Delegated Destruction: Artificial Intelligence in Warfare, The Accountability Gap and The Crisis of Global Governance

Abstract

With the spread of Artificial Intelligence to the military sphere, the past decade has seen a revolution in the ways in which warfare is conducted. While autonomy in weapons may bring some advantages to the battlefield, their increased production and deployment in recent conflicts raises legal and ethical dilemmas. This thesis focuses on the problem of accountability and investigates the efforts proposed at the international level to regulate AI in warfare through solutions of human involvement. Using regime theory as the analytical lens, this research adopts a qualitative case study approach. It draws on extensive collection of primary sources, followed by content analysis and a comparison to alternative regimes to track how this regime evolved between 2010 and 2025 and explain why it has been ineffective in its purpose. Findings reveal that the regime has been able to establish a set of shared principles that revolves around meaningful human control. However, I identified a lack of institutionalized rules for compliance, preventing regulation from being enforced. The reason lies in four factors: rapid technological advancement, dual-use capability, complex multi-actor dynamics and geopolitical fragmentation, all of which have halted the development of the regime towards a fully functioning tool. These results offer broader insights on the challenges of global governance in the face of emerging technologies. They demonstrate that, despite formal consensus, in the absence of robust structures, regulatory frameworks waver, putting the whole international law system at risk.