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International Law
22 March 2022

Will Military Swarms Be the Next Weapon of Mass Destruction?

As part of the Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS) and War Crimes research project, in the 10th episode of the podcast series "Lethal Autonomous Weapons: 10 Things We Want to Know", Paola Gaeta and Marta Bo interview Giacomo Persi Paoli, Programme Lead for Security and Technology Programme at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), about the next generation of lethal autonomous weapons systems – robot swarms –  and their technical and operational features. 

The LAWS and War Crimes project analyses the challenges of ascribing criminal responsibility for war crimes raised by the advent of increasingly autonomous weapon systems and human-machine shared decision-making in the targeting process (so-called mixed-initiative systems).