Is Soft Law the New Law? Exploring Discourses on Governance and Regulation of Emerging Disruptive Technologies in the Military Domain

In view of the increasing number of emerging disruptive technologies EDTs in military and warfare contexts, their regulation is becoming ever more urgent. EDTs encompass a very wide range of weapons technologies. In this article, I focus on technologies and applications in the fields of autonomy, artificial intelligence and cyber technologies. Dealing with the regulation of these technologies is particularly relevant as they are increasingly used in military contexts, yet at the same time there is no uniform international regulation approach to these EDTs. Moreover, this is a field in which different disciplines come into play. While social science research in this field focuses, for example, on the development of norms and political processes, aspects of human-machine interaction play an equally central role in this context, for example with regard to autonomous weapon systems. It becomes apparent that normative processes with regard to EDTs in the military sector take on a different dynamic and that soft law approaches are becoming increasingly important in view of unsuccessful regulatory and arms control efforts. In this paper, this focus of current research is considered in relation to the respective disciplines.