Introduction to the Special Section: The Autonomisation of Weapons Systems: Challenges to International Relations
| Author | Hendrik Huelss,Ingvild Bode |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12704 |
Introduction to the Special Section: The
Autonomisation of Weapons Systems:
Challenges to International Relations
Ingvild Bode and Hendrik Huelss
School of Politics and IR, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
As large-scale interstate conflicts - the dominant type of
warfare in the first half of the 20th century - continues to
decrease, states resort to different forms of using force.
Developments in the last two decades appear to underpin a
global interventionism characterized by small-scale, so-called
‘precision’strikes, limited ground troop engagement, but
long-lasting military operations. Such practices have shaped
Western security policy in the global ‘war on terror’, leading
to an often limited but seemingly never-ending use of vio-
lent force in the Global South.
This development is intimately connected to the
weaponization of emerging technologies. The US-lead esca-
lation of ‘drone-warfare’, facilitated by the introduction of
increasingly sophisticated, remotely-controlled weapons sys-
tems, has become one of the most visible outcomes of this
ongoing reconceptualization of interventionism and has not
only gained significant academic but also political and pub-
lic attention. Research on drones as novel security instru-
ments has produced important insights into the ethical,
legal, social, and political consequences and implications of
their deployment (Cavallaro et al., 2012; Sauer and Sch€
ornig,
2012; Gregory, 2015; Warren and Bode, 2014; Casey-Maslen,
2012; Schwarz, 2016; Chamayou, 2015).
However, recent technological advancements point to the
growing importance of an increasing range of autonomous
features in weapons systems, which qualitatively surpass
remote-controlled instruments. Partly overshadowed by a
continued focus on drones, in particular within the discipline
of International Relations (IR), the multi-faceted and complex
weaponization of artificial intelligence (AI) is already in full
swing (Altmann and Sauer, 2017; Bode and Huelss, 2018;
Boulanin and Verbruggen, 2017; Garcia, 2016; Scharre, 2018).
Following the call of international non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) as key agenda-setters, the international
community has responded to this development by debating
‘lethal autonomous weapons systems’(LAWS) under the aus-
pices of the United Nations Convention on Certain Conven-
tional Weapons (UN-CCW) since 2014. While this process has
since become institutionalized with the creation of the
Group of Governmental Experts (UN-GGE), progress has
been slow and, as of June 2019, states parties could not
even develop a shared understanding of what LAWS are.
This underlines the complexity of autonomy as an issue,
which is closely related to questions of human-machine
interaction and the limits of human control.
In the same vein, the academic debate in IR has only
slowly responded to the emergence of autonomous weap-
ons systems (AWS), broadly understood. Reflecting the UN-
CCW process, AWS are primarily considered from the view-
points of science and technology studies and international
law –and the latter is chiefly invested in investigating the
implications of autonomy for jus in bello in relation to inter-
national humanitarian law (IHL) (e.g. Asaro, 2012, Bhuta
et al., 2016; Sartor and Omicini, 2016). For the discipline of
IR, AWS remains a marginal topic –despite the fact that
research intersects with theoretically motivated studies on
security technologies in contexts such as border control,
cyber-infrastructure, or surveillance –both domestically and
internationally.
This special section aims to contribute to the further elab-
oration of an IR-perspective on AWS and is the outcome of
a workshop we (the special section editors) organized as
part of the European Workshops in International Studies
(EWIS) in Groningen in June 2018. Its eight contributions
cover a range of important aspects related to the autono-
mization of weapons systems. While the contributions focus
on specific questions, they can also be seen as relating to
an overall and fundamental question: how can we maintain
an appropriate level of human control over AWS and what
factors and actors play a role in this process?
The concept of meaningful human control has gained
increasing currency both in the political debate on AWS and
in academic literature. Originating in conceptual work pur-
sued by the NGO Article 36 (Article 36, 2013; Roff and
Moyes, 2016), meaningful human control centres on estab-
lishing key boundaries on machine autonomy in weapons
systems in favour of safeguarding a meaningful form of
human decision-making in warfare. While the concept was
also introduced to circumvent the stalemate arising from
definitional issues around what AWS are, meaningful human
control remains closely linked to defining an understanding
of what autonomy, human agency, and technological influ-
ence is –thereby constituting the complex relationship of
human-machine interaction.
Meaningful human control as a concept is neither uncon-
tested nor particularly clear, but it is helpful in highlighting
Global Policy (2019) 10:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12704 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 3 . September 2019 327
Special Section Article
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