The Meaning of Weapons

Reviews / Votes

Lars de Wildt studies worldviews in videogame production, content and consumption, at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen. His first book, The Pop Theology of Videogames (AUP 2023), studies how Western game developers sold religion to secular audiences. His current (NWO Veni-)project, Reorienting Global Gaming, studies how Western games adapt to Chinese worldviews. For more, see larsdewildt.eu.

Tessa Diphoorn works as an Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her research and teaching focuses on security, violence, and sovereignty in Kenya and South Africa. She previously conducted ethnographic research on private security in South Africa: Twilight Policing: Private Security and Violence in Urban South Africa (University of California Press, 2016). She is also the co-author of the book Nairobi Becoming: Security Uncertainty and Contingency (Punctum, 2025), and co-editor of the volume Security Blurs: The Politics of Plural Security Provision (Routledge, 2019). with Erella Grassiani. Her current on-going book project analyses police reform and oversight in Kenya. In addition to her writing, she is also the co-host and co-founder of the podcast series Travelling Concepts on Air.

Murtala Ibrahim is a research assistant at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universitaet Berlin. His research at the institute is funded by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). His primary research interest focuses on the intersection of religion and new media technologies in Nigeria. Trained in Religious Studies at the University of Jos in Nigeria, he earned his PhD in 2017 from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. After completing a one-year research fellowship at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology at Freie University Berlin, he became a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University from 2020 to 2023. He recently concluded a postdoctoral fellowship under the Global Encounter Platform at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, from 2024 to 2025.

Jenny Wiley Legath is Associate Director of the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion at Princeton University. She is a scholar of religion, gender, and material culture in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. Her first book was Sanctified Sisters: A History of Protestant Deaconesses (NYU Press 2019).

Erik Meinema is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Heritage at Utrecht University. His research focuses on religious diversity, youth culture, and political secularism in East Africa. He has (co-)published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Religion, Africa, the Journal of Religion in Africa, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies. He is also interested in questions about materiality, religion, and (violent) conflict and has published an edited volume on this topic with Brill together with Lucien van Liere. From January 2025, he is working on a Veni-project entitled Art, Religion, or Heritage? Negotiating Indigenous African Traditions in the Religiously Diverse Context of Coastal Kenya that is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Elena Romashko was born and raised in Belarus, she holds a Magister Degree in Theology and Religious Studies (Belarusian State University) and an M.A. degree in Intercultural Theology (Goettingen University). Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies and the coordinator of the Intercultural Theology study program in Goettingen, Germany.

Younes Saramifar is an Assistant Professor of the Anthropology of History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is researching narratives of domination and religious populism by focusing on Islamic Republics and non-state armed combatants. His research follows how objects and bodies are configured through history and collective memory. His is author of - among others - Living with the AK-47 (Cambridge Scholars 2015).

Frank Slijper is economist and leads the Arms Trade project at PAX, a Dutch peace organisation. Slijper has been working on arms trade and disarmament issues since 1993. In recent years his work has largely focused on the development of increasingly autonomous weapons, as well as arms trade in the context of the war in Yemen, and arms transfers to Israel.

Srdjan Sremac is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-director of the Amsterdam Center for the Study of Lived Religion at the same university.

Nina ter Laan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany, where she works as part of the Collaborative Research Center "Media for Cooperation" subproject (B04) 'Digital Publics and Social Transformation in the Maghreb.' Her research focuses on art and music, media, material religion, migration, gender, and the production of heritage in relation to postcolonial politics of belonging, with a special focus on Morocco.

Pieter van den Heede is a lecturer and researcher at the History department of Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research focuses on the study of historical culture (how people in the past and present relate to the past), history didactics, public history and other forms of meta-reflection on history as a discipline. He is also interested in the cultural history of games and play.

Lucien van Liere is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University. His research focus is on violence, conspiracy theories, and religion. He has published several volumes, including Material Perspectives on Religion, Conflict & Violence (with Erik Meinema, Brill 2022) and Trauma and Nostalgia (with Srdjan Sremac, AUP 2023). He is currently preparing a book on religion and violence.

Jan Joris Visser specializes in material culture and is based in Brussels. He works as an independent expert on restitution as well as repatriation for the Dutch and Belgian government. He intermediates between private collections and institutes on provenance and authenticity, and published on art and culture from former colonial regions.