Irish Network for Middle Eastern and North African Studies

  by Sean McCafferty  Operation 'Guardian of the Walls', May 2021 (Wikicommons) The proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) - particularly loitering munitions - represents a significant development towards Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems, demanding deeper reflection on the military deployment of machine learning . Most military UAVs are semi-autonomous systems and need human oversight for lethal action, yet the development of autonomous systems is already a reality. The UAVs developed by Israeli Aerospace Industries and Elbit, for instance, can be deployed with varying levels of autonomy and are already being used by Israel in occupied Palestine. Technologies such as deep neural network image classifiers , which, when incorporated into UAVs allow for automated target recognition systems, also increase the possibility of inaccurate violence and human fatalities.  This article looks at the incorporation of deep neural network image classifiers into the automated t...

Sunday of Unity Protests, 3 November 2019. Photo by Katarzyna Wodniak. Blog By Waleed Serhan On 17 October 2019, Lebanese citizens from various sects began protesting en-masse under the slogan “killun yaani killun” meaning in Arabic “all of them means all of them”. By “them” the protesters were referring to the political class and sectarian leaders that have been ruling Lebanon since the end of the civil war in 1990. While the protests had been attributed to a WhatsApp tax imposed by the government, it was the inability of Lebanese citizens and residents of Lebanon  to withdraw normally from their bank account deposits in US Dollars  that caused an aggravated state of alarm among the various populations of Lebanon. The acute and ongoing economic crisis that Lebanon has been enduring since late 2019 has been described by the  World Bank  as possibly one of the worst three economic crises worldwide in the past 150 years. With the drastic devaluation of the local curren...