Powers of the Gun Process and Possibility in Global Small Arms Control

Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) are the principal tools of armed violence, but the development of a global ‘regime’ has been a fragmented and fragile process that reinforces sovereignty more than it regulates violence. This article argues that rather than a settled regime, the global processes on SALW are better understood as a ‘global assemblage’. Drawing on new materialism and process philosophy, the article does not seek to explain a regime through power but to explain power through its assemblage. It shows how powers are produced as a global collective for action on SALW is composed. This composition of powers operates not only by producing agreements, but by creating and proliferating the possibilities to disagree, re-composing the meanings of decision and consensus, and generating objects for cooperation that constitute particular modes of global action that render guns governable.