Where is civilian drone research going?

At the RegulAIR project closing conference on 24 November in Oslo, followed by a second event in Brussels two days later, the project’s results were presented and future trajectories of the fast-changing field of civilian drone technology were discussed.

The theme of flux and unpredictability in drone technology development was evident right from the opening words of the conference: “the project would have been outdated even as it began” had it started with a preconceived idea of how to regulate this emerging field. The project project leader, Bruno Oliveira Martins (PRIO), illustrated how RegulAIR had been constructed around the three vectors of security, regulation and imagination, and stated the guiding research question: “In what ways are the Norwegian and EU airspaces re-imagined, reconceptualised, and re-regulated in the context of drone proliferation?”. Samar Abbas Nawaz (UiT), who wrote his thesis within the project, emphasised that imagination has legal pertinence: “Law is trying to create a reality; there is a very strong element of imaginary here.”

Avoiding bold predictions and sensationalism, just as the project itself did, this note outlines emerging trends and likely directions of civilian drone innovation and regulation in EU+ states, based on the findings presented at the closing event. It follows the project’s structure: security, regulation and imagination.

Security: Merging safety and security in a more complex airspace

The traditional framing of aviation regulation as primarily concerning safety is no longer adequate in the age of proliferating drone technology. Early EU and international efforts placed civilian drones under aviation rulemaking, with the main concerns being airworthiness, and collision and airspace management. Drone “security” was initially limited to privacy - think of the anxiety that individuals might spy on one another with airborne cameras, a kind of technological curtain twitching.

However, DG HOME’s recognition of drones’ potential misuse by non-state armed groups in the wake of several ISIS (non-drone) terrorist attacks in Europe in the 2010s, combined with the rise of low-cost, high-impact small drones, pushed the EU toward a combined safety–security framework. Today drones are recognised as the ideal tool to conduct hybrid warfare as capable of deception, difficult to attribute and thereby providing options to exert psychological pressure. Russian drones recently flown over European critical infrastructure illustrate how even limited incursions can generate public unease and have brought the idea of psychological pressure into the mainstream of popular discourse. Importantly, even though Norway is not a member of EU, it is part of the Single European Sky, which means that EU measures addressing civilian airspace are also applicable in Norway.

Continuums replace dichotomies

At the RegulAIR event, industry speakers from the oil and gas industry and critical infrastructure underscored the practical convergence of safety and security. They described a shift from a safety-only perspective to one where safety protocols must coexist with new security procedures, without replacing them. This shift will take time and require experience and, possibly, some close calls or moments of insecurity: in the same way that safety regulation took many years, and plenty of accidents, to develop, we can expect the same with civilian drones and security.

The project brought into sharp relief the inadequacies of existing conceptual binaries that underpin regulation. Aviation law still assumes clear distinctions between human control and autonomy, yet delivery companies, to give an example, increasingly deploy one-to-many operations where humans supervise semi-autonomous fleets. Like so often with the fast proliferation of disruptive technologies, we should not expect a clear demarcation signalling that drones have reached full autonomy – some drones are already at that point, and we already exist in a reality where regulators must adapt to autonomy as a spectrum rather than as a binary.

New vulnerabilities, new actors

A central issue for dual use technologies, meaning those that can have both military and civilian uses, is function creep – the repurposing of a tool, often for surveillance purposes. Technologies developed to monitor, identify or counter drones – such as the tracking networks, jammers or sensors that are set to make up the so-called EU Drone Wall – can be easily repurposed for surveillance. Predictions regarding the how the drone market will develop, what threats will emerge and what is thereby needed by states and citizens to guarantee both safety and security can also serve corporate interests by shaping risk perceptions to attract investment: what Didier Bigo identified as “stock market of fears”, which itself implies important accountability issues. As an example, we can take predictions of imminent conflict between EU States and Russia and accept that the EU requires must invest in and develop drones, drone infrastructures and counter drone technologies. If after said investment conflict is not forthcoming, corporate and political advocates of these preparations can always claim that their initiatives in fact deterred those attacks that had been predicted in the first place. But this is a common dynamic with arms development: the hawks claim greater insecurity and drive defence industry investments.

The real change with drone technology is the multiplication of potential players and relevance this David and Goliath technology can lend to small states, states that previously had a negligible defence industry profile, or even non-state actors and individuals. And this is not to digress from civilian drones into the more trodden path of military applications – in this field these can be one and the same thing and individual civilians are already having greater impacts than one would normally expect on this fast-emerging industry, both in conflict and commercial settings. Private actors are also essential to ensure state security, whether that be in developing drone sector technologies or securing critical infrastructures that the state relies on for its own international security and domestic safety. Thus, alongside public authorities, emerging actors like private security companies, foreign intelligence services, critical-infrastructure operators, criminal groups and hobbyists complicate the security landscape. The number and diversity of actors with influence over airspace governance is likely to grow.

Since 2024, armed groups across multiple conflicts have turned to small commercial or DIY drones. Skills developed in Ukraine and beyond are shared widely across platforms like Telegram, meaning that techniques diffuse rapidly – also further decentralising activities normally reserved for the defence sector. This generalisation has been documented by independent journalists and researchers, such as Faine Greenwood, who participated in the RegulAIR event. In her Substack she analyses and documents targeted attacks on civilians, emergency responders and public transport in contexts ranging from Syria and Sudan to Mexico and Myanmar. This constitutes “a novel threat” distinct from traditional aviation risks. The overriding point here is that these are often consumer drones being used for violent or intrusive purposes by any number of actors.

Regulation: Beyond “law lag” to structural complexity

Regulatory debates often invoke the idea that the law lags behind technological innovation. But RegulAIR’s PhD project demonstrates that there is much greater challenges to deal with than the law lag. The issue is not only speed but inconsistency: overlapping legislation, divergent institutional interpretations and conceptual gaps that persist even with sustained regulatory attention.

Returning to the reconfiguration of key binaries such as “autonomy” versus “control” and “safety” versus “security”, we can appreciate some of the barriers to sound and consistent regulation of drones. The diversity of uses and of potential users of this technology lies at the centre of this issue. The globalised drone market, with China being the leading producer of commercial drones, much like in other technological spheres, in particular the digital, adds further complexity to European regulatory efforts. Drone producers of course seek lighter regulations and where possible some harmonisation of regulations across jurisdictions in order to achieve economies of scale through unitary production lines. This dynamic is what allows the Brussels Effect where companies globally conform to EU regulations in order to access the largest single market in the world. Given the logic of economies of scale where one production line is more economically efficient than several, often this means that products sold in other markets still conform with EU regulations, effectively externalising said regulations.

Rivalling this now is the so-called “Washington Effect” on one side and the “Beijing Effect” on the other. The former is the watering down of EU regulations under US corporate lobby and State pressure. The latter is the adoption of Chinese standards globally – see Disney’s self-censorship in several recent productions to guarantee access to the ever larger Chinese market.

There is also internal contestation of both norms and regulations in the EU, as well as diverging national interests or perceptions. The Baltic states have a particularly acute sense of threat from an aggressive Russia, resulting in much more developed national drone strategies in these small states than at the EU level. This is also likely to shape regulations, with more space left open to defence and military purposes at the EU level a likely outcome of pressure from the Baltic States. Thus, the EU’s regulation of drones is pulled in different directions internally as well by its two largest trading partners abroad, one of whom it is dependent on for drones themselves (and for a growing gamut of adjacent technologies) and the other on whom it is dependent for defence.

A central RegulAIR finding is that classical regulatory boundaries – public vs private law, civil vs military domains, autonomous vs non-autonomous systems – are an increasingly inadequate framework for regulating technology. Hybrid systems and dual-use technologies require new regulatory instruments that can operate across domains, all of which is further complicated still by the fast development of AI technologies – themselves considered as dual use – that can greatly increase the autonomy and scope of drones.

The development of U-space, the EU’s framework for low-altitude traffic management, represents an attempt to build an entirely new governance architecture. Yet implementation is slowed by technological demands, communication challenges and zoning decisions. Scaling up drone operations requires rethinking foundational assumptions of airspace governance rather than merely extending aviation rules downward.

Overall, regulation is likely to become more complex, more multi-level and more dependent on cross-domain coordination.

Aeropeace and the politics of the “drone wall”

In a recent commentary piece, Kristin Sandvik (UiO) of the RegulAIR project has proposed the concept of aeropeace, drawing on distinctions between negative and positive peace. In her view, EU initiatives such as the “drone wall” risk building militarised architectures that blur defensive and offensive functions. These systems depend on continuously imagining a threat actor, potentially entrenching permanent restrictions on airspace and directing innovation towards military objectives. So, drones, particularly in a context of international instability, can accelerate militarisation and we also have the same issue of function creep that I mentioned above.

Kristin Sandvik’s vision of positive airspace governance includes:

1. Reimagining lower airspace as a public commons, akin to outer space.
2. Prioritising human security
3. Embedding democratic and social-justice principles into regulatory processes.

Competing imaginaries and societal acceptance

The RegulAIR project’s emphasis on imagination when it started five years ago proved prescient. What once appeared technocratic now constitutes a central arena of European security politics. Imaginaries shape modelling, standard-setting, investment and public acceptance. With drones in essence multiplying the commercial, military, hobbyist and other variables that shape air space, we must exercise our imagination so as to better grasp potential future trajectories in this fast changing space. As an example, the EU’s vertical security strategies from ground-based sensors to satellite-enabled tracking, from concerning geographic areas to presiding over airspace volume, illustrate how imaginaries shape policy trajectories. Competing visions frame drones as enablers of mobility, inspection and humanitarian response or as instruments of surveillance and coercion.

Emerging trajectories and open questions

Back at RegulAIR’s closing conference, several themes are likely to define the coming years:

1. The DIY and grey-market challenge: Small custom-built drones undermine traditional governance levers and require new approaches to accountability.
2. Digital sovereignty debates: Divergent national conceptions will influence how Europe balances openness, autonomy and security. Drones may have a surprisingly large role to play in defining what this highly contested concept may come to mean for the EU.
3. From negative to positive peace (hopefully!): Avoiding excessive militarisation and ensuring social justice become central to sustainable drone governance. This seems less than likely in the current international environment.
4. Integration into airspace: U-space is an early prototype; building workable systems will demand major infrastructural and regulatory redesign.
5. Balancing risk and innovation: Drones present both threats and transformative opportunities, requiring proportionate and adaptive governance.
6. The power of imagination: Stakeholders’ visions shape policy far in advance of technical reality; understanding and seeking to influence these imaginaries will remain relevant work for researchers and industry alike.
7. International coordination: Regulatory influence may shift as the EU, US and others contest standards and governance models.

Conclusion: A field defined by ongoing dialogue amidst conflict

The RegulAIR project demonstrates that the future of civilian drones is not predetermined. It will emerge through dialogue among researchers, regulators, industry, security actors and civil society. Rather than searching for definitive predictions, the key challenge is shaping the conditions under which drones can support security, mobility, innovation and human rights to push towards a positive peace.

• Giovanni Dini is a Visiting Researcher at PRIO
• Watch the closing conference of the RegulAIR project here