Short Abstract

The combined sessions will confront military technoscience and challenge STS to examine algorithmic warfare, in terms of autonomy, data-driven targeting, and machine-speed decision-making, as well as their imaginaries and effects to transform critique into action for livable futures.

Description

In recent years, the accelerating development and deployment of algorithmic and computational technologies in military domains, from autonomous weapon systems and drone swarms to network-enabled command and control and data-driven targeting, have brought military technoscience to the forefront of public debate. Meanwhile, defense budgets are rapidly expanding across Europe, and military tech start-ups are gaining global prominence. The result is an expanding zone of “software-based war,” where speed, datafication, and automation are reshaping how violence is programmed and enacted, partially with devastating consequences, accompanied by ever-increasing societal militarization. Yet, the militarization of digital and algorithmic infrastructures, and of society at large, remains undertheorized and often sidelined within the broader STS community.

Therefore, we seek to provoke a critical intervention by asking:

- How do concepts like meaningful human control, accountability, and proportionality travel (or fail) at machine speed?

- In what ways do the logics of speed, data-driven decision making, drone swarms, and experimental warfare challenge STS concepts of agency, responsibility, and non/human relations?

- How do the imaginaries underpinning military AI reproduce or challenge geopolitical and epistemic asymmetries?

- What could the unique contribution of critical (feminist/postcolonial) STS be?

We will address these questions in three sessions, which align with the conference theme of “resilient futures” by insisting that creating livable futures requires confronting military technoscience and its epistemologies, imaginaries, and patriarchal and colonial residues. The two open panels will invite a broad range of empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions bringing together discussants across STS, critical security/military studies, critical data studies, feminist/postcolonial theory, journalism, and activism. The roundtable will serve as a “call to action,” offering a space to reflect collectively on how STS can engage more systematically with today’s military technoscience through our research agendas and methodological tools, but also considering ways to intervene effectively in the world-making and world-unmaking practices of the military-industrial complex.

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