Small Arms and Economies of Violence

An “economy of violence” often refers to how states or militaries calculate the amount of violence needed to achieve political aims. This paper examines the afterlives of small arms that are transferred to foreign governments or abandoned in the wake of wars and fall into the hands of civilians. I show that these arms can alter economies of violence and give rise to types of violence that are not easily contained by states nor easily interpreted by scholars. I will use the post-WWII civil war in the Philippines as a case study to examine these questions.

The development of expensive, powerful weapons or weapons systems are thought of as deterrents to inter-state violence and are considered “high-value” weapons that are closely monitored by states. On the other end of the scale are small arms–namely guns–that have, since the Cold War, increasingly circulated through military aid and are not well tracked, and, most importantly, often “left behind” after major military operations. Small arms are often overlooked and are, in fact, even categorized by the state in non-violent terms—in the aftermath of WWII small arms are termed “surplus property” and since at least the early 1970s have been referred to by the State Department as “spare parts.” However, in the aftermath of WWII, small arms dramatically altered the economy of violence as millions of dollars of worth armaments were left in territories, including the Philippines, at the end of the war. These "leftover weapons," I argue, produced a new economy of violence in the Philippines that not only made possible a six-year campaign of state violence against a civilian population but also led to other types of violence—such as intrapersonal violence—that fit neither the category of anti-colonial resistance nor state oppression.