Emerging Technologies and Global Security: The Prevalence of Threat Multipliers

The 21st century has been marked not simply by the proliferation of technologies that alter how we live and work, but by their increasing entanglement with core questions pertaining to security, conflict, and international governance. Indeed, the advent and maturation of novel technologies—from artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous weapons to cyber capabilities and next-generation advancements in the context of quantum—are not merely transforming the tools of statecraft and international relations, they are reshaping the very ontologies of power, control, and strategic competition. As this book illustrates, the global security implications of these innovations—when co-opted or weaponized—are generating profound uncertainties in which they blur long-standing distinctions: between combatant and civilian, between precision and mass destruction, and between pre-emption and prevention. What has resulted is a complex, fast-evolving strategic landscape in which traditional international norms and institutions are struggling to comprehend—let alone regulate—threat-multiplying technologies. By critically engaging with both the enabling capacities and the disruptive potentials of technologies covered in chapters on AI, drones, lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), cybersecurity and cyberwarfare, and quantum computing and the quantum internet, this volume aims to unpack the new dilemmas these tools pose to policymakers, strategists, legal and governance scholars, and civil society. It invites a reorientation of how global security communities can understand and engage with emerging technologies, moving beyond reactive measures through to proactive, anticipatory governance.