Eye in the Sky: Facts and Fiction in Military Decision-Making - Shiri Krebs

Law and the Future of War

Send us a text

In today’s episode we are continuing our holiday season special on entertainment and IHL. Dr Lauren Sanders is speaking again with Professor Shiri Krebs, but this time about targeting and the movies. In particular they are talking about her paper, Drone-Cinema, Data Practices, and the Narrative of IHL, and how representations of the use of drones in movies (such as the 2015 movie, 'Eye in the Sky'), gets IHL wrong, and how it is being used (or misused) to educate people about ethical decision making in armed conflict and how IHL applies in targeting decisions. Spoiler alert: contains plot details of 'Eye in the Sky'.

Professor Krebs draws upon Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and post-humanist feminism literature to critically evaluate how drone visuals shape and influence military practices; using popular culture products, such as drone cinema, to critique military processes of knowledge production and the Western-militarist ethos of objectivity.
Shiri is a Professor at Deakin University’s Law Faculty, as well as the Co-lead of the Law and Policy Theme in the Australian Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC). In 2022 she was elected as the Lieber Society on the Laws of Armed Conflict Chair (with the American Society of International Law), and she is an affiliated scholar at Stanford University’s Centre for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Professor Krebs has written and published broadly on algorithmic bias and drone data vulnerabilities, data privacy, and human-machine interaction in technology-assisted legal decision-making, at the intersection of law, science and technology. She teaches the outcomes of her work in many fora – including to governments and militaries.
Special thanks to Rosie Cavdarski for editing.
Additional resources:

• Shiri Krebs,'Drone-Cinema, Data Practices, and the Narrative of IHL’ , Zeitschrift fur Auslandisches Offentliches Recht und Volkerrecht, Vol 82, 2022
• Shiri Krebs, ‘Law Wars: Experimental Data on the Impact of Legal Labels on Wartime Event Beliefs’, (2020) 11 Harvard National Security Journal 106
• Shiri Krebs, ‘Predictive Technologies and Opaque Epistemology in Counter-Terrorism Decision-Making' in 9/11 and the Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law (K. L. Scheppele and A. Vedaschi, eds.
• Donna Harraway, 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective', Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988).