Description
As Europe “rearms” and military budgets bloat across the continent at the expense of public and planetary services – who are we investing in “to preserve peace”? In this paper, I share reflections from an ethnographic deep-dive into seven globally relevant yet NATO-oriented military trade shows (2023-2025). Documenting the material, social and power relations constitutive of the community tasked with delivering Europe’s “defence readiness,” I reveal the settings and logics that underlie the production of military-industrial (man)power. Military trade shows are central nodes in the global circulation of violence and capital and the “military business culture” found therein is telling of the gendered and racialised relations and rationalities through which armed violence – its production, practice and profiteering – is legitimised, normalised and glorified. In this space, money, men and martiality rule; here, the ideal-type warrior mixes and merges with the ideal-type business man, producing a White hypermasculinity at once set on physical, social, sexual, technological and monetary dominance. Writing up the embodied knowledge of both researcher and research subjects, the paper deepens our empirical and conceptual understanding for how wo/men, war, weapons, wealth and Whiteness are made in relation to each other at great costs for human and planetary wellbeing.
