ABSTRACT
Arms control and disarmament are practices of controlling violence by controlling weapons. In these practices, and the rather limited theoretical engagement with them, approaches to international security have replayed and reproduced rigid oppositions of subject and object, inside and outside, certain and uncertain, social and technical. This chapter explores and critiques this by developing a broadly 'posthumanist' engagement that seeks to engage the potentialities for transformation rather than mere management of weapons and violence. It focuses on what this practice has become as it has been founded on dualisms of the human and non-human, social and technological. It argues that this has led to practices in which some weapons are deemed determinative of great harm and are prohibited, while other are deemed harmful by virtue of the particular actors that have them or contexts within which they may be placed. It therefore is principally a politics of attributing responsibility for violent action in either the human on non-human realms.
