Laws, UFOs and UAVs: Feminist Encounters with the Law of Armed Conflict

In May 2014, the state parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the regulation of lethal autonomous weapon systems, even though the technology to produce these ‘killer robots’ did not exist at the time of the meeting. Reading the news coverage of this development reminded me of Judith Gardam's seminal piece in Naffine and Owen's book Sexing the Subject of Law, which imagined how the law of armed conflict might be understood from the point of view of an alien. At the time, Gardam reflected on the role of states, the implicit gendering of the law of armed conflict through the recognition of ‘natural’ and ‘constructed’ players, and the importance of honour within the international legal structure. In 1997, when the book was published, the notion of an actually constructed player — that is, a non-human player — was the stuff of science fiction. Likewise, the capacity for remote weapon systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, was still within the realm of science fiction. A few years before Gardam's piece, Celina Romany authored a piece on women as aliens within international law. In this chapter, drones are the unidentified flying objects and women the aliens as, inspired by the scholarship of Judith Gardam, I revisit stories of honour and subjectivity in the international law of armed conflict.I use Gardam's ‘Alien's Encounter’ as a starting point to consider the adaptations and developments in international law, particularly with respect to the regulation of weapons and the construction of subjectivity within the law of armed conflict as well as the shifts in perspectives regarding women's subjectivity within international legal discourses. I argue that women remain ‘aliens’ in international legal discourse, and that the regulation of weaponry has remained static in the intervening fifteen years. The latter conclusion is illustrated through the United Nations approach to the regulation of drones and lethal autonomous weapon systems. Because, somewhat confusingly, the acronym of the term ‘lethal autonomous weapons systems’ is ‘LAWS’, I refer to these as lethal autonomous robots — or LARs — throughout the chapter. My purpose is to argue for feminist legal approaches and feminist disarmament politics within our approaches to international law, armed conflict and subjectivity that complicate our approach to the law of armed conflict.