Royal Holloway University, Stewart House, London
Artificial intelligence is increasingly central to the organization, mediation, and execution of contemporary violence. Across military, political, economic, and informational domains, algorithmic systems now participate in processes of surveillance, targeting, strategic planning, predictive analysis, border enforcement, cyber operations, and narrative production. Governments and corporations present these technologies as neutral tools of efficiency, optimization, and security. Yet, the rapid integration of machine learning into infrastructures of security and governance raises profound questions concerning the future of political authority, sovereignty, agency, accountability, and the political ordering of life and death.
As recent events have shown, AI is no longer merely a speculative or emerging technology in the context of conflict. Machine-learning systems have been used to assist military targeting operations in ongoing conflicts, including in Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran. At the same time, generative AI technologies have accelerated the production of synthetic propaganda, disinformation, and influence operations across electoral and geopolitical contexts, amongst a range of actors, from belligerent states to domestic extremists. The proliferation of commercially available satellite imagery, automated intelligence analysis, biometric surveillance, and predictive systems has transformed how states and non-state actors perceive, classify, and intervene upon populations and territories.
Current conflicts in which AI has played a significant role have further intensified debates concerning the operational and political implications of AI-enabled warfare. Indeed, these conflicts mark a significant moment in the transition toward accelerated and partially automated decision-making infrastructures in warfare, raising renewed concerns around escalation dynamics, civilian harm, accountability, and the compression of human deliberation within military command systems.
At the same time, major technology corporations have become increasingly entangled with defence institutions and security agencies. Cloud infrastructures, large language models, facial recognition systems, autonomous platforms, and data architectures now circulate across civilian and military domains with unprecedented fluidity. The boundaries separating war from policing, military intelligence from platform governance, and battlefield operations from everyday digital life appear increasingly unstable, further disrupting traditional distinctions between civilian and military technological domains.
Yet these developments cannot be understood solely through the language of technological innovation or strategic competition. Rather, they reflect longer histories in which technologies of classification, identification, and surveillance have served projects of colonial administration, racial governance, counterinsurgency, and capitalist accumulation. Contemporary AI systems inherit and intensify these histories, reproducing epistemologies of visibility, prediction, categorisation, and control that have historically underpinned projects of imperial expansion and political domination. The language of “ethical AI” and “responsible innovation” frequently obscures the structural conditions under which these technologies emerge: occupation, militarized research funding, platform monopolies, extractive supply chains, vast environmental costs, and the global asymmetries of data and computational power. Indeed, AI frequently operates as an accelerant of older formations of empire, extractive capitalism, counterinsurgency, and geopolitical domination.
This interdisciplinary symposium seeks to understand how AI reconfigures the conditions under which violence is imagined, legitimized, delegated, enacted, and contested. We hope to explore the myriad intersections of technology, violence, politics and culture from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, and across a broad range of historic and geographic contexts.
09:45 – 10:00
Registration & Welcome
10:00 – 11:40
PANEL 1: THE CONDUCT OF WAR: Human Judgment, Autonomy, and Military Decision-Making
Anthropomorphic Robots, Imitative AI, and Ethical Human-Machine Warfare
Prof Christian Enemark, University of Southampton
Lethal Optimization: The Standardization Trap and the Abdication of Political Judgment in Modern Warfare
Chiara Caterina Gatti, Independent Researcher; Liverpool John Moores University
A Mass of Problems or a Problem of Mass? Collaborative Drone Swarms and New Challenges to Context-Appropriate Human Control and Judgement
Dr Tom F. A. Watts, University of Southern Denmark
The Risks of Incorporating Artificial Intelligence into Cyber Operations
Stuart Esdale, University of Wolverhampton
Defence AI, Strategic Infrastructure and the International Order
Dr Rupert Barrett-Taylor, Alan Turing Institute
11:40 - 11:55 Coffee Break
11:55 – 13:15
PANEL 2: VOICES FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH (Hybrid panel via MS Teams): Critical Perspectives on AI, Surveillance, and Political Violence
From Bentham's Panopticon to Foucault's Panopticon 2.0 to Algorithmic Panopticon 3.0: How Surveillance Systems in China Evolved into State-Engineered Terror
Dr Rana Danish Nisar, University of Management and Technology (UMT), Pakistan
Seen as Data, Silenced as Witnesses: AI, Palestinian Women, and the Gendered Politics of Visibility in Gaza
Tamara Zuhier Alhasanat, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
Algorithmic Pre-emption and the Governance of Political Violence
Zuhaib Maqbool Baba, Contrails AI, India; Central University of Kashmir
Weaponizing Innovation: Terrorist Exploitation of Emerging Technologies and Its Policy Implications for Pakistan
Dr Mehmood Hussain & Zeeshan Javed, Allama Iqbal Open University, Pakistan; Strategic Vision Institute
13:15 - 14:15
Lunch
14:15 - 15:35
PANEL 3: AI, STATES, & BIG TECH: Sovereignty, Accountability, and the Corporate–State Nexus
Strategic Power in the AI Era: Frontier Technology Firms and the Transformation of Sovereignty
Dr Christina Bates, Bates Consulting LLC; King's College London
A Decolonial Perspective on AI Warfare and the Corporate-State Alliance
Dr Nazam Laila, SOAS University of London; Chatham House
The AI-State Terror Nexus: The Palestine Laboratory
Dr Akil N. Awan, Royal Holloway, University of London
Beyond a Strategy of Tactics: War-Making in the Age of Hyperconnectivity
Dr Matthew Ford & Axel-Charles Monin Nylund, Swedish Defence University
15:35 - 15:50
Coffee Break
15:50 – 17:30
PANEL 4: THE POLITICS OF VIOLENCE: Propaganda, Legitimacy, and Political Mobilisation
Government, AI, and the Erosion of Democracy
Dr Douglas Weeks, California State University
AI, Synthetic Intertextuality & the Legitimisation of War
Prof Ilan Manor, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
‘Danger Zone’ – Donald J. Trump and an AI-Enabled Cult of Personality
Jackson van Uden, Royal Holloway, University of London
An Anatomy of Tech Dissent: A Typology of Anti-Technology Resistance
Dr Mauro Lubrano, University of Bath
Built to Burn: AI Data Centre Infrastructure and the Emerging Landscape of Political Violence
Dr Ashton Kingdon, University of Southampton
17:30
SYMPOSIUM CLOSE
