THE NEXT FORTY YEARS?

In the 40 years of its life as an independent research institute, SIPRI has witnessed enormous changes in the security environment and in the issues that have dominated political, academic and popular debate about security. They have included the ups and downs of cold war détente, punctuated by 'hot' regional crises from the Middle East to Afghanistan; the shift away from a bipolar, East-West strategic confrontation after 1989-90; the sudden surge of concern about non-traditional, 'asymmetric' threats after the terrorist attacks of September 2001; and, in more generic terms, a widespread tendency to look less at the mere existence of arms and more at 'good' and 'bad' users and uses of them when determining where the dangers to international peace lie. The growing use of the word 'security' itself-at the expense of references both to 'defence' and to 'disarmament'- reflects increased awareness of the many different types of transaction that affect human life and quality of life in an increasingly globalized setting, and of the way in which these dimensions interact.

What has not changed, however, is SIPRI's mission in regard to these realities. For 40 years and under six different directors, the Institute has sought at all times to analyse what is happening with the help of the best information and most scientific tools available. It has recorded and explained, and where appropriate has not hesitated to comment, to judge and to extrapolate-but always on the basis of its own independent vision. Without being neutral in a moral sense, the Institute has made a value of, and built much of its reputation on, being nonpartisan in a political and institutional sense. It has attracted staff and collaborators who are prepared to dedicate themselves to the hard work, the self-discipline and the sometimes very sensitive balance needed to keep this ethos pure while at the same time making it continuously productive.

The extracts from past SIPRI Yearbooks reproduced in this volume underline how often SIPRI and its researchers have proved prescient about the longer-term impact of the events they recorded, and even prophetic about specific events that would follow. By the time I arrived at SIPRI as Director in mid-2002, my predecessors had already made adjustments in the structure and focus of Institute activities that left SIPRI well-positioned to deal with the emerging agendas of the early 21st century. I saw no need to change, and have not changed, the three-pillar structure that underlies SIPRI's varying number (currently eight) of project teams. Our three main areas of activity thus remain as follows: (a) data-based work on military expenditure, arms production and arms transfers;

(b) arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation research, covering all types of weapons (including chemical and biological ones from the outset) and now embracing special expertise in transfer controls and assisted disarmament; and (c) studies of 'active' security including conflict and conflict management, developments in major institutions and major strategic relationships.

The first type of work has always been at the core of SIPRI's distinctive profile and is inherently and permanently global in its coverage. It takes up a large share of the Institute's manpower resources, and it deserves them. The second is also a strand reaching back to the earliest days of SIPRI, but one where the emphases have had to alter a good deal with the rise of new concerns, for example, about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation (including to non-state actors) or the humanitarian impact of mines and small arms. The third area of work is no newcomer insofar as SIPRI Yearbooks have reported on conflicts from the start; but it is only in the past years or so that separate project groups have been established to look at a range of conflict-related issues, with the current main research emphasis on peace-building. Reporting on political and institutional developments in the Euro-Atlantic area and more widely has become-especially since the end of the cold war- a team activity led by the Director personally, which among other things gives fl exibility to fine-tune SIPRI's output to the rapidly shifting topics and moods of this debate.

There can never have been a time in SIPRI's history when the Institute and its leaders did not need to interrogate themselves over whether their chosen work profile was the right one. SIPRI's mission and guiding values mean that it cannot resolve such questions just by reference to what its staff want to do and can most easily do, or-still less-to what types of work will draw in the most generous grants. To some extent, in fact, SIPRI needs a predisposition to 'lean against the wind' of political and intellectual fashion, to look out for biases and gaps in others' coverage, and to stay alert to the worries and needs of all the world's different security constituencies. Thus, after 11 September 2001, the Governing Board and SIPRI management were at one in agreeing that the Institute should not declare a sudden interest in the study of terrorism as such, nor switch its WMD experts to the task of producing short-fuse studies on problem states' supposed holdings. Rather, the Institute looked for ways to link its core expertise to the new concerns and to help fill analytical gaps: notably in the study of connections between conflict and terrorism, although SIPRI also had been working for years on topics linking terrorism and WMD.

In the same vein, when commenting on the major US-Europan and intra-European debates of these past years (which were also, more than is usually acknowledged, intra-US debates), SIPRI has tried very hard not to become the mouthpiece for any one faction. We have been critical and questioning where critiques and questions were deserved, but we have also tried to look deeper, further back and further ahead to understand the larger purport of all this turbulence. We have tried to be less obsessed with how various actions were inspired or explained and more diligent in assessing their practical effects. We have devoted considerable energy to documenting and discussing security issues that lie outside the nexus of the 'global war on terrorism' but that matter a great deal for other regions and other constituencies. It has been particularly satisfying when we could present facts that spoke for themselves, like the extraordinary increases in US (and hence in world) military expenditure that have drawn so much media attention at the time of publication of the most recent Yearbooks.

If partisanship and trendiness are the obvious dangers for SIPRI to avoid in modern conditions, the more subtle ones are complacency and becoming sidelined from the debate. SIPRI's Swedish founders did not intend it to be a closed-circuit system but one that would project information to the world and make a difference thereby, whether or not the information was joined with explicit judgement and advice. No Director and no individual researcher at SIPRI can ever say that the work of active adjustment needed for success in this task-adjustment both of content and of the techniques used for communication-is complete. If the Institute is to last (as we all hope!) and to justify its existence for a further 40 years, there can be no doubt that it will go through many more changes, tactical and strategic, of its intellectual focus and quite probably of its structure as well.

Can any pointers to such new research directions be found in our current work and preoccupations? Four issue groups may be noted here that seem to me to have this potential. All of them could be pursued without doing too much violence to SIPRI's traditional profile or even its project structure, although they would demand even more cross-project interaction than happens (and it is on the rise!) at present.

A question that has been open ever since the end of the cold war is whether the world can settle into a new, overall form of security governance that both works well in controlling the functional challenges to peace, order and human welfare, and engages the strengths of the various power players in a constructive way. In recent SIPRI Yearbooks we have been obliged to comment, more often than not, on ways in which this task is becoming constantly more difficult. Important power actors are not just more numerous than in the mid-20th century, but also more diverse. Part of the current US-European tension reflects the problems of interlocking a single, rather traditional national power with a European 'power' that is partly collectivized but still extremely fuzzy in its aims and governance. Russia is perhaps now a complicating factor more at the regional than at the global level, but China and India are fast graduating from the regional to the world arena. At the same time, non-state, sub-state and trans-state actors play roles that are graded much higher on the public-policy agenda than in the past, whether through their impact on conflict and human security or through their potential to generate 'asymmetric' threats against even the most mighty nations. Religious, cultural and social as well as ethnic drivers of security actions have come back into the focus of concern: but there can be few who seriously believe that they may be dealt with by cold war-type methods of segregation or military 'defeat'. Barring policy failure on an apocalyptic scale, the world can only advance through solutions that involve the safer and fairer handling of increasing coexistence, interplay and even integration of different civilizations.

There are philosophical modes of approaching these issues-for instance, the question of whether universal norms and rights can be imposed for human security, and by whom- and political approaches, typically starting out from the USA's role and the debate on its recent more interventionist approach. It would be interesting to explore what different contributions SIPRI's typically analytical and (where feasible) statistical approach might bring. The Yearbook already addresses some important parts of the jigsaw, for example, by documenting the full complexity of the pattern of national and institutional peace missions (and their costs) or the challenges facing traditional regulatory methods in the field of arms control and non-proliferation. The Institute has also been devoting more attention lately to the-uniquely advanced, if flawed-European model of integration in security and defence: how could its potential be drawn out to deal with new actors and multi-dimensional threats, how realistically can it be transmitted to further states in the European Union's neighbourhood, why are so many other regions trying to imitate it, and how do the results chime with the USA's currently more bilateral or unilateral methods? I would personally like to see such analysis pushed further, but where possible passing judgement on generic approaches to security building (interventionist, legislative, integrative or other) rather than on the beaux yeux of individual institutions. In the process, SIPRI would need to pay more direct attention than it has been able to do of late to the issues surrounding the United Nations Organization and its future.

A second issue that is really a sub-set of the first is the analysis of processes involving non-state actors. SIPRI has always done this because it has always had a strong focus on armaments, which are overwhelmingly produced in the private sector. Recent Yearbooks and other SIPRI publications have noted the shifting of the frontiers that once used to defi ne 'the' defence industry. Scientific and technological developments leading to advanced weaponry, or to other tools available for (good or bad) security purposes, can no longer be ring-fenced in practice from to those feeding into the civilian economy. Defence (and non-defence) companies have begun to offer a much wider range of security services for sale to governments-and other buyers-than was expected or thought acceptable for most of the 20th century. As concern about destructive weapons focuses more and more on who they are transferred to, policy makers are homing in on aspects of transfer like the handling of 'dangerous knowledge', export control, transport security and interception of wrongful deliveries where little or nothing can be done without industrial or commercial involvement. Different SIPRI projects are already looking at all these issues, and at those related to non-state actors in conflict and peace-building. The Institute published in 2004 a more general compendium on 'Business and Security', with special reference to non-traditional threats. It would be good to see SIPRI drawing together the several threads of its competence in this field to help defi ne a 'cross-sectoral' security research agenda-crosssectoral in its targets for enquiry but ideally also in its participation-that would bring to the issues a cooler and more professional evaluation than they commonly receive.

A third set of issues also going back to the foundation of SIPRI are those concerning the application of resources. Practically every Yearbook has noted the trade-off between military expenditure and other deserving areas for public spending-or conversely, the positive feedback between disarmament and development. Sadly, far from having outgrown dysfunctional choices in this area, the world is currently witnessing a new rapid rise in military spending led in part by the world's strongest nations (which are also the safest from traditional confl ict) and in part by fast-rising powers like China. Interesting new complications have, however, entered the issue from two sides. First, recent experiences both of conflicts and of transnational threats have cast a spotlight on the importance of internal and border security functions-what may be called the 'non-military security sector', although questions of definition are tricky in themselves. Nations seeking to give their societies (and in multilateral organizations, their neighbours) comprehensive security coverage against the latest threat/risk patterns now have to makes choices not just between 'guns or butter', but also between guns, the policeman's baton and 'softer' forms of human protection like epidemic control or environmental strategy that would formerly have been placed in the 'butter' category. Second, in the light of hard experience in conflict zones and a more sophisticated notion of 'peace-building', security experts and development policy experts find themselves pondering the same questions of whether a post-crisis state is better rebuilt by cutting back everything to do with armed violence or by strengthening while reforming the central military power. Conceptually, these two new agendas are actually one, since the resource choices open to richer powers include exporting resources to provide military or non-military strengthening (or both) for weaker ones. Thus far, however, scholarly work has scrambled to keep up with the series of successful and unsuccessful experiments being made in the real world. SIPRI would be ideally placed-by combining its three core research skills-to help construct a better framework for assessing both this set of resource-related challenges and the effectiveness of different answers to

Fourth and certainly not least come the issues of data quality, transparency and democracy in the security sphere. SIPRI was created as an independent authority partly because the data produced by other sources in the 1960s were so often incomplete and tendentious-and they still are. The problem is compounded by the fact that so many further dimensions of security-related activity, and the actions of so many more players, now have to be looked at for the sake of completeness. To get a full picture of the security impact of armaments transactions, for example, one would have to know not only what arms are produced, what they can do and what they cost, but also whose hands they come into, how long they are held, whether and how they are used, and when and how they are finally disposed of. Bits of this story are covered by measures of different kinds that involve transparency as a primary or additional goal- for instance, export controls, verifi cation and monitoring, and assisted destruction schemes- but there are serious gaps in the chain, and great inequalities in coverage from place to place and user to user, and problems of incompatibility in the techniques used and in their fi ndings. This incompleteness does not only matter for governments and organizations that try to ana-lyse the security effects of all these transactions and-one would hope-to reduce their negative impacts. It is also an obstacle to popular understanding, to proper debate within states on resource choices involving (and within) the defence sector, and to informed campaigning by the concerned non-governmental organizations.

The general topic of democracy has, to be sure, come to prominence in recent world debates on security: but it has often been prescribed as a panacea for supposedly less functional powers by states that have themselves been prone to base policies on misleading information, to minimize their representative institutions' control of operations, and to bend the rules of fundamental civic rights in the name of security. SIPRI has always been and will remain a fighter in this fight in the very direct sense that it exists to disseminate the 'cleanest' possible information on key security transactions, on all states and to all the audiences that it can reach. The Institute will, however, surely need to engage further with the linked issues of data and transparency at a number of different levels in the future. It could call for, and work for, a more dispassionate and complex understanding of the relationship between democracy (in its tangible, measurable forms) and the quality and nature of security processes. It must certainly draw attention to the continuing and even growing importance of good data, as such, and comment on ways that this requirement could be built into current policy initiatives. It must continue to question and upgrade its own methods, both conceptual and technical, of handling security-relevant information; and it must work constantly to ensure that its products reach the widest range of people who need them. Good progress has been made in translating and distributing the SIPRI Yearbook and/or a gratis 'pocket-size' version in different languages-Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian at the latest count-and in improving the range and depth of material freely available through the Institute's website, as well as raising the Institute's public profile generally. There are also ambitions to make available (i.a. through the Internet) more of the buried treasure that is locked away in early and out-of-print SIPRI publications. All this is still not enough, and it will never be time to stop trying harder.

While on the subject of SIPRI outreach, I would personally like to add a word on our host country, Sweden, and our neighbouring Nordic-Baltic region. The founders of SIPRI saw the Institute as a gift to the world, and the Swedish authorities have been extraordinarily and commendably consistent in not trying to instrumentalize SIPRI for narrower, national purposes. Precisely this guarantee of independence, however, makes it possible for the Institute to interact quite intimately with its Swedish and Nordic surroundings without putting principles on either side at risk. My own research interests include Nordic defence and security, and it would have been asking too much for me to refrain from pursuing those topics with Nordic friends while living in Sweden-SIPRI's recent volume The Nordic States and the European Security and Defence Policy being among the results. More generally, however, I would suggest three reasons for any director (regardless of personal interests) to take seriously the question of strategy towards the Institute's Swedish environment. First, Sweden and the other Nordic states continue to be active within the European context and more widely in promoting security issues and initiatives of more than purely selfish concern. These actions often lie within fields where SIPRI has competence and could, at the least, be informed by access to SIPRI's knowledge and advice. Second, these countries themselves offer a fascinating microcosm of many of the current defence and secur ity challenges outlined above and, through the relative transparency of their governance systems, offer a good place to study the travails of governments in trying to get to grips with them. Last and rather obviously, the Swedish and Nordic audiences are SIPRI's closest ones and they can and should benefit from all that our public information effort has to offer.

The Swedish Government, of course, also gives SIPRI the lion's share of its funding through a single annual core grant. This generous support is crucial for ensuring that the Institute need never become so dependent on other, transient funders as to call its independence, and the coherence and continuity of its core research, into question. It allows SIPRI to maintain its unique in-house editing capacity (the envy of many), and a library of the highest quality, and to spend a large part of its time and personnel resources on data-based work that in practice cannot be funded from other sources. None of this, however, absolves SIPRI and in particular its Director from doing everything possible to raise more, and more diverse, financial support from reputable sources. Thanks are due to all those-institutions, nations and foundations-that have helped SIPRI to work towards this goal and, in particular, to expand the range of its innovative and policy-relevant research during recent years. My keenest hope for the future of the Institute is that both the Swedish authorities and others will continue to see SIPRI's contribution as worth the money, and preferably worthy of more money, as time goes on. Granted the resources to survive and to evolve, the Institute can be relied upon to go on delivering something of true value for the survival and evolution of the entire world.