In 2017, in the course of PhD field research I travelled to Afghanistan — a country I had worked in back in 2010–11 as part of a NATO Combined Security Transition Command (CSTSC-A) military capacity-building programme. At the time of my research travel there were 8,448 American military personnel on the ground, alongside approximately 24,000 private contractors and roughly 600 United States government civilians. General John Nicholson — commander of the NATO-led forces — observed during a discussion about the force composition and prevalence of contractors: ‘Is that really light footprint? I’d argue it’s not.’ …

Increasingly, stated government support for LGBTQ+ rights is a benchmark for belonging to the community of Western neoliberal countries. The legalization of same-sex marriage in several countries, alongside an increasingly substantial queer presence in Western media, has convinced many non-LGBTQ+ people that most LGBTQ+ discrimination is a thing of the past. Though instances of discrimination may still occur, they are framed as one-off aberrations in an arc of history that bends toward acceptance.

Academic departments are no strangers to this narrative. After a research center at my PhD-granting institution expressed alarm that a majority of students wanted hate speech punished…

Debates about the role of artificial intelligence in drone warfare have taken on a new urgency of late. Since the first battlefield killing by an autonomous drone in Libya during May 2020, questions about the violent impacts of AI on soldiers and civilians alike are no longer hypothetical. It is therefore vital to examine the impact of the ongoing automation of warfare and its potential future effects on those living through it.

While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and artificial intelligence (AI) may decrease the costs to conflict, they also signal a change in the nature of dehumanization in warfare, which…

There is much interest of late in China’s growing role at the United Nations (UN). Commentators write of ‘angst about the growing Chinese [multilateral] role’ when discussing PRC UN officials and outline the need for the US to prevent Chinese control of multilateral agencies. The Trump administration charged PRC international civil servants as lacking ‘independence from the Chinese Communist Party’ and created a new special envoy for multilateral integrity to ‘[counter] malign influences of the PRC and others in the UN system’. …

When it comes to weapons, the Olympian phrase ‘citius — altius — fortius’ (faster, higher, stronger) is ironically apt to describe the unsportsmanlike world of military competition. After developing ‘higher’ missiles that can reach the orbit and ‘stronger’ bombs that can obliterate cities, the new round of competition now focuses on getting ‘faster’. Capable of traveling at Mach 5 or above, hypersonic missiles can arrive at their targets within minutes with little or no warning, potentially overwhelming any missile defence system currently deployed. …

Western states are increasingly being explicit about their limited faith in the transformative potential of interventions. This reflects their waning belief in the applicability of liberal internationalism since the end of the Cold War. In our recent article in International Affairs we explore how interventions have been gradually reconfigured in response to the West’s unrealized strategy to achieve liberal democratic peace. We argue that the West’s continued drive to shape fragile states through intervention is increasingly conditioned by a desire to introduce distance between intervenor and intervened rather than promote democracy or support the populations they directly effect.

Distancing themselves from the consequences

The West’s…

In a recent speech delivered to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, UK Ambassador Neil Bush argued: ‘We need to listen to survivors. And put survivor-centred, and survivor-led approaches at the heart of our policies’. A day earlier, the EU High Representative, Josep Borrell, and the UN Special Representative on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, Pramila Patten, jointly declared that: ‘The protection of survivors and a survivor-centred approach, including in terms of justice and reparations, is essential, particularly in fragile conflict-affected settings, and when survivors face multiple forms of stigma and discrimination’. …

In 1983, the world came within a phone call of nuclear annihilation. When an alert of incoming ballistic missiles registered at an early warning command centre outside of Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov had to decide whether or not to confirm the signal to his superior, an action which could have sparked a catastrophic nuclear exchange. Rather than escalate the report up to Soviet leadership, Petrov — who felt he ‘was sitting on a hot frying pan’ — decided the missile alert was a system malfunction.

Later called ‘the man who saved the world’, Petrov demonstrated an astute understanding of…