The #WARS project addresses how the new possibilities of participation affect people and places afar from the warzone.
Digital technology has transformed warfare. Conflict parties use artificial intelligence for target identification, drone surveillance and satellite imagery for intelligence gathering, GPS jamming to disrupt the enemy’s information networks and launch cyberattacks and digital information campaigns.
Previous media innovations – telegraphy, photography, radio, and television – have also changed how war was fought, represented and experienced. What is new is that digital technology blurs the distinction between communication and action and between civilian and combattant.
Nowadays, everyone with an internet connection cannot only follow the developments in the warzone in real time but digital technology enables ordinary people to participate in distant armed conflicts. This digital war participation ranges from producing, spreading, or countering war propaganda, to analysing open-source data and to fundraising for military equipment or humanitarian charities. And it benefits from digital platform’s capacity to tap into already existing personal ideas and political views and trigger affects like pleasure, anger, or compassion through images, language, and sound. The particular allure of digital war participation can obscure the political issues at stake and potentially serious real-world effects.
The #WARS project addresses how the new possibilities of participation affect people and places afar from the warzone.
Project Objectives
#WARS main objective is to understand war participation in the digital age (and to theorise the transnational dynamics of contemporary warfare). To this end, it will generate empirical knowledge on the war ecologies and participatory modalities in three cases: the war in Myanmar, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and the war in Sudan.
Based on the case studies, it will investigate the transnational dynamics of contemporary warfare consisting of the interplay between world society, war ecology and war agency.
