19–20 November 2026 at the University of University of Cologne
Technologically, weapons are designed to inflict harm and cause physical damage. However, a significant proportion of the arms and weapon systems produced throughout history have never been utilized to cause any damage to bodies, goods or infrastructure.
Nonetheless, they have made a significant impact: their owners have deployed them in strategical positions, displayed them publicly and communicated their technological destructive potential; they have devoured – oftentimes enormous – economic, environmental and political resources. Moreover, societies or individual actors have attributed various meanings to them or have forcefully disputed these meanings. By being used in non-violent ways, weapons have always been a decisive factor in conflicts both within societies and between them. At the same time, many governments, experts or military actors have presented the non-violent use of arms as a means to achieve and guarantee peace, again a hotly contested argument. While recent and current research has treated some highly important case studies and specialized aspects of the topic, we are still lacking systematic, trans-epochal research on the non-violent uses of arms.
The planned conference, organized by the German Association for Historical Peace and Conflict Research (AKHF), will analyze how non-violent use of weapons contributed to the escalation of conflicts and how it shaped ideas and practices of peace in different regions of the world from the 17th century to the present. The conference will be based on a broad understanding of the concept of non-violence. It refers to all uses that do not apply the technologically central function of weapons, which is to inflict physical damage. This, for instance, encompasses the symbolic or ritualized staging of arms, verbal or numerical communication about armaments, or their strategical deployment understood as movement of armaments to position them for defense or attack. Contributors are invited to analyze the history of these varied usages of arms. Moreover, they are welcome to engage with grey zones of non-violence, e.g., through long-delayed effects such as in the deployment of mines.
The unfolding of the impact of non-violent uses of arms should be understood as a complex process in which technology, knowledge about technology, and attributions of meaning are core factors. The technological characteristics of a weapon or weapons system are just as important as awareness and knowledge a society has about the features of a weapon or which people attribute to supposed armaments. To analyze this process, it is therefore necessary to combine approaches from the history of technology, the history of knowledge, as well as from cultural and political history. This helps to avoid not only technological determinism, which views the effectiveness of a weapon as an inherent feature of the weapon itself, but also purely constructivist perspectives that might fail paying due attention to the materiality of armaments.
The explicit aim of the conference is to discuss non-violent uses of arms within a broad spectrum of conflicts and peace efforts that are usually analyzed separately from each other. On the one hand, we are looking for contributions which deal, for example, with the enforcement of weapons’ bans, weapons’ maintenance, military parades or maneuvers, statistics and comparisons, or deployment of weapon systems in international conflicts and peace negotiations. On the other hand, we are interested in non-violent usages of arms within societies, e.g., in social conflicts about the enforcement or questioning of gender roles, performative arms demonstrations by revolutionary movements, or the symbolic use of arms to impose colonial hierarchies or (foreign) rule in general.
With the aim of analyzing the impact of non-violent arms use in these contexts, proposals should address one or several of the following questions:
- How have knowledge, knowledge gaps, and misinformation about armament
technologies been created? Which actors were involved in this process? - Which meanings were attributed to certain weapons and weapon systems – by whom
and to what ends? - To what extent can the analysis of the non-violent use of arms contribute to a better understanding of conflict dynamics or peace arrangements?
We invite proposals (max. 300 words) and a short CV to be submitted to Daniel Stahl (daniel.stahl[at]fau.de) until February 15, 2026. We are planning to cover the costs for travel and hotel accommodation for all invited speakers.
Dates of the conference: 19–20 November 2026
Location: University of Cologne.
Language: English
Download PDF here.