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Paper short abstract

Drawing on fieldwork at European arms fairs, this paper examines how emotion within the fairs is used to sustain violence. I suggest pleasure and play build an affective veil, integrating explicit acknowledgements of killing into a broader ideological frame, neutralising harm and naturalising war.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the affective dimensions through which violence is sustained and rendered ordinary within the global arms trade. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at arms fairs in Prague, Istanbul, Athens, and London I explore the place of emotions within arms fairs. While scholarship has highlighted the spectacle, sanitisation, and aestheticization of weapons at defence fairs, this paper focuses on the men who sell them and the everyday emotional and moral labour that makes this work ordinary, enjoyable, and ethically survivable.

Engaging feminist critiques of the supposed dichotomy between emotion and reason (Ahmed 2005), I argue that emotion plays a central role in the functioning of the arms trade. Within arms fairs, an affective environment is carefully cultivated in which play, masculine pleasure, technological awe, and commercial festivity intertwine. This environment does not work to obscure violence through ignorance; rather, it creates what I conceptualise as an affective veil, integrating explicit acknowledgements of killing into a broader ideological frame that neutralises harm and naturalises war.

I trace how sellers oscillate between fantasies of domination, rooted in masculine imaginaries of power, mastery, and technological superiority, and claims of powerlessness, articulated through references to geopolitics or the inevitability of conflict. This oscillation reveals the emotional and moral labour through which responsibility for violence is simultaneously felt and veiled.

By foregrounding emotion, this paper contributes to anthropological debates on complicity, harm, and wilful blindness, while demonstrating how emotion, and particularly pleasure, operates as a mechanism sustaining the trade in the implements of violence.