On day one, Fer Avar and Emma Caals participated in a panel on ‘International Security Practices’. Fer presented her work on drone security as an object of expertise and authoritative knowledge, while Emma discussed a Community of Practice approach to NATO-Ukraine collaboration. The subsequent discussion focused on the merits of adopting an epistemic or practice-oriented approach to study phenomena in international security.
Day two started with a panel on digital mapping, organized by Robin Vanderborght, in which he presented a paper co-authored with Laszlo Steinwärder on the financial ecosystem of the European defense tech sector. Jasper van der Kist was part of this panel too, discussing a paper on the mapping of military AI platforms co-authored with Marijn Hoijtink, Robin Vanderborght, Anne Helmond and Fernando van der Vlist. In the afternoon, Marijn and Laszlo organized a roundtable on the ‘Tech Oligarchy’ and discussed its material foundations and ideological fragmentations together with Tobias Liebetrau, Elke Schwarz, Raluca Cseratoni and Ali Reza Taskale.
On day three, Marijn participated in the panel ‘Security (Un)limited: Governing and Experimenting at the Digital Frontier’ and presented ongoing work on new sites of defense innovation in Europe. After that, she was invited to a roundtable, discussing new conceptual avenues for ‘Making Sense of Big Tech’ in IR. In the afternoon, Martine Jaarsma presented her ongoing work on NATO’s Maven Smart System in a panel on ‘War and the Socio-Technical Construction of Legal Facts’. The discussion with other panelists Ingvild Bode, Taylor Woodcock and Klaudia Klonowska, chaired by Lauren Gould, revolved around the question of how AI technologies reshape legal categories, court evidence and civil-military interaction.
The final day started with a panel on ‘AI and Conflict Related Civilian Harm’, organized and chaired by Marijn Hoijtink. As part of the panel, Milutin Ðurašković presented his work on the embodied realities of algorithmic warfare and new forms of civilian harm in Gaza. The subsequent debate with the other panelists Lauren Gould and Oscar Noach centered around how AI-enabled warfare transforms the meaning of harm, protection, and civilian safety, and whether prevailing mitigation frameworks can adequately account for the embodied realities and political consequences experienced by those living and operating within algorithmic systems of violence.
Many of these discussions and presentations were part of the Digital IR section that PLATFORM WARS’ Jasper van der Kist co-organized with Vanessa Ugolini from VUB. In addition to the team’s contributions, colleagues from all over Europe organized panels and presented exciting work in the section, e.g. on the political economies of predictive technologies, the fallacies of digital sovereignty or the world-making effects of digital infrastructures.
As always, PEC-EISA brought together many familiar faces, friends and colleagues from around the world in the spirit of inter and intradisciplinary knowledge production and exchange. We are looking forward to the next one in Ljubljana.
