Assistant Professor Marijn Hoijtink and 3rd-year PPE student Marlene Tröstl wrote an article on soldier-robot relations for The Intimacies of Remote Warfare programme. In it, they reflect on the sharp contrast between human empathy for military robots and the dehumanization of local publics that underpins remote warfare.
"Independent of whether military robots are programmed to be social or socialize, they still perform an important social and political function."
Marijn Hoijtink is Assistant Professor in International Relations at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research interests include emerging security technologies, their circulation and relation to risk, militarism, and weapons research. She is the editor of Technology and Agency in International Relations (with Matthias Leese), published by Routledge in 2019. Her current research project, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), focuses on the politics of AI and examines how novel AI applications shape and transform current military practices and forms of decision-making.
Marlene Tröstl is a third-year Bachelor student studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and is currently writing her bachelor thesis highlighting the relevance of Plato’s conception of rhetoric for the analysis of warfare discourse today. Next to PPE, she is doing a research assistantship at VU’s Faculty of Social Sciences where she has been mainly researching the social role of modern warfare technologies as well as the development of AI policy perspectives on EU level. Moreover, she is a co-founder of Initiative Interchange, an international network raising funds for primary education.