The Duck of Minerva

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots secured an important victory last week when delegates of States Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) voted unanimously to take up the issue as part of their work to oversee the implementation and further development of the 1980 treaty, which regulates weapons causing inhuman injuries to combatants or civilians. The CCW process, which includes yearly meetings of state parties as well as review conferences every five years, have become a periodic forum for discussions not only of how to enforce existing rules, but of norm-building...

As captured in the final images of this important new documentary, there seem to be at least three different debates going on about drones: The first is reflected in a recent op-ed titled "Five Ways Obama Could Fix Drones Right Now." Here, Sarah Holewinski of CIVIC and Larry Lewis, a Center for Naval Analyses researcher whose classified data on drone deaths made headlines a few months back, argue that the US' drone strike policy is ok on its merits but could be far more humane, both in measures taken to reduce collateral damage and restorative justice for civilians harmed in drone attacks....

Killer Robot Blogging: This week, NGOs are massing in Geneva to encourage states party to the Convention on Conventional Weapons to consider banning autonomous weapons under the auspices of this treaty. This follows the UN Disarmament Committee meetings in New York in October, where multiple countries expressed concern about this issue. As in New York, NGO campaigners will be holding side events and briefings in Geneva to press their claim that these weapons should be banned. Human Rights: A report form the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University outlines the complicity...

I am traveling this week for the 40th Anniversary Celebration at the Center for the Study of Women in Society at University of Oregon, where I completed my doctoral work ten years ago next month. CSWS was kind enough to fund field travel for my dissertation back then, which became my first book, and it's a pleasure to be back to present at their event. In a few hours I'll present a short talk on "War and Civilian Security," tying together my earlier work on gender and civilian immunity with emerging and very urgent trends in human security norm development. The YouTube version is here: A...

via Geek in Heels, your friendly Friday Star Wars Meyers-Brigg test. Which character are you? Also: Star Wars VII release date has been, well, released. Doug Mataconis comments.

Lionel Beehner and Joseph Young write in The National Interest that while targeted killing by drone strike is increasingly denounced (and decreasingly used by states), cross-border incursions by counter-terror ground troops are an increasingly accepted practice – despite the fact that both violate state sovereignty. Citing the capture of Abu Anas Al-Libi by US special ops in Libya, drug kingpins by Brazil in Bolivia and Peru, and the frequency of cross-border incursions in Africa, they express surprise that not all violations of sovereignty are equally frowned upon, and explain this based on...

As part of World Politics Review's new feature on "winding down the war on terror," I rant about the US' continuing use of a war paradigm for global law enforcement operations: The term “shadow wars” aptly describes the U.S. approach to the war on terror. Policymakers perceive they are fighting an enemy composed of shadow and dust, one hidden in and facilitated by the dark underworld of global politics. But to prosecute this campaign, the U.S. has itself, to borrow a term from the writer J.R.R. Tolkien, “fallen into shadow”: Its moral high ground and once-principled politics have been...

Drones are on the international agenda this week, with Pakistan excoriating the US at the General Assembly and with human rights heavyweights Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch launching a new and scathing joint report. OpenGlobalRights, OpenDemocracy's global-south-oriented human rights wing, is having a number of interesting articles on the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine: here, here and views on the subject from India here. New York Times Magazine's online coverage of the South China Sea territorial dispute breaks ground in mainstream multi-media journalism. Seriously, check...

[Note: This is a guest post by Lauren Wilcox, Lecturer in Gender Studies at University of Cambridge, and author of "Machines that Matter: The Politics and Ethics of ‘Unnatural’ Bodies" in Iver Neumann and Nicholas Kiersey eds, Battlestar Galactica and International Relations, Routledge 2012] In a recent blog post on the Monkey Cage, Heather Roff-Perkins is concerned that military robots are being built with masculine characteristics. She is correct that gender is one of many pertinent issues surrounding contemporary military technologies but in my opinion she doesn’t go far enough in...

Killer Robots: Wired reports on developments in autonomous weaponry, quoting military personnel who say the idea is to think of them "not as tools but as members of the squad." Video gamers collaboratively solved a decade-old puzzle about the complex structure of an enzyme relevant to HIV-AIDS research, suggesting human spatial reasoning is superior to algorithms: a point not at all lost on those who think putting complex situational life and death judgments into machine hands is a bad idea. 270 engineers, roboticists a computer science experts have signed a statement demanding a...