Description
Literature on disarmament/arms control has long been interested in how norms, institutionalised in international law, shape state practices. But there is a growing interest in how practices shape norms, going beyond a positivist legal understanding of state practice. Understanding this process analytically is vital as legal regulation typically lags behind the development of emerging technologies used in novel weapons systems. The paper contributes to this debate by arguing that norms can emerge in practices that are non-deliberative or non-verbalised in nature. So far, norm contestation and practice theories recognise deliberative practices that actors verbalise in communicative forums as sources of norms, but this argument does not extend to practices of doing. But practices of developing, testing, and operating weapons systems with autonomous features shape what states consider as appropriate when it comes to using force in important ways. The paper illustrates this analytical contribution through demonstrating how ways of operating air defence systems with automated and autonomous features have over decades incrementally shaped an emerging, silent norm of what counts as meaningful human control. These operational understandings run counter to efforts of deliberatively shaping meaningful human control as a fundamental new norm to govern weapons systems with autonomous features.
