Nearly all states have their own military establishment or armed forces which they provide with different resources. On the one hand, there are professional soldiers, i.e. a certain amount of trained and uniformed men and women.

Militarisation is a difficult term with many interpretations and definitions. From a more qualitative perspective, militarisation means to gear a state or a society toward the needs of a military environment or to subject a community to military requirements.

War is not easily waged without the necessary hardware: no country could maintain and employ its armed forces without military equipment, weapons and ammunition. Many states purchase these products from national arms producers.

The Global Militarisation Index (GMI) of the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) defines militarisation in the quantitative sense as those means and capacities available to the armed forces of a state. It shows the relative weight and importance of the military apparatus of a state compared to its society as a whole.

In 1998, European Union (EU) Member States agreed on a Code of Conduct that was to aid individual states in making arms exports decisions. This Code of Conduct was aimed at harmonising EU Member States’ arms export policies in the framework of a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).

The international trade in weapons is only partially regulated and this regulation is based on individual contracts. One such contract is the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (a.k.a. the Ottawa Convention) (1997), which prohibits the trade of landmines, among other things.

When the media report on weapons transfers, they are mostly talking about weapons systems, such as tanks, submarines and fighter planes. There are few reports on the category of weapons known as SALW – small arms and light weapons, often referred to by their brand names Kalashnikovs, G3 or Uzi.