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About

Chris Jenks is a legal scholar whose work sits at the intersection of military technology, international humanitarian law, and the law of armed conflict. His research has focused particularly on the legal and ethical dimensions of unmanned and autonomous weapons systems, making him a notable voice in one of contemporary security law's most contested debates. Jenks's most influential contribution, "Law from Above: Unmanned Aerial Systems, Use of Force, and the Law of Armed Conflict" (2009), garnered 20 citations and offered a rigorous legal analysis of U.S. drone operations against al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in northwest Pakistan, challenging simplistic characterizations of drone warfare and examining how existing legal frameworks apply to emerging technologies. Building on this foundation, his subsequent work tackled the increasingly urgent question of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). In "False Rubicons, Moral Panic & Conceptual Cul-De-Sacs" (2016) and "The Gathering Swarm" (2017), he critically examined calls to ban so-called killer robots, arguing for more precise conceptual framing and urging policymakers to focus on the actual legal and operational challenges posed by autonomous systems. Taken together, Jenks's scholarship provides students and researchers with a grounded, legally sophisticated perspective on one of the defining military technology debates of our era.