Blog post archive

Wednesday, 23 Aug 2023
Oppenheimer, Ukraine and Cluster Bombs

In desperate situations, it is essential that ethics are not sacrificed, as happened in practice in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the cinema, currently we can follow the United States’ development of the atom bomb, headed by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. At the same time, Nazi Germany was ...

Tuesday, 21 Dec 2021
Giant Fake Ladybugs on Tanks? The Future of Warfare in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and the Need for Ethics

In September this year, Chief Software Officer for the U.S. Air Force Nicholas Chaillian, unexpectedly resigned. The reason for his resignation? To protest the slow pace of technological transformation taking place in the U.S. military, and where he argued the U.S. had already lost the race for AI dominance to ...

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 ...

Monday, 6 Sep 2021
Artificial Intelligence, Warfare, and Bias

When you think about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and war, you might find yourself thinking about killer robots, like those we have seen in movies such as The Terminator. In reality, AI and warfare looks quite different from these popularized images, and today we see many countries around the world exploring ...

Monday, 12 Oct 2020
Red Lines and Grey Zones: Ethical dilemmas in humanitarian negotiations and the need for a research agenda

When turning humanitarian principles into practice, humanitarian organisations are faced with a range of difficult ethical dilemmas. These dilemmas are rarely as tangible as when the organisations negotiate with local counterparts for access and programming in settings of armed conflict. This dimension of humanitarian negotiations remains to be systematically studied, ...

Tuesday, 18 Aug 2020
Fighting Racism and Decolonizing Humanitarian Studies: Toward Mindful Scholarship

Addressing racism and decolonizing humanitarian studies is urgent, and as scholars we need to step up our efforts. Partnerships between scholars and conflict-affected communities are as unequal as ever, and the disparities between humanitarian studies in the global North and global South remain large. Dorothea Hilhorst here introduces the importance ...

Friday, 15 Nov 2019
Accountable to Whom? Reflecting on the ethics of doing migration research

Who are we accountable to when doing research on migration and mobility? Many scholars, ourselves included, do research with – rather than about – refugees and other migrants, or indeed communities and individuals in origin or destination country. But to whom are we accountable? And what can and should accountability ...

Thursday, 12 Sep 2019
Review of Violence: Humans in Dark Times

Evans, Brad & Lennard, Natasha, Violence: Humans in Dark Times. San Fransisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2018, 335 pp., ISBN-10 0872867544 In her writings on violence and totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt famously used the term “dark times” to refer to not just the monstrosities of the 20th century, but the necessity ...

Monday, 25 Feb 2019
A Fool’s Errand? Exercising Critique through Ethics in EU Security Research

Claims about being “critical” as academics seldom explain what being critical actually means for us, or what it implies for our professional and personal conduct. Sometimes, it is associated with distanced observation “from above”, while at other times it is about descending from the Ivory tower and engaging with political ...