Monitoring long-term conflict and Arms trafficking trends.
Analysis from the Asia - Asia/Pacific Observatories on Beyond legacy weapons: South East Asia’s illicit arms trade is diversifying. Arms trafficking in South East Asia has diversified considerably in recent years, moving beyond the legacy weapons from past conflicts that have long saturated the region, and increasingly intersecting with other illicit economies. These changes contributed to an uptick in the region’s arms trafficking score between 2021 and 2023 (4.82 to 5.23 out of 10), according to the Global Organized Crime Index, with the largest increases seen in Laos , Myanmar and Thailand . This mirrors broader criminality trends observed in the region under the Index, with the overall score rising by a similar margin, from 5.44 to 5.82. Although arms trafficking remains less severe than other illicit economies, such as human trafficking , synthetic drug production and environmental crimes , and has received less attention than the international scam operations that hav...