AAC Conférence à Oxford “Desired and Despised: Guns and Law-Abiding Civilians in Europe, c. 1870–1970″
Call for Papers – EU-GUNS Workshop
“Desired and Despised:
Guns and Law-Abiding Civilians in Europe, c. 1870–1970, in Comparative and Transnational Perspective”
Exeter College, University of Oxford, 18–19 March 2027
Deadline for submission: 21 December 2026
Over the past 150 years, the use of small firearms such as handguns, rifles and shotguns in Europe has changed profoundly. In the second half of the 19th century and during the Belle Époque, guns were widespread and part of everyday life: children often received them as birthday presents, revolvers were given away as newspaper prizes and shotguns were sold by mail order. Despite growing concerns about living in “the age of the revolver”, gun legislation was rare and, where it existed, mostly targeted the carrying rather than the possession of guns. The Great War proved a major turning point. Gun control emerged in its wake as a political technology that, in the name of fighting crime, political radicalism and violence, subjected the use and possession of guns by law-abiding citizens to licensing. Paradoxically, while lawful owners faced ever tighter regulation, paramilitary formations and radical political movements armed themselves on a large scale. In part the result of strict wartime controls and a new wave of post-war paramilitarism and violence, the consolidation of the regulated relationship between civilians and firearms marked the interwar period. Being unarmed gradually became a socially accepted condition in Western Europe, and guns were deglamourised and depoliticised, becoming above all tools for sport and leisure. Only in the 1970s did law-abiding citizens begin to question civilian disarmament.
Legislation, however, did not exist in a vacuum: it reflected, and in turn reshaped, much deeper transformations. Europe was home to a variety of gun cultures – encompassing practices, values, meanings, emotions and images connecting civilians with guns – which varied greatly by country and region, social class and gender, town and countryside. Guns were both desired and despised; they inspired affinity, love, hate, charisma and fear, and were rarely politically neutral objects. Guns strongly shaped gender identities: they offered men a way of performing masculine ideals and, in turn, encouraged them to behave in certain ways, as protectors, hunters or citizens-in-arms. Lawful owners gave guns their own meanings – as tools for work and leisure, or as an antidote to fear and insecurity – and negotiated, adapted to and sometimes resisted the rules imposed on them. Gun control and gun cultures constantly shaped each other.
Lawful, ordinary uses of small firearms in Europe remain largely unexplored by historians, overshadowed by two dominant historiographies. On the one hand, vast scholarship on the United States has dominated the debate, but it rarely adopts a comparative perspective, with Europe often dismissed as a non-issue. On the other, the history of small firearms in Europe has mostly been written as a history of war and crime. Major contributions by scholars such as Dagmar Ellerbrock, Dominique Kalifa and Gunner Lind have begun to chart other courses, notably on self-defence, insecurity and regulation, but the lawful gun owner has yet to take centre stage.
Filling this gap provides a benchmark against which to measure the everyday presence of guns and their violent and criminal uses, helps deconstruct the mutual exceptionalisms of American and European gun histories, and opens new angles on state-building, citizenship, gender relations and the boundaries between legal and illegal violence – all questions that the workshop seeks to address and develop.
Themes
The ERC-funded research project EU-GUNS (www.euguns.eu), hosted by the DiSSGeA department at the University of Padua, in collaboration with Exeter College, University of Oxford, invites scholars at any stage of their career to submit abstracts for a workshop that places the law-abiding gun owner at the centre of the history of guns in Europe and seeks to historicise the relationship between civilians, guns and the state. Central questions for the workshop are: What representation of the trustworthy gun carrier did states promote, and what does this selection reveal about the relationship between citizens and authorities? What did it mean to own and use a gun in everyday life? How did gun control and gun cultures shape each other? How did European ways of dealing with guns compare to the rest of the world?
Potential themes include, but are not limited to:
● licences, permits and gun taxes: how states intervened in lawful ownership and use, and how and why the relationship between citizens and firearms changed over time;
● criteria of trust: respectability, property, age, gender, class, nationality, race and political loyalty – and the ambiguous status of women and young people as gun owners;
● selective arming: how local authorities decided and negotiated who could be disarmed, armed or rearmed, especially during and after wars, occupations, revolutions and social unrest;
● gun cultures: national, regional, class and gendered cultures of gun ownership; the meanings of guns as status symbols, gifts and markers of masculinity and citizenship; their representations in the press, literature, film and advertising; their glamourisation and deglamourisation, and how they shaped and were shaped by regulation;
● everyday uses and practices: hunting, sport shooting, collecting, self-defence, and guns at home and at work;
● the impact of guns: incidents and evolving perceptions of risk and danger associated with guns;
● markets and technology: manufacturers, gun shops and catalogues, how they shaped the respectable customer, and how technology and the arms trade linked domestic practices to transnational processes.
Although the focus is on civilians and on Europe, we strongly invite participants to adopt a historical approach that is also comparative and transnational. We welcome papers on colonial contexts and other world regions, including the United States, that engage with European developments.
Keynote
The workshop will open on 18 March with a keynote lecture by Andrew C. McKevitt (Louisiana Tech University), author of Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America (2023).
Organisation
The workshop will run from the afternoon of Thursday 18 March to the evening of Friday 19 March 2027 at Exeter College’s Cohen Quad, Oxford. It is designed as a small, discussion-based event of about 20 participants.
The organisers will cover accommodation for two nights (18–19 March), meals during the workshop and the workshop dinner on 18 March. Funds are available for presenters to support travel.
How to apply
Please send an abstract of no more than 400 words and a short CV (max. 1 page) to euguns.dissgea@unipd.it by 21 December 2026. Applicants will be notified by early January.
For further information, please contact Matteo Millan (matteo.millan@unipd.it) and Martin Johansson (martinbirgergabriel.johansson@unipd.it).
EU-GUNS is funded by the European Union (ERC-CoG 2023 Grant EU-GUNS, G.A. 101124518).