Comment archive

Thursday, 8 Jun 2023
Ukraine Takes the War Deep Into Russia

Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military philosopher, was rarely studied in Soviet military academies, but the Ukrainian high command — seeking to “win first and start fighting after” — appears to be taking a page out of his treatise, The Art of War. Naturally, the intentions for a spring offensive have ...

Sunday, 23 Oct 2022
Drones over Norway: A Security and Regulatory Analysis

Over the last five weeks, numerous incidents involving drones have made headlines in Norway. These incidents include multiple drone sightings outside oil platforms and energy installations, drone incursions in the vicinity of airports leading to the temporary closure of some of them, and Russian citizens being arrested at Norwegian border ...

Wednesday, 11 May 2022
Drones in the Ukraine War: An Initial Strategic and Sociological Assessment

Drones have played a very important, multidimensional role since the beginning of the current iteration of the war in Ukraine. This importance mirrors what happens in modern conflict all over the world: both in more conventional conflict and in other insurgency / counter-insurgency settings, drones have become a central part ...

Friday, 17 Dec 2021
Disharmony in Harmonized EU Rules

In 2019, the European Union (EU) passed regulations for the aviation safety of civilian drones. They are aimed to foster innovation and ensure the safe integration of drones, of all sizes, into European airspace. This move was made to also harmonize drone rules throughout the EU as the previous framework ...

Tuesday, 14 Sep 2021
Book review: Ethics of Drone Strikes. Restraining Remote-Control Killing

by Christian Enemark (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. IX + 204 p The increasing use of armed drones has raised a series of ethical and legal questions. The fast-evolving development and sophistication of technologies that drones combine (aerospace, robotics, satellites, artificial intelligence) have stimulated intensive debates about the need ...

Wednesday, 2 Jun 2021
Book review: Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare

by Katherine Chandler, New Brunswick & Newark: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 190pp. ISBN: 1978809743 Imaginations of the possibility (and the terror) of drone strikes existed well before they were possible. Echoing science fiction work like H.G. Wells’ War in the Air, Nikola Tesla warned in 1921 of “Machines of destruction ...

Friday, 19 Feb 2021
Military drones beyond targeted killing: The case of Israel

The emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or “drones” as they are more popularly known, is one of the most widely discussed developments in contemporary security and military affairs.So far, the academic literature on drones has been heavily focused on what is usually known as “targeted killings” in the context ...

Thursday, 4 Feb 2021
Book Review: Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence

by Rebecca A. Adelman and David Kieran(eds),Universityof Minnesota Press, 2020,ISBN 978-1-5179-0748-8,352 pp. Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violenceis a volume of essays edited by Rebecca A. Adelman and David Kieran, and addresses the contemporary conceptual constraints that surround academic research in remote warfare.In the words of the editors, this volume ...

Friday, 11 Sep 2020
The War Against Vague Threats: The Redefinitions of Imminent Threat and their Impact on Anticipatory Use of Force in the “War on Terror”

In this research project, I explored how the United States (U.S.) has redefined the concept of’imminentthreat’to relax the rules for anticipatory use of armed force against insurgent groups. In particular, two new definitions ofimminent threat have changed the conduct of specific combat activities: drone strikes and ground combat operations. In ...

Friday, 24 Apr 2020
Drones in the Time of Pandemic: Caution Behind the Hype

The fight against the COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized national and international resources of all types, from funding of medical research to financial rescue plans, and has led to widespread state of emergency declarations. While the approaches adopted all over the world have differed from one country to another, an underlying ...

Tuesday, 4 Feb 2020
“Drone technology has democratized”: An Interview with Bruno Oliveira Martins and Andrea Silkoset

On February 12 PRIO will host a launch event for the report: Counter-Drone Systems: Implications for Norway in an EU and NATO context. The report aims to comprehensively address opportunities and potential risks, associated with the implementation of counter-drone technology (C-UAS). Together with Arthur Holland Michel, PRIO researchers Bruno Oliveira ...

Thursday, 17 Oct 2019
The Iterative Relationship Between Technology and International Security

Scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations are often subject to public discussion about their capacity to affect international security, either by their military exploitation or their uptake and re-appropriation through non-state actors and terrorists. While accompanying proliferation and militarisation concerns are not new, the challenge of governing emerging technologies is as ...

Monday, 23 Sep 2019
The EU’s Response to the Drone Age: A United Sky

The European Union’s vision for an integrated Europe has reached new heights. With the release of the highly anticipated guidelines for unmanned aircrafts, the EU takes a big step toward a singular sky. Violeta Bulc, EU Commissioner for Transport, stated that “the EU will now have the most advanced rules ...

Tuesday, 30 Jul 2019
Droneland: Towards a Domestic Drone Theory

In December 2018, a civilian drone operator allegedly disrupted hundreds of flights at Gatwick Airport in the UK by flying an industrial class drone across the flight path of aircrafts, causing a major political and security incident. To be sure, the Gatwick drone was neither the first nor the last ...

Thursday, 25 Jul 2019
Dressing for a machine-readable world: An interview with Adam Harvey

‘Think Privacy’ Public Service Announcements by the Privacy Gift Shop ©Adam Harvey 2016 Adam Harveyis an award-winning artist and researcher based in Berlin. His work has been widely covered in such publications as the New York Times, CNN and the Huffington Post, and has also been cited by critical theorists ...

Tuesday, 15 Jan 2019
Droneland: Towards a Domestic Drone Theory

In December 2018, a civilian drone operator allegedly disrupted hundreds of flights at Gatwick Airport in the UK by flying an industrial class drone across the flight path of aircrafts, causing a major political and security incident. To be sure, the Gatwick drone was neither the first nor the last ...

Wednesday, 31 Oct 2018
The Good Drone

Edited by Kristin Bergtora Sandvik, Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018, 202 pp.:  9780367000844 (hbk) Kristin Bergtora Sandvik and Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert’s collected volume entitled ‘The Good Drone’ highlights the materiality of the drone in the context of humanitarian applications and questions. While the book primarily deals with the question ...

Saturday, 11 Aug 2018
A Venezuelan Incident: Maduro and the Politics of Latin American Drones

On 4 August 2018, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s speech at a military parade in Caracas was interrupted by the sound of two explosions. Maduro’s camp immediately claimed that the explosions resulted from a failed assassination attempt by drones carrying explosives. Although the nature of the incident remains disputed, and is ...

Monday, 12 Feb 2018
From Principle to Practice: Humanitarian Innovation and Experimentation

Without methods to gauge success and failure, and without appropriate ethical frameworks, humanitarian tech may do more harm than good. Humanitarian organizations have an almost impossible task: They must balance the imperative to save lives with the commitment to do no harm. They perform this balancing act amidst chaos, with ...

Tuesday, 7 Jun 2016
African Drone Proliferation: The Meaning of Leapfrogging

The ongoing drone proliferation throughout Africa has received little critical attention. However, African drone proliferation has become a vehicle for the production and distribution of forms of legitimacy and of resources that have implications for drone proliferation both within and outside Africa.  More specifically, the percep­tion of Africa as being ...

Wednesday, 24 Feb 2016
New Developments in Drone Proliferation: How Africa was Deployed to Rescue Drones

Debates on global drone proliferation tend to assume that adoption and adaptation of drones follow a universal logic and that the drone industry is a singular thing, geographically concentrated in the Global North. In this blog post I argue that these assumptions make it difficult to critically assess the growth ...

Tuesday, 9 Feb 2016
Brazil: an Emerging Southern Drone Actor

This blog post uses the case of Brazil to reflect on how actors in the Global South now engage with drone technology. This technology has been employed across a series of areas where Brazilian stakeholders are involved or seek to become more involved, both at the domestic and international levels: ...

Wednesday, 2 Dec 2015
What’s Wrong with the Idea that ‘Robots don’t Rape’?

The politics of rape denunciation is fast becoming the politics of lobbyists, vendors and military manufacturers seeking access to new customers and markets. The recognition of wartime rape as a fundamental violation of international law has been a hard-fought victory. Ending rape and other forms of sexual violence in war ...

Thursday, 13 Aug 2015
Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Killing the ‘Robots-don’t-Rape’ Argument

Earlier this spring, we debated a law professor who insisted that lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS) could clean up war. The professor posited that a war fought with autonomous weapons would be a war without rape. Taking humans out of the loop would, the argument goes, lead to more humane war. ...

Friday, 12 Dec 2014
Fighting the War with the Ebola Drone

A particularly interesting and puzzling corner of the War on Ebola imaginary is inhabited by the triad consisting of Ebola, humanitarian governance, and unmanned technology, drones more precisely. Out of this triad has emerged what will here be called ´the Ebola Drone`. The Ebola Drone has materialized from a confluence ...

Monday, 12 May 2014
Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Issues for the International Community

On May 13-16 a United Nations (UN) expert meeting will discuss ‘questions relating to emerging technologies’ in lethal autonomous weapon systems. Such systems are distinguished by being mobile and selecting targets autonomously without direct human supervision. This type of expert meeting represents the lowest rung of the UN ladder. The Chair of ...

Friday, 4 Apr 2014
Issues for the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots was launched in April 2013 with the objective of achieving a ban on the development, production and deployment of lethal autonomous weapons. In May 2014, the issue will be discussed by a UN expert meeting under the auspices of the Convention on Conventional Weapons ...

Sunday, 1 Dec 2013
The Promise and Perils of ‘Disaster Drones’

The dire humanitarian consequences of the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) in conflict have become all too familiar. In contrast, there has been much less public discussion about the potential humanitarian uses of drones. So-called ‘disaster drones’ offer humanitarian agencies a range of possibilities in relation to ...