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.
Submission guidelines
We invite contributions that explore any aspect of the relationship between AI, war, conflict and political violence, including but not limited to:
How does the use of AI change the nature of war, conflict, and political violence?
How do actors use AI to imagine, legitimise, delegate, enact or contest war and political violence?
· How are AI technologies increasingly deployed to identify targets, automate surveillance, manage borders, suppress dissent, shape public discourse, or intensify state violence?
How does AI alter the temporality and spatiality of warfare?
Can AI be used to hold actors to account for their conduct in war?
How are publics using AI to receive information about war?
What role does AI play in cultural mobilisation towards conflict and political violence.
How does AI affect the memory of war and conflict?
How can AI be used to work for peace and conflict resolution?
· How does AI contribute to contexts of occupation, displacement, surveillance, incarceration, border violence, racialised governance and political struggle?
What possibilities exist for abolitionist, postcolonial, feminist, or ecological responses to AI-driven power and violence?
How does AI transform agency, conduct, responsibility and accountability for violence?
In what ways do predictive systems reshape doctrines of pre-emption and security?
How do platform infrastructures and private technology firms participate in both (g)local and geopolitical conflict?
Please submit a 350 word abstract complete with author and contact information to akil.awan@rhul.ac.uk by the 1st of July 2026.
This symposium is generously supported by The Conflict, Violence and Terrorism Research Centre (Royal Holloway), and the New Political Communication Unit (Royal Holloway).