Self-determination in the age of algorithmic warfare

Lahmann, H. (2024). Self-determination in the age of algorithmic warfare. Eur. J. Legal Stud., 16, 161.

Abstract

The paper advances and defends the claim that the pervasive surveillance practices employed for the purpose of training and feeding warfare algorithms negate the conditions of possibility of spontaneous and collective political action, a practice that is both precondition of and legally secured by the right to self-determination.

Taking recent events in Gaza and the West Bank as the point of departure for its analysis, the paper provides a detailed description of Israel’s salient utilisation of algorithmic systems in armed encounters with Palestinians. This account serves as the basis for the claim that because the Israeli security apparatus can point to the legal strictures of IHL targeting rules to rationalise the further entrenchment of surveillance architectures that are necessary to sustain the increasing deployment of machine-learning algorithms, the law of armed conflict has assumed the function of a justificatory rhetorical framework for the perpetuated, structural denial of the exercise of the right to self-determination by the Palestinian people. This claim is defended by thinking with the conceptualisation of spontaneous political action as advanced in the works of Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt, demonstrating that spontaneity is inextricable from the idea of collective political agency, which in turn is presupposed in the concept of self-determination as a procedural right to political action. As the algorithmic rationalities of the military and security context inevitably inhibit the possibility to act spontaneously, it follows that the deployment of such systems will come to violate this collective right.

The argument unfolds in three steps. First, the paper describes the increasing use of machine learning technologies in military applications, in particular for the purpose of assisting human operators in ISR and targeting, with a focus on the process of anomaly detection. Second, the paper critiques emerging scholarly interventions that have introduced fairness narratives based on conceptual frameworks of privacy and data protection in response to algorithmic data practices by militaries and intelligence agencies. Building on this assessment, third, the paper analyses the algorithmic rationalities and their consequences through the concept of spontaneous political action as developed by Luxemburg and Arendt. After reappraising the collective right to self-determination as (also) amounting to a primordial procedural right to political practice, the paper explicates the critical role of spontaneity for any emancipatory politics in the understanding of the two political theorists. Based on this understanding, the paper argues that their political theory provides the conceptual tools to understand how the intrinsically backward-looking principles of machine learning cannot but stifle such a practice that is determined by spontaneity.

Keywords: Algorithmic warfare, gaza, machine learning, military artificial intelligence, military ai, self-determination, spontaneity, israel, palestine, rosa luxemburg, hannah arendt, political theory, international humanitarian law, ihl, law of armed conflict, targeting, distinction, precaution, privacy