Jones, M. (Jan 2013) Review of "The Gun: The Story of the AK-47" by C.J. Chivers (Penguin 2010), Journal of International Relations Research, Volume: 2, No:1. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Becoming Weapon: An Opening Call to Arms
Critical Studies on Security, 2017
How does a weapon become one? What are the materials, knowledges and affects implicated in a process of weaponisation? In what ways does a weapon wield its user? In an opening call to arms, this introduction to the special issue on ‘Becoming Weapon’ sets out the scope and ambition of a new research agenda for the study of weaponry in International Relations. After reviewing the existing literature on weapons and outlining its limitations, the article presents the special issue’s individual contributions, highlighting how each of them sheds new light on the constitution and efficacy of our most lethal apparatuses. See special issue on "Becoming Weapon" in Critical Studies on Security: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcss20/5/1?nav=tocList
Weapons, desire, and the making of war
Critical Studies on Security, 2017
Weapons have been traditionally understood as tools of violence subject to human intentions. This article challenges this view of weaponry in favour of thinking of weapons as agentic entities with formative influence over human desires. It builds this account by using contemporary materialist theories to reconceptualise weapons as pluripotential entities that act in ways that exceed human intentions. The article argues this understanding of weaponry can be usefully applied to reinterpret debates over the nature of war, insecurity and technological development. It shows how minimising the political efficacy of weapons limits contemporary understanding of these events.Weapons have been traditionally understood as tools of violence subject to human intentions. This article challenges this view of weaponry in favour of thinking of weapons as agentic entities with formative influence over human desires. It builds this account by using contemporary materialist theories to reconceptualise weapons as pluripotential entities that act in ways that exceed human intentions. The article argues this understanding of weaponry can be usefully applied to reinterpret debates over the nature of war, insecurity and technological development. It shows how minimising the political efficacy of weapons limits contemporary understanding of these events.
Weapons - Social Relevance, Impact and Future
Journal of emerging technologies and innovative research, 2021
Often questions arise whenever we think about weapons, there social relevance, impact and future. Questions like Should weapons be made available to local public in our Country like many other, and if weapons are allowed with proper rules and background checks to common citizens then what will be its effect on Women Safety, Crime Rates, Law and Order management, etc. What are the various types of weapons that can be licensed to citizens, should weapons training be made important or compulsory in our country like many others where military training is compulsory to improve self-defense and improve utility in case of any personal or national emergencies? In This Paper We will focus on such questions and will try to provide their probable solutions. We will also be providing with certain probable situations that might occur if the countries all around the world decide to get rid of their nuclear arsenals and we will also discuss about the future of weapons and weapons in development like Direct Energy Weapons (DEW) or Laser tech Weapons, etc. Direct Energy Weapons are a type of weapons which uses highly focused energy to destroy or damage their targets. These types of weapons are the heart of science fiction movies from Star Wars to Iron Man. Direct Energy Weapons can be used to destroy the target either by the hard kill means destroying them like conventional weapons or soft kill i.e., destroying certain components like board etc. so that enemy loss its ability to operate. Countries like China, Russia, India, United States of America, United Kingdom are developing these types of weapons while Iran and Turkey claim that they haves these weapons in their respective active service. Although after decades of research and development Direct Energy weapons are still in the experimental stage only time will tell whether these come to practice use and replace conventional weapons.
Gunning for war: infantry rifles and the calibration of lethal force
Infantry rifles are responsible for the majority of war-related deaths. This paper describes how and why they became ‘stan- dard-issue’ military equipment. Examining testing reports, field surgery observations and bullet specifications, I develop a theory of instrumentality through which a specific way of killing in war- fare becomes legitimate and manifest in infantry rifles. Rather than pregiven objects that are made acceptable through an evaluation of their uses and consequences, I show that weapons become possible through an ontology that calibrates how killing in war occurs, technologically and ethically. More generally, this paper expands the study of weaponry and war by uncovering the mate- rial and moral specifications that not only design but also crucially define what counts as a weapon. Clearly stated are when and against whom the line between life and death can be drawn. This paper, by contrast, uncovers the conditions that generate how and with what that line can be legitimately crossed.
Unden;tandirm resistance movements and armed militias in the Middle East is ke>· in unravelling this complex and sensitive region. 'I'hL<> book focuses on the HezboUah group in Lebanon. oombinilllt extensiv(' etlmOJtmphy v.ith critical ins1ghts drawn from a mnge of discipHnes indudlng soc1ology, ps><cholog)· and philosophy lnste;:~d of approaching l'esistance or violence throllS!h )"('('.('ived m.acro-fonnulatton~. the book ooncenlrnte.s on mJcro-nW'rah\<e:-> and ~palial d~rn;:~mi CCt of two ("riti~l sp;:~C('$ -nameh•. r>ahiya . .a Shi;:~4 m(\jorit}' suburb of BcJrut and IIezboUah'~ .stronghold. and tnunmg camp:;. whl'rl' wlunt4)1.•J'S mt>tnmorph-o:<:P into milit:mts. The hnok is unique in thnt it juxtapo:c:p_c; cthnogt·t\ph.ic: Mrratwcs in such a wa,v that t h<·y oortpt thctr ov.n rich tale of bodily tactict;, 'resLc;umce' and pos.c;ible .subjectivity in the realm of e\'eryrla>' life.
Uses, Users, and Instruments: Relevance and Replicability of Small Arms Research
Doctoral thesis, 2020
This PhD thesis uses aspects of a criminology framework to examine the extent to which research on small arms and light weapons (SALW) undertaken to support international policy is relevant and replicable beyond its immediate field of practice. Using a sample of six primarily field-research-based publications, I examine whether this research generated a greater understanding of the most problematic uses and users of SALW, and the role of these weapons as instruments of violence. With respect to uses, the application of public health and mixed social science methods has helped to reduce knowledge gaps on the effects of SALW in developing and post-conflict societies. Estimates of the costs of violence in developing countries demonstrated the instrumentality of SALW—i.e. the more serious societal impacts of firearm violence than those of violence involving other instruments. SALW research on users contributed to expanding the agenda from an initial focus on international trafficking to supply insurgent groups to a more comprehensive examination of the patterns of SALW procurement, management, control, and use among a broad range of actors able to contest the state’s monopoly of coercive force. My work on the instruments of violence contributed to an increasingly precise understanding of the most problematic types of SALW held by criminal, terrorist, and non-state armed groups in Africa and Europe. Finally, replicating field-based black-market price-monitoring techniques in conflict areas showed that ammunition prices and war-related fatalities can be strongly correlated, and provides an important lead for further examining the accessibility thesis—i.e. the link between SALW availability and levels of violence. The present thesis provides several suggestions for moving the field of practice forward. Firstly, there is a need to consolidate the lessons learned from SALW researchers’ extensive use of social science methods—including surveying—in post-conflict situations, and to analyse their implications for the measurement of SALW availability and the incidence of violence more broadly. Secondly, SALW researchers need to engage in scientifically robust evaluations of the impact of the most novel interventions, which would represent significant contributions to both SALW policy and academic research into gun violence. Finally, various streams of SALW research have highlighted the importance of ammunition supply in sustaining conflict and violence, a subject so far largely overlooked by those researching gun violence in developed countries. More expansive inquiry into ammunition flows and their relationship to violence has the potential to represent a major contribution to academic research into gun violence.
Short Circuit: Retracing the Political for the Age of 'Autonomous' Weapons
Critical Military Studies, 2020
The spectre of lethal autonomous weapons has drawn increasing interest and concern in recent years as advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have signaled their potential immanence. Long portended in dystopic pop culture conjurings, the figure of the militarized automaton already registers in popular imaginaries in ways that intersect with quotidian understandings of ‘smart bombs’ and ‘surgical strikes’, first made familiar to global publics in the opening days of the 1991 Gulf War and elaborated in its cultural aftermath in everyday forms from cinema to video games, and more. Much in the way of the discourse and semiotics of arms control professionals now grappling with the idea of ‘killer robots’ flows together with and reproduces both these popular renderings and the rhetorical technologies of what has been taken to be a revolution in military affairs driven by watershed developments in advanced weaponry. In so doing, they mystify locations of political subjecthood in ways that might be profoundly disenabling of workable resistance strategies. This also threatens implication in unequal power circulations that have worked to exert an emergent monopoly by the most powerful over legitimate recourse to organized political violence.