Power and politics in the war machine: global social forces, local resistance

This event is organised in partnership with the Sussex International Relations Department, Pluto Press, and Lark and Bloom Library.

Governments are spending ever more on the military, while they cut social spending to pay for it. Arms company shareholders are getting richer while majority populations are getting poorer. Wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere are being waged in part with foreign-made weapons, while the state and corporate actors facilitating them explicitly valorise the war economy. In the UK, direct actionists and civilly disobedient elders are now charged with terrorism offences if they engage in or support practical intervention to halt the production and flow of weapons.

How, as scholars, activists and members of our varied local communities, can we think and organise together against the global war economy, in pursuit of a more just global system? This public event brings together scholars and activists working on questions of militarism, war and the arms trade to explore the global social forces driving the war machine, and the politics and prospects of local resistance to it. It draws on the 2024 Pluto Press edited volume Monstrous Anger of the Guns. How the Arms Trade is Ruining the World and What We Can Do About It, the forthcoming Verso book, Making A Killing: How The West Profits From Slaughter in Yemen and Gaza, and the Stop L3 Harris campaign, which seeks to end the presence of an arms factory in the city of Brighton.

Roundtable participants 

- Ahmed Alnaouq, Director and Co-Founder, We Are Not Numbers 
- Andrew Feinstein, Executive Director, Shadow World Investigations 
- Lianne Howard-Dace, Minister, One Church Brighton 
- Anna Stavrianakis, Professor of International Relations, University of Sussex
- Joely Thomas, PhD researcher, International Relations, University of Sussex