War-making increasingly depends on infrastructure that states do not own or fully control: cloud and compute capacity, satellites and connectivity, data, and the commercial platforms built on top of them. Much of the existing scholarly debate on emerging digital technologies and war has focused on the ethical and legal governance of specific applications, particularly military AI and autonomous weapons. This risks overlooking a broader and comparatively underexplored question: what does it mean for the conduct and politics of war when the infrastructure it requires is privately owned and controlled, and how should we study this?
This workshop at the University of Antwerp (January 28-29, 2027) brings together a small, interdisciplinary group of academics and early-career researchers to explore this question. The workshop is designed to generate interdisciplinary approaches to understanding this topic – including through science and technology studies (STS), critical security studies, infrastructure and platform studies, and legal and regulatory analysis. The aim is to sharpen how we think about contemporary issues of private power, war and infrastructure, and to bring together an informal network of researchers that work on this topic in adjacent disciplines.
Guiding questions
What counts as military ‘infrastructure’ today and what changes when private firms, not states, own, operate and control it?
How does infrastructural dependency (e.g. cloud compute dependency) reshape sovereignty and alliance dynamics?
What continuities and ruptures exist between today's tech-military entanglements and older forms of the military-industrial complex?
How do private infrastructural actors gain authority or legitimacy in war-making? How can private power be governed, regulated, or challenged?
What is the geography of this infrastructure, and what does that reveal about global power asymmetries?
How to apply
Applicants are invited to submit an abstract of up to 300 words and a short academic biography by email to Marijn Hoijtink (marijn.hoijtink@uantwerpen.be). The deadline for submissions is 13 November 2026. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 27 November 2026. Accepted participants will be asked to circulate a draft of around 5,000 words two weeks before the workshop. We warmly encourage applications from scholars working across disciplinary boundaries and from diverse geographical and institutional backgrounds. A limited number of travel grants will be available for participants who do not have access to institutional funding.
