“You can’t build the impenetrable shield,” says BU military tech expert Sanne Verschuren

As a child in 1990s Belgium, Sanne Verschuren watched news of the Balkan war’s horrific carnage. “Why are these people fighting?” she recalls asking her grandfather. “Why can’t they just make  ?” Later, her law school thesis at Ghent University focused on the regulation of new military technologies—such as drones—under international law.

“That puzzlement of why people fight, and at such massive scales,” drives her research into weapons of war, from nuclear weapons to antimissile defense, says Verschuren, an assistant professor of international security at the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. “Military technology, to me, sits at the crossroads of a lot of different things. It’s a legal question, a political question, a social question, a budgetary question—it’s a question of imagination.”

In recent studies, she’s explored how weapons shape international security policy and national security decision-making…

To read more, visit THE BRINK,  where this article originally appeared on July 22, 2024.

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