Dr Bérénice Boutin is Senior Researcher in International Law at the Asser Institute, Coordinator of the Research Strand on Disruptive Technologies in Peace and Security, and project leader of the NWO-funded project Designing International Law and Ethics into Military Artificial Intelligence (DILEMA). Her research explores the mutual impacts between new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and international law. This includes the role of international law in the governance and regulation of technologies, and the impact of new technologies on core notions and concepts of international law.
The DILEMA project explores interdisciplinary perspectives on military AI, with a focus on legal, ethical, and technical perspectives on safeguarding human agency over military AI. It analyses in particular subtle ways in which AI can affect or reduce human agency, and seeks to ensure compliance and accountability by design. For more information on the project, research team, and research results, see the project’s website.
The Research Strand on Disruptive Technologies in Peace and Security conducts research on technologies that have disruptive implications for international security and international law, such as military AI, data-driven warfare, biochemical weapons, and conventional weapons or dual use technologies with a disruptive potential. Our research focuses, in particular, on the development of the international regulatory framework for the military and security applications of disruptive technologies. Two main lines of enquiry guide our research: on the one hand, we question how legal norms and ethical values can shape technologies, and on the other hand we analyse how technologies challenge our legal and ethical concepts.
Dr Boutin currently co-supervises two PhD candidates: Taylor Woodcock and Klaudia Klonowska. She is the coordinator of the Asser Institute’s Winter/Spring Academy on Artificial Intelligence and International Law training programme, member of the Editorial Board of OXIO, and Associate Fellow with the SHARES Project.
She previously received funding from Gerda Henkel Stiftung for a research project on the Conceptual and Policy Implications of Increasingly Autonomous Military Technologies for State Responsibility Under International Law (2018-2019). She has been Managing Editor of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law (2016–2019), and Research Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) (2015–2018).
She has presented her work at various international venues including the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (Cambridge), the United Nations Headquarters (New York), the Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme (Paris), the Swedish Defence University (Stockholm), the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (Warsaw), the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law (Malta).
She completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam (2015) on the topic of Allocation of International Responsibility in Collaborative Military Operations, under the supervision of Professor André Nollkaemper, as part of the SHARES Project on Shared Responsibility in International Law.
