Stop the killer robots! War humanisers future-proofing the war machine

Abstract

In my doctoral thesis, I examine and critique the interplay between the humanitarian approach to the regulation of military violence and the reproduction of war. I do this by focusing on the field of war humanisation and its ongoing attempts at regulating lethal autonomous weapons systems—i.e., LAWS or killer robots—with proscriptive and prescriptive rules in line with a paradigm of humane violence. I define the field of war humanisation as a social space structured upon, and aimed at continuing, the nineteenth century-born project of humanising war, whose dominant positions are inhabited by influential humanitarian and human rights NGOs and INGOs—especially, Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross—and which attracts and conditions other social agents, particularly civil society activists, experts, and small and middle powers. However, I move away from the canon, which emphasises the field’s progressive potential through successful bans on inhumane weapons, a practice that is usually labelled humanitarian disarmament, and also redefine the views of critics, who stress this practice’s indirect authorisation of humane alternatives. By scrutinising the conditioning forces of the double game of regulating inhumane weapons and humanising warfare on its players, who I label war humanisers, I find a much more direct link between their social actions and the consecration of war as a legitimate institution.

My central argument is that the field of war humanisation actively contributes to the legitimation and perpetuation of war. Drawing on the case of the ongoing humanitarian attempts to regulate killer robots, I offer three reasons for this. Firstly, by envisioning the issue as one of fully autonomous weapons, war humanisers needed to normalise existing theatres of war and violence and the weapons therein employed. Initially deployed to evidence the trend to an upcoming threat, extant forms and means of violence were put behind a moral line that only fully AWS would cross. Secondly, by broadening their response from an outright ban to the addition of positive obligations of human control, war humanisers shifted from restricting emerging autonomous weapons, to guaranteeing their acceptability. Learning from the design and operation of existing AWS, and drawing on the paradigm of humane violence, they turned to the prescription of requirements on future AWS ranging from their development to their use. Thirdly, seeking to deepen the ethical stigmatisation of LAWS, war humanisers turned to human rights. Yet, having selected violence-permissive notions especially tailored to oppose LAWS, they have concomitantly deployed them to further dignify the practice of killing when conducted by (certain) human militaries. Overall, through industrious knowledge production, legal interpretation, and the mobilisation of influential symbolic systems, war humanisers consecrate war on scientific, legal, and moral grounds, thereby cementing it as a human-compatible practice. In return, the legitimised war machine with its incessant technological innovations and inherent humanitarian challenges justifies and reproduces their own existence.

My research approach to the field of war humanisation draws on the social sciences’ tradition of reflexivity, and intertwines a multi-method political ethnography with Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. In this manner, I produce original empirical data from a main site of study, namely, the multilateral deliberations on LAWS hosted by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, at the United Nations Office in Geneva. My multi-method approach comprises both participant and remote observation of public and private sessions of these discussions and interviews with key informants, especially humanitarian disarmament campaigners and diplomats, conducted between 2020 and 2022. It also incorporates a thorough and extensive analysis of documents ranging from the emergence of the issue of killer robots up to May 2023. These include interventions, official statements, working papers, policy reports, studies, and dissemination materials issued by States, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and its wide membership of humanitarian and human rights NGOs as well as AI and robotics experts, both within and around the Geneva-based talks. The contribution of this work to knowledge is threefold. Firstly, it adds to an emerging critical appraisal of the humanitarian approach to regulating autonomous weapons. In a scholarly debate saturated by normative arguments about whether these should be restricted or not, this research joins a few critical efforts that demystify and contextualise both the scope and effects of these normative stances. Secondly, it brings Bourdieu’s thinking tools, particularly the notions of field, habitus, and investment/illusio to the study of the practice of regulating the means of violence within a humane paradigm. With them, I unveil the intricate dynamics by which war humanisers classify the means of violence into unacceptable and acceptable categories, and subsequently both stigmatise and actively legitimise them, thereby extending knowledge on the consequences and limits of this approach. Thirdly, and crucially, my research contributes to critical scholarship that assesses the interplay between the law, violence, and humanitarianism. By examining the dual proscriptive-and-prescriptive humanitarian approach to regulating LAWS, I demonstrate that the field of war humanisation reproduces and reifies the fundamental contradiction of the project of humanising war, that is, that not only does it restrict war, but it also contributes to enable and perpetuate it.