MAIN PROJECT: “Disarming the Algorithmic War: Contemporary Reconfigurations of Disarmament at the United Nations and in Civil Society”
I seek to answer the following question: How does the confrontation between traditional and humanitarian doctrines of disarmament within debates on the use of algorithmic weapons shape their international regulation?
I define “algorithmic weapons” as computer systems that generate recommendations for lethal military targeting based on data collected and analysed by artificial intelligence (AI) systems. How can we ‘disarm’ weapons that do not look like weapons? How can we control the use of weapons whose inner workings are often obscure and beyond existing frameworks of regulation?
This project contributes to (1) conceptualising disarmament as a process of contestation, within which various actors seek to advance their vision of the regulation of algorithmic weapons; (2) demonstrating how the interplay of discourses, practices and representations fuels the normative struggle that constitutes the disarmament process; and (3) showing how normative contestation either facilitates or limits the possibilities for regulating algorithmic weapons.
OTHER PROJECTS
GYnopolitics and demographic rearmament: Making feminist sense of France’s (re)militarization (co-author: Emma limane)
This project investigates the complex entanglement of France’s feminist stance with its renewed and contradictory natalist and militarist rhetoric. how do renewed iterations of militarist and natalist discourses and their convergence with state feminism impact the government of women’s reproductive work? Through the original concept of gynopolitics, this article argues that the convergence of feminism, natalism, and militarism leads to a renewed control of women’s bodies via the control of whose bodies they birth and to what extent these new bodies will serve to strengthen or threaten France’s state apparatus.
This project was presented in 2026 at the British International Studies Association conference in Brighton (UK) and at the Société Québécoise de Science Politique.
Emma Donnaint 