The Duck of Minerva

One of the more depressing elements in the narrative at the CCWUN Experts' Meeting this week has been the argument, repeated by a number of autonomous weapons proponents both in plenary and discussion, that an advantage of such weapons is the following: unlike human soldiers, they would never commit rape. This is but a new twist on a broader argument most prominently made by Georgia Tech Professor Ronald Arkin in his book Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, but shared by many AWS proponents. The argument is that autonomous weapons might not just be good for national security,...

A common refrain from critics of the campaign to ban autonomous weapons is that these weapons are "inevitable." If that's true, then efforts to mitigate or pre-empt their use are not just a waste of time but a dangerous distraction from the real issue: staying ahead in an impending robot arms race or, at least, making sure that the weapons (which will definitely be built and deployed) have the best "humanitarian" programming possible. My colleague Michael Horowitz made the former argument recently in Foreign Policy. Kenneth Anderson and Matthew Waxman (Waxman is slated to speak tomorrow at...

I am in Geneva this week to participate in the Convention on Conventional Weapons' Experts' Meeting on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems. There, I'll present survey data I collected on US public sentiment around autonomous weapons, joining global civil society in reminding world governments of the Marten's Clause in the preamble to the Hague Convention. This clause, originally inserted to protect irregular non-combatants in guerilla wars, enjoins states to consider the "dictates of the public conscience" in determining the lawfulness of means and methods of war not openly prohibited by...

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: "Game of Thrones and International Relations: Empirical Investigations" Deadline: May 26, 2014 Dan Drezner and I seek paper abstracts for an International Studies Association 2015 Conference panel proposal examining the relationship between the A Song of Ice and Fire book series and/or HBO hit series Game of Thrones and global political phenomena (or "first-order" representations of those phenomena). In other words, this panel focuses specifically on empirical investigations of the circulation of pop culture ideas in "real-world" foreign policy / global processes.* As...

The New Scientist reports that Russia has announced it will deploy fully autonomous lethal robots as guards around missile bases. Several countries already have autonomous sentry technology (the US, Israel and South Korea) but [UPDATED: if this report is accurate, it suggests Russia might be the first country to announce] it will openly deploy such weapons without a human in the loop. The reported announcement comes at an important moment in international norm-building efforts to regulate the deployment of fully autonomous weapons. At the behest of a global civil society campaign, states...

Defense analyst Lawrence Lewis has authored an unclassified report critically analyzing the metrics used to estimate civilian casualties from drone strikes.* Lewis is an analyst and field representative for the Center for Naval Analysis, which published the report today. He has led numerous projects on operational effectiveness for DOD, including the Joint Civilian Casualty Study in support of General Petraeus, and knows of what he speaks. He is also the author of a classified study of casualties from manned and unmanned air attacks in Afghanistan. This remarkably balanced analysis begins...

Felix Haas has written a monster blog post over at Bretterblog with interesting descriptive statistics from the #ISA2014 hashtag. Among other fascinating points: 11% of IR scholars at the conference tweet, compared to only 2% of the global population The most popular tweet of the conference contained the Sheraton lobby wifi password Most prolific tweeter: Annick Wibben Number of tweets sent by Laura Seay while simultaneously participating on the Twitter roundtable: 61 Haas also details how he gathered and coded the tweets, which itself is interesting methodologically in terms of how social...

(This is a solicited guest post by University of Chicago's Eric Hundman, who is currently conducting fieldwork in Taiwan. Also follow him on Twitter.) At around 7:30pm on Tuesday, March 18, around 300 protesters scaled the fence around Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan (Taiwan’s equivalent of a parliament) and occupied the building. The protesters then barricaded themselves inside the legislative chamber and began organizing, with the help of opposition legislators and the acquiescence of “patient, though confused police.” The executive branch in Taiwan probably* does not* have the authority to send...

Many Ducks are posting about their highlights from #ISA2014. Mine - aside from the Bloggers' Reception and the many smart junior scholars I met in the lobby - was a meta-theoretical twitter conversation with former Duck Patrick Thaddeus Jackson occurring as I was headed to the airport. First the context. Just before departing, I live-tweeted Chris Tenove's "Representations Beyond Borders" panel (description here) after my presentation on same. There were many terrific papers: Wendy Wong and Ron Levi on "money as representation"; Chris on who gets to represent the aggrieved at the ICC;...