This paper considers cognitive warfare and points out that, in the end, there is no choice but to strengthen information literacy. Cognitive warfare is information input to make the opponent take actions advantageous to oneself. It is always performed to a greater or lesser extent in any relationship, can be input from all over the world, and execution is easy. Cognitive warfare becomes a problem for the opponent when information that is not appropriate for the opponent is (...) included. In that case, it is also a high-risk operation where the opponent becomes vigilant toward the information source. In the end, the countermeasure is the strengthening of information literacy to judge whether information is appropriate or not. The strengthening of information literacy is important in many situations, not limited to cognitive warfare. Also, if a regime brings up the term cognitive warfare, it is better to be vigilant about that intention. (shrink)

Taddeo’s recent article, ‘Information Warfare: A Philosophical Perspective’ (Philos. Technol. 25:105–120, 2012) is a useful addition to the literature on information communications technologies (ICTs) and warfare. In this short response, I draw attention to two issues arising from the article. The first concerns the applicability of ‘information warfare’ terminology to current political and military discourse, on account of its relative lack of contemporary usage. The second engages with the political and ethical implications of treating ICT environments as (...) a ‘domain’, with its ramifications for the pursuit of ‘dominion’, particularly through military action. (shrink)

The origins and consequences of warfare or largescale intergroup violence have been subject of long debate. Based on exhaustive surveys of skeletal remains for prehistoric hunter-gatherers and agriculturists in Japan, the present study examines levels of inferred violence and their implications for two different evolutionary models, i.e., parochial altruism model and subsistence model. The former assumes that frequent warfare played an important role in the evolution of altruism and the latter sees warfare as promoted by social changes (...) induced by agriculture. Our results are inconsistent with the parochial altruism model but consistent with the subsistence model, although the mortality values attributable to violence between hunter-gatherers and agriculturists were comparable. (shrink)

Electronic warfare is a critical component of modern military operations and has undergone significant advances in recent years. This book provides an overview of electronic warfare, its historical development, key components, and its role in contemporary conflict scenarios. It also discusses emerging trends and challenges in electronic warfare and its contemporary relevance in an era of advanced technology and cyber threats, emphasizing the need for continued research and development in this area. The book explores the burgeoning intersection (...) of artificial intelligence and electronic warfare, highlighting the evolving landscape of modern conflicts and the implications of integrating advanced technologies. The multifaceted roles of artificial intelligence in electronic warfare are highlighted, examining its potential advantages, ethical considerations, and challenges associated with its integration. (shrink)

In this article, I present a two-pronged argument for the immorality of contemporary, asymmetric drone warfare, based on my new interpretations of the just war principles of “proportionality” and “moral equivalence of combatants” (MEC). The justification for these new interpretations is that drone warfare continues to this day, having survived despite arguments against it that are based on traditional interpretations of just war theory (including one from Michael Walzer). On the basis of my argument, I echo Harry Van (...) der Linden’s call for “an international treaty banning all weaponized UAV [uninhabited aerial vehicles].”. (shrink)

This paper attempts to understand the nature of guerrilla warfare as taught by T.E. Lawrence in light of Clausewitz and Liddell Hart.

In this chapter, we consider the plausibility and consequences of the use of the term “honest errors” to describe the accidental killings of civilians resulting from the US military’s drone campaigns in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. We argue that the narrative of “honest errors” unjustifiably excuses those involved in these killings from moral culpability, and reinforces long-standing, pernicious assumptions about the moral superiority of the US military and the inevitability of civilian deaths in combat. Furthermore, we maintain that, given (...) the knowledge-distorting practices within the US military’s organizational structure, few if any civilian deaths from drone strikes meet the criteria of a genuinely morally excusing “honest mistake”. Instead, these accidental killings often reflect objectionable attitudes of relative disregard for the safety of civilians. These attitudes are, we argue, sufficient to warrant the attribution of blame and moral responsibility, both with respect to certain individual actions and with respect to the US military as an institution. In light of this, we propose incorporating a Principle of the Moral Equality of Non-combatants into military assessments of what counts as “acceptable risk” to civilians. This would go some way, we argue, to redressing the ongoing injustice inflicted on the victims of civilian killings by the failure of the US military and US political leadership to take moral responsibility for unjustified civilian deaths. (shrink)

The paper discusses the dynamical nature of fifth-generation warfare, which is gradually becoming a new way of waging war. In the past two decades, there has been a fierce debate on the nature and methods of fifth-generation warfare across the international security forums. Within these discussions, the term “Hybrid warfare” has grabbed the attention of various security experts. Although the discourse of “Hybrid warfare” initially emerged in the mainstream sphere during the 2006 Lebanon war, it gained (...) prominence after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, which triggered debates on the nature of warfare in the 21st century. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Military doctrine “Escalate to deescalate” is very clear about the Russian red line for NATO expansion on the Eastern European shores that aims at least aggression with maximum gains. The article enquires about the wider analytical and historical notions of security to sum up the discussion on the new military strategies and tactics on security. The Russian operation in Ukraine with hybrid warfare methods will be the focal point of the discussion throughout the article. The article will also discuss the well-established hybrid warfare infrastructure of Russia vis-à-vis NATO to further elaborate on the discourse of modern armed conflict. To theoretically explore the topic, this study will consider the growing challenges to international security amidst the hybrid warfare settings through the lens of strategic theory. (shrink)

Predictions about autonomous weapon systems are typically thought to channel fears that drove all the myths about intelligence embodied in matter. One of these is the idea that the technology can get out of control and ultimately lead to horrifi c consequences, as is the case in Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein. Given this, predictions about AWS are sometimes dismissed as science-fiction fear-mongering. This paper considers several analogies between AWS and other weapon systems and ultimately offers an argument that nuclear weapons (...) and their effect on the development of modern asymmetrical warfare are the best analogy to the introduction of AWS. The fi nal section focuses on this analogy and offers speculations about the likely consequences of AWS being hacked. These speculations tacitly draw on myths and tropes about technology and AI from popular fi ction, such as Frankenstein, to project a convincing model of the risks and benefi ts of AWS deployment. (shrink)

van Els, Paul. "Tegen aanvalsoorlogen" (Against Offensive Warfare). Dutch translation of Mozi chapters 17, 18, and 19. Het Trage Vuur 40 (December 2007): 8–19.

This paper argues against prominent views of the impermissibility of autonomous weapons systems (AWS). It does so by assuming each theory is true and arguing towards contradiction. To arrive at a contradiction two assumptions are necessary. First, the theory of impermissibility in question is assumed. Second, a thought experiment called the ideal warfare scenario is assumed. The paper aims to demonstrate that in theory AWS could be deployed such that they bring about the best of possible warfare. However, (...) even if AWS were deployed in the fairest and safest way, these accounts would still find them to be impermissible. This is deemed to be a failure of these accounts. Finally, this paper discusses the future of artificial intelligence (AI). It explores how AI may be used in the future of warfare and the challenges advanced AI would pose to the ethics of war and the relationship between human soldiers and AWS. (shrink)

This paper examines the responses to advanced and transformative technologies in military literature, attenuates the conclusions of earlier work suggesting that there is an “ignorance of transhumanism” in the military, and updates the current layout of transhuman concerns in military thought. The military is not ignorant of transhuman issues and implications, though there was evidence for this in the past; militaries and non-state actors increasingly use disruptive technologies with what we may call transhuman provenance.

In recent years, Taiwan has been consistently targeted by cognitive warfare launched by China, using tactics that demonstrate a level of complexity beyond traditional academic definitions. This paper examines cognitive warfare through a multi-modal framework, integrating the concept of horizontal dissemination from political communication theory to expand scholarly understanding of these strategies. It also asserts that since cognitive warfare includes “malicious socio-disruptive technologies,” such tactics should not be categorized under the rights protected by free speech. This study (...) extensively examines the theoretical and practical frameworks for countering cognitive warfare, focusing on three primary concerns: first, the clarification of the multi-modal cognitive warfare framework; second, analyses of cognitive warfare from both theoretical and practical perspectives; and third, proposing possible response strategies rooted in Taiwan’s democratic resilience. (shrink)

The use of advanced technologies, even of so-called transhuman technology, does not make militaries transhuman. Transhumanism includes dimensions of ethics that are themselves in direct conflict with many transhuman capabilities of soldiers in warfare. The use of advanced weapons of mass destruction represents an anti-humanism that undermines the modern, open, and high-tech nation state.

This chapter studies classifications of warfare in Master Wu, The Four Canons, and Master Wen. In sections one through three, I analyze the classifications in their original contexts. How do they relate to the texts in which they appear? In what way does each classification feed into the overall philosophy of the text? In section four, I compare the three classifications. What are their similarities and differences? In section five, I discuss the possibility of a relationship between the three (...) classifications. Are any perhaps directly and demonstrably influenced by another? I hypothesize that the classification of warfare in Master Wu may have served as a source for those in The Four Canons and Master Wen. In section six, I explore the development of classifications of warfare in writings from the Warring States period to the early Han dynasty. How did the classifications evolve from military–strategic writings to texts of politico–philosophical nature? Finally, in section seven, I survey the impact of classifications on the wider political debate on warfare in those days. Did classifications influence the debate? If so, to what effect? (shrink)

It has been commonly claimed that prehistoric warfare in Japan began in the Yayoi period. Population increases due to the introduction of agriculture from the Korean Peninsula to Japan resulted in the lack of land for cultivation and resources for the population, eventually triggering competition over land. This hypothesis has been supported by the demographic data inferred from historical changes in Kamekan, a burial system used especially in the Kyushu area in the Yayoi period. The present study aims to (...) examine the previous claim by using an expanded dataset of human skeletal remains and Kamekan. First, in order to quantify the intensity of warfare, we developed a database of injured individuals found in the middle phase of the Yayoi period in two large populations in the northern Kyushu area, the Fukuoka plain and the upperand middle-stream of the Homan River. Second, we collected Kamekan data from site reports published after 1990 and constructed a comprehensive database to infer the demography in these areas. Finally, we compared the frequency of injured individuals and the inferred demography. The results suggest that the frequency of injured individuals and the population increase tended to be higher at the upper- and middle-stream of the Homan River than on the Fukuoka plain. Different assumptions of the lifetime of each type of Kamekan can produce mixed results on the relationship between demography and the frequency of injured individuals. They were positively correlated under the traditional assumption of constant time intervals, while there was no correlation using time intervals based on carbon dating by the National Museum of Japanese History. Thus, our results are partially consistent with the previous claim that the population increase and the lack of land and resources due to the introduction of agriculture were causes of warfare in the northern Kyushu area in the middle phase of the Yayoi period. (shrink)

The paper investigates the compatibility of the modern technologies of warfare, specifically the use of offensive drones, with traditional military ethics and suggests that the new technologies radically change the value system of the military in ways which make large parts of the traditional military ethics inapplicable. The author suggests that Agamben’s concept of ‘effectivity’ through ‘special actions’ which mark one’s belonging to a particular community or profession is a useful conceptual strategy to explore the compatibility of drone (...) class='Hi'>warfare with traditional military ethics; this strategy shows mixed results at best. (shrink)

Critics of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) argue that these weapons cannot reliably distinguish between legitimate targets and those protected from attack. As a result, the use of AWS seems to violate the principle of distinction under international humanitarian law (IHL), which requires that combatants “not make civilians the object of attack” and not carry out attacks that are “indiscriminate in nature.” This criticism, however, misunderstands the principle of distinction and ignores important aspects of how AWS are being developed and deployed. (...) Critics rely on an overly broad definition of AWS, and hold these systems to a standard that is inconsistent with the principle of distinction as it is actually formulated under IHL. Despite their very real limitations, the characteristics of modern AWS in fact highlight an impressive feat of technological design, and mark a further step on our long and fitful road to making warfare a less brutal and bloody enterprise. (shrink)

The article raises the question of the contemporary Gaudiya-vaishnava adherent’s attitude towards the war and kshatriya duty. It analyses the ways Vaishnavas from Ukraine, Russia and India perceive Russia’s war against Ukraine and kshatriya duty in the context of understanding the holy war in the Mahabharata and Krishna’s instructions about duty of kshatriya in Bhagavad-gita. There are four types of symbolic correlation of modern war with the events of the Mahabharata: religious, mythological, ideological, and ethical. The differences between them have (...) led to disagreements and discussions within the Vaishnava community about how to understand the duty of the Vaishnava in this war. The article substantiates the religious nature of the spiritual-practical position of Ukrainian Vaishnavas, which for some of them is expressed in peaceful service to people during the war, and for others - in the performance of the duty of kshatriya in the ranks of the armed forces. (shrink)

This article demonstrates a priori cosmopolitan values of restraint and harm limitation exist to establish a cosmopolitan “no-harm” duty in warfare, predating utilitarianism and permeating modern international humanitarian law. In doing so, the author exposes the atemporal and ahistorical nature of utilitarianism which introduces chaos and brutality into the international legal system. Part 2 conceptualises the duty as derived from the “no-harm” principle under international environmental law. Part 3 frames the discussion within legal pluralism and cosmopolitan ethics, arguing that (...) divergent legal jurisdictions without an international authority necessitates a “public international sphere” to mediate differences leading to strong value-commitment norm-creation. One such norm is the “no-harm” duty in warfare. Part 4 traces the duty to the Stoics, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, African traditional culture, Hinduism, and Confucianism. Parts 5 and 6 explain how the duty manifests in principles of distinction and proportionality under international humanitarian law. (shrink)

Recent incidents of civilian casualties in modern conflicts, including the tragic airstrike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, that claimed the lives of at least 175 children, have sparked intense debate about the role of artificial intelligence in warfare. While AI targeting systems are often blamed, this paper argues that AI is not the root cause but rather an accelerator of deeper structural problems. -/- Drawing on Load Minimization Theory (LMT), we conceptualize war as an inherently high-load system (...) characterized by forced synchronization, one-way load export, and massive accumulation of prediction error (ΔE). Using the 2026 Minab school strike and King’s College London’s AI wargame simulations as key cases, we demonstrate how competition-oriented objectives amplify systemic load and escalate violence. In contrast, reframing the objective function toward harmonious coordination and total systemic load minimization (L_min) offers a promising path to reduce such tragedies. -/- We conclude that protecting the future of children — who will bear the consequences of today’s decisions — must be the foremost duty of the current generation. True peace requires not merely better technology, but a fundamental shift in purpose from rights assertion and victory-seeking to boundary-respecting harmonious coexistence. (shrink)

An ethical framework for assessing the morality of warfare that strikes a balance between realism and pacifism is provided by Just War Theory or tradition, which has its roots in ancient civilizations, and was developed as a systematic and coherent doctrine of military ethics by medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. The idea of waging a war for a just cause was first articulated in non-Western ancient literature, such as Hindu and Chinese philosophical writings, despite the (...) fact that Just War Theory is typically thought of as being exclusively Western. The Theory has provided foundational ethical and legal frameworks that have regulated warfare for millennia. However, it faces challenges from modern hybrid and asymmetric warfare, particularly cyberattacks and non-state actors, which complicate traditional war-peace distinctions. This study reviews Just War Theory's historical development and its relevance and applicability to grey-zone warfare, analysing how its principles, such as just cause and non-combatant immunity, apply to non-kinetic threats. Through conceptual analysis and case study, it also examines the challenges posed by non-state actors like terrorists, private military companies (PMC), militias, etc., which complicate self-defence under international law. The breakdown of non-combatant immunity in urban warfare leads to significant civilian casualties, disproving claims that the tradition is outdated or inapplicable. Just War Theory remains a critical moral guide, adaptable to contemporary conflicts, necessitating revisions to address new challenges and uphold ethical accountability amidst evolving warfare dynamics. (shrink)

This paper advances a single structural claim across three registers named in its title. First, that dollar hegemony functions as a monetary ground — the deep Treasury-market infrastructure that defines the value layer of the international system. Second, that dollar-backed stablecoins are not a challenge to that ground but its enrollment architecture: the distribution mechanism that extends it to the retail and small-business layer of the global economy, through adoption made rational at the point of transaction and aggregated into sovereign-debt (...) demand invisible to the people producing it. Third, that the information environment surrounding this extension operates as cognitive warfare by resonance collapse, a mechanism documented in this corpus at two scales: discursively, by The Signal and the Noise, as strategic information pollution that buries structural exposures through corona dynamics rather than censorship; and at the substrate level by The Physiological Layer, which documents the closed-loop architecture of continuous biometric measurement, narrative selection, and physiological entrainment that the discursive corona rides on top of. The connective mechanism among the three is the gatekeeper layer: perimeter statute, delegated rulemaking, contested-faction co-option, and opacity by design — the four-element architecture documented in the companion paper, now shown operating in the stablecoin sector through Section 404 of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act and the GENIUS Act’s reserve mandate. As of late May 2026, the aggregate stablecoin float (~$322 billion) exceeds the official foreign-exchange reserves of more than ninety sovereign states; in April 2026 a private issuer froze approximately $344 million in reserves attributed to the Central Bank of Iran at the protocol level; and the Bank for International Settlements, in May 2026, confirmed in its own register the Treasury-demand channel this corpus named in March. The paper documents these as a single threshold crossing, maps the architecture against the two canonical manuals of strategic power (Sun Tzu and Greene), and identifies the structural form of the failure that mapping exposes: an ouroboros — a recursion without an exit condition, in which the externalisation of cost initialises the stop-variable to infinity and the success-condition is undefined in a system whose only metric is self-perpetuation. This is captured resonance at the architectural scale: the same pathology the corpus documents at cellular, neurodegenerative, behavioural, discursive, and physiological scales, now appearing at the political-economic scale with the same defining features. The paper specifies falsification conditions and closes on the reflexive turn: that the legitimising language of financial inclusion is, structurally, the architecture’s own measure, and the missing break statement is its own structural fault. Every load-bearing empirical claim is sourced to primary documents. (shrink)

In November 1939, within the opening months of the Second World War, Alice A. Bailey published a remarkable passage in her book, The Externalisation of the Hierarchy: “Sea and air and land are arrayed against the Forces of Light; they are the agents of material substance and can be used potently against the spiritual Forces. The forces of the air are, however, increasingly on our side.” EXT 171/72. AAB. -/- Most students of Alice A. Bailey interpret this statement symbolically, seeing (...) in it an occult reference to the psychological and spiritual dimensions of world conflict. Yet the passage also invites a literal interpretation. Alice Bailey specifically names “sea and air and land” in direct sequence, employing the exact terminology of modern mechanised warfare. -/- Written at the beginning of a global conflict in which aerial supremacy would determine the survival of nations, the statement can plausibly be understood not only as symbolic but also as prophetic in a practical and technological sense. Within this framework, the phrase “the forces of the air are, however, increasingly on our side” may be read as a direct allusion to the emergence of British aerial defence, and most especially to the work of R. J. Mitchell and the creation of the Supermarine Spitfire. (shrink)

*North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP) Book Award 2019.* *International Studies Association (ISA) - International Ethics Section Book Award 2021.* Although military mores have relied primarily on just war theory, the ethic of cooperation in warfare (ECW)—between enemies even as they are trying to kill each other—is as central to the practice of warfare and to conceptualization of its morality. Neither game theory nor unilateral moral duties (God-given or otherwise) can explain the explicit language of cooperation in (...) developing and enforcing principles of military ethics and the law of armed conflict. The ethic of cooperation is borne of various motivations: reciprocity, self-preservation, and efficiency, to be sure, but also a sense of warrior honor and concern with human rights. This shared morality can persist despite making it more difficult for one side or the other to win and, unfortunately, its well-meaning motivations often lead to unintended tragic consequences. This book explores three manifestations of this significant yet overlooked ethic of cooperation in warfare: (1) for a “fair fight,” (2) to protect classes of individuals (e.g., non-combatants or prisoners of war), and (3) to end the war quickly. Such cooperation can take unexpected forms, from ad hoc decisions on the battlefield to institutionalization in international law, and is the source of some critical tensions in one of the most significant developments in warfare in recent years: namely, how to handle terrorism or other forms of warfare that lie outside the purview of international law. Each type of ECW raises questions internal to that ethic, such as inconsistencies in the concept of “parity” across different weapons bans, contradictions within the warrior ethic that heavily influence—and therefore confuse—notions of the “fair fight,” the disconnect between what protections a person receives and his responsibility for the war (e.g., political leaders), or the limited decisiveness of outcomes generated by very short wars. Their simultaneous application also generates significant tensions and raises questions about the proper relationship of ECW to the immediate goal of war itself, which is to win, and thus yield either a political settlement or a justicial decision. For example, the ECWs for a “fair fight” and to protect classes of individuals can make it harder to win the war, but even more concerning is that they can also kill more people, which in the latter case contravenes its very purpose. Human history is in some ways the story of trying to concurrently wage and tame war, and the architecture of warfare itself is informed by the ECW, in particular: (a) the political nature of war, (b) the abdication from jus ad bellum judgments in order to concentrate on justice within war (jus in bello), and (c) the ways in which modern nation-states collude to define “legitimacy” in war. The combination of these three features leave questions of justicial right and responsibility for war disturbingly unresolved, it also generates new challenges in a geopolitical context in which cooperative and non-cooperative (e.g. contemporary terrorism) forms of warfare clash. (shrink)

The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) invites proposals for an online conference entitled Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality. The proceedings will be considered for publication in a special issue of the JCRT. This conference investigates how beliefs, paranoia, and conspiratorial modes of knowing shape a contemporary cognitive battlespace in which actors struggle to define truth, authority, and reality itself. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know and (...) Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need to Believe (2024), we focus on practices of selective fact use and “truth-selecting” that construct alternative epistemic orders while claiming privileged access to what is “really” going on. (shrink)

Information has always been at the core of conflicts. When Napoleon planned to invade Italy, he duly upgraded the first telegraph network in the world, the French “semaphore”. He famously remarked that “an army marches on its stomach,” but he also knew that the same army acted on information. As Von Clausewitz once stated “by the word ‘information’ we denote all the knowledge which we have of the enemy and his country; therefore, in fact, the foundation of all our ideas (...) of actions [in war].”I am very grateful to Mariarosaria Taddeo for this citation and for our fruitful collaboration on a 2-year project about the ethics of information warfare, Marie Curie Fellowship Grant, FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF see now . This is why the radar, the computer, the satellite, the GPS system, and the Internet were initially developed as military technologies, while unmanned vehicles are becoming a reality thanks to DARPA. The difference between then and now is that information warfare .. (shrink)

This book aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), including their characteristics, origins, methods, consequences, and defense strategies, with a focus on detecting these threats. It explores the concept of advanced persistent threats in the context of cyber security and cyber warfare. APTs represent one of the most insidious and challenging forms of cyber threats, characterized by their sophistication, persistence, and targeted nature. The paper examines the origins, characteristics and methods used by APT actors. It (...) also explores the complexities associated with APT detection, analyzing the evolving tactics used by threat actors and the corresponding advances in detection methodologies. It highlights the importance of a multi-faceted approach that integrates technological innovations with proactive defense strategies to effectively identify and mitigate APT. (shrink)

This article for Chronicles Magazine deals with Aleksandr Dugin's religious, philosophical, and political outlook and how the Ukrainian war can be analysed in these terms.

Democracy is the longest-running political experiment in human history — and the most constantly endangered. Born in the city-states of ancient Greece, refined through centuries of Enlightenment thought, tested in revolution and war, and extended — unevenly, incompletely, but directionally — to most of the world's population, it rests on a deceptively simple conviction: that the people who must live with the consequences of political decisions should have meaningful agency in making them. That conviction has survived every previous challenge that (...) history has placed before it. The question this paper asks is whether it will survive the ones that the next fifty years will bring. Those challenges are without precedent in democratic history. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) — systems that match or exceed human cognitive capability across all domains — is anticipated by leading AI researchers within a decade. Artificial superintelligence (ASI) — systems that radically exceed human intelligence — may follow within a generation. Cognitive warfare, as documented in this author's previous SSRN papers, is already restructuring the epistemic foundation of democratic participation. Digital identity systems are concentrating unprecedented power in state and corporate actors. Longevity science may extend human lifespans to 120, 150, or beyond — raising entirely uncharted questions about who votes, who governs, and whose temporal interests political systems represent. New forms of conflict — synthetic, cognitive, economic, and physical — are straining the international architectures that democratic cooperation depends on. And the ecological and resource crises unfolding in parallel may produce abundance or scarcity scenarios that stress-test democratic institutions beyond historical precedent. This paper argues, from a position of grounded optimism, that democracy will survive — but only if it is deliberately reinvented, not merely defended. The democracy of 2076 cannot look like the democracy of 1976, for the same reason that the constitution of 1789 was not adequate to govern an industrial nation. The technological, social, and cognitive environment of governance has changed beyond the design specifications of eighteenth-century representative democracy. What is needed is not the abandonment of democracy's foundational values — popular sovereignty, individual rights, accountability, and the peaceful transfer of power — but the architectural reinvention of the institutions, mechanisms, and identity systems through which those values are expressed. The paper introduces the Conscious Democratic Architecture (CDA) — an original framework for democratic redesign that draws on liquid democracy theory, digital identity infrastructure, cognitive sovereignty principles, AI governance architecture, and the philosophy of conscious capitalism. The CDA proposes five design principles for democracy's reinvention: Verified Presence (the resolution of the digital identity crisis), Liquid Sovereignty (the move from periodic representative elections to continuous, delegable, contextual participation), Cognitive Protection (the constitutional right to an unmanipulated epistemic environment), Temporal Justice (the extension of democratic representation to future generations), and Conscious Governance (the integration of purpose, ethics, and long-term thinking into the institutional architecture of political decision-making). The paper concludes with a vision of what democracy at 2076 might actually look like — and what India, uniquely positioned among the world's large democracies, has to contribute to its design. (shrink)

The ongoing development of autonomous weapons systems, and the increasing frequency of their deployment on the battlefield, poses a pressing problem for military ethics. Somephilosophers have argued that the deployment of fully autonomous weapons would be unethical because it would generate responsibility gaps, that is, situations in which no agent, human or artificial, is morally responsible for wrongful harms resulting from that deployment. But do laypeople find it plausible that the use of fully autonomous weapons gives rise to such gaps? (...) This paper reports results from two studies (total N = 497) designed to answer this question. In these studies, participants were presented with a hypothetical war crime scenario in which an officer ordered a lethal autonomous robot to attack a village, resulting in the deaths of innocent civilians. Most participants attributed some responsibility for the outcome to the officer commanding the attack, the robot that carried out the attack, and the people who programmed the robot. Results from both studies were consistent with the Path Model of blame, according to which attributions of responsibility are influenced by a variety of contextual factors, such as the extent to which the target is seen as acting intentionally. Attributions of responsibility to agents of war, both artificial and human, thus seem to be at odds with the idea that the use of autonomous weapons would generate responsibility gaps. Philosophers who oppose using autonomous weapons on moral grounds, therefore, may want to avoid argumentative strategies that rely heavily on worries about responsibility gaps. (shrink)

Sparrow argues that military robots capable of making their own decisions would be independent enough to allow us denial for their actions, yet too unlike us to be the targets of meaningful blame or praise—thereby fostering what Matthias has dubbed “the responsibility gap.” We agree with Sparrow that someone must be held responsible for all actions taken in a military conflict. That said, we think Sparrow overlooks the possibility of what we term “blank check” responsibility: A person of sufficiently high (...) standing could accept responsibility for the actions of autonomous robotic devices—even if that person could not be causally linked to those actions besides this prior agreement. The basic intuition behind our proposal is that humans can impute relations even when no other form of contact can be established. The missed alternative we want to highlight, then, would consist in an exchange: Social prestige in the occupation of a given office would come at the price of signing away part of one's freedoms to a contingent and unpredictable future guided by another agency. (shrink)

Leonard Harris’ ‘racism as necro-being’ thesis, its theoretical contours, and actuarial methodology is a brilliant philosophical account of racism which posits the phenomenon as a polymorphic agent of death that confers upon its victims the status of the living dead. Though Harris’ thesis relies on arguments against attempts to understand racism as a logos or logic, there exists an explanatory account of racism which is nevertheless complimentary with his actuarial approach: the racism as war thesis. Indeed, there is a deep (...) conceptual harmony between the racism as necro-being and racism as war thesis (despite their structural asymmetry) regarding: (a) the plasticity of racism’s expression and (b) the centering of war, militarism, and death as its absolute indicators. Harris’ overall philosophical aim – to depict racism as a killing machine – is ultimately strengthened when yoked to an explanative account of the basic mechanisms that underly the pattern to be depicted, which the racism as war thesis can supply. On this basis, this essay will argue for a synthesis of these two theses. (shrink)

Clausewitz made the intuitively appealing claim that wars tend to “absoluteness,” and that all limitations imposed by law and morality are in theory alien to it. Clausewitz of course knew that there are in practice many limitations to how wars are fought, but he saw them as contingent to what war is. Since then, however, historians such as John Lynn (Battle: A History of Combat and Culture [Westview Press, 2003]), John Keegan (A History of Warfare ([Random House,1993]) and Victor (...) Davis Hanson (The Western Way of War [Oxford University Press, 1989]) have taught us to see things differently: war is a cultural phenomenon, and the limitations that rituals and taboos impose are essential to what war is. With Conspiring with the Enemy, her intelligent and erudite book on cooperation in war, Yvonne Chiu builds on that work by showing the wide variety of forms cooperation in war can take—something that, Chiu claims, we tend to overlook and take for granted at the same time. (shrink)

Debates about terrorism and technology often focus on the potential uses of technology by non-state terrorist actors and by states as forms of counterterrorism. Yet, little has been written about how technology shapes how we think about terrorism. In this chapter I argue that technology, and the language we use to talk about technology, constrains and shapes our understanding of the nature, scope, and impact of terrorism, particularly in relation to state terrorism. After exploring the ways in which technology shapes (...) moral thinking, I use two case studies to demonstrate how technology simultaneously hides and enables terroristic forms of state violence: police control technologies and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones. In both these cases, I argue that features of these technologies, combined with a narrative of precision and efficiency, serves to mask the terroristic nature of the violence that these practices inflict and reinforces the moral exclusion of those against whom these technologies are deployed. In conclusion, I propose that identifying acts of terrorism requires a focus on the impact of technologies of violence (whether they are “high tech” or not) on those most affected, regardless of whether users of these technologies conceive of their actions as terroristic. (shrink)

Grey zone attacks tend to paralyze response for two reasons. First, they present us with choice scenarios of inherently dilemmatic structure, e.g., Prisoners’ Dilemmas and games of chicken, complicated by difficult conditions of choice, such as choice under risk or amid vagueness. Second, they exploit our uncertainty about how much we do or should care about the things under attack¬—each attack is small in effect, but their effects accumulate: how should we decide whether to treat a given attack as something (...) meriting a serious response rather than a mere irritation to be ignored? This chapter brings standard decision theoretic tools to bear on the issues, tools such as the maximization of expected utility principle, and the precautionary principle. But it also develops three innovations. It shows that seeing it as possible to make choices not just of actions given our values, but also choices of values themselves, can extricate us from certain kinds of decision paralysis. It shows how we can rationally regard ourselves as having bright decision lines even when nothing in the circumstance of choice has these lines in its structure. And it shows how certain conflict escalation risks from the former two strategies can be managed by both parties seeing that cooperation can yield a sharable surplus of goods, and that cooperation can be rational upon a rationally defensible change in their values so that each comes to derive utility from the success of both parties. This yields cooperative solutions to what amount to Prisoners’ Dilemmas. The Cold War was prosecuted on the logic of strategic rationality and that part of game theory that is deterrence theory. We need a new logic from decision theorists for the games that constitute grey zone conflict. (shrink)

Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or not warfare among prehistoric hunter – gatherers was common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective (...) pressure for the evolution of human behaviour. This paper reports the mortality attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus shown among ancient hunter–gatherers using skeletal evidence in prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13000 cal BC–800 cal BC). Our results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is an urgent need for an international doctrine for cyberspace skirmishes before they escalate into conventional warfare.

Von Braun developed the V2 rockets for the Americans using slave labour from concentration camps, who lived appallingly and died due to poor treatment and conditions. Many of the V2S were taken back to the US along with missile technology that was greatly expanded and developed into today's current arsenal of ballistic and nuclear missiles of the many types known today. The Tibetan uses the word robot to describe the V rocket technology of the Nazis. It is well documented that (...) the V rockets addressed by the Tibetan DK were built using slave labour at the behest of the Nazi scientists. The USA and the Russian counterpart Nazi scientific relocation operation developed the entire one-armed camp as DK described the world. Today we have the world military nuclear, rocket, weapons and drone complex — one armed camp. This continuity reaches its most dangerous contemporary expression in artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems. -/- The specific concern about AI removing human decision-making from the nuclear chain, what strategists now call taking humans out of the loop, directly and precisely echoes DK's warning that science would be prostituted to destruction. Petrov's human judgement saved the world in 1983. An AI early-warning system operating autonomously would in all probability have launched. As hypersonic weapons, drone warfare and AI targeting systems proliferate across multiple state and non-state actors, the margin for human correction narrows with each technological generation. DK did not name these specific technologies, but his framework anticipated their logic exactly. (shrink)

Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or notwarfare among prehistoric hunter–gathererswas common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective pressure for the evolution of (...) human behaviour. This paper reports the mortality attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus shown among ancient hunter–gatherers using skeletal evidence in prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13 000 cal BC–800 cal BC). Our results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common. (shrink)

Gaza has become one of the most visible sites of contemporary armed conflict, yet its ethical significance is often obscured by the intensity of political debate surrounding it. This paper treats Gaza not as an exceptional moral spectacle, but as a structural test case for contemporary war ethics. It examines how siege warfare, civilian exposure, and prolonged insecurity persist alongside extensive legal, humanitarian, and moral discourse, raising questions about the capacity of existing ethical frameworks to interrupt foreseeable harm. -/- (...) Drawing on the concept of moral drift developed in earlier work, the paper analyzes how international humanitarian law, proportionality reasoning, securitization, and moral exceptionalism interact to normalize civilian suffering without requiring overt norm violation. Ethical language remains active, but its function shifts from constraint to management. Civilian harm is acknowledged, assessed, and narrated, yet rarely allowed to function as a decisive moral limit. -/- By examining siege conditions, cumulative harm, and the temporal endurance of violence, the paper argues that Gaza illustrates a broader pattern in contemporary warfare: ethical frameworks persist rhetorically while losing their interruptive force. The paper concludes by reaffirming a consequence-centered ethical orientation, in which foreseeable and sustained civilian harm must become morally decisive rather than administratively tolerable. Gaza, in this sense, is not an anomaly, but a lens through which the ethical limits of modern war are made visible. (shrink)

This treatise deploys Ockham's War—a methodology of aggressive intellectual self-criticism—to demolish the farcical "otrovert" construct emerging in contemporary personality discourse. Through systematic application of Boether's (2025) framework, I expose the otrovert as an intellectual joke, a laughable repackaging of internet-culture's "sigma" personality archetype dressed in pseudo-academic terminology. The analysis reveals the otrovert to be not merely wrong but embarrassingly derivative, representing the apotheosis of pop-psychology's tendency toward manufactured profundity. Having reduced the otrovert to intellectual rubble through systematic skepticism, I propose (...) its replacement with the "Ubervert"—a genuinely transcendent personality configuration that exists beyond traditional categorical constraints. The Ubervert embodies authentic comfort in liminal spaces between conventional binaries: existence/non-existence, happiness/sadness, social/solitary. Unlike the otrovert's pretentious mediocrity, the Ubervert represents the rarest psychological configuration—those who find equanimity in paradox itself. This paper demonstrates how only through the warfare methodology of systematic skepticism can we destroy pseudo-intellectual constructs like the otrovert and clear space for genuine philosophical innovation. (shrink)

If, as asserted by the French collective Tiqqun, we are essentially living in a global colony, where the 1% control the 99%, then it follows that the revolutionary struggle should strategically reorient itself as guerrilla warfare. The agents of this war, Tiqqun characterize, in part, by drawing on ethnologists Pierre de Clastres and Ernesto de Martino, specifically their figures of the Indigenous American warrior and the Southern Italian sorcerer, respectively. Hybridizing these two figures into that of the “warrior-mage,” the (...) present article posits an actionable exemplar thereof in players of the massively popular trading and online card game, Magic: The Gathering (MTG). More specifically, I propose a strategic mapping of MTG’s five colors of magic onto the five divisions of a coalition against late capitalist Empire, which I call the “Warrior-Mage Guild,” including liberation clerics, animal rights activists, propagandists, anti-psychiatrists, hackers, saboteurs, and those who threaten decolonizing force contra Empire. (shrink)

This interview explores the transformative impact of military drone technology on global security, warfare, and ethical responsibility. Robert Junqueira argues that while drones represent disruptive technological advancement with devastating potential—from precision strikes to autonomous swarms—the core challenge remains fundamentally human. He critiques the notion of "autonomous" drones, insisting that these systems are programmed devices embodying human volition, and that responsibility for their actions must remain exclusively with humans. The discussion addresses how AI-enabled drones are reshaping military strategy and international (...) relations while examining the social, political, and philosophical implications of attributing agency to machines rather than their human operators. (shrink)

The prioritization of belligerent perspectives at the expense of civilian protection and welfare has a long history in just war theory and practice, from the works of early just war theorists to the legal and scholarly defenses of colonial conquest to the contemporary moral injury discourse. In this article, I show how this history has contributed to the ongoing infliction of devastating harms on civilians, as evidenced in the case studies of drone warfare and the war in Gaza, and (...) I argue for the inclusion and prioritization of noncombatant civilian perspectives in academic, policy, and legal analyses of war. Doing so, as I demonstrate, radically disrupts traditional just war thinking and has important implications for broader social, legal, and policy approaches to armed conflict and its aftermath. (shrink)

How did an ostensibly agrarian community in seventh-century Medina produce armies capable of sophisticated siege warfare, coordinated multi-front campaigns, and rapid institutional state-building within a single generation? This paper proposes a structural solution to what we term the “competence paradox” of early Islamic military history. The Ansar (the “Helpers” of Medina), conventionally identified as settled oasis farmers, are reidentified as descendants or factions of the Ghassanid confederation — Romanized Arab foederati who served as Byzantine military auxiliaries for generations before (...) migrating southward into the Hijaz during the Byzantine-Sasanian War (602–628 CE). Drawing on Byzantine military history, Arab genealogical traditions, recent epigraphic evidence, and comparative Late Antique studies, the paper argues that Ansar military competence is explicable through inherited Roman tactical doctrine, institutional logistics, and administrative organization transmitted via foederati kinship networks. The hypothesis operates entirely within traditional Hijazi geography, advances explicit falsification criteria, and positions early Islamic expansion as a Late Antique foederati succession phenomenon structurally analogous to the Visigothic, Vandal, and Ostrogothic cases. (shrink)

The Mozi presents at least three distinct arguments against offensive warfare. The "moral argument" holds that offensive warfare is morally wrong. The "economic argument" maintains that the foreseeable costs of a military campaign inevitably outweigh its potential benefits. The "religious argument" warns that military aggression runs counter to the interests of Heaven. Drawing extensively on translated passages from the original text, this paper examines these three lines of argumentation. It considers what each argument entails, the audiences to which (...) it may have been addressed, and its persuasiveness from a modern academic perspective. The paper shows not only how Mozi and his followers theorized about offensive warfare, but also how, at least according to anecdotes preserved in the latter part of the received Mozi, they put these arguments into practice. Ultimately, it argues that the Mohists actively adapted their argumentative strategies in their search for the most effective words with which to bring wars to an end. (shrink)

The Mozi contains at least three distinct arguments against offensive warfare. The "moral argument" claims that offensive warfare is morally wrong. The "economic argument" calculates that the foreseeable costs of a military campaign inevitably outweigh its possible benefits. The "religious argument" warns that military aggression harms the interests of Heaven. This paper discusses these three lines of argumentation, with extensive reference to the original text in translation. The paper explores what the arguments entail, to whom they may have (...) been addressed, and how persuasive they are from a modern academic perspective. It shows not only how Mozi and his followers theorized about offensive warfare, but also how their arguments were used in practice, at least according to anecdotes in the latter part of the received Mozi. The ultimate goal of this paper is to show how the Mohists actively adapted their argumentative strategies so as to find the best words to end wars. (shrink)