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Weaponisation and Defence Transformation in the Global South: Crisis Readiness in a Pre-War World
Tahir Azad
Analysis Series
Analysis//0025/May/2026/London-Dialogue. 25 May 2026
Introduction
The international security environment has entered a phase of sustained systemic instability that demands analytical vocabulary adequate to its complexity. For decades, scholars and policymakers have relied on the concept of militarisation to describe the expansion of military capacity in developing regions. That framework, rooted in Cold War-era political sociology and the empirical methods of institutes such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, captures quantitative trends: rising defence budgets, growing armed forces, and increased arms imports. It does not, however, capture the qualitative transformation currently underway. This analysis argues that the Global South is not merely militarising. It is being systematically weaponised, and that this distinction carries serious implications for strategic stability, arms control, and the future of the international order.
According to the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database published in April 2026, global military expenditure reached 2,887 billion US dollars in 2025, the 11th consecutive year of growth and the highest level in recorded history. It represents 2.5 per cent of global GDP. Behind this headline figure lies a structural shift: the centre of gravity of military investment is moving. The Global South is no longer a passive recipient of great-power security largesse. It is an active driver of military innovation, procurement, and doctrinal transformation.
Militarisation versus Weaponisation: A Critical Distinction
The distinction between militarisation and weaponisation is not rhetorical. Militarisation, as theorised by scholars including Cynthia Enloe and elaborated in the peace studies tradition, describes the process through which military institutions, values, and priorities expand their influence within states and societies. It is measured in troop numbers, procurement budgets, and the institutional weight of armed forces in governance. This framework was adequate for analysing the Cold War security landscape, in which superpower patrons equipped client states with conventional weapons tied to ideological alignment.
Weaponisation describes something categorically different. It refers to the systematic integration of advanced technologies, dual-use civilian infrastructure, and multi-domain operational capabilities into national security strategies. The concept captures the conversion of artificial intelligence platforms, commercial satellite navigation systems, and civilian drone industries into instruments of strategic competition. Critically, weaponisation does not recognise a clear peacetime-wartime boundary. States operating in a weaponised environment engage in continuous strategic competition across land, sea, air, cyber, space, electromagnetic, and cognitive domains simultaneously, regardless of whether formal conflict has been declared.
The Global South is not simply building bigger armies. It is being drawn into a weaponised international system that operates without off switches.
This distinction has significant policy consequences. Arms control frameworks designed for militarisation, based on counting tanks, warheads, and troops, are structurally inadequate for weaponisation. The Missile Technology Control Regime, the Wassenaar Arrangement, and the existing nuclear non-proliferation architecture were all designed for a different threat environment. They have no provisions for hypersonic glide vehicles, AI-enabled autonomous targeting systems, or the militarisation of commercial satellite constellations. This governance vacuum is not peripheral to the analysis: it is its most dangerous implication.
China as the Decisive Variable
No actor has done more to accelerate the weaponisation of the Global South than China. The transformation of China’s defence industry from a producer of affordable but technologically limited systems to a full-spectrum exporter of cutting-edge military technology represents one of the most consequential structural changes in international security since the Cold War. The US Department of Defense Annual Report on Chinese Military Power consistently documents the breadth and pace of this transformation, noting advances in hypersonic systems, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence, and space-based military infrastructure that challenge Western technological assumptions.
China’s DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle, travelling at speeds exceeding Mach 10 on a low-altitude manoeuvrable trajectory, defeats all existing theatre and ballistic missile defence architectures. This is not merely a weapons system: it is a strategic argument. It asserts that precision, speed, and manoeuvrability have superseded the layered missile defence investments that underpinned US and allied deterrence strategy for three decades. The CSIS Missile Defense Project notes that no existing interceptor system has demonstrated the ability to engage a hypersonic glide vehicle under operational conditions. If the technology proliferates, and there are already indications that it is doing so through China’s partnerships in South Asia and the Middle East, the deterrence architectures of smaller states will require complete reconfiguration.
Equally significant is China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System. The BDS-3 constellation, comprising 55 operational satellites, provides global coverage with sub-10-centimetre precision in military mode. For the Global South, this matters not as an abstract capability but as a concrete strategic offering: BeiDou embeds in partner military networks, enabling GPS-independent precision navigation for missiles, drones, and naval platforms. It severs the dependence on a US-controlled signal that Washington could theoretically degrade or deny in a crisis. Thirty or more Global South states have now integrated BeiDou into their defence infrastructure. The strategic implications of this dependency shift have been underappreciated in Western policy discourse.
China’s electronic and magnetic warfare capabilities represent a third dimension of this transformation. The People’s Liberation Army has integrated electronic warfare brigades at every level of its operational command structure, and Chinese-origin EMW platforms have been transferred to partner states across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The International Institute for Strategic Studies documents in successive editions of The Military Balance the growing sophistication of China’s EW architecture, noting its particular emphasis on jamming, directed-energy systems, and radar suppression capabilities designed to deny adversary battlespace awareness before kinetic action begins.
The Arms Market Restructured
The SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, published in March 2026, covering the period 2021 to 2025, reveals a global arms market undergoing structural reorganisation. The United States retained its position as the world’s largest arms exporter with approximately 42 per cent of total global transfers, an increase of 27 per cent in volume compared to 2016 to 2020. However, the more analytically significant finding is Russia’s collapse and France’s rise. Russia’s share fell from over 20 per cent in the mid-2010s to approximately 8 per cent in 2021 to 2025, a consequence of sanctions, reputational damage, and the diversion of productive capacity to the war in Ukraine. France emerged as the world’s second-largest arms exporter at approximately 13 per cent, driven by major contracts with India, Greece, and Gulf states.
China, at approximately 6 per cent, does not yet rival the United States or France in volume. The analytical error would be to read this as evidence of limited influence. China’s strategic leverage in global arms markets derives not from volume but from what it offers that others do not: a full-spectrum technology package, from small arms and armoured vehicles to hypersonic systems, satellite infrastructure, and AI-enabled command platforms, delivered without the human rights conditions, governance requirements, or technology transfer restrictions that accompany Western procurement. For states seeking rapid modernisation without political friction, this is an extraordinarily attractive offer.
China is not simply selling weapons. It is offering strategic relationships, and the Global South is buying on terms that were not available under the previous Western-Russian duopoly.
Crisis Readiness: A Pre-War International Order
The cumulative effect of these trends is a strategic environment that this analysis describes as a pre-war international order. This is a contested and deliberately provocative formulation, and it requires defence. The term is not predictive: it does not assert that a major war is imminent or inevitable. It is descriptive: it characterises an environment in which states have adopted military postures, doctrines, and procurement strategies calibrated for continuous crisis rather than for the alternation between peace and war that twentieth-century international relations theory assumed.
Across the Global South, states are increasingly oriented towards what this analysis terms permanent crisis readiness: the maintenance of forces at high readiness continuously, the development of rapid mobilisation capabilities measured in hours rather than days, the use of cyber, electronic, and space-based operations as instruments of peacetime strategic signalling, and the integration of AI into command and control systems that compress decision cycles to the point where human oversight becomes operationally marginal. The RAND Corporation’s work on AI and autonomous weapons has consistently highlighted the escalation risks generated by compressed OODA loops, particularly in environments where nuclear weapons are present.
South Asia illustrates the highest-risk manifestation of this dynamic. India and Pakistan are engaged in an active missile arms race overlaid by nuclear deterrence postures and, as of May 2025, a history of recent armed conflict. Both states are pursuing hypersonic missile capabilities. India’s BrahMos-II programme and Pakistan’s Ababeel MIRVed missile represent qualitative shifts in the subcontinental deterrence balance that existing confidence-building mechanisms, designed for an era of slower-moving and more easily observable military competition, are not equipped to manage. The absence of a bilateral hotline for cyber incidents, the lack of any agreed norm on ASAT use, and the fragility of the 2003 ceasefire line arrangement together constitute a governance deficit of serious proportions.
Critical Assessment: Deterrence or Deeper Insecurity?
Any honest analysis of weaponisation must engage with its central paradox. The acquisition of advanced military capabilities may enhance the deterrence posture of individual states. A state with hypersonic missiles is harder to coerce. A state with integrated EMW and BeiDou-guided precision strike capability has more credible deterrence options than one relying on Cold War-era platforms. From the perspective of individual rational actors, investment in advanced military technology is a defensible response to a deteriorating security environment.
The problem is systemic. A region in which every significant state has acquired hypersonic missiles, AI-enabled targeting systems, and EMW capabilities becomes substantially harder to manage in a crisis. Decision cycles shorten. Misperception becomes more likely. The confidence-building tools available, which were designed for conventional and nuclear deterrence contexts, have no purchase on the new domains of competition. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s work on nuclear risk reduction has noted that the integration of new technologies into nuclear-armed states’ conventional force structures creates what analysts term entanglement risk: the danger that conventional military operations involving dual-use systems trigger nuclear escalation thresholds inadvertently.
A further critical concern is the proliferation of dual-use technologies to non-state actors. The Iranian-origin Shahed drone, now operationally documented in Yemen, Ukraine, and the broader Middle East, represents the first confirmed case of an advanced precision strike system operated at scale by a non-state actor. Conflict Armament Research has documented the spread of drone components across multiple jurisdictions, demonstrating that export control frameworks are structurally unable to contain this proliferation. If hypersonic technology, even in degraded form, follows the same diffusion pathway, the implications for conflict management and civilian protection are severe.
There is also an economic dimension that warrants critical attention. Defence spending in the Global South is not occurring in a fiscal vacuum. India’s 92.1-billion-dollar defence budget coexists with 600 million people living in multi-dimensional poverty. Pakistan’s 11.9 billion dollar spending, representing an 11 per cent year-on-year increase, is funded in an economy that required a 3 billion dollar IMF bailout in 2023 and a 7 billion dollar Extended Fund Facility in 2024. Saudi Arabia’s 83.2 billion dollar budget is sustained by hydrocarbon revenues whose long-term trajectory is uncertain. The opportunity cost of weaponisation, measured in foregone investment in health, education, and climate adaptation, is a dimension of the analysis that strategic studies literature typically neglects.
Conclusion
The weaponisation of the Global South is neither a marginal phenomenon nor a temporary fluctuation. It is a structural transformation driven by the convergence of three forces: the diffusion of advanced military technologies at unprecedented speed and scale; the emergence of China as a full-spectrum defence exporter offering a politically unconditioned alternative to Western procurement; and the intensification of great-power competition that has made the Global South both a theatre and an actor in systemic strategic rivalry.
The concept of militarisation, adequate for the Cold War, is no longer adequate for this environment. It cannot capture the qualitative shift represented by AI-enabled decision loops, GPS-independent precision strike ecosystems, or the simultaneous activation of seven military domains in a crisis that has not yet been formally declared. Weaponisation, with all its uncomfortable implications, is the more analytically honest framework.
The most urgent policy implication is the governance deficit. There is no treaty governing hypersonic weapons. There is no multilateral framework for AI in warfare. There is no agreed norm on ASAT use. The United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems has been deliberating for over a decade without producing binding commitments. In the meantime, the technology is proliferating. The international community is governing a 2025 security environment with 1970s-era institutional architecture. That gap is the central challenge that policymakers, analysts, and institutions such as London Dialogue must urgently address.
The question is no longer whether the Global South is militarising. The question is whether it is being structurally weaponised for an era of permanent crisis and whether the international community has the institutional capacity to respond.
Dr Tahir Mahmood Azad is Executive Director of London Dialogue, an independent UK-based research and policy institute. He can be reached at [email protected]
Tahir Azad
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