Stop Killer Robots: A New Argument for Banning Autonomous Weapons

The Manuel Ballbé Chair in Human Security and Global Law is proud to present the new 2025 Argument Paper, authored by Joaquín Rodríguez Álvarez and Pere Brunet, in collaboration with the international campaign Stop Killer Robots and the Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau. This document is a key contribution to the global effort to prohibit autonomous weapons (AWs) through a binding international treaty.

AWs are systems capable of selecting and attacking targets without human intervention. Their deployment in current conflicts—such as those in Gaza, Libya, and Ukraine—has shown that these technologies are far from neutral. They automate violence, reinforce structural inequalities, and shift the human cost of war onto vulnerable communities, often in the Global South. The new argument paper exposes how these weapons operate within a technopolitical ecosystem that includes mass surveillance, opaque algorithms, and combat systems that accelerate conflict cycles beyond human control.

The paper highlights the ethical and legal rupture caused by delegating life-and-death decisions to machines. It documents how algorithmic errors, racial bias, lack of transparency, and the impossibility of accountability make AWs incompatible with international humanitarian law. It also dismantles the dominant narratives that justify these technologies in the name of military efficiency. While proponents claim that AWs reduce casualties and improve precision, the evidence shows otherwise: civilians are killed, systems fail to recognize racialized faces, and oversight mechanisms are absent in many regions.

In response, the paper calls for concrete measures: a legal ban on AWs, mandatory algorithmic audits, radical transparency in military AI systems, and the inclusion of affected communities in the design of ethical and legal safeguards. Autonomy without humanity is not progress—it is a direct threat to sustainable peace, epistemic justice, and human dignity.

The Manuel Ballbé Chair reaffirms its commitment to defending meaningful human control over the use of force and to building a normative framework that prevents the logic of machines from replacing the ethics of care. This new argument paper is a vital step in that direction.