ideas, and debates about the defense industry. The results evidenced three different approaches to the defense industry—integration, autarky, and domination. In that regard, we present several case studies in which the defense industry is used as an instrument of foreign policy or national sovereignty. Future studies may focus on empirical research to validate the theoretical findings or to identify variables that lead some defense industries to seek synergies, resorting to mergers and acquisitions, while other defense companies prefer to obtain State funds.

Democracy and the challenges of globalisation: a theoretical framework

“…Overall, a systematic review was a valuable tool to discover key theories, concepts, ideas and debates around globalisation and democracy (Hart, 1998). Although a truly comprehensive approach to produce a systematic literature review generally requires the use of more than one database (Reis et al, 2020a;Reis, 2021), our priority was transparency and ease…”

Defence industries and open innovation: ways to increase military capabilities of the Portuguese ground forces

“…This article builds upon the existing theory (Simões et al 2020), seeking to explore the defence industry in what is known as the quintuple helix innovation model. Thus, this article goes beyond the recent findings of Reis (2021) that suggest a possible existence of quadruple helix within the scope of the defence industry.…”

“…If in one hand, it is a symbol of the EU´s commitment in trying to create a solid and integrated Pan-European defence industry (European Parliament 2020); on the other hand, efforts to integrate the EDTIB also take risks, as the EU can be seen as protectionist, which can lead other significant arms suppliers, such as the United States of America (USA), to pay back in the same coin (Reis 2021).…”

“…Academic search engines, such as Google Scholar, were initially excluded because they include non-peer-reviewed literature and have a limited scope for applying filters. In addition, Scopus also emphasises the human and social sciences compared to similar databases (Martín-Martín et al 2021), and has been used in similar research (Reis 2021).…”

“…The highest number of articles refer to defence industry innovation in the USA, United Kingdom (UK), and the EU (Figure 3). Reis (2021) observed that the referred countries have been announcing public measures to support their defence industries. PRC is in 7 th place as it still needs to reach a stage of radical or disruptive innovation, for which it still lacks resources and R&D personnel, together with investment in financial resources and willingness to take risks (Béraud-Sudreau and Nouwens 2021).…”