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Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2013
Peter W. Singer is Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He is the author of three award winning books, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, Children at War, and Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.1 He has served as a consultant with groups that range from the US military and FBI to human rights organizations.
In this interview, Peter Singer explains to what extent and how new technologies change the way we think about going to war and the way we conduct war, as well as how they will impact the work of humanitarian actors. He shares his vision for the future, analyzing both the ethical and legal challenges that access to new advanced technologies poses and the opportunities it offers.
This interview was conducted in Washington D.C. on 29 April 2012 by Vincent Bernard, Editor-in-Chief of the International Review of the Red Cross, Mariya Nikolova, Editorial Assistant, and Mark Silverman, Head of Public and Congressional Affairs, ICRC Washington.
1 See Singer, Peter W., Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, updated edn, Cornell University Press, New York, 2007Google Scholar; Children at War, University of California Press, Berkeley C.A., 2006; and Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, Penguin Books, New York, 2009.
2 See Keegan, John, Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris; June 6–Aug. 5, 1944, revised edn, Penguin Books, New York, 1994Google Scholar.
3 John Donne, Sermon CXVII, Preached at St. Paul's upon Christmas Day, 1621, John 2:8.
4 Editor's note: ‘Manhattan Project’ is the code name of a secret US government research and development project that built the first atomic bomb during the Second World War.
5 Available at: http://www.wired.com/magazine/ (last visited June 2012).
6 Singer, Peter W., ‘The ethics of killer apps: why is it so hard to talk about science, ethics and war’, in Journal of Military Ethics, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2010, pp. 299–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
