The jury consisting of Nils B Weidmann (University of Konstanz), Hanne Fjelde (Uppsala University) and Michael D Ward (Duke University) has awarded the fourth JPR Best Visualization Award to Brandon J Kinne (University of California, Davis). The prize-winning article is titled "Agreeing to arm: Bilateral weapons agreements and the global arms trade" and was published in the 2016 special issue on 'Networked International Politics', Journal of Peace Research 53(3): 359–377. The author relies on different types of visualizations to illustrate key aspects of the theory, the data used for the analysis, and the results. Two line graphs at the beginning of the article help to motivate the research question. A set of carefully crafted, eye-catching network visualizations show the structure of the weapons agreement networks examined in the article, and how they evolved over time. This is supplemented with a map to illustrate the spatial distribution of these agreements. Finally, the author goes to great lengths to present the results from the model estimation using coefficient plots, using color to highlight significant results. These plots also illustrate how particular coefficients vary over time. The jury found this to be an impressive way to present a large number of results effectively. Overall, Kinne's article is exemplary not only because of its interesting analysis, but also due to the number of aesthetically pleasing and informative graphics. The award is USD 500.
