 All right, let's wait for a couple of seconds until we get the attendees up and then we can get started. Great, looks like everyone is slowly trickling in. Okay, fantastic, why don't we start now? Welcome, everyone. It's a real pleasure to have you here at the annual School of Security Studies Conference. This is our very esteemed IRN ethics panel and it's entitled looking through the fog of war into disciplinary lenses. And as you'll see, as we go very quickly through our amazing speakers, our IRN ethics team is really, really interdisciplinary. We have a lot of different lenses to kind of make sense of this phenomenon of war, which has been really in the news in the last six months or so. It's a real pleasure to have you here on Zoom as well as live streamed on YouTube. So without further ado, we get started with Francisco Lobo, who's a PhD candidate in here in the Department of War Studies. Francesco, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, for inviting me to speak today. So I was told to be brief. I will keep it brief and simple, but not simplistic, following my supervisor's advice, Maria Varaki. So yeah, I will be talking about Yuzkogen's norms, this special kind of norm that we have in international law and how they have been applied or resorted to in the conflict in Ukraine, at least in the discourse, in the narrative. So Alvina has my slide. Okay, next. So in the first slide, I wanna show you, I wanna show you the definition of Yuzkogen's in international law. It is a very obscure Latin phrase, right? But what it really means, it's really simple. It's a boundary on the power that states have to conclude treaties. So it's defined as a current or a norm of general international law, according to the street, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of states as a whole, as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law, having the same character. So a lot of lawyers think this actually is natural law, not positive law, but it doesn't sound very like natural law to me, that no references to reason, the common good, nothing like that. So it's very formalistic, in my opinion. But this is the concept. This is the legal concept of Yuzkogen's. It's still very, like I said, neutral empty. In the next slide, we can see how the UN International Law Commission has tried to flesh out a little disconcept for the past six years or so. So they have said at this commission that current or norms of general international law or Yuzkogen's norms, reflect and protect fundamental values of the international community. They are universally applicable and are hierarchically superior to other rules of international law. So what I wanted to highlight here is that they reflect fundamental values of the international community. So they are the intersection actually of ethics and law. That's why some lawyers actually don't like them because they think it's too much morality and not a lot of law in them, which is perfect for this panel actually. So, and what about some examples? Finally, in the next slide, we can see a bit more fleshing out of this concept. The same commission at the UN, they have come up with a bunch of examples of Yuzkogen's norms that everybody could agree on apparently. And the list is very, it's a minimal list, but very important. So it's a bunch of prohibitions, the prohibition of aggression or aggressive war, the prohibition of genocide, the prohibition of crimes against humanity, basic rules of international humanitarian law that is the law of armed conflict, the prohibition of racial discrimination or apartheid, the prohibition of slavery, the prohibition of torture, and finally a positive one, the right of self determination. This is like the non-exhaustive or illustrative list that the international law commission came up with a couple of years ago. Some states, if we go to the next slide, some states have liked this idea of having a list with examples of Yuzkogen's, some states have it. So we have a list here of states who support or are against the list in favor of it are Austria, Belgium, Colombia, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, South African, Switzerland, and against having a list, Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark on behalf of all those states, Sweden, Iceland, Norway and Finland, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the West. They don't like this list, they're not against, so this is important to highlight, they're not against the council of Yuzkogen, they just don't see any added value in this list, so they prefer to keep it more abstract and flexible. So, in the next slide, we can see finally what this means for the purposes of today's presentation. In my opinion, Yuzkogen's reflects a reality in international law and international politics, which we could call legal polytheism. So polytheism, you know what it is, it means you worship several gods instead of the one God and what I have seen in legal practice and discourse and the literature is that everybody worships a specific kind of God from the list or the illustrative list of Yuzkogans or maybe more than one, but everybody favors one at least and it's very protein, it's very malleable in that sense and that means that conflict and contestation is inevitable just as with the polytheists. So, let's see an example just to bring it home with the point we've trained in the next slide. We can see how both Russia and Ukraine of the West have used this same list to their advantage or to bolster their own narratives about the war. So, and it's basically the same standards but used differently, this is what is so interesting. So, Russia prays to the gods of the prohibition of genocide. They actually said they invaded to prevent the genocide. We can see that Ukraine and the West also pray to the prohibition of genocide. Actually Ukraine sued Russia at the ICJ because they are misusing or abusing the concept of genocide prohibition of aggression. Also the Russians say, oh, but this was in self defense preemptively and the Ukrainians of course, they say, well, this is an actual self defense, we are being attacked. Basic rules of IHL. The Russians have played with this a bit more. They're not referring, of course, to war crimes. It's not convenient, but maybe they are relying to match on the principle of military necessity. Whereas, of course, Ukraine and the West, they are highlighting the perpetration of war crimes all over the place and documenting it thoroughly. And finally, self-determination. Everybody's talking about self-determination. Russia says it's because of self-determination in the east of the country that we are doing this. And Ukraine says it's because of self-determination as a nation, as a whole, that we are resisting. And yeah, the next stage in this, the final slide, shows the next stage in this judicial or legal battle. I know there's an actual battle going on, but get me wrong, but it also has a legal dimension. And the next stage will be, well, in court at the ICJ, the International Court of Justice. So like I said, Ukraine sued Russia because they're abusing the concept of genocide. The ICJ believes they have jurisdiction to hear this case. The Russians don't agree, but in the end, the court said they have to submit their briefs. Ukraine in September of this year, Russia in March of next year, and then who knows when this is going to end. But it is a judicial case already, a legal dispute. So like I said, everybody's using Yuskogans more specifically the list, as a form of legal poepleism praying to the gods that are more convenient to each of them. Or maybe the same God, but you have a different interpretation of the same doctrine. So that's about it. Yeah, thank you. Hey, thank you very much. Fantastic, thank you very much. So this is our legal lens on the problem of war, as it kind of unfolds and is becoming transformed and contemporary times. Our second speaker will be Dr. Lola Frost, who is a research fellow, also here in the Department of War Studies. And let me just get the slides up for you. Lola is yours, Lola. Thank you very much, Elvina. So wonderful to be here and to be with my colleagues. So my question today is, what is the work of art for violence against women? The work of art, by which I mean, it is what the work of art does. And it's sometimes difficult to describe. Indeed, our experience of art tends to exceed what we can say about it, but even as a cause for interpretation. And I'm not going to go into the study of aesthetics, which has spent a lot of time trying to figure out that conundrum, but generally just to stay with their conclusions that it seems to all of us that one of the most important things we can say about art is that it educates us. It's a kind of aesthetic education in the work of art. And I've been interested in what is politically, ethically, and normatively at stake in the aesthetic education of art, in its provocations particularly. And in this brief presentation, I look at four images to explore how ethics, recognition, normative regulation, and resistance are intrinsic types to our experience and interpretation of art. But before I do so, a few thoughts on what the work of art can do for the injustice of violence against women. And I suppose in that sense, I'm thinking about what you've said before. So unlike war, which is commonly perceived of as the public enactment of militarized aggression between societies and states, practices of misogyny and violence against women are mostly conducted beyond public scrutiny. That secrecy is not only an index of the failure of women's rights to freedom and equality, but is also an indicator of how those who conduct misogynist abuse and violence against women refuse to recognize the rights of dignity and freedom. And this raises the specter of an omnipresent fog that obscures those arguments and practices musted to sustain control of women's bodies, desires, and agency. So on this school, I suggest that works of art cannot deliver justice, but they can mediate injustice. And they do so by illuminating the normative failures of their misogynistic bulk on this topic that we're talking about. So the work of art involves what some call an aesthetic education, which is generally registered as an ethically entangled publication. And it's much more than that, it's a meaningless event, which I could speak on, is that the statisticians spend a lot of time trying to explain, but let's just stay with this idea of an aesthetic education. And indeed, to be a participant in the practice we call art, all of us are inscribed into its rules, which frame an experiential and pluralizing spectrum that bears between and across sense and understanding. And as co-participants in that practice, artists and audiences grapple with processes and affects, which challenge representation and invite imaginative interpretation or creative ecstasy or affective disavowal, all of which are both ethically and non-ethically shaped. So we look at our first example. It's not a good quality image because I had to get it all connected, but this is a work by Pellis Yopis, who is a very distinguished South African artist. And it's a small painting, part of an enormous series that she did in between 2002 and 2005 as a response to the Cruising Records Exiliation Fiction. And this small sample gives you a sense of it, but registered as a series, its effects are remarkably compelling. And those effects provoke our recognition of the psychological and ethical events, the rape and violence against women and tales. And Yopis' astonishing shame series, which I just tried to sketch for you, I suggest is both an identification with that shame as a thought of compassion and an indictment of misogynistic social order that produced it. And Yopis claims that this body of work is the articulation of what she calls a poetics of vulnerability. And by this, she means, I think, that these images carry the vulnerabilities of those whose violations she seeks to meet public, as well as something of her effective and creative methods that require her own undoing, itself an ecstatic, ethical, and normatively inflected aesthetic performance. Next question. Luise Bourgeois claims that childhoods and neutrons relating to her father and the patriarchal construction of her female artist were exorcised through her art practice, whose narratives of desire, transformation, and resistance amount to subliminal critique of misogynistic and patriarchal domination. So Bourgeois' famous five sculptures, which you see here, allude to the strength of her mother, where metaphors of spinning, weaving, nurture, protection provoke and threaten alternatives to the phallocentric status quo. These provocative, mesmerizing, threatening, protective creatures offer ethical alternatives to the phallocentric status quo by invoking a sense of an alternative and grotesque, beautiful female power. Next one, please. My painting, titled Coming Alive, is saturated by libidinal investments and is part of a longstanding quest to resist the repression of desire and the subordination of women. The fractal life force of this painting is folded into this headless, limitless, visceral, umbilical body called a assemblage that rises vertically and aspirationally against the violence of my own self-regulation, as well as those repressions laid down by a phallocentric project to demean, silence, and control women, including their bodies and desire. Like Bourgeois' Spiders, this abject assemblage mediates and contests misogynified violation by confronting the view of vulnerable, excessive, retest, raging, and hence normatively unspeakable female power. Last but not least, Zanelli Maholi's image, titled Apilele, is an interrogation of a politics of representation and of the gaze. In the traditions of portrait painting and photography, the work of that gaze has also been questing to sustaining racial, gender, and heteronormative hierarchies that this of our racial violence and demean women of color. Maholi's activist work within LGBTQI plus community in South Africa is an explicit repress of the gender conforming, the violence that gender conforming individuals suffered because they threatened that hegemonic normativity. To end, my conflict, sorry, my argument is that work that art does, simply put, is registered as an interpretive and experiential nexus. I have argued that this nexus is both normatively saturated and heteronormative. And that the work of art is a diagnostic of both the power of and resistance to misogynistic control and abuse. Such artistic mediation is a big and pluralizing, but it is also intrinsic to the practice we call an aesthetic education whose ethical, diagnostic, and transformative potential should not be underestimated. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you so much, Lola. Next, we have Professor Vivian Jabri, who's a professor of international politics, also here in the Department of War Studies. And Vivian will be joining us online. Okay, thank you very much, Alvina. And that's so far the panel has been great. So let me try and offer my bit to this engagement with the subject of war and how we move on. The question for me is always, what concepts do we use in understanding the wars of our contemporary era, but also wars across the modern period? And one of the interesting aspects of what's going on in the present moment is the juxtapositioning of what scholarship as well as in the wider public sphere is known as the liberal international order. So we have that as a concept and it's given a number of understandings and renditions, I would say versus the post-colonial international order. So I will focus on the post-colonial international order because that is what we have in the present juncture of historical development of the international system. The post-colonial international order, I mean an order that actually fundamentally changed when the formerly colonized countries gained access to this realm of politics that we refer to as the international. I think this was a hugely significant period of history whereby the post-colonial societies through their anti-colonial struggles brought into the discourse of international relations, issues relating to racism, issues relating to self-determination and specifically the right to self-determination. And I would suggest that in our contemporary era and particularly in the late 1990s and 2000s, the post-colonial international order, including if you like legal, juridical, political structuring, its normative structuring, has actually been transgressed to a very significant degree and indeed challenged to a very significant degree. And post-colonial societies and their governments have in a sense responded very, have responded to this in a multitude of ways from voices rendered at the United Nations, but also if you like on the streets. So I would suggest that the emergence of what we've come to know as the Arab Spring before the civil wars in Syria and the civil war in Libya, I would suggest that one of the instigators of the Arab Spring and the protests on the streets of a number of Arab countries actually was a response to the transgression of the post-colonial international order. So what were these transgressions? These came about in terms of the interventions, both military as well as if you like at societal level, the interventions that took place in the 1990s and into the 2000s, which we would normally refer to as liberal wars. We refer to them as liberal wars because if you like the states that were involved in those interventions were indeed liberal democratic societies led by the United States. So the intervention in Iraq primarily, but also prior to that interventions on the Balkans and so on. The discourses that framed these interventions related to humanitarian wars, the idea of the rescue of populations, for example, in Kosovo, in relation to Iraq, they were framed in terms of counterterrorism, but also very significantly, as we all know, regime change and with these discourses came the dichotomy that we use in international relations relating to war, namely the difference between legitimacy and legality. So a number of scholars who, if you like, rely on the notion of legitimacy and Francesco has in a sense alluded to this when he talked about the norms of the international order. So a number of scholars would suggest that humanitarianism as a motivation for war is indeed about this idea that wars can happen in late modernity relating to the rescue of populations, humanitarianism and so on and so on. However, those who focus on legality and the idea of the bounded limited sovereign state would, if you like, focus on what constitutes the post-colonial international order, namely the self-determination and sovereignty of the limited political community. So this is a genuine, both ethical and political debate that goes on in the discipline of international relations and that clearly exercises all of us when it comes to our judgments about warfare. So liberal wars, as these came to be known, saw the global as the remit of operations. So the uses of militaries involved both warfare, the use of direct violence against populations, and primarily these populations were located in the post-colonial world. But also, if you like, actions particularly in Iraq, which relate to the global political economy. So for example, the sudden and wholesale privatization of Iraq's oil industry, the introduction of GM crops, for example, into Iraq and so on and so on. In terms of transgressives, or the transgression of international law and the norms of the post-colonial international order, these came about in the occupation of Iraq during that period. So what of where we are now, and very quickly, I'm very aware of time passing. What is the war in Ukraine and how do we characterize that war? I've suggested in the title that we might, in a sense, characterize it in terms of a nationalist or a totalitarian-based war. Why do I say this and how has the post-colonial world responded to this particular war? So it's driven, as we all know, by a nationalist ideology, but it's a nationalist ideology that has a kind of pan-ethnic national agenda to it. And this is seen, and it's very clear in the speeches that Putin has given. So rather than seeing this as a kind of global remit, you might conceptualize the Ukraine war more in terms of a sort of regional, ethnically-driven conflict. However, there is more to it as well, and hence the use of my word, totalitarian, obviously, I'm very much influenced by Hannah Arendt's reading of totalitarianism. The war is also, in a sense, driven by what is the politics, not just of the region, but the internal politics within the Russian federation. So where liberal wars depoliticize conflict in a particular way, suggesting that conflict is about humanitarianism and so on and so on. Totalitarian wars depoliticize conflict not just in terms of this focus on ethnicity and culture, but also in relation to actually seeking depoliticization. So the war in Ukraine and this kind of pan, you might say pan-Slavic ideology might be also to do with the internal politics that are going on in Russia and the drive against. If you like, again, to use an Arendtian term, it's the right to politics. So what is the right to politics? It is about a presence in the public sphere. It's about the expression of the right to contest, what goes on not just in relation to government policy, but also to other participants in that public sphere. It's about taking away the space, the actual material space, but also the discursive space wherein politics actually takes place. So the war in Ukraine is very much connected to the internal politics of what is going on within the Russian state. And this is very interesting because it raises a number of questions about how we compare wars and the motivations behind them. What concepts do we use? What are the discourses that frame each particular war? It's not about a comparison so much as actually understanding the dynamics of each of these different types of war. Now, each of them involves violence against populations, as we saw in Iraq and as we continue to see in Ukraine. The interesting question for us is in relation to how we conceptualize these different kinds of war, but also to be very curious about how the post-colonial world responds. And in terms of the response to this particular war from the post-colonial world, what we've seen and as personified by the Kenyan representative at the UN, what we've seen is that there is absolute recognition across the post-colonial world, though some of that world abstained at the UN General Assembly, that there is an understanding of this war as indeed nationalist-driven imperialist war, but that imperialism is understood as in a sense very much as it has always been understood in terms of the right to self-determination. And you can have a look at the Kenyan representative's speech at the Security Council when it happened and it's there on the UN website. So I'll just conclude there. Thanks very much. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Vivian, for being muted. But okay, I think we're back now. Great, fantastic. Our next speaker will be Professor Mervin Frost, who's a professor of National Relations in the Department of War Studies. Thank you, Alvin. I'm aware of time. I will simply go like a steam train until you say stop, and I will stop. And by then, even if I haven't reached the end, people will know where the train is going. So the word fog is a well-known phrase in the fog of war, and it might be taken to mean breakdown, chaos, disorder, or anarchy. It may be taken to suggest the state of affairs that is completely chaotic, where things are like this might be thought that folk of ethics is a waste of time. For ethical questions usually arise in some kind of stable order. So for example, we might ask, when is it ethical for the police to use force? Or is the use of waterboarding justified against the person suspected of planning some terrorist act and so on? Now, the just war tradition is presented to us in the literature as having two parts, the Usaic Bello and the Usin Bello. But all just wars here is kind of presuppose a two-step process. The one is a description of a messy state of affairs we understand as war. This is like a snapshot taken from above. And the second introduces ethics and asks from an ethical point of view what ought to be done and so on. But in both cases, there's the description and then the ethical question. It is this standard conception that I want to challenge in the five, four minutes that are left to me now. My challenge is easily stated. And here's the punchline. Fighting is doing. It does not involve randomly rational behavior, but action. Soldiers say there's airmen and women's spies, special forces, strategists, and so on all the way through. They participate in a war. They're doing things. And you can only do things in the context of a practice with its association, associated rules and embedded ethics. So the complete set of actions that comprise a war is not some pre-ethical reality in the face of which ethical decisions have to be made. Action is ethically laden from the outset. Even in the deepest fog of war, ethics is, as it were, embedded in what goes on there. So there's a heading, action and ethics. So quickly, all human action, including making the war, can only be understood in the practice in which it is constituted as an action of a certain kind. So today I'm giving a short paper, very short, at this conference. And you can only understand what I'm doing in the context of university life. We can elaborate on that. So the professors, libraries, teachers and seminar rules. And you can only understand what I'm doing insofar as you understand that this practice of ours has gotten embedded ethics to do with the pursuit of knowledge. And that is similarly the case in all the actions that we conduct in warfare. So my talk then is about the ethical constitution of actors. So in order to be an actor in a social practice, one has to be constructed in it by a process of mutual recognition. So I'm only a professor insofar as you recognize me as such, all of you and others. And Vladimir Zelensky is only a president of Ukraine, because he's recognized as such by the citizens of the Ukraine, and by all of us, the rest of the international community. This point about actors being constituted within social practices applies to all social practices from sports universities through to states and international organizations. Now when a person is constituted as such within a social practice. That actor by virtue of being constituted in that way is bound by the ethical components of the practice in which he's constituted such. So for you to be students in universities, you have to be bound by these ethical constraints. The condition of you being a student. And similarly, in warfare, the participants are bound by the ethical constraints in the practice in which they're constituted as soldiers, sailors, spies, or whatever. If you flout those constraints, you get expelled from the community that you belong to. So if you flout the constraints of university life, you will be expelled and not recognized as a scholar. If I was discovered to have plagiarized this whole little bit, and so on. So, from the point of view of a participant in a practice, the worst thing that can happen to you is to lose your standing as a member of that practice. So for all of us, especially senior old people like me, the worst thing that could happen would be to be deconstructed as a professor. If I was found to have plagiarized a whole book, I would be kicked out drummed out at King's. And the same applies to international actors and the actors who make war. They have to comply with these things, otherwise they will no longer be constituted. So this analysis indicates that everything an actor does in the social formations in which he was constituted as an act of that kind. He, she it is vulnerable to ethical criticisms. This is as applicable to actors engaged in war as in other domains. So primary imperative of actors war fighters included must be avoid to avoid ethical criticism that deconstructs them as a participant in that practice. Now the implications here are utterly profound and not often recognized. In war, an actor might be winning a physical battle. In other words, killing more people destroying more fighting missions, downing more aircraft drones. But all of this has no heft whatsoever. If the actor is plotting the ethics of the practice, because if the actors doing that, the actor will be extruded as a pariah. Thank you. So the South African case is a very nice one. The National Party government in the old days had military superiority. They killed dozens hundreds and tortured hundreds more of the ANC. So they were winning the military battle, but they were losing their status as a participant in the global practice of states. So they were declared pariahs. So I've got lots more here, but you can see where this is all going. What matters in international relations and you can see it in the Ukraine is there's an ongoing battle to maintain the ethical status. So Putin tries to maintain his case that he is a wrong party in some sense, but the whole question then turns on is his ethical argument stronger than the allies, the Ukrainian ethical argument. So everything turns on the ethical case being made, and the military stuff is secondary to that and unfinished. Thank you very much. Wonderful timekeeping from Professor Frost. Thank you very much. We have two more speakers left. So please stay with us. And as you have questions, please post them in the Q&A little button here or if you're in the room, obviously you can join later when we open it up. So our penultimate speaker will be Lily Miller, who has just recently submitted a PhD here in the department is awaiting her defense in a couple of weeks. So, Lily, the floor is yours. Thank you, Elena. Thank you so much. I'm honored to be here today to discuss these contemporary issues around how to study war and if you're ready for all the tools that we can mobilize in this fall before to understand developments and trajectories in our contemporary era with these very esteemed colleagues that thank you very much. My direction will be as Lily just mentioned, based on my research I just conducted my PhD where I argued for a transformation of how we study cybersecurity, and how we need from defining what cybersecurity is towards understanding what cybersecurity does. So most studies currently in the field of national relations and critical security studies focus on cybersecurity and cyber war by looking at big events. This is the latest big event of the nuclear power that I ran. Now there's a lot of studies that focus on Ukraine, where they look at experts or threat actors, and then base their theorization on these cases then say something about what type of war cybersecurity is. So I have heard it might have slipped this perspective around, and rather than trying to define what cybersecurity is what it's not through these cases. I my research start from the other side and examine how cybersecurity and cyber threats are made in focusing on how it's made every day by the technicians that both create cyber threats and cyber security in that practice. So focusing on this insignificant every day I argue can transform how we understand and study the use of digital technology and cyber weapons in the world. So to do this in the short time I'll illustrate why it's important that we do this and my intervention will be structured as follow I will first and then just a time drawn the case of Ukraine, even though it's, yeah, it's fresh in our minds and an context I'll just throw that. And so I'm not using it as a case to show how cyber has changed, but rather to make this argument that the dangers of certain way of thinking about war and cyber war, and the consequences that it has to focus on these events for how these problems are understood. So secondly, based on this case, I will present a different way to understand cyber security. So, with the case of Ukraine, and cyber war was suddenly back in the specter of what I was talking about. And when Russia was building up their military along the Korean border, many analysts stressed the potential for destabilizing and devastating cyber attacks. To see professors such as Jason Haley at the University of Columbia predicted that if Russia invades the opening salvoes like which be with offensive cyber capabilities. And William Corbyn Peter Wilson from rams and we've warned that massive employment cyber warfare tools will create shock upon us in Ukraine's defense or will fight to collapse. So accordingly, the United States and the United Kingdom deployed cyber war teams to help Ukraine defend against these impeding strategic cyber strikes against critical national infrastructure. And some even further suggesting that Russia may not even need to use their military, or is it all a cyber strikes could achieve much the same effect across the border. And this assessment was actually shared by policymakers working to counter the Russian threat with anonymous senior Biden administration officials pouring this in official news. So, but no cyber war happened. So, as previous professor at King's Thomas rates in his words cyber war did not take place. And we're left wondering, where is this cyber war and all the discussions following or what is this not happening as a tax throw then more intentional tools of war. So it's not a new observation comes right in John Stove and had this discussion right in 2012. And so I were to place or not. So there's a long trajectory discussing. What I am saying is that, with all these discussions and theorization in place, why did this not happen, how the cyber war becomes so expected, and how are we so shocked. So why I'm arguing is that the theoretical methodological tools that critical security studies and scientific studies that it's given us guides us to study cyber war and cyber security to the everyday practices and how these threats and risks are made. And we do these tools give us and study the everyday practitioners and experts that make cyber security. We can gain understanding what cyber security actually is when it's practice. And when we do that we can see how cyber weapons are built and how they're detected and secured against the news. And if we have that knowledge, we can actually already preempt that in the case of Ukraine, there is no shopping on cyber weapons, cyber war. And with the time I have I'll just very quickly go over some of them. So if we look at this for the war, the title is through this interdisciplinary lens I'm advocating. We firstly see there is no cyber bomb that fits all you can't just build a cyber weapon and put it on a shelf and have it ready when needed. It takes time to build it takes position and inside knowledge and access to systems that you want to attack. So the cyber weapon needs to be continuously built and updated as the technological systems are updated. So the consequence of that is for example, this expectation also from the West that they would attack the Russian military obviously they will have extremely early military systems knowledge to build a bomb that will attack their digital infrastructure. And yes, the Russian sponsored sandworm packing group did try and sabotage the Ukrainian power grid. In the last months. However, it was easily put together cyber operation, and it was discovered very early by victims and hence it had been possible. So we come at this risk in cyber war, once we actually crack understand how it's built these cyber weapons that you never really know how the weapons are going to work and when it works, the effect so that the time that so relevant and more to summarize the implications of the methodology I'm suggesting or advocate for towards this focusing on the everyday shows that rather than following the brilliant narratives and discourse and cyber security that is the big next thing in war. A cyber weapons and use of cyber in war takes place alongside all the other classical photos of war. It's a supporter, but it's not this whole new way of fighting work. And that goes for the question of the terrorists to. So the last point is that cyber can be used alongside the conventional ways of fighting work is likely to be the same next thing. But cyber security and cyber attacks and malicious actors and weapons are real and not saying they're not important. And it's the most important that we secure against this threat to our society and state and everyday systems. But it's not as much the classical war sets, hence we just shift where and how we understand the battle. Thank you very much. Well, look forward to seeing this research out in the world. And that leads us to our final speaker Professor did you go who's also Professor of international relations here in the Department of War Studies. And I'll be sharing my screen as we go and you tell me when to go next to the next slide. Thank you very much. We have done research. About 20 years of war and content areas. We have presented, I say we, the collective of more than 60 people in different places in the world. Each time we are back to the question, what about. So, my question for today is, do we have a paradigm change concerning war studies with invasion of Ukraine by the end of liberal globalization and liberal wars against them. Other logics and practice of winter terrorism of three. Or have they been extended to a point that was not imagined by the Western country, when they have initiated. Because it is a difficult question to answer. And only time will give some kind of. We cannot answer now, and the one who say they are. Important in terms of expert. What you can do is as much important that what you see. So if like Joseph borough, say, narrative and cultural misunderstanding are fed by the misrecognition of others and mimetic we value. And if there is a currency of international relation, then it is important to think carefully about the friends of war and the great ability and precarity of the form of life. And I refer to. Are we back. To the reality of international world of real. That's a little bit what some geopolitical invading the TV and unseen from the end of the cold war. And it's delight to find between Ukraine and Russia. Through the frame of what did not happen during the cold war between us as well as the West with the invention items. So is Ukraine the poster child of the Western civilization to tell, or is Ukraine the adolescent for getting its Easter root and fatherhood and obliged to realize that is geography in both for paper today. That's the so called lesson of Joe. The so called rule of being neighbor of strong states, and he explained a little bit. There's a position of baby. If you are interested, a little bit of French and European. So we have now a dance of death around the dance of death around liberal values to be defended. And the legal agreement consecrated or not by NATO, which is delimiting the tolls of death and the number of civilian victims in Ukraine necessary for change. There are the curses of indignation and. Who deserve not to die to die with honor to die without recognition to be forgotten. The frame of Western ethics and boundaries lie between all well this dimension of values and norms and the ideas that legality is not. Maybe later explained that it's not that it's embedded into practice and not into the world. So we can see why you have so much narrative of genocide of right. While crime or on the contrary of various or in history just defines that when you are on war you can do what. And you can see that the day to day major war violence report on intimate situation of this. At the effect of presenting the suffering that distance as an ethical move of proximity, while the repetition of images renders a penalty of war nearby us. But for me and they don't want. That's where is the problem. We can say that NATO has developed more and more this idea with the idea that arms sales can be a form of this thing. We can go back to it. Of course you have really a research to do on every example of war which have been limited by technological. Where you help a country to go even more into a high level technical war or do you create more. And of course you have to analyze here, not only the public and the soldier, but all the role of the private companies and the arms sales company and how they are involved with their elements. How do we analyze the role of our dealers. How do we analyze the fact that already some companies are in Ukraine to discuss about reconstruction. So it's this form of citizens that we have to analyze into this mentality of war which has been done. More importantly, we have seen that we are incapable to read the Russian counter terrorism discourse. Why? Because in some way, we don't want to analyze what they say because they dare to say that we Westerners are the terrorists. And that we are supporting neonatalism. So we are the one to be fight against with a vocabulary which is exactly the one of counter terrorism. Special operations on TV season, potential regime change, freedom versus terrorism worldwide, survival of the nation, merging between internal and external situation. So what this counter terrorism, Washington discourse do is that it creates see the ratio of the situation. See the ratio is a philosophical sense that we cannot just realize that it's important. For example, I finished part, is it difficult to take a side step to think outside of the box, to use both your formula. And it is even more the case for work steps. This side step is seen by actors engaging legitimately for their own violence as a betrayal. We are both to admit that it's understandable for their own point. But what we need is to have the courage to point out their similarity in terms of practice of violence, even if they insist to absurdize the difference and to impose a diabolization of the attack. This is this analysis of framework war and understanding of who are critical, which can give you some lessons and methods to go beyond the mentality. Wonderful timekeeping again, so that leaves us with about 20 minutes to 25 minutes for Q&A and we already have a couple of questions in the box, which I'll read out and then, you know, you pick them up as you as you see fit. And of course, if anyone in the room has a question, you can just raise your arm. So the first question is actually for Francisco Francisco sorry. So Carl Islam is asking, in the context of IHL are norms also derived from obligations, erga omnis. Maybe I'll ask a few more questions because I also have a question to from Stefan, do you want to ask them or should I read them out. Do you want to stand up and speak up. Yeah. Thank you very much. So just to repeat to what extent the invasion of Ukraine has been emerging of imperial totalitarian forms of war practices. Another question from Carl Islam this time to Morgan. He's asking in Professor John Mirsheimer offensive realism paradigm. International politics appears to be a practical exercise and not a moral one. If that theory is valid and applies to a conflict involving an aspiring hegemon, for example, China, and does it follow that no ethical standards are applicable to relations between states, for example, because universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states. So, maybe we'll turn it back to the panelists for now. Francisco, do you want to begin and then we'll go around. Okay. Yeah, but it's very technical. So, okay, every use go against norm. Okay, let me speak up. Yeah. Okay, every use go against norm entails an obligation to respect it from everybody that's what erga omnis needs. Everybody is obligated to respect them right. So we have use go against rules and we have erga omnis obligations, and they overlap sometimes, but not always so you can have erga omnis obligations that are not at the same time use go against norms. Right. So, for instance, freedom of navigation, which is like a long standing principle international law in times of brochures and even the Romans. So that is an erga omnis obligation but it's not a use go against standard, not yet at any rate. The rules of IHL, insofar as they are use go against norms, the basic rules of IHL of the law on conflict entail obligations, erga omnis, but we have to be more specific. This is something that many states have actually suggested like Austria or the United States. We need to define more clearly what we need by the basic principles of international law. If we define them, then we can say yes they are use go against standard or erga omnis, but not every rule of IHL entails obligations for the omnis. I don't know if that's clear but it seems like Carl has some background in the law so hopefully that was enough. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Next I would like to invite Vivian to come in and answer Stefan's question and then we have Didier and then you can answer Stefan as well as the other question. So Vivian please join us back here. Hi Stefan, really good question. Is the war in Ukraine imperialist and can we characterize it as totalitarian. I said in my in my talk, I want to use this concept of totalitarian war, because I actually see this war as in terms of totalitarianism and the way Hannah Arendt describes totalitarianism. Why do I characterize it as such. It's because it is absolutely related to politics within Russia. It's about I connected to the idea of. I'm getting a message here that says that says I was muted so Stefan I hope you can hear me and everybody else. So I characterize the war in the Ukraine I see it as a indeed. In a sense a continental imperialist pan nationalist war, but I've also characterized it as totalitarian because I see it as connected to the internal politics within within Russia. It's related to the idea of the right to what I would refer to again borrowing from Hannah Arendt the idea of the right to politics. And the notion of self determination and the right to politics so this would be my, in a sense to characterizations of this war it's not a global war it's not a war about in a sense about a global remit. It's not a war about humanity as the discourses of of what I called liberal wars, what others have called liberal wars were. It's not about humanitarianism it's not about counterterrorism and so on, but rather it's about this core concept, which is the right to politics it's a war against the right to politics. Thank you very much. Next, did you do you want to answer the question. So, I will say, whatever you think, which is a frame of war, never reduce the analysis of war on your own frame. This is such a lesson from politics. Who drive the dynamics of conflict, it's never you, your own frame is important for the enemy, but frame of the enemy is important for you. So you need to clarify and to analyze what are the frames of war of all the military participant, the intelligence service participant. There are three different actors. The private people were there, the NGO, and that very important underlords, which are very important in the decision about Beijing. So you have always multiple frames of war with different form of freedom. And that's why I will insist, because that's one of the reasons of the critical approach of politics. If you reduce to one main understanding, then you go back always, always to jail. That's why it's necessary to avoid the alternative of values for politics is also an alternative which will not render, which will render part of it, but never gives a sense of it. We are in a rational perspective. That's why it's absolutely central. Thank you. I want to answer that. And I think what my answer would have something to do. What did he has just said, but would be critical of what he has just said, is on me a shyness starts from this point of view that here we are experts for studies experts facing the world and out there are states. And then we experts start analyzing how the states might or might not relate to each other each with its own ideology and so on. The point of view that I presented here is quite contrary to that it says to be a state is to already be a participant in a global practice with its with its rules of the game if you want to call it that. If you want to be a participant in that practice, you have to be shown to already adhere to certain ethical value. So, the new summer picture of well, it's just a balance of car. Doesn't explain how we already understand these things to be states, and the states understand each other to be states, and they understand each other to have certain duties and privileges and actions available to them. And I think you will, one of which is going to the International Criminal Court if you want, they're all sought to maneuvers that states make, I guess the most conspicuous of course is, they all participate in global diplomacy, and they all participate, pretty much them all of them participate in the new process. So, the big divide here is between people like Nishima and other, what I call sociologists who think they're looking at the thing from the outside. There is no outside in this case, we're all citizens of states, all the states are internal to the practice of states, and the ethical arguments are inside there. So, the students having an argument with us inside that practice, and what we have to do is evaluate the argument, that's what we do daily and at the health, and we think he's losing. And I think he also knows he's losing. Thank you. Do we see any questions in the Q&A box? Do we have any questions in the room? Otherwise, I will abuse my, yeah, go ahead to play slowly. Yeah, just to take up this conversation, just to go back to the years, wonderful presentation about relational and ethical and readability. It seems to me that, you know, you say this relational thing is this group of activists in the constitutional, but to try, there are huge issues of tensions in what is around, what is considered within them. Yes, I think it's central, once again, it's all the actions. I took your stand back and compare with the chair. Thank you very much. But it's central, I think, to that is really to come back to the sensitivity of journey. And the way she has changed the perspective before by introducing the key element, which push the question of ethics into a system of practice. And that's why we are in there. And that's why it's important is that if we continue to say that Russia is just what we want them to be without looking at what they say we are, don't they? They consider we are there. We are there. And so they consider Ukraine to be legitimately decimated without any problem, even if they are from the same team. And that's why it's a problem because they are not international. They don't consider Ukraine as there. They consider some Ukrainian as terrorist that can be eradicated. The terminology used by the Russian has been word by word, the one we have you think about. And then you can see why people like Lula in Brazil is not really to go on the West side, people use that. And I'm in contact with a lot of people in Latin America. And they have that in mind because they are not directly connected. And they say, well, you cannot just now go back to one frame of war or you are the great, great good. And the other is the absolute. Maybe we have to stand for our value and not think that it's not okay, but we need also to do this move more to go outside of that. That's our role as well. I'd like to use the last sort of six minutes to also invite Lola and Lily to join this discussion. So my first question, kind of building on this theme of, you know, pluralizing the actors, the stakes, the themes that emerging from the study of war. And it actually builds on something Vivian mentioned earlier about looking at the UN, the different interventions, African states coming in and kind of reframing what's at stake. And we also see maybe the emergence of new kinds of alliances, different kinds of imaginaries. So not only this economist geopolitical thinking but you know we can kind of build on what Vivian said earlier. And then for Lola, especially in terms of art and artists, obviously in war, art is also being targeted and that's sort of one of the symbols to eradicate the nation right so we've heard a lot in the first few weeks about and Ukraine artists their homes and artworks being targeted by Russian and, you know, quite deliberately so. So to think a little bit also about the role of artists themselves, not just art but artists and kind of transnational transversal alliances. And finally for Lily, could you open up this little cybersecurity black box and just walk us through these relations that you uncovered of how this threat is constructed again for this plurality of different actors that are kind of, you know, part of this process. So how about we start with Lola, and then Lily, and then Vivian if you want to add something to that, we can have you coming in again and then we'll close the panel. So. Thank you. I've been very interested in the difference between activism and it seems to me just to pick up on what you hear the same as that. And Judith Butler is very interested in that, particularly that it's this binding to solidarity. So that solidarity and it finds its participants into, well, they're doing it because it becomes an activism for Ukraine. And, and I get quite annoyed quite often because artists and there's a huge and what I was trying to say is that in this practice of this education is much wider. It doesn't mean to say that it doesn't do all the resistance and think that I mean, analytics and resistance. But it seems to me that there's a kind of openness in the practice of art that resists that kind of activist co-optation. So the ethics of art are actually, they are pluralizing and relational. And that's very different to solidarity. And I think that's a very important point to make everybody forgets those just slide out. And what I tell what I'm trying to say something about an art doesn't, doesn't through this hefty term called a sense of education which of course is much more than education is experiential. It's provocative. It changes you in ways that you don't exactly know how. And to come back to censorship of that, you know that most alternative, they resist on research precisely because it does its work before you even know it's done. And I think that there's an enormous potential for that for understanding what art does before anybody knows. Fantastic. Thank you. Lily you're next. Thank you for that great question. I mean, it's not really on the same level of discussion going on here, but to open up the black book of the minute of the other groups or actors involved in cyber war, even the point in trying to make an intervention I had earlier is that the current discourse is going to come to Ukraine has been looking a lot at Russia as a state for the groups connected as hacker groups. And that they're putting both what we need to talk about now but especially when it comes to cyber security, the constructors of this digital space of both making weapons and security of it. And they really have a lot more power and they studying them gives us insight into what's happening in the Ukrainian war and other time that I mentioned as well. So it's not that urgency. It's more fluid of what happened. And you, I mean, we're trying to create a new work. And your size is not a new things if you study what's happened in that space. In the years past, it's easier to also understand what's happening. If you speak to the members of later, there's been a lot of conflict and attacks and one thing they do say is that Russia is actually very successful in fighting in the digital domain just because the attacks haven't been successful and we don't see that being said by between states or And finally, I'm not Vivian if you want to come in and say a few final words and some of these questions that we've just raised. Thank you very much Alvina. I think just finally, really the question is about how is this war being looked at globally if we take a relational understanding of this particular war, we need to look at it from the viewpoint of the rest of the world. So, whereas the mere shyness of this world and many commentators just simply look at this one from the perspective of the West. Once again, in a sense, rendering the world in terms of, you know, in cold war terms really just just to refer back to what did you was saying. But if you look at it from the vantage point of the mass of the rest of the world, namely the postcolonial world, what you see is a is a distinct idea of the value of the postcolonial political community what does postcolonial community mean. And in a sense, those communities are applying this idea to what is going on in in in Ukraine and they see a kind of their their memories of that of the condition that they were under during the colonial era. And just to remind people of France Fanon's notion of postcolonial cosmopolitanism. This is a cosmopolitanism, not off acquisition, not off liberal globalism and so on and so on. It's a cosmopolitanism of solidarity. And this is what you see in a number of speeches that were made in the relevant UN Security Council, as well as General Assembly. And really I urge people to look at those. Thanks very much Alvina. Fantastic thank you so much everyone so that's right on time so very good timekeeping thank you all so much for joining us both online as well as in person, this kind of hybrid digital world that we're all still navigating. And I wish off with a round of applause for our amazing interdisciplinary panel, and hopefully it's helped you to kind of make sense of this fog of war and how to approach a current condition and transformations of war so thank you very much.