Technologies of Armed Violence and the Transformation of Global Order: Introducing the Special Forum

Abstract This special forum grew out of the European Workshops on International Studies (EWIS) at the University of Amsterdam in July 2023, where a group of scholars met to discuss the meaning and significance of technologies of armed violence for global order. The impetus for the workshop was a shared observation that while critical security studies (css) has reconceptualized security and engaged in methodological innovation, and while discussion of racialization, colonialism, and the gendered character of global order is increasingly prominent across critical international relations (IR) more broadly, surprisingly little of this has translated into the study of what is commonly called the arms trade. While there have been pockets of innovation in relation to specific technologies, there has been no overarching reconceptualization of the field of study around the arms trade. In this introduction, I set out an account of the demise of debate about the arms trade in IR and css, make the case for retaining a research agenda on technologies of armed violence, set out what this agenda can learn from adjacent literatures, and briefly introduce the five articles of the forum.