In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, AOAV has so far recorded 63,601 casualties from explosive weapon use across 13,210 incidents up to the 17 September 2026; this includes 58,638 civilians.

Since 1 January 2011, Belgian artist Dieter Ohler has spent every day recording newspaper headlines about deaths around the world, creating thousands of handwritten pages that explore how journalism turns human lives into numbers.

Mass shootings are fuelling a culture of insecurity and self-defence

Here AOAV reviews a commemorative volume that explores Walter Benjamin’s vision of history as an endless catastrophe, using Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus and Berlin’s wartime ruins to critique the illusion of progress and the enduring legacy of violence.

Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy of violence compels us to look beyond the spectacle of bloodshed to the quiet, systemic and symbolic forces that normalise cruelty and uphold the ideological myths of power, peace, and humanitarianism.

Hannah Arendt’s insights into the nature of violence, power, and moral responsibility expose how modern cruelty often stems not from hatred but from thoughtlessness. To see violence as such gives us a powerful philosophical perspective, which can help us confront the systems that make such violence possible.

Unless we recognise Umberto Eco’s characteristics of fascism shaping contemporary militarism, we risk sleepwalking into catastrophic global conflict, says AOAV’s Executive Director Iain Overton.

The UK government has denied reports of a “secret arms embargo” on Israel, asserting no change in its policy while facing calls for greater transparency and a halt to arms sales amid escalating conflict in Gaza.

Dr Ieva Jusionyte, a legal and medical anthropologist at Brown University, discusses her book “Exit Wounds,” which explores how the smuggling of guns from the United States to Mexico contributes to violence and the migrant crisis, drawing on extensive research and fieldwork at the US-Mexico border.

The war logs reveal extensive violence in Iraq from 2004 to 2009, including tens of thousands of civilian murders, horrific torture methods, and mass graves, often targeting those associated with Coalition forces.

Since April 2023, Sudan has experienced a troubling surge in violence, heavily impacting civilians through explosive incidents and air strikes, largely driven by a complex internal power struggle within the country’s military leadership. Here AOAV unpicks the data.

The report provides an overview of the conference ‘A Disarming Debate: Challenging Militarism in British Academia,’ which addressed concerns about the influence of the military-industrial complex on UK universities.