The world stands at what UN Secretary-General António Guterres calls a “pivotal juncture.” In 2025, military spending reached a world-historic high, while only one in five of the UN Sustainable Development Goals will be reached by 2030. The arms trade is the crucial link connecting state spending, corporate weapons production, and the wars, violence, and inequality that follow, driving death, displacement and disease.

This book project offers a novel, creative and accessible account of the arms trade and its significance for global (dis)order. "Unfinished Business. Weapons, War and Empire in the 21st Century" will reveal the arms trade as both the coercive backbone of capitalism and the unfinished business of empire and decolonization. The book asks the deceptively simple question: where do those fighting in today’s wars get their weapons from? An adequate answer requires a full reckoning not only with state interests and the commercial linkages of trade but also with colonial afterlives and our ongoing imperial present.

"Unfinished Business" traces the life-and-death cycle of arming to make an urgent and timely interdisciplinary intervention into public and scholarly understanding of the arms trade, war and global (dis)order. The book is both a scholarly output and a vehicle for change, drawing on my experience, skills, knowledge and networks as a public-facing academic expert on the global arms trade.

The research draws on official statistics, company records, industry publications, research institution data, civil society and media reporting to build the empirical analysis, supplemented with and interpreted through secondary and historical sources. The analysis is grounded in critical political economy and critical security studies, as well as the work of historians of empire and the global Cold War, and geographers working on transnational circuits of war preparation.