Platforms

In light of the increasing automation and platformization of warfare and military decision-making, especially in the context of Ukraine and Gaza, the expertise of PLATFORM WARS and RAW researchers was high in demand last year, resulting in a series of interviews in newspapers, radio stations and podcasts.

In a recent blog post for Opiniojuris, PLATFORM WARS' Marijn Hoijtink and Jasper van der Kist reflect on the growing importance of the platform model in defense tech and warfare, drawing analogies to other domains in which platform corporations have gained extraordinary market power in recent years.

In the last week of January, the PLATFORM WARS project organized an interdisciplinary workshop focusing on different conceptualizations of ‘the platform’ and what they could add to the analysis of contemporary warfare.

In interviews with news outlets De Morgen, Radio1 and Trouw, Marijn Hoijtink and Jessica Dorsey reflect on Google’s departure from its commitment not to develop technology for weapon systems.

The project welcomes three new PhD researchers who will conduct research on platform corporations' role in contemporary warfare from a variety of theoretical, conceptual and empirical perspectives.

This article, published in the European Journal of International Security, centers around the concept of ‘prototype warfare’, an approach adopted by Western militaries to accelerate the experimental development, acquisition, and deployment of emerging technologies in warfare.

This article, published in Global Society, analyses how algorithmic innovation in contemporary warfare unfolds through new alliances and contestations among civil and military actors in the face of an overarching rhetoric around the need to lead in “information manoeuvre”.

This article, published in International Political Sociology, calls for an analytical perspective on Machine Learning platforms to understand how they proliferate across the military and to what effects.