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Paper short abstract

Framed as a descent into anthropology’s seventh circle (of hell), this paper reflects on the ethical and political dilemma of studying the international arms trade. It explores issues of researcher complicity, fraught connections, and 'espionage' within spaces of corporate violence and sycophancy.

Paper long abstract

The arms fair circuit is infernal. From the station exit to the exhibition hall’s main entrance, you move as a mass of suit-wearing consultants and executives, flanked by police. After an intensive security check, you arrive at a theatre of warmongering, filled with holograms, networking booths, and toy-like models of missiles, drones, and heavy-duty tanks. Here, prospective bloodshed is aestheticized and marketed as innovation.

This paper traces my personal descent into the world of military exhibits and conferences, foregrounding the ethical and emotional impact of inhabiting a field site structured by corporate violence, sycophancy, and disassociation. Conducting fieldwork in such spaces exposes the ethnographer not only to the spectacle of militarism, but to the ethical ambiguities of witnessing and documenting a world that thrives on destruction while speaking the language of security and progress.

Drawing on fieldnotes written over the past two years, I reflect on moments of discomfort, seduction, and doubt that arise in proximity to corporate and military power. These encounters raise questions about the limits of ethnographic empathy, the impossibility of informed consent in certain research settings, and the legitimacy of understanding a world that resists self-scrutiny. What forms of knowledge emerge when anthropology enters this infernal marketplace, and what moral debts accompany them?

Rather than seeking redemption through critique or distance, the paper argues for an anthropology that confronts its entanglement with darkness—acknowledging that our methods, affects, and ethics are shaped by the very systems and supply chains of violence we study.