Laura Shewan, SGR, reports from the recent protests in London outside the world’s largest ‘exhibition’ of military technology.

Responsible Science blog, 6 October 2025

This September marked 25 years since the first Defence and Security International (DSEI) arms fair took place in the UK. Held every two years in London’s ExCel Centre Docklands, DSEI brings together over 45,000 participants from more than 90 countries to showcase and sell weaponry and other technologies utilised in contemporary global conflict. Attended by a surprising diversity of participants and speakers, the event is instrumental in facilitating and legitimising the ideologies and material components of warfare. Between 9th and 12th September, more than 1,700 weapons companies showcased their weapons to governments, arms traders and national militaries. The deals struck here actively facilitate death, human suffering, and environmental destruction worldwide.

The global trade in arms is estimated at $138 billion per year (although the true value is likely to be substantially higher) [1] and DSEI is the professional face of warmongering, wrapped in smart suits and streamlined communications.
 

What has changed since DSEI 2023?

In many ways, DSEI operates as business as usual: organised by Clarion Events and the UK government agency, Defence and Security Exports, it continues to facilitate the global supply chain of arms. In the two years since the last exhibition was held in 2023, the ‘bureaucratisation’ of conflict has continued. Intensified by developments in drone technology and the narrative of nuclear threat, global conflict has rarely felt more distant and yet more imminent [2]. The landscape of international peace feels increasingly precarious, with the emboldening of the far right on both the domestic and global stages. The world’s military spending is spiralling upwards. It is also the first of the DSEI exhibitions held since the Gaza war began in October 2023.

From the front line of the protests outside the event, the public outrage at the profiteering from suffering and injustice around the world was palpable. Over the last two years, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in particular, has been a mobilising force, bringing together disparate groups whose concerns have concretised over witnessing the destruction of a place and a people. Awareness of the British government’s complicity in genocide has connected more and more people to peace activism: in June of this year, for example, Britain sent Israel 281 units of military cargo worth £400,000, including explosives, ammunition and projectiles, parts for tanks, guns and rifles [3].

The first day of the event saw over 500 peace groups, including SGR, coming together in solidarity outside the ExCel Centre to non-violently disrupt the event and to add their voices of protest against the global war machine. Pushed back forcibly by police at times, grassroots groups such as Parents for Palestine, stood shoulder to shoulder with established veteran voices such in the anti-war movement with a clear and coherent message: to stop the trade in technologies and weaponries of warfare. Nonetheless, the atmosphere of defiance in the face of destruction was tangible, and the protest movement was successful in disrupting the façade of slick professionalism that hides the dirty business of arms deals.

The internationalisation of the industry has continued apace: with many arms companies such as BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, Leonardo, Rafael, and Rheinmetall amongst others, acting as global enterprises [4]. Operating out of multiple countries, and co-developing and producing the technologies of war with other states and commercial companies makes it increasingly difficult to regulate the industry [5]. The bureaucratisation of the arms industry is therefore not just wrapped up in smart shoes, expensive suits and briefcases: the performance of business presents a visible obfuscation of the violence and destruction of conflict. It also materially creates the conditions for companies and governments to obscure their role in the production of and trade in conflict, and the profits gained by these activities.
 

The role of universities

Another disturbing element of DSEI was the official presence of universities. Representatives spoke on panels and ran exhibition stalls to showcase engineering and computer science degree programmes. Over half of the Russell Group of leading UK universities, including the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, were there. Some even took part in live demonstrations of battlefield technologies. UK universities receive at least £100 million annually from the arms industry and are involved in formal alliances with companies and government bodies including the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment [6]. On the eve of DSEI, the British government launched its new ‘Defence Industrial Strategy’, including setting up a Defence Universities Alliance [7]. All of this legitimises and normalises the narrative of the production of the war machine – an essential backbone of an international order built on a monopoly of force and sustained by ideologies of racial, class and gender hierarchies.

From the inspiring speakers standing up and calling out the violence obscured behind the commercialised doors of London’s ExCel Centre, the message outside DSEI was clear. War, genocide, suppression of human rights, environmental degradation, endemic poverty, and gross inequality are all underpinned by the same threads of destruction. To tackle one issue, is to begin to tackle them all, and to disentangle the systems and structures that manage and profit from global insecurity and violence is a huge task; but by working together in cross-solidarity we can begin to expose the forces of exploitation and extraction from under which we all suffer.
 

Laura Shewan is campaigner on the militarisation of science education at Scientists for Global Responsibility.
 

References

[1] Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2025). Arms Industry Database, 2025. https://www.sipri.org/databases