Dr Brendan Walker-Munro

Since 2020, Australia and India have committed to coordinating policy on critical technologies to promote peace and stability. This is part of a deepening political, economic and strategic relationship across many sectors. One of the policy tools for managing technology policy in both countries has been that of technology impact assessment (TIA), a process that has been in existence for more than five decades. Both Australia and India would benefit from a clearer commitment to regularized TIA of critical technologies for peace and stability. This would involve organizational reform and commitment of more resources, which could be justified by reinstating peace and stability to the policy status it enjoyed in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. A drift to more confrontational relationships in international affairs in the past decade should point to the need for more investment in TIA related to maintaining stability, alongside the increasing investment in TIA for hard military capability or domestic security. This paper presents TIA mechanisms for peace and stability in Australia and India demonstrating that while there are existing approaches to TIA by government and non-government stakeholders, a lot more could be done to bring the two countries together to conduct joint impact assessment of critical emerging technologies in support of peace and stability.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the policy and legal underpinnings of the emerging use of AI in secured cloud environments for the transmission and storage of classified or sensitive research information in higher education institutions (HEIs). Using research security as a conceptual lens, we propose that universities will be increasingly required to adopt such secured exchanges for the protection of research data; not just from a good practice perspective, but also to protect privacy, intellectual property rights and meet any obligations under cybersecurity or critical infrastructure laws. Early adopters of the technology will benefit the most, with those institutions which do not adequately embed AI in the secured cloud offerings they uptake likely to be more vulnerable to internal and external threat actors.

Spying is often referred to as the second oldest profession – yet the lawfulness of the employment of covert actors to achieve diplomatic and foreign policy objectives in a peaceful fashion has received patchwork attention from academia. Under both international and domestic legal frameworks, the covert acts of agents of a State are essentially unregulated, with espionage charges only attaching to the actions of a spy if they are caught, though sanctions may apply if the actions were attributable to their hosting nation. The obvious value of covert action remains the achievement of diplomatic and foreign policy objectives which cannot be secured by conventional means, and for which armed conflict is an unacceptable or unlawful recourse. This paper will critically examine the international and domestic treatment of three commonly employed forms of covert action by States: information operations, pre-emptive “strikes” and cyberattack or cyberwarfare. The specific methodology of each case study will be examined in detail and compared to both international and legal frameworks which might broadly apply to such conduct. These case studies will be used to present the argument that actions taken on a covert basis in furtherance of peaceful diplomatic or foreign policy should receive broader international and domestic legal protection to incentivize its use over armed conflict.