Dr. Raluca Csernatoni is a research Fellow at Carnegie Europe in Brussels, Belgium, where she specialises in European security and defence, with a focus on emerging and disruptive technologies. At Carnegie, she is a Team Leader and Senior Research Expert on new technologies for the EU-funded project, EU Cyber Diplomacy Initiative - EU Cyber Direct (EUCD), and led Carnegie Europe’s research project on ‘The EU’s Techno-Politics of AI’ supported by the McGovern AI Grant. Csernatoni is currently also a Professor on European security and defence, focusing on new technologies, at the Brussels School of Governance (BSoG) and its Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS), at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. At the CSDS, she is a Senior Research Expert on digital technologies in the context of the EU-funded project, ‘Indo-Pacific-European Hub for Digital Partnerships: Trusted Digital Technologies for Sustainable Well-Being’ (INPACE). She is also a Co-Leader of the ‘Governance of Emerging Technology’ Research Group with the Centre on Security and Crisis Governance (CRITIC) at the Royal Military College Saint-Jean, Canada. Her academic articles appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Minds and Machines: Journal for Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Global Policy, Geopolitics, European Foreign Affairs Review, European Security, Critical Military Studies, Global Affairs, and European View. Her co-edited book, Emerging Security Technologies and EU Governance: Actors, Practices and Processes, was published with Routledge Studies in Conflict, Security and Technology Series in 2020.

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Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I believe that the most vibrant work currently sits at the interdisciplinary intersections of International Relations (IR), Critical Security Studies, Critical Technology Theory, and Science-and-Technology Studies (STS). Here, scholars are unpacking how code, data and algorithmic infrastructures reorganise global power dynamics, war and peace, recast security logics, and blur the civilian-military divide. What is more, this debate no longer stops at what we would call “high politics”. Rather, it interrogates supply chains, semiconductor chokepoints, colonial data extractions, human-machine interactions, ethical concerns, and the embodied labour that sustains “cloud” and AI warfare.

Some emerging strands I am currently interested in are digital militarism, feminist post-humanism, and decolonial AI, which cross-pollinate with classic IR concerns about sovereignty and order, but also require generating methods that mix ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and opening the “black box” of technologies. Increasingly, IR researchers work in multi-disciplinary labs with engineers, lawyers, and artists, building speculative prototypes to surface the politics baked into technological design and innovation.

This interdisciplinary and praxis-oriented turn challenges IR’s traditional state-centric gaze, foregrounding how Big Tech actors, private platforms, standards bodies, and hacker collectives can shape geopolitical and security realities. In short, the most exciting debates happen wherever disciplinary boundaries are deliberately questioned to study the co-production of technology, security, imaginaries, and world politics.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

It is hard to identify such influences – my love for Science Fiction would be one of them – as my thinking is constantly shaped by inspiring new ideas. More recently, I have been revisiting certain works that are reorienting some of my understanding of world politics. First, engagement with Günther Anders and Byung-Chul Han is displacing instrumental readings of technology by revealing its formative effects on subjectivity, temporality, and political imagination. Anders’s reflections on the “Promethean gap”, namely humanity’s inability to morally apprehend the scale and speed of its technical creations, illuminate contemporary debates on autonomous weapons and algorithmic governance. Han’s notion of “psychopolitics” shows how digital capitalism internalises surveillance, turning individuals into entrepreneurial data-labourers whose self-exploitation lubricates planetary computation. Second, re-reading Donna Haraway’s work on cyborg ontology unsettles the human-machine divide, allowing me to theorise emerging and disruptive technologies as hybrid socio-technical assemblages rather than discrete capabilities. In short, Anders’s work foreshadows and warns that automation and nuclear-era speed compress political imagination, leaving humanity existentially “too late” for the machines it builds – think, for instance, how this resonates with current discussions about the advent of “superintelligence”. In this respect, Haraway’s cyborg, a hybrid of organism and machine, offers a vocabulary for interrogating post-human or “more-than-human” AI agency and the gendered, militarised substrates of innovation. Taken together, these authors have shifted my attention toward an ontology in which technology, power, and knowledge are co-produced. My research now spotlights the material cultures of AI systems, chips, and digital infrastructures, tracing how they mediate geopolitical order, security, and epistemic authority. So, I would therefore argue that understanding world politics nowadays requires grappling with human-machine co-evolution as a central analytic problem. Today, my chief concern is how emerging and disruptive technologies reorder social contracts, epistemic authority, and the conduct of war — all questions that require grappling with human-machine co-evolution rather than treating tech as mere strategic “capability”.

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