UC Santa Cruz

Within the current global security environment, several new military technologies hold the potential to fundamentally transform warfare and, by extension, how international actors use force towards political ends. In particular, autonomous weapons emerged as a focal point of normative contestation at the global, domestic, and institutional levels. My research focuses on how these technologies are created by the U.S. as the pre-eminent military power despite growing normative arguments against their development at the international level. I draw on historical and discursive methods of analysis to argue that incompatible norm regimes within global governance structures and global security cultures account for this disjuncture. My research suggests that international politics—in a deeply constructivist sense—is embedded in the process of creating new military technologies like autonomous weapons via the logic of what I call the strategic imaginary.