PhD thesis defence by Frederik Carl Windfeld
Lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) are frequently positioned as harbingers of a third revolution in warfare, capable of fundamentally upending the conduct of war, most notably by removing humans from critical decisions over the deployment of force. These claims circulate despite the absence of a shared definition, disagreements over what constitutes an autonomous command, and uncertainty about their operational impact on the battlefield. Rather than resolving these tensions, the dissertation treats this ambiguity as analytically productive and as revelatory of deeper tensions in how International Security Studies conceptualises and studies material objects, autonomy, and technological change.
The dissertation’s core contribution is the development of a materially sensitive rendition of poststructuralist discourse analysis, which foregrounds the epistemic force of objects. It argues that objects matter in international security not as brute facts or passive referents of meaning, but as always-already active components of discursive formations whose material specificities and potentialities condition what can be rendered intelligible in the first place. Objects exert political and epistemic force through what they can and might do, even when such capacities remain unactualised, as they are embedded within broader dispositifs that both enable and constrain possibilities of interpretation and action. To operationalise this intuition, the dissertation develops interobjectivity as a methodological extension of intertextuality, geared toward reading objects relationally through three registers: inscriptions, potentialities, and indexicalities.
Empirically, the dissertation is structured around three analytical foci, the three Ds , each corresponding to a distinctive autonomy claim attached to LAWS. First, dubiety examines how legal, technical, and military forms of expertise struggle to stabilise LAWS as a coherent governance object. I show how the techno-material complexity and terminological multiplicity of such systems inscribe them with an agentic bent, making them act as barriers to governance by interpellating and reinforcing specific epistemic authorities at the expense of others. Second, disruption traces how autonomy is projected into LAWS through claims that technological innovation drives change. Focusing on early military balloons—taken as an early emergent and disruptive technology (EDT) and antecedent to LAWS—I show how a recursive grammar of disruption binds an imagined inevitable future to an inactionable present, thus producing an amnesia of the moment. Third, disappearance interrogates the supposition that autonomous technologies can supplant or replace humans in warfare. Through a historical analysis of pilot-cockpit relations, I show that autonomy has never resided in a sovereign human subject but has continually been reconfigured and redistributed across human-machine configurations, rendering disappearance an ongoing condition rather than an imminent, terminal event.
Overall, the dissertation calls for the reinvigorated critical study of what I call aberrant automata, that is, those diffuse entities that seem to escape human control and comprehension, as politically and ethically consequential objects, without allowing their apparent autonomy to foreclose critique and contestation.
Frederik Carl Windfeld is a PhD researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute. His doctoral research focuses on the study of emergent technologies and technological change in International Relations, with an empirical focus on lethal autonomous weapons systems. He has a particular interest in international theory, international political sociology, as well as discursive and genealogical methodologies and their application to the study of war. His previous research has been published in journals such as the Review of International Studies, International Political Sociology, Contemporary Security Policy, and Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Previously, he has held visiting research positions at the Stockholm Centre on Global Governance (SCGG), the Swedish Defence University, and the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.
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