This article offers the first scholarly analysis of the shift from revolvers to semi-automatic handguns in Canada to contribute to our knowledge of police militarization. In the 1990s, most Canadian police handed in their venerable service revolvers and received modern semi-automatic pistols. Advocates of new weapons pointed to relatively rare but high-profile shootings of police to show the dangers of law enforcement work and the need to have better firearms. The gun industry encouraged the rearming of police through an aggressive marketing campaign emphasizing that modern police forces required more advanced weapons and the military lineage of their products. The transition to semi-automatic handguns sometimes proved controversial, as human rights advocates believed the new handguns could result in excessive use of force. Despite this concern, most police were rearmed by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In the Bronze Age, warriors are probably the best-known social class. Evidence for warfare and other violent encounters links them to aggression and bloodshed that could be translated into social status. This made warriors a potential two-fold threat to the social cohesion of their communities: not only did they risk threatening the integrity of communities as agents of death but also they could challenge local authority and cause internal conflict. Here, the author presents evidence that suggests that internal conflict was a major concern for Nordic Bronze Age societies, in that warriors constituted an internal social challenge, and proposes that local communities may have mitigated this threat in rituals such as the sacrifice of weapons and the construction of social narratives through rock art.

In Ghana, the economic costs of violent conflicts (loss of jobs and revenue, drop in gross domestic product, and disruption of production chain) have been well documented. However, there is little scholarly work on such conflicts’ human security costs, a critical element in contemporary security management arrangements. This study examines the costs of violent conflicts from a human security perspective using the farmer–herder conflict in the Agogo community in the Ashanti region of Ghana as a case study. A total of 400 participants were randomly and purposely selected. A χ2 test was employed to determine the association of rape, armed robbery, arson and murder with the farmer–herder conflict. The study found that at a 5% margin of error, the p value for armed robbery was 0.01, rape was 0.01, arson was 0.03 and murder was 0.00, indicating a close association between these variables and the conflict.

This article offers a new perspective on a diverse corpus of high-status Western Slavic objects from the domain of the Piast dynasty in Poland, dated between the tenth and eleventh centuries ad. It is proposed that the lavish zoomorphic decorations, often depicting snakes, found on jewellery, weapons, and equestrian equipment reflected Western Slavic pre-Christian religious ideas and served as material markers of elite identity. The results of this study lead to a more nuanced understanding of Western Slavic worldviews and their material expressions, paving the way for new investigations into cultural interactions both within and beyond the Slavic homelands.

This paper discusses the deposition of weapons in English rivers and wetlands during the Viking Age. Such finds have been extensively studied in Scandinavia but have rarely been academically discussed in Britain. It can be argued that the arrival of the Scandinavians in ninth- to eleventh-century Britain precipitated a marked increase in depositions of a ‘pagan’ nature. Despite deep-rooted, institutionalized Christianity having dominated England for some time, it is possible that pagan beliefs were dormant but not forgotten, with the Scandinavian arrival triggering their resurgence. Weapons form a large number of ritual depositions, with seventy deposits being mapped geographically to identify distributional patterns across the landscape. It is suggested here that ‘liminal' depositions in Viking Age Scandinavia provide an interpretative model for these finds. Given the context of endemic conflict and territorial consolidation within which they may have been deposited in England, this material can shed new light on attitudes to landscapes subject to conflict and consolidation.