Military Issues

Introductory Note: Jesse Driscoll is an associate professor of political science at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He is an area specialist in Central Asia, the Causcasus, and the Russian-speaking world. In 2022, he took a year's leave from UCSD to serve in the Plans division of the Joint Staff (J5, Europe/NATO/Russia Division). The following narrative includes his

The challenges:

• Moving beyond academic critique and arm’s length critiques of defense policy from a “just war” perspective to discussions within military circles based on a more interdisciplinary perspective
• Engaging with future peace and security policymakers to update the “moral vocabulary” around the use of force to take into account the new dilemmas of force short of war,

The challenges:

• Determining in which stages of development or deployment of technology to engage with machine learning, using a just war logic
• Choosing to closely engage with a military project as a critical scholar, given that the use of the project may result in the loss of human life

The background and policy setting:

John R. Emery

The challenges:

• How to fund policy relevant research without compromising ethics.
• The complexities of managing government funding.
• The dilemmas of private foundation funding.
• The positionality of funding dilemmas.

The background and policy setting:

All scholars need funding for research. Sometimes we need to pay for field research, sometimes for surveys. Sometimes – indeed, often – what we