At the turn of the twentieth century, Portugal launched armed campaigns to subdue its African colonies, following the example of neighbouring powers. The Ovambo peoples of southern Angola mounted strong resistance to Portuguese encroachment. Lisbon’s anxieties were compounded by the German presence in South West Africa. In late 1914, the Ovambo seized upon the Portuguese military defeat by German forces to lead an unprecedented uprising. Portugal retaliated in mid-1915 with a large-scale campaign that employed systematic terror. These tactics caused a famine that killed tens of thousands and arguably constituted genocide. This article examines the 1915 campaign in southern Angola, focusing on the devastating impact of Portuguese repression. It reflects on the links between colonialism, violence, and genocide, and considers the political reverberations of this violence in metropolitan Portugal.

Raïssa Maritain is one of the most compelling Catholic poets of the twentieth century, and yet her work is largely overlooked by literary critics. This short essay explores her mystical reading of darkness as a place of spiritual discernment, intuition, and kenosis and the poetic night vision she developed to negotiate it. The essay reads her as a fire-thief intent on stealing from poetry a light able to illuminate God’s dazzling darkness and the ruinous gloom of war.

How do states use drone exports to build their leverage with buyers? The scholarly literature acknowledges that states use arms exports to cement alliances, improve the capacities of allies and support their domestic arms industry. But there has been no examination of how suppliers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) tailor their export strategies to develop leverage with their buyers. This paper deploys SIPRI’s classification of arms exporters (hegemonic, industrial, and restrictive) and describes how each uses a varying combination of inducements (bundling, lock-ins, and predatory pricing) and risk-mitigation strategies to build leverage while avoiding reputational damage from being drawn into external conflicts. Examining new data on seven types of follow-on sales or defence cooperation agreements after drone sales, this paper finds that of the three of the five major drone suppliers – China, Turkey, and to a lesser extent Iran – operate like hegemonic exporters. To test the proposed mechanisms, it explores how China and Turkey have exploited their drone exports to build leverage with Pakistan. It offers conclusions about how drone diplomacy will evolve as the export market diversifies.

Integrating AI into military decision processes on the resort to force raises new moral challenges. A key question is: How can we assign responsibility in cases where AI systems shape the decision-making process on the resort to force? AI systems do not qualify as moral agents, and due to their opaqueness and the “problem of many hands,” responsibility for decisions made by a machine cannot be attributed to any one individual. To address this socio-technical responsibility gap, I suggest establishing “proxy responsibility” relations. Proxy responsibility means that an actor takes responsibility for the decisions made by another actor or synthetic agent who cannot be attributed with responsibility for their decisions. This article discusses the option to integrate an AI oversight body to establish proxy responsibility relations within decision-making processes regarding the resort to force. I argue that integrating an AI oversight body creates the preconditions necessary for attributing proxy responsibility to individuals.

This article investigates the profound impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data on political and military deliberations concerning the decision to wage war. By conceptualising AI as part of a broader, interconnected technology ecosystem – encompassing data, connectivity, energy, compute capacity and workforce – the article introduces the notion of “architectures of AI” to describe the underlying infrastructure shaping contemporary security and sovereignty. It demonstrates how these architectures concentrate power within a select number of technology companies, which increasingly function as national security actors capable of influencing state decisions on the resort to force. The article identifies three critical factors that collectively alter the calculus of war: (i) the concentration of power across the architectures of AI, (ii) the diffusion of national security decision making, and (iii) the role of AI in shaping public opinion. It argues that, as technology companies amass unprecedented control over digital infrastructure and information flows, most nation states – particularly smaller or less technologically advanced ones – experience diminished autonomy in decisions to use force. The article specifically examines how technology companies can coerce, influence or incentivise the resort-to-force decision making of smaller states, thereby challenging traditional notions of state sovereignty and international security.

In this article, we maintain that the anticipated integration of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled systems into state-level decision making over whether and when to wage war will be accompanied by a hitherto neglected risk. Namely, the incorporation of such systems will engender subtle but significant changes to the state’s deliberative and organisational structures, its culture, and its capacities – and in ways that could undermine its adherence to international norms of restraint. In offering this provocation, we argue that the gradual proliferation and embeddedness of AI-enabled decision-support systems within the state – what we call the ‘phenomenon of “Borgs in the org”’ – will lead to four significant changes that, together, threaten to diminish the state’s crucial capacity for ‘institutional learning’. Specifically, the state’s reliance on AI-enabled decision-support systems in deliberations over war initiation will invite: (i) disrupted deliberative structures and chains of command; (ii) the occlusion of crucial steps in decision-making processes; (iii) institutionalised deference to computer-generated outputs; and (iv) future plans and trajectories that are overdetermined by past policies and actions. The resulting ‘institutional atrophy’ could, in turn, weaken the state’s responsiveness to external social cues and censure, thereby making the state less likely to engage with, internalise, and adhere to evolving international norms of restraint. As a collateral effect, this weakening could contribute to the decay of these norms themselves if such institutional atrophy were to become widespread within the society of states.

This article prefaces our Special Issue on “AI and the Decision to Go to War.” We begin by introducing the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled systems increasingly infiltrating state-level decision making on the resort to force, clarifying that our focus is on existing technologies, and outlining the two general ways that this can conceivably occur: through automated self-defense and AI-enabled decision-support systems. We then highlight recent, on-going developments that create a backdrop of rapid change and global uncertainty against which AI-enabled systems will inform such deliberations: (i) the widespread tendency to misperceive the latest AI-enabled technologies as increasingly “human”; (ii) the changing role of “Big Tech” in the global competition over military applications of AI; (iii) a conspicuous blind spot in current discussions surrounding international regulation; and (iv) the emerging reality of an AI-nuclear weapons nexus. We suggest that each factor will affect the trajectory of AI-informed war initiation and must be addressed as scholars and policymakers determine how best to prepare for, direct, and respond to this anticipated change. Finally, turning to the pressing legal, ethical, sociotechnical, political, and geopolitical challenges that will accompany this transformation, we revisit four “complications” that have framed the broader project from which this Special Issue has emerged. Within this framework, we preview the other 13 multidisciplinary research articles that make up this collection. Together, these articles explore the risks and opportunities that will follow AI into the war-room.

This article tackles head-on a question that is often thought to defeat pacifism: ‘How then would you react against a Nazi invasion?’ That multiple wars are still recurrently justified as necessary to confront yet another ‘Hitler’ makes tackling this question critically relevant far beyond pacifist circles. On the Nazi context specifically: the question comes too late if pitched in 1939; militarism did not deter Hitler; there were actually many examples of nonviolent resistance against Nazis; even Hitler was mindful of public opinion; and the fight ‘against Nazis’ claimed many non-Nazi German victims too. More generally, and adding theoretical depth: pacifism need not entail a single absolute rejection of violence in all scenarios; nonviolent resistance has been proved to be effective; war-readiness has a corrosive constitutive impact; the Nazi question tends to assume that the application of retaliatory violence is controllable; and to presume that violence is the only option is absolutist and idealistic. Far from delivering a conclusive victory, the Nazi question, carefully considered and discussed, exposes cracks in conventional thinking about violence and war and provides opportunities to unpack and clarify multiple arguments advanced by pacifism.