At the annual conference of the British International Studies Association (BISA) in Brighton, Martine Jaarsma took part in a panel on 'Emerging Challenges in the (Geo-)Politics of AI Governance and Regulation' where she presented a paper on NATO's adoption of Palantir's Maven Smart System and the norm setting function of the private sector. The talk was followed by an engaging discussion with the other panelists and the audience.
After returning from BISA, Martine went to AFCEA's TechNet International in Brussels, a meeting point for NATO commands and the defense-technology industry. There, she spent her time speaking to practitioners from both the military and the private sector, several of them working on or around the Maven Smart System.
Fer Avar presented her ongoing work titled 'From Security Problem to Expertise Object: The European Drone Wall and the Construction of Euro-Atlantic Aerial Deterrence' in a session on 'Fractured Epistemic Orders: Politics of Knowledge and Expertise in Global Governance' at the 13th European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) in İzmir this July.
Concentrating on insights from Science and Technology Studies, the workshop participants explored how actors construct and negotiate epistemic authority. Rather than treating the ‘expert’ character of knowledge as an attribute of specific forms of knowledge, the contributions focused on the political work involved in defining what counts as valid and useful expertise and whose knowledge is recognized to be legitimate.
