War, Conflict & Global Migration
Think Tank Programme
Blog Posts
As a refugee in Calais, Coronavirus is the least of my concerns’ – Refugee Camps during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Coronavirus or ‘COVID-19’ amongst other labels, has been referred to as ‘the virus that doesn’t discriminate.’ In reality, certain vulnerable groups in society, particularly refugees, have become more isolated during the pandemic due to a lack of ‘pre-existing conditions such as medical, economic, social, political and racial (Ironstone, 2020; Solnit, 2020).
Interview with Phil Miller
Phil is an investigative journalist and author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes (Pluto Press, 2020).
The swarm that we already are: Artificially Intelligent (AI) swarming ‘insect drones’, targeting and international humanitarian law in a posthuman ecology
Over the last fifty-odd years the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has launched programs aiming at emulating and incorporating insect technologies in military technology. The US Army Unmanned Aircrafts Systems Roadmap 2010–2035 has specified insect swarming as a field of development for Unmanned Aviation Systems. While legal scholarship has paid substantial attention to drones, autonomous weapons systems and artificial intelligence (AI), developments based on insect swarming technologies have been largely ignored. This article takes emerging AI swarming technologies in military warfare systems as its starting point and asks about the significance of the swarming insect in and through contemporary International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and warfare. Taking up Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notions of ‘the swarm’ and the ‘war machine’, and drawing on critical environmental legal scholarship, the article argues that rather than dispersing the human from its central position in the ‘targeting loop’, the increased interest in insects for commercial and warfare purposes is an intensification of transhumanist desires and an acceleration of late capitalism. As a counter-move, and as a contribution to a posthumanist turn in IHL, the article calls for becoming-insect, swarm and minoritarian as an epistemological practice and ontological shift in IHL and its critical scholarship, resulting in a posthumanitarian legal ordering of becoming. Arvidsson, Matilda
Notes on: Louise Glück (1992) The Wild Iris (The Ecco Press).
Louise Glück’s poetry collection “The Wild Iris” arrived to me from a used books shop, dedicated “To Ruthy, with love from Mom, on your 43rd birthday”. When I order used books the traces of their prior lives are often as interesting as are their original texts.
Notes on: Barbara Johnson (2014) “My Monster/My Self” in B. Johnson A Life with Mary Shelley (Stanford University Press)
By Matilda Arvidsson In “My Monster/My Self” Barbara Johnson brings forth some fundamental insights into what it means to be a writing subject: a “self” who authors and authorises a text/being in her own image: this is the monster whose existence is irreversible reminding of its author as well as the impossibility of conflation with the author. While researching the ways in which international law as well as international legal scholarship emerges I’ve found Johnson’s “My Monster/My Self” helpful for mapping questions of authority, authorship, subjectivity and ways in which the “self” is embedded in the laws we study and scholarships we pursue. Editorial Team
Notes on: Judith Butler (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press)
Judith Butler’s theory of the emergence of the subject as interrelated with its others has been formative to my thinking about what legal subjectivity is and how it comes about.