As autonomous functions migrate into the targeting cycle, the doctrine of meaningful human control has anchored the debate over autonomous weapons. A rich critical literature has shown, empirically and discursively, that the control humans exercise over such systems is often closer to meaningless than meaningful. This article asks why. It argues that the hollowness the literature documents has an identifiable architectural source. Authority in contemporary military decision systems is distributed across computational tiers, and the human signature attaches at a terminal tier downstream of the tiers where classification, proportionality and collateral-damage estimation are computed. The result is the terminal-systemic authority gap: control is formally present yet substantively hollow, because the endorser cannot review machine-paced, opaque reasoning within the decision window. Situating this account within recent scholarship on meaningful human control, and distinguishing military decision systems from civilian algorithmic systems by their development context, legal framework and deployment practice, the article reframes control as a property of the authority architecture governed across the technology’s full life cycle, and draws implications for design, oversight and accountability without assuming that design alone can carry the burden.
This paper is a conceptual intervention rather than an empirical study. It asks how the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) communication, rather than the truth or falsity of any particular message, may restructure the way a population perceives and makes sense of events during armed conflict. Drawing together communication theory, educational epistemology and the political economy of technology platforms, it develops the concept of narrative acceleration: the proposition that generative and increasingly agentic AI can compress the production, circulation, amplification, contestation and social validation of conflict narratives to a pace that may outrun the slower velocity of human and institutional verification. The distinctive claim is not that digital media accelerate war narratives, nor that AI communicates, both have well-established antecedents, but that the combination of speed, scale, variation, recursion and synthetic social validation may alter the relationship between how fast meaning forms and how slowly it can be checked. The author writes from inside the information environment of the 2026 Gulf conflict that vantage is used as reflexive illustration, explicitly distinguished from empirically demonstrated findings. The paper proposes that conflict over territory and matter is increasingly also conflict over the informational conditions through which societies learn what is happening to them, and closes by considering, and questioning the structural feasibility of, pedagogical and civic responses oriented toward epistemic resilience.
This paper explores how the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into military decision-making poses new challenges to human rights focused open-source investigation (OSI). It identifies three key epistemic risks emerging from AI’s role in the military ecosystem. Across these risk areas, AI’s perceived neutrality and rationality create feedback loops of impunity, where human oversight is symbolic or compromised—obscuring both the messy realities of warfare and the potential culpability of military decision-makers. The paper then argues that to continue exposing AI-driven military violence, OSI practices must reorient their methodologies. Rather than treating AI as a discrete, technical tool, OSI must focus more systemically and systematically on the dispersed material infrastructures and political forces underpinning AI militarism. By refocusing investigative practices onto these systems, investigators can better reveal concealed networks of accountability linking state and corporate actors. Such a shift also enables OSI to move beyond narrow legalistic frameworks and engage with structural forms of violence that often evade formal accountability. This could support more expansive, justice-oriented investigations—amplifying marginalised perspectives, mapping complicity, and aligning OSI with broader struggles against systemic harm. Detached from the procedural demands of law, OSI can become a more active, politically mobilising practice, amplifying marginalised perspectives, mapping networks of complicity, and supporting grassroots struggles for justice beyond the courtroom.
This article argues that multinational tech firms have evolved from peripheral suppliers into “digital proxies” in modern warfare. By providing essential services like cloud infrastructure, satellite communications, cyber defence and AI analytics, these private actors now actively mediate operational continuity, battlefield awareness and the tempo of military action. Using the Russo-Ukrainian war and Israel’s Project Nimbus as key case studies, the research demonstrates how tech giants wield a new quasi-military power through infrastructural gatekeeping and software control, fulfilling roles traditionally held by states. While this corporate integration enhances military resilience and defensive capabilities, it introduces critical risks. It creates acute technological dependencies, complicates longstanding questions about the line between civilian and military targets and generates severe accountability gaps when corporate executives or platform architectures dictate battlefield decisions. Ultimately, the article calls for a new governance framework to regulate this emerging “corporate battlespace.”
What does accountability look like when the work of investigation and moral witnessing is performed by machines? This article examines a profound shift in the exposure of organizational misconduct: the rise of an algorithmic conscience. We develop this concept through an in-depth analysis of a revelatory case: the exposure of "Dark Basin," a global hack-for-hire operation, by researchers using machine learning to cluster and attribute thousands of cyberattacks. We argue that this case exemplifies a new architecture of exposure comprising two interdependent layers. First, forensic AI acts as an investigative moral agent, autonomously performing pattern recognition and attribution at a scale and speed beyond human capacity. Second, we theorize the imminent need for blockchain-based infrastructures to serve as a moral ledger, providing the immutable provenance and verifiable custody chains required to secure the output of this algorithmic conscience against legal and technical adversaries. The convergence of these layers, we contend, does not merely augment human efforts; it reconfigures the very socio-technical geometry of truth-telling, redistributing agency, redefining evidence, and raising critical new tensions between automated vigilance, procedural justice, and enduring power asymmetries. Our analysis advances theories of digital governance by offering a new framework for understanding post-human accountability.
Every time Russian aviation is in the air, people in Ukraine know about it from alarm systems—analogue sirens on the streets and mobile apps. Nevertheless, to learn more details about threats, people often turn to social media: there, they learn how many drones are in the air, how they are moving in real time, and whether there is any danger of ballistic missiles. This study explores Telegram channels that monitor and facilitate air threats to civilians in real time during attacks on Ukraine. Analysing 25 Telegram air monitoring channels that together generated 893,472 posts in 2 years, the study combines digital ethnographic observation with network analysis to map channels’ communication ecosystem. Drawing on mediatisation theory, the findings reveal that channel identity (whether official military, OSINT investigator, or anonymous activist) shapes how raw military data are translated into emotional framing and civilian situational awareness, constructing a digital coping space in a war-torn country. At the same time, network analysis shows that channels operate as structurally independent broadcast hubs: despite sharing a common civic identity, they exhibit near-zero temporal coordination even under real attack pressure. Crucially, independent activist channels initiate the majority of first-move alerts, while the official Air Force channel ranks 14th in speed, pointing to a polycentric mediatisation model in which the state’s traditional monopoly over life-saving data has been displaced by a decentralised civilian ecosystem.
Modern warfare is a reductive pursuit shaped by digital technologies that promise an idealised, precise conflict. Martial cultures aspire to hyper-surveillance systems driven by advanced technologies and outsourced expertise they covet and themselves lack. Martial cultures assume digital tools can deliver perfect representations of enemies for precision-guided destruction, believing datafied, optimised war ensures swift, decisive outcomes by targeting the opponents’ material foundations. Martial cultures are captured by a managerial ideology (see Klikauer, 2015; Eagleton-Pierce and Knafo, 2020) enacted through supporting technologies of datafication. It deifies rational managers and engineers as architects of streamlined processes and in warfare, it feeds into a techno-centric belief that conflict can be rendered predictable and efficient. Its intent is to flatten and shift expertise away from military actors and into private sector hands. However, it has failed to reduce the human cost of war or accelerate its resolution. Instead, digital technologies perpetuate an illusion of optimised warfare, periodically reinvented but strategically limited. By analysing technologies used in the War on Terror, this article argues that war itself has become incidental to an obsession with managerialism. The connection between state and the purpose of war is broken and must be reconstructed for the sake of taking conflict seriously as an issue that has brutal consequences for those subject to it.
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Automated Target Recognition (ATR) optimises martial prophecies of perpetual threat while simultaneously exonerating the politically inclined prosecution of “forever” wars. The affordances of AI in data-centric warfare are, as a result, not only in line with military demands but also increasingly consistent with government mandates and the zero-sum game of national security. Deployed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza since October 2023 (and in service there since at least 2021), this article will propose that the use of AI in ATR systems such as The Gospel (Habsora) and Lavender demonstrates these invariably fatal techno- and thanato-political alignments. Although regularly offered up to deny the fact that automated prototypes of killing are a prevailing reality in contemporary wars, I will observe how the safeguards nominally associated with the so-called human-in-the-loop (HITL) defence are effectively nothing more than a convenient fallacy. A stark reality has therefore emerged in modern warfare: through the use of ATR, and Automated Weapons Systems (AWS) more broadly, AI is reliably providing an alibi for the prosecution of wholesale methods of killing without, in turn, provoking much by way of substantive political censure or legal accountability.
This study analyzes along gender lines Ukrainian political communication in both English and Ukrainian on Twitter/X and Facebook during comparable periods before (February to June 2021) and during (February to June 2022) Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. An original database of Ukrainian politicians’ socio-demographic attributes was created and analyzed using a novel mixed methods approach of structural topic modeling and social network analysis that transcends traditional content analysis. Overall, politicians’ use of narrative and interaction on social media differed along gender lines. Women were more collaborative and interactive, seeking support from the West and promoting themselves and their country. Men more frequently used military and combative terms. While politicians continued to update their constituents directly on Facebook in Ukrainian, English-language tweeting on Twitter/X increased 58
In this study, I conduct an analysis of Ukrainian-language tweets from 2022, the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, using the statistical software R. After a brief overview of the linguistic history of Ukraine and how it has been shaped by Russia, resulting in widespread Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism, I discuss the challenges of working with Ukrainian Twitter data and compiling a Twitter corpus concerned with Russia’s war in Ukraine. Subsequently, I conduct the analysis and visualize the results. The analysis reveals that, since Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022, Ukrainians have employed various means, such as nicknames and slurs for members of the aggressor state, decapitalization of proper nouns, the creative use of prepositions, and creative orthography and ‘Mock Russian.’ Sentiment analysis suggests that Ukrainian Twitter users respond positively to certain war-related events, demonstrating confidence and the will to resist the aggressor. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that linguistic questions are relevant for Ukrainian society at war, showing that the analysis of linguistic behavior on social media helps to shed light on how Ukrainians cope with Russia’s war of aggression and how they use social media as a tool for decolonial resistance.
This essay sets out to tackle a theoretical challenge: to offer a conceptual re-framing that addresses how digital technical and cultural transformations have influenced the nature of modern warfare resulting in the emergence of ‘larval warfare’ (larva being Latin for ‘mask’ and/or ‘spectre’). The aim is to explore the rationale and theory of larval warfare, as well as speculate about its significance and implications for future security challenges that will necessitate not only managing risks and threats, but also require the creation of new concepts and epistemological tools. Focusing on conceptual/philosophical arguments, I speculate about the emergence of a distinct construct of warfare that conceptually depends on blurring the strict boundaries between military and civilian domains. The latent, emergent, and masked nature of this mode of warfare exceeds, and thus disrupts, traditional domains of theorization. As a construct (rather than as a ‘model’ or ‘prototype’ that can be implemented), the notion of larval warfare allows philosophical rumination about the changing nature of warfare in the context of planetary-wide technical transformations. The first section introduces the theoretical context and empirical trends that have led to the emergence of larval warfare, focusing on outlining selected but relevant interdisciplinary scholarship in international relations, war studies, surveillance/media studies, and cultural studies. The next section offers a philosophical interpretation of the notion of ‘larval warfare’ and lays out its distinctions from the existing models of modern warfare (conventional and non-conventional). The final section concludes with some thoughts on the fundamentally predatory quality of larval warfare and its amenability with the contemporary phenomenon of ‘surveillance capitalism.’
The “kill chain”—involving the analysis of data by human users of military technologies, the understanding of that data, and human decisions—has fast been replaced by the “kill cloud” that necessitates, allows, and exacerbates increased thirst for domination, violence against distant populations, and a culture of experimentation with human lives. This commentary reports an interdisciplinary discussion organised by the Disruption Network Lab that brought together whistleblowers, artists, and experts investigating the impact of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies on networked warfare. Exposing the problematics of networked warfare and the kill cloud, their colonial overtones, effects on human subjects in real life, erroneous scientific rationalities, and the (business) practices and logics that enable this algorithmic machinery of violence. The conference took place from the 29th of November to the 1st of December 2024 at the Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, Germany.
This article investigates how fallen British soldiers of Operation TELIC (Iraq) and Operation Herrick (Afghanistan) are commemorated on the Facebook page British Troops Remembered. Based on an online ethnography and fifteen semi-structured interviews with users of this page, this article aims to better understand how online commemoration is performed, experienced and shaped in everyday life. It argues that people participate in the reproduction of militarism when they promote military values and frame military lives as grievable and worthy through commemorative practices. Paradoxically, although digital commemorative spaces offer new opportunities for people to counter official narratives of warfare and democratize national memory, it is precisely this possibility that keeps people from sharing alternative interpretations of military losses online. By analysing how the logics of militarism are reproduced in everyday encounters online, this article aims to contribute to discussions within critical military studies and memory studies about the relationship between online commemoration and militarism.
How do you train an artificial intelligence (AI), or automated image processing model, to classify and recognize images? This question is central to Trevor Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucination series (2017–ongoing), a project that employs a generative adversarial network (GAN) to classify, identify and crucially, produce unique images. Paglen’s series demonstrates how images produced by AI image processing platforms—in this instance, a GAN—are, despite claims, never predictable or, indeed, accurate in their classifications. A significant indicator of this unreliability is evident in the potential for GANs, alongside other generative AI (GenAI) models, to hallucinate and erroneously classify images. Notwithstanding this systemic failing, automated image processing platforms remain central to classification tasks, including those associated with facial recognition and surveillance. They remain, for that reason, central to defining, if not pre-defining, how we perceive and look at the world through automated models of machine vision. Encouraged to see like machines, or at least take their classifications seriously and act upon them accordingly, we now inhabit a realm of perception defined by “machine realism”, if not algorithmic delusion. Enquiring into how we can better understand the degree to which AI encodes our perception of the world, it is this regimen of “machine realism” that Paglen and Downey explore throughout the following conversation: If AI models of image perception replace ocular-centric ways of seeing, they ask, do these apparatuses have the capacity to not only (pre)define but, in time, further estrange and alienate us from the world?
This article examines the significance and practical challenges of using leaked email data for academic research into the inner mechanisms of non-democratic regimes, with a focus on Russia’s hybrid warfare against Ukraine. While investigative journalism and open-source intelligence have immensely benefited from leaked email data, academia has largely distanced itself from this novel type of reference and related empirical findings. Initial scholarly endeavors utilizing leaked emails highlight two key issues: 1) the authenticity of leaked data and the specifics of its interpretation and verification; and 2) research ethics concerning the privacy of leaked email account holders. I argue that traceability and ethical dilemmas should be addressed in tandem, considering the wider public good. The findings of this article may also apply to the study of other authoritarian regimes, such as China and Iran.
When Russia escalated its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, pro-Ukrainian resisters around the world took to cyber and digital spaces to support Ukraine’s cause. Social media platform Telegram played a vital role in coordinating and mobilizing action transnationally, foregrounding the impact of platform design and use in the trajectory of war’s mediatization. Our study contributes to empirical research and theory around cyber resistance tactics and platform affordances. We use qualitative thematic analysis to examine Telegram posts from the first two months of the full-scale invasion on select pro-Ukrainian resistance channels, identifying a range of tactics constructed within Telegram. This includes a phenomenon of “kitting” whereby capable members and moderators provide tools and templates, along with guidance, to participants to lower the access barrier to cyber resistance. We discuss Telegram’s affordances in relation to these tactics and, noting how Telegram is used to coordinate action on other social media, we propose a model of user-affordances interaction in a multiplatform media environment. Lastly, we provide suggestions for designers and policymakers regarding platform designs in broadly coordinated cyber resistance.
Zeinab Mir, Majid Rabet and Safdar Ahmed spoke at the Sydney hearing of the Airspace Tribunal at The Ethics Centre on 14 October 2019. The hearing considered the case for and against a proposed new human right to protect the freedom to live without physical or psychological threat from above. This text expands on the evidence which they presented to the hearing and considers the experience of aerial bombardment, the impacts of trauma and anxiety on future generations and the role of art and activism in thinking outside the medical model, raising questions of accountability and agency, and developing communities of self-expression. The Counsel to the Tribunal was Professor Andrew Byrnes.
Biases in artificial intelligence have been flagged in academic and policy literature for years. Autonomous weapons systems—defined as weapons that use sensors and algorithms to select, track, target, and engage targets without human intervention—have the potential to mirror systems of societal inequality which reproduce algorithmic bias. This article argues that the problem of engrained algorithmic bias poses a greater challenge to autonomous weapons systems developers than most other risks discussed in the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (GGE on LAWS), which should be reflected in the outcome documents of these discussions. This is mainly because it takes longer to rectify a discriminatory algorithm than it does to issue an apology for a mistake that occurs occasionally. Highly militarised states have controlled both the discussions and their outcomes, which have focused on issues that are pertinent to them while ignoring what is existential for the rest of the world. Various calls from civil society, researchers, and smaller states for a legally binding instrument to regulate the development and use of autonomous weapons systems have always included the call for recognising algorithmic bias in autonomous weapons, which has not been reflected in discussion outcomes. This paper argues that any ethical framework developed for the regulation of autonomous weapons systems should, in detail, ensure that the development and use of autonomous weapons systems do not prejudice against vulnerable sections of (global) society.
Recently, there have been groundbreaking studies that seek to create unique cybersecurity datasets used to empirically test theories related to strategic cybersecurity. To date, however, this research has neglected cyber-enabled information operations (CEIO). With the remarkable amount of information operations being reported on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, there is a substantial gap in the literature regarding empirical studies on CEIO using cross-national datasets. This exploratory, descriptive study seeks to remedy this dilemma. To do so, this paper investigates the question, “What are the political and economic characteristics of states that are most likely to be targeted by CEIO over social media on Facebook?” To investigate, this exploratory, descriptive study utilizes a unique Information Operations Threat Report Dataset (2020) based on Facebook’s release of 2020 influence operations information that captures CEIO on its platform from 2017 to 2020. A descriptive data analysis reveals that mixed regimes (i.e., states that are partially authoritarian and democratic) and slightly wealthier states are more likely to be targeted in CEIO on Facebook. These exploratory findings provide useful insights into what types of states may be more susceptible to CEIO attacks on Facebook.
In little more than 100 years, humans have radically transformed the sky: chemically, territorially and militarily. In this increasingly contested space, technological developments are accelerating the transformation. New forms of military and commercial exploitation are increasing the disparity of power between those who dominate airspace and outer space, and the billions of people on the ground affected by the impacts. Conceived by Shona Illingworth and Nick Grief the Airspace Tribunal considers the case for and against the recognition of a new human right to protect the freedom to live without physical or psychological threat from above. Drawing on wide expertise and experience, it engages the public in discussion and seeks to challenge the narrow terms by which airspace is represented and defined in law. The hearings consider the changing environmental, cultural, social, psychological, political, military and historical definition, perception and composition of airspace. Its members (‘judges’) are an invited cross-section of the general public who are involved as participants in this initiative, challenging the traditional state-centric view of how international law is created. This double special issue includes transcripts of the hearings, peer reviewed papers by speakers and artworks.
