Introduction

ArmsTradeWatch is an initiative to map out the European arms industry and arms trade. Our goal is to enable investigative journalism and research into this industry, in order to improve public accountability of this industry and government policy. By bringing together information on the European arms industry from a diverse range of open data sources, we want make this data more accessible and provide a detailed overview of which companies are active on the defense market.

ArmsTradeWatch made an inventory of defense companies based on arms trade reports, procurement and tender data and membership lists of industry organisations. For these companies basic company information and data on ownership relations and group structures has been collected in this database.

On this blog we will publish about ArmsTradeWatch and research projects using our database, done ourselves or by others. Further we will provide news about other interesting research on arms trade, experiences and reflections on data research, point to interesting data sources and methods to use them, and so on. If you like to stay updated, you can register for our mailing list.

In this first text we introduce ArmsTradeWatch, a new data project to map out the European arms industry and arms trade. This database provides an inventory of companies in Europe active on the defense market or exporting arms.