Home Publications Research Data Research Grants Equipment Inventions & Patents Awards Additional Research Activities Faculties & Institutions Research Areas

Automated decision-making (ADM) in surveillance, border militarization and warfare: scoping the transformative potential of human rights (EXC 3039)

Third Party Funds Group - Sub project

Acronym: EXC 3039

Start date : 01.02.2026

End date : 31.12.2026

Website: https://www.transforming-human-rights.fau.de/en/research-projects/

---

• Overview

   

• External partners

  (1)

Overall project details

Overall project

Cluster of Excellence “Transforming Human Rights“ (EXC 3039) Jan. 1, 2026 - Dec. 31, 2032

Project details

Scientific Abstract

The project follows a trans- and interdisciplinary research design to identify central challenges for human rights in relation to automated decision-making (ADM) in warfare. 
The rapid development of digitalization is affecting the realization of human rights across a variety of areas. Digital systems – including machine-learning-based perception and classification, AI-enabled decision-support systems, autonomous navigation and weapon functions, and generative foundation models such as Large Language Models – are increasingly used to expand, accelerate, and reorganize military capabilities. 
This research project explores the ways in which such digital systems affect the realization of human rights and explores how human rights can and should inform responses to the use of automated decision-making (ADM) and artificial intelligence in armed conflict. It empirically assesses various actual and plausible future use cases for ADM through a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research approach that integrates knowledge produced through legal practices in the field of human rights with scholarly knowledge production from the fields of law, geography, political sciences, philosophy, among others. Drawing on the knowledge and expertise of human rights practitioners, the project maps existing effects of such digitalization processes on human rights and takes stock of the challenges faced in emerging attempts to pursue human rights accountability. It thus seeks to establish how accountability is conceptualized and operationalized in complex and partly algorithmically controlled, ADM and coordination processes (influence of AI on accountability norms/duty bearers) and to develop normative demands on how human rights can or should transform legal and policy responses to AI and ADM. 

Involved:

Contributing FAU Organisations:

Funding Source

Research Areas