“Ukraine: World’s Testing Ground for Military Robots” by Wim Zwijnenburg and Dr. Kristian Gustafson

Wim Zwijnenburg is a Humanitarian Disarmament Project Leader,  holding a Masters in International Development Studies from the Radboud University Nijmegen and having received a Philosophy scholarship from the Thomas More Foundation. He works on conflict and environment related issues, the use and proliferation of emerging military technologies and arms trade. Zwijnenburg is a coordinator of the European Forum on Armed Drones and is a frequent contributor to open-source journalism. Recently Zwijnenburg has been involved in reporting the impacts of the Russia-Ukraine war, considering not only the local impacts, but also larger scale environmental and political impacts.

Dr. Kristian Gustafson is a reader in Intelligence & War. He is the Deputy Director of BCISS and runs our very successful Distance Learning MA in Intelligence and Security Studies. After an MA at the University of Alberta, Canada, he moved to the UK to take his PhD at Downing College, Cambridge. Before coming to Brunel, Dr. Gustafson was senior lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He has served in the Canadian Army and as a Reservist in the British Army, and taught at the Joint Services Command and Staff College of the United Kingdom.

Together, Zwijnenburg and Gustafson will contextualize the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. The focus of this lecture will be the implications of robotics usage within such modern warfare. With a historic view, the rise of the technologies are taken into account, delving into the impacts on various actors (national and international), international rights and more.