"Drone strikes: ethics and laws of 21st century warfare" by Dapo Akande and Dr Alex Leveringhaus

Past Event

Date
27 February 2014, 4:30pm - 6:00pm

Location
Lecture Theatre, Oxford Martin School
34 Broad Street (corner of Holywell and Catte Streets), Oxford, OX1 3BD

This seminar is part of the Oxford Martin School Hilary Term seminar series: Blurring the lines: the changing dynamics between man and machine

Speakers:

With military personnel able to dispatch death and destruction thousands of miles away at the click of a button, do we need new rules to govern warfare in the 21st Century?

Drone strikes have increasingly come under the media spotlight in recent years, with the frequency and consequences of remote attacks causing growing public unease over accountability and fairness.

Hear from law and ethics experts Dapo Akande and Dr Alex Leveringhaus, whose work is helping inform the international debate on drone strikes in relation to international law, human rights and ethics.

Join in on twitter with #humantech
This seminar will be live webcast here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbLbelvj0H8 at 3.30pm on 27 February

About the speakers

Dapo Akande is Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Human Rights for Future Generations, Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC),Yamani Fellow at St. Peter's College, and Oxford University Lecturer in Public International Law. He is the current Convenor of the Oxford Law Faculty's Public International Law Group.

He has varied research interests within the field of general international law and has published articles on aspects of the law of international organisations, international dispute settlement , international criminal law and the law of armed conflict. His articles have been published in leading international law journals such as the American Journal of International Law, the British Yearbook of International Law and the European Journal of International Law. His article in the Journal of International Criminal Justice on the "Jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court over Nationals of Non-Parties: Legal Basis and Limits" was awarded the 2003 Giorgio La Pira Prize.

Dr Alex Leveringhaus is a James Martin Fellow at the Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, Oxford Martin School and a Post-Doctoral Researcher on the research project ‘Military Enhancement: Design for Responsibility and Combat Systems’. Alex holds a PhD in Government and a Masters in Political Theory from the London School of Economics (LSE), where he also served as an LSE Fellow in Political Theory from 2008-2010. In 2011/12, Alex taught just war theory at the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, and served as a German Research Council-funded post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study ‘Justitia Amplificata’ based at the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.

In his current post-doctoral research, Alex addresses to what extent the use of advanced IT-information technology in modern targeting systems impacts on the conduct of armed conflict, including the moral psychology of combatants. His work assesses whether the use of IT-technology is compatible with existing jus in bello norms. Specialising in political philosophy and ethics, Alex also has research interests in theories of rights and justice.