Last week, IRW’s Dr. Lauren Gould and Linde Arentze travelled to Istanbul to attend the European International Studies Association’s European Workshops in International Studies at Kadir Has University. 

The workshop, organised by Dr. Tom Watts, Dr. Rubrick Biegon, and Dr. Daniel Møller Ølgaard, focused on imaginaries of military technologies and the future of war in an era of great power competition. Discussions addressed the imagined futures and lived realities of algorithmic warfare, cognitive warfare, and low-carbon warfare, explored the role of technologies ranging from commercial drones to loitering munitions, and nuclear weapons, and considered implications for human-machine teaming, precision, and meaningful human control.

Gould and Arentze’s contribution ‘From Imaginaries to the Realities of Algorithmic Warfare’, co-written with Dr. Marijn Hoijtink, explored the realities of Israel’s ongoing “algorithmic warfare” in Gaza. Drawing on the work of investigative journalists, Gould, Hoijtink, and Arentze examine the perspectives of scientists innovating, officers executing, and civilians undergoing the violent effects of the IDF’s AI-driven bombing campaigns. By investigating both how the IDF’s algorithmic technology is developed and operationalized by an emerging ‘military-industrial-commercial complex’ and the direct, reverberating, and compounding civilian harm effects that it produces, they trace and illuminate the increasingly blurred lines of responsibility within the “algorithmic kill chain”.