Lecture
Through the Drone Looking Glass: Reimagining Compliance with the Law of Armed Conflict
- Date
- Wednesday 30 April 2025
- Time
- Location
- Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DP The Hague - Room
- 346
We are delighted to announce the upcoming lecture by Professor Shiri Krebs (Deakin University) on experiments in international law and drone warfare. The lecture kicks off the first event of 2025 as part of the COLAB project, a multi-year research project led by Dr Misha Plagis and Dr Daniel Peat on compliance and behavioural approaches to international law.
Lecture overview
Drone technologies are changing the modern battlefield, providing new information for military decision-makers and enhancing available tactics. While it is generally believed that the information generated through drone lens and analysed through AI-powered algorithms is neutral (or ‘objective’), examples from concrete military operations demonstrate that drone-generated data may reproduce decision-making biases, leading to lethal errors and potential violations of the law of armed conflict (LOAC). Improving military risk assessments and decision-making processes requires, therefore, a deeper understanding of the cognitive dynamics surrounding human-machine interaction in drone warfare. In this project, we field a series of vignette experiments using hypothetical military scenarios in three countries (Germany, Australia, and the US) to identify and measure the effects of drone technologies on human decision-makers. The experiments focus on core elements in drone-human interaction, such as the saliency of drone images (compared to non-visual data), the algorithmic level of certainty, whether conclusions are reached by a human or an algorithm, and whether the tasks are delegated to a human or to an autonomous system. At a time when drone-fuelled warfare leads to devastating deaths and destruction, the findings from our experiments will identify challenges to compliance with international law in digitised armed conflicts and provide insights to improve military decision-making processes and better protect humans, animals, and the environment.
Biography of prof. Krebs
Shiri Krebs is a Professor of Law at Deakin University and the Director of the Centre for Law as Protection. She serves as the Chair of the Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflict and is an affiliate scholar at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). In 2024-2026 she is an Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellow at the University of Hamburg, as well as a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Professor Krebs’ scholarship focuses on behavioural approaches to international law, biases and blind spots in predictive counterterrorism tools, and human-machine interaction in drone warfare. Her research on drone warfare and surveillance technologies is currently funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Registration
Please register via this form if you want to attend the lecture.