The Security, Policy & Nationalism Research Center (UGSPN) represents a synthesis of expertise in security, policy, nationalism studies and research. Established with the vision of becoming a leading institution, UGSPN strives to provide a comprehensive and integrated approach to understanding, researching, and influencing policy in the realms of national security, defense, and nationalism studies.
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Author: Revaz Topuria
This article examines what the war reveals about the actual military utility of battlefield AI, its genuine contributions, its structural limitations, and its implications for the future of armed conflict. Drawing on operational reporting, peer-reviewed analysis, and critical war studies scholarship, it traces AI’s role across Ukrainian drone warfare and targeting, the compression of the intelligence-to-strike cycle through platforms such as Palantir, Russia’s more centralised and comparatively underdeveloped AI posture, and the unprecedented involvement of Western private technology firms as de facto participants in the conduct of hostilities. The analysis finds that AI has not proven decisive in the conventional sense, its battlefield value is highly context-dependent, eroded rapidly through adversarial adaptation, and ultimately contingent on institutional integration rather than algorithmic sophistication alone. Engaging Bousquet’s concept of technoscientific regimes and Der Derian’s theory of “virtuous war,” the article argues that AI has made the battlefield more legible without making it more decisive, thinning the fog of war while leaving the underlying frictions of logistics, organisation, and political will largely intact. It concludes that the war’s deepest lesson is not technological but structural, that the states best positioned for future conflict will be those that master not the algorithm, but the organisation built around it, a finding with significant implications for the unresolved governance of autonomous weapons and the growing privatisation of military AI.
Authors: Nino Gozalishvili, Revaz Topuria, Mariam Kalandadze, Keti Ukleba
Abstract
In this study, the ways in which Georgian civil society and youth movements sustain and reconfigure political agency amidst the contraction of institutional spaces for civic engagement are examined. Focusing on the protest wave that intensified in 2024, triggered by legislative amendments, concerns over electoral manipulation, and the suspension of Georgia’s EU accession process, the study situates these mobilisations within a broader cycle of contention in which questions of identity, historical memory, and geopolitical orientation are deeply intertwined.
Empirically, the study draws on two sources: protest announcements issued by civil society organisations and movements, and youth-authored ethnographic diaries documenting participation in the 2024 protests. Through qualitative content analysis and cultural approaches in social movement studies, the study analyses how narratives of resistance construct political participation and collective identity.
The central argument is that, in the context of declining levels of trust in political parties, narrowing avenues for formal contestation, and increasing governmental control over civic space, civil society and youth actors actively adapt and redefine agency through affective solidarity, symbolic action, and shared historical memory. Agency is maintained precisely through its reconfiguration: noninstitutional protest emerges as the primary site through which political subjectivity is constructed and sustained.
The Georgian case contributes to comparative debates on democratic erosion, noninstitutional participation, and civic resistance in Eastern Europe.
Vasiko Khorava
Master’s Candidate for the Central and East European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow
Abstract
The paper seeks to analyze the patterns and the operational logic of Russia’s air strike campaign against Ukraine, in particular, the integration of drones and long-range precision weapons into the combined air strike packages. It is argued that the campaign is part of the wider attritional strategy aimed at exhausting the resources of Ukraine and exploiting the systemic limits of its defensive systems. Based on the collected data between November 2024 and November 2025, the study identifies the patterns of the conducted air strikes and the extent of effectiveness of Ukrainian air defense systems. The contextual framework is defined by the research of the Russian military thought on the concepts of “Modern War”/”Contactless Warfare”. Alongside the empirical findings, the study aims to contribute to the growing literature on remote warfare. Keywords: Ukraine, Contactless Warfare, Air Strikes, Ballistic Missiles & Attack Drones
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