Abstract
In recent years, the accelerating development of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) and so-called ‘killer robots’, has raised a number of legal and ethical concerns in the international community, including questions of compliance with international law and the principles of Just War. At the same time, governments and military services hope to introduce game-changing military technologies that are ‘better, faster and cheaper’, investing heavily in research and development of AWS. In this paper, I wish to map the different and competing practices of critique and justification that shape the technopolitical controversy of AWS, showing its complexity and internal contradictions. In addition to identifying the dominant regimes of justification, that organize the discourse of AWS, I argue that the military bureau and its officeholders become technopolitical mediators and translators of risk in an emergent practice of jurisprudence, referred to as ‘hybrid law’, allowing the simultaneous application of a plurality of conflicting legal, ethical, political and economic rationalities.