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Forum on the Arms Trade Experts

Expert

Iain Overton

Iain Overton

Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW)
Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas
Landmines and Cluster Munitions
Humanitarian Law/Human Rights
Harm to Civilians
Executive Director | Action on Armed Violence
Contact
X / Twitter
Phone:
+44 079 84645145
Email:
ioverton@aoav.org.uk
aoav.org.uk/staff/iain-overton/

Iain Overton is Executive Director at the London-based nonprofit Action on Armed Violence. He has been witness to the devastating impact of armed violence on numerous occasions and has reported on conflict or extremes of violence in Ukraine, Syria/Jordan, Pakistan, Philippines, Kosovo, Nagorno Karabakh, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Iraq, Solomon Islands, Mexico, the West Bank, Somalia and Liberia. His human rights reporting has been awarded a Peabody Award, two Amnesty Awards and a BAFTA Scotland, among others. He is the author of 'Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms' (2015) and ‘The Price of Paradise: How the Suicide Bomber Shaped the Modern Age' (2019). Overton holds an MPhil and BA from Cambridge University and obtained his PhD from the University of Portsmouth.

Featured Publications

Britain Weighs Wider Arms Restrictions On Israel As Burnham Government Signals Policy Shift

AOAV | August 13, 2026.
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Covering massacres, the fog of war and Nazi zombies: a novel methodological approach to reporting gun violence

Handbook on Gun Violence and Society | August 6, 2026.
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The Business of War: Who Really Benefits From Britain’s Planned Military Spending Surge?

Byline Times | July 23, 2026.
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Publications

  • Britain Weighs Wider Arms Restrictions On Israel As Burnham Government Signals Policy Shift
    AOAV | August 13, 2026.
  • Covering massacres, the fog of war and Nazi zombies: a novel methodological approach to reporting gun violence
    Handbook on Gun Violence and Society | August 6, 2026.
  • The Business of War: Who Really Benefits From Britain’s Planned Military Spending Surge?
    Byline Times | July 23, 2026.
  • For Healey and Carns, enough was never enough in the world of defence spending
    Action on Armed Violence | June 11, 2026.
  • From Whitehall to the weapons industry: tracking a decade of MOD connections with the global military-industrial complex via their expense receipts
    Action on Armed Violence | June 8, 2026.
  • Britain and America’s militaries are quietly abandoning civilian harm accountability. This is not good
    Action on Armed Violence | May 16, 2026.
  • Who commands the god in the machine? AI and the future of military authority
    Action on Armed Violence | February 27, 2026.
  • The missing weapons: the weapons behind most explosive violence in the hottest conflicts around the world go unreported
    Action on Armed Violence | January 27, 2026.
  • Why did Britain’s arms licensing regime to Israel ignore the genocidal language by Israel’s leadership?
    Action on Armed Violence | January 19, 2026.
  • Are defence stocks too high?
    Action on Armed Violence | October 27, 2025.
  • Did Britain fly at least 623 spy flights over Gaza? AOAV’s data suggests so
    Action on Armed Violence | October 22, 2025.
  • Universities as military-industrial watchdogs: British colleges must never offer to monitor students for arms firms
    Action on Armed Violence | October 9, 2025.
  • Ukraine’s other war: the battle against drug-resistant bacteria
    Action on Armed Violence | October 1, 2025.
  • UK Surveillance Flights Over Gaza: Are We Israel’s Useful Idiots?
    Byline Times | September 9, 2025.
  • A culture of impunity: accountability failures in Britain’s armed forces
    Action on Armed Violence | July 30, 2025.
  • Impact of Libyan arms proliferation after NATO intervention in Africa: the role of the UK and France’s air campaigns and their impact on regional destabilisation
    Action on Armed Violence | July 28, 2025.
  • Exporting risk: how UK arms sales overlap with countries using explosive weapons in populated areas
    Action on Armed Violence | July 20, 2025.
  • Profits from fire: how MBDA’s UK links tie Britain to Bombs dropped on Gaza
    Action on Armed Violence | July 17, 2025.
  • Britain’s military embrace of Israel’s war on Gaza examined
    Action on Armed Violence | June 17, 2025.
  • Permissive US firearm laws blamed for thousands of child deaths
    Action on Armed Violence | June 11, 2025.
  • Kill codes and command lines: understanding the rise of algorithmic warfare
    Action on Armed Violence | May 30, 2025.
  • Murder in Uniform: Britain’s Special Forces and Their Killings in Afghanistan
    Byline Times | May 15, 2025.
  • In the UK’s development of hypersonic weaponry, perhaps let’s not move too fast: a call for a public debate
    Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) | April 8, 2025.
  • Trump’s new arms sales push: when profit trumps morality and what we must do about it
    Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) | April 3, 2025.
  • Op-ed: America’s Second Amendment and unique relationship to guns has dark global consequences
    Action on Armed Violence | January 27, 2025.
  • Framing gun violence at the United Nations: a missed public health opportunity
    Action on Armed Violence | December 10, 2024.
  • When Israel bombed British doctors using UK weapons
    Declassified UK | November 26, 2024.
  • Op-ed: the UK’s arms trade with Israel needs a rethink and fast
    Action on Armed Violence | August 5, 2024.
  • From War Crimes to Drug-Running Claims – UK’s Special Forces’ Revered History of Honour and Heroism is in Tatters
    Byline Times | April 15, 2024.
  • The British army trains cadets from at least eight countries that have had recent military coups
    AOAV | November 27, 2023.
  • A Decade of Mass Civilian Casualty Events from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)
    AOAV | November 9, 2023.
  • UK Arms Exports Surge in 2022: an Analysis
    Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) | October 5, 2023.
  • For me to return to Afghanistan… It’s Death’: The Reality of Demonised Asylum Seekers
    Byline Times | September 12, 2023.
  • Penetrating the Fog of War: the lives of Ukraine’s reporters covering the Russian invasion
    AOAV | August 20, 2023.
  • Cradles and Conflicts: Is Ukraine Facing a Demographic Death Spiral?
    Byline Times | July 25, 2023.
  • The Impact of Explosive Violence on Children: A Global Crisis
    Action on Armed Violence | May 2, 2023.
  • Shinzo Abe’s assassination and firearm control in Japan
    Action on Armed Violence | July 8, 2022.
  • Explosive Violence Monitor: 2021
    Action on Armed Violence | 2021
  • In Sending Weapons to Ukraine We Must Not Forget the Lessons of History
    Byline Times | March 14, 2022.
  • The Ugly Face of War: How Technology is Set to Change the Battlefield
    Byline Times | February 7, 2022.
  • The Improvised Explosive Device and ‘The Propaganda of the Deed
    Action on Armed Violence | December 13, 2021.
  • The targeting of high-rises in Gaza: an analysis of Israel’s air strikes on tall buildings in 2021
    Action on Armed Violence | September 30, 2021.
  • The Politics Of Torture & the Erosion of Truth
    ByLine Times | May 26, 2021.
  • A Decade of Explosive Violence Harm, 2011-2020
    AOAV | May 25, 2021.
  • Explosive violence trends and patterns in Afghanistan (2011-2020)
    Action on Armed Violence | April 14, 2021.
  • Explosive Violence Monitor 2020
    Action on Armed Violence | March 2, 2021.
  • Childhood Under Attack: A timeline of harm following an explosive blast
    Action on Armed Violence | February 25, 2021.
  • A decade of global IED harm reviewed
    Action on Armed Violence | October 15, 2020.
  • War is Boring – But We Need to Scrutinise the Military More than Ever
    Byline Times | September 29, 2020.
  • Explosive violence monitor 2019
    Action on Armed Violence | September 4, 2020.
  • Global explosive violence sharply declines during Covid19, new data suggests
    Action on Armed Violence | August 12, 2020.
  • Blast injury: the reverberating health consequences from the use of explosive weapons
    Action on Armed Violence | July 10, 2020.
  • Muhammad bin Salman meeting with Donald Trump
    Forum on the Arms Trade | March 19, 2018.