The article analyses how robotisation as the latest advance in military technology can depersonalise the methods of killing in the 21st century by turning enemy soldiers and civilians into mere objects devoid of moral value. The departing assumption is that robotisation of warfare transforms military operations into automated industrial processes with the aim of removing empathy as a redundant ?cost?. The development of autonomous weapons systems raises a number of sharp ethical controversies related to the projected moral insensitivity of robots regarding the treatment of enemies and civilian population. The futurist vision of war as a foreign policy instrument entirely ?purified? of the risk of morally wrong actions is in opposition with the negative effects of the use of drones. The author concludes that the use of lethal robots in combat would eventually remove enemy soldiers and civilians from the realm of ethical reasoning and deprive them of human dignity. Decision to kill in military operations ought to be based on human conscience as the only proper framework of making decisions by reasoning whether an action is right or wrong.

This paper examines two large urban projects within a defined theoretical and methodological framework. Firstly, we analyse how the city administration in Belgrade, in post-socialist Serbia, managed the initial steps of the transformation of a part of the old town into the new large-scale development, the Belgrade Waterfront (BW), on the right bank of the Sava River. The contested outcome of the land transformation process contributes to a recognition of the unethical decision-making and performance of the responsible city authorities. Secondly, the postwar planning and construction of New Belgrade, in particular its Central Zone, is critically examined from the aspect of radical urban landscape transformation and its impact on society. Through a critical examination of the spatial development of the socialist period, we aim to identify emancipatory architectural and urban practises that could be an alternative to contemporary spatial production and that might provide a notion of key strategies for (re)establishing corresponding forms of socio-spatial justice. The two aforementioned research subjects are examined using different research questions, methodological tools, and different theoretical frameworks, which overlap, merge, and combine in the part of the study where the obtained results are discussed.

The paper looks at the military use of burgeoning technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in designing the visual regime of the drone as a tool for control of combat efficiency in twenty-first-century warfare. The author posits his analysis in critical theory and critical war/military studies with focus on the operationally relevant use of technical properties of the visual regime of drone observed through a wealth of video material uploaded to YouTube and related to the ongoing war in Ukraine. While many analyses delve into the combined practices of intelligence gathering, targeting, and killing aimed at the enemy, the author investigates how recent combat practices unveil the potential for an emerging role of drone surveillance: the scrutinization of combat performance of one?s own soldiers. In the age of a highly professionalized and industrialized warfare, inherent to the politics of military interventionism aimed at maintaining liberal peace across the globe, the shift towards a pervasive control over the combat ?assembly line? reconstitutes technological character of the drone so that it becomes an apparatus of domination. The author concludes that the drone as mobile platform for surveillance displays hidden potentials to reinforce the existing relations of domination and cautions that the advent of nano-drones could socially constitute far more intrusive and intimate control of ground troops.

The paper aims to determine where exactly fear of intelligent machines is located in the narrative layers embedded in science fiction film stories based on the intelligence explosion hypothesis. The analysis departs from the assumption that the Robopocaliptic narrative, a science fiction narrative depicting the dystopian future of human–robot relationship, is constitutive of the irrational technophobic stance widespread in the public opinion of today’s postindustrial societies. As narration plays an essential part in our daily reflective and social practices, we are naturally inclined to look for narrative structure in popular culture, particularly in film, the most popular form of visual art, and the easiest one to consume. Nine science fiction films have been selected as relevant empirical evidence: The Invisible Boy (1957), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Westworld(1973), Futureworld (1976), Demon Seed (1977), Blade Runner (1982), The Terminator (1984), The Matrix (1999), Ex Machina (2015). The Robopocaliptic narrative interwoven with the themes of the analysed films uncovers four recurrent ideas or messages that create robotophobia: redundancy of the human race, moral indifference of robots, robots as emotional abusers, and the loss of control over one’s own mind and body. The author proposes that these four ideas or messages mirror four layers of fear, all pointing to a meta-fear: the fear of rejection to be recognised and treated as a morally worth human being. In conclusion, the author suggests that Axel Honneth’s concept of recognition opens a plausible avenue to clarify the roots of the fear of the Robopocalypse.

The paper examines publicly available scientific achievements and technical and technological innovations in nanotechnology brought into the context of the modernization of US military capabilities. The starting assumption is that the development of sophisticated military capabilities centred around achievements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a key guarantor of sustainable military power in 21 st century, or successful global projection of armed force as a means of preserving hegemony worldwide. The analysis focuses on achieved and anticipated breakthroughs with the potential for military application resulting from publicly available primary and applied scientific and developmental projects in the field of nanotechnologies covered by the defence budget, as well as on achievements presented in scientific and professional literature. The analysis includes achievements in the following fields: advanced materials, explosives and their detectors, nano drones and nanorobots, microsatellites, and cyborg soldiers. The author concludes that the future utilization of the breakthroughs in the development of nanotechnology for military purposes can be limited by problems of the functional integration of sophisticated solutions into the military-strategic, operational and tactical framework, hence, the technological "leap" does not necessarily lead to greater effectiveness of military capabilities on the battlefield.