Christiane Wilke writes with news of a fascinating special issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal (441, 1) on Gender, War, and Technology: Peace and Armed Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.

Gender, War, and Technology: Peace and Armed Conflict in the Twenty-First Century:  Emily Jones, Sara Kendall & Yoriko Otomo

Targeting, Gender, and International Posthumanitarian Law and Practice: Framing The Question of the Human in International Humanitarian Law: Matilda Arvidsson

How International Law Learned to Love the Bomb: Civilians and the Regulation of Aerial Warfare in the 1920s: Christiane Wilke

Technology, Dead Male Bodies, and Feminist Recognition: Gendering ICT Harm Theo:  Kristin Bergtora Sandvik

War’s Perpetuity: Disabled Bodies of War and the Exoskeleton of Equality: Gina Heathcote

A Posthuman-Xenofeminist Analysis of the Discourse on Autonomous Weapons Systems and Other Killing Machines: Emily Jones

The Architecture of Slow, Structural, and Spectacular Violence and the Poetic Testimony of War: Helene Kazan

The editors explain in their Introduction:

As the following articles illustrate, triangulating gender, war, and technology as a field of inquiry produces a wide domain of analysis, with topics ranging from human enhancement technologies to autonomous weapons systems, surveillance and aerial bombardment, artificial intelligence, and big data. The three terms themselves invite interpretation and debate.

The first term, ‘gender’, has been used in the context of international humanitarian law to signify vulnerability; women are treated as a group that may require further protection, where gender operates as a qualified identity that supplements the category of civilian (or indeed, comes to define the category of civilian). Yet some of the articles considered here adopt a more reflexive approach informed by feminist scholarship, considering issues of agency, difference, and intersectionality, and contesting gendered constructions that presuppose femininity, ethnicity, and passivity. The gendered subjects of law and war are at the same time subjects embedded within political economies of race, class, ability, age, and other factors. While gender serves as the primary focus of many articles within this special issue, gender theory’s commitment to intersectionality can be seen throughout, with articles considering issues of race, colonialism, ability, masculi- nity, and capitalism (and thus, implicitly, class). Beyond this special issue, the field would benefit from analysis of the broader range of intersectional concerns that emerge from recent technological developments in warfare.

The second term, ‘war’, is understood through drawing on existing feminist and gender critiques of war and armed conflict. Our point of departure is Cockburn’s well-known ‘continuum of violence’, whereby war and peace are noted to be part of a shared continuum as opposed to distinct (legal) categories. Such an outlook dis- rupts legal categorisations of conflicts by acknowledging that when a conflict ends as a matter of law, it has not necessarily ended for people living through it.  Not only do the place and time of ‘armed’ conflict then become questions, but presumptions about who produces, participates in, and is affected by conflict are also revisited and critiqued.

The final term, ‘technology’, has been defined within the context of conflict in the twenty-first century, following the post-war ideological movement described above. We are aware of the vast amount of literature which seeks to define technology broadly, with Heidegger defining technology to include things such as art and law, roughly defining technology as a tool and theorising how it is technology which helps humans become human. This special issue focuses on technology specifically within the context of twenty-first-century armed conflict, such as military technologies and/or algorithmic decision-making and data collection. In light of the multiple ways in which technology is changing conflict, we argue that the focus on these technologies reflects the ways in which technology is impacting on and changing the global order and conflict. This special issue seeks to draw attention to the urgent need for gendered perspectives on the interrelationships between war and technology.