International Law and the Regulation of Autonomous Military Capabilities

Abstract There is a dissonance between principled consensus and operational dissensus in the emerging regulatory framework for autonomous military capabilities (AMCs). This framework is based on the application of international humanitarian law (IHL) and the maintenance of human control and responsibility, but it remains unclear whether and how IHL might apply to AMCs and how human control and responsibility can be maintained. The emergence of a regulatory framework in the face of this dissonance raises questions about how alternative regulatory possibilities have been excluded and how the possibility of regulation has been assumed. This article explores the mechanics of this exclusion and assumption. It sheds light on the conditions of possibilities and trajectories of development of the regulatory regime for AMCs, and also provides insights into international regulatory frameworks more broadly, especially in relation to new technologies. Using the example of the everywhere-forever war on terror, this article points to the role of a failure of politics and a consequently amorphous and expanding ideal of security in excluding the possibility of prohibition or restrictive regulation of the military promise of AMCs. The article then turns to four discursive strategies that sustain the assumption that AMCs are amenable to regulation. Through conflation, different types of AMCs are subsumed within an imaginary that is more easily accommodated within the regulatory consensus. Deferral creates a façade of consensus while shifting contentious issues to the national sphere. Normalization operates to de-emphasize the novelty of AMCs, while valorization pulls in the opposite direction by exaggerating the virtues of AMCs.