Daniel Møller Ølgaard

This chapter explores the relationship between the imaginaries and realities of algorithmic warfare – one of the defining global security challenges of the twenty-first century. We begin by defining what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is and outlining some of its many military applications. We then critically engage with the International Relations (IR) literature on whether recent technical advances in AI are changing the character – and possibly the nature – of war. Through an empirical examination of the recent wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the chapter highlights important differences between the various imaginaries associated with AI and its real-world battlefield use. We conclude by outlining a revised research agenda for the study of algorithmic warfare that: (1) adopts a more consciously “critical” approach to the study of these technologies; (2) reflects on how the various popular imaginaries associated with AI may distort their empirical study; and (3) focuses more on the practical use of AI-enabled Decision Support Systems in contemporary conflicts, rather than solely on “killer robots” and autonomous weapon systems.

This chapter grapples theoretically and analytically with the significance of new digital media technologies in relation to the study of emotions and world politics. It begins with a review of existing international relations literature that identifies the need for scholarly engagement with the technological backdrop of emotions and their politics. Drawing on insights from postphenomenology, it then introduces “technological mediation” as a theoretical prism with which to make sense of the role of media technologies in relation to how emotions become collective and shape world politics. It ends by illustrating the value of this approach by exploring how the refugee crisis is mediated in the virtual reality (VR) experience Sense of Home. In doing so, the chapter unveils the politics of emotions inherent to this humanitarian VR experience, which appeals to and manages the emotions of spectators but also reproduces problematic ways of seeing distant suffering.

This chapter investigates digital media as new spaces for the promotion and normalisation of war and violence and marks a shift in analytical focus from the content of digital text, images or videos to the wide range of senses and practices involved in providing meaning to these forms of representation. To this end, the chapter presents an embodied reading of Islamic State’s (IS) propaganda video ‘Flames of War’. This draws out, firstly, how the organisation’s online propaganda addresses the embodied and affective sensibilities of spectators to facilitate a felt sense of intimacy and, secondly, how the affective potentials and intensities generated by such experiences are mobilised through the networked dynamic of digital and social media. These, the chapter argues, are distinctive features of how war is experienced on and through digital media, revealing new possibilities for promoting military action for insurgent groups like IS who do not have the communicative capacities that state militaries do.