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New technologies: what has Feminist Peace Research (FPR) brought to light through a gendered approach to military technologies? (AI, drones, etc.)

Historically, science and technology, and especially war technology, have been associated with men and masculinity. Women and gender and sexual minorities are largely absent from accounts of technology development, although, in practice, women have been involved early on in the development of important technologies such as computers. This can be explained notably by the fact that the values at the core of Western science and technology, such as objectivity and control, are associated with masculinity.

Over the past decades, feminist scholarship has highlighted that gender and gender relations are embedded in the military technologies themselves, in terms of who controls and uses these technologies and how gender values and roles influence their development. For instance, feminist scholars have shown that for drone operators, gender constitutes one of the main variables used to identify potential targets in so-called conflict areas, using the usual associations between, on the one hand, men-combatants-guilty and, on the other hand, women-civilians-innocent. FPR also underscores how the use of military drones leads to the dehumanisation of the victims and to a technology-induced distance between drone operators and those they target…