The discussion will be held in both Arabic and English, with interpretation available on Zoom only.
You can register to attend by following this link. You will receive a Zoom confirmation email should your registration be successful. Alternatively, you can watch the event live here on our Facebook page.
As AI-assisted targeting and predictive policing seep into contemporary warfare, the lines between combat zone and civilian space are blurring.
This inaugural “Siyasa & Silicon” webinar from the Arab Reform Initiative moves beyond technical International Humanitarian Law debates to ask what ethics, accountability, and regional governance should look like in practice—especially given the tech-powered genocide in Gaza and the weaponization of technology in attacks on Lebanon.
How are algorithmic decision systems reshaping responsibility for harm? What limits on autonomy, data access, and export should be demanded? And how can researchers, civil society, and policy actors in the region organize to integrate these questions into public debate and institutional reform?
Bringing legal, technical, and ethnographic lenses together, our speakers will map the technology, examine the capacity to meaningfully control it, and center lived experiences under mass surveillance.
Join us to help set a regional agenda that safeguards rights while confronting the realities of AI-enabled conflict.
Speakers
- Zena Assaad — Senior lecturer,School of Engineering, Australian National University (Controllability and oversight: what “human control” over targeting systems means—and where it breaks).
- Nehal Bhuta —Professor of International Law, University of Edinburgh (Legal architectures of accountability: beyond compliance toward responsibility in AI-enabled targeting).
- Sophia Goodfriend — Harry Frank Guggenheim Research Fellow,University of Cambridge (Ethnographies of surveillance: documenting how mass datafication and AI shape Palestinian everyday life).
This event launches ARI’s “Siyasa & Silicon” series, which seeks to advance social-science engagement with artificial intelligence and emerging technologies across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, fostering critical inquiry into how digital transformation is influencing governance, accountability, and civic life.
