About

WARSHARE: The New War Front: Digital Participation in War is a five year project (2025–30) awarded as an ERC Advanced Grant and funded by UKRI (HEu ERC Advanced Grant EP/Z53335X/1) to Professor Andrew Hoskins, University of Edinburgh.

The battle over representations and perceptions of war is transformed in an era of billions of images, videos and other digital content of war being produced, shared, edited, liked, linked, fabricated and deleted on smartphones, social media platforms and messaging apps.

War in the twenty-first century is participative. People can record and document war, and unwittingly and deliberately transmit data points that can generate targets on the battlefield. Smart devices are both a way to represent war and a node in its practice.

This project will produce new interdisciplinary understanding of how and why digital participation is transforming how individuals and societies (including militaries and states) fight, experience, understand, remember and forget (perceive, explain, and de/legitimise) warfare.

The project is organised around three connected research strands:

1. Digital participation
   How do smart devices and platforms enable allcomers to participate in warfare?
2. Drone ecology and AI war
   How drones and AI revolutionise the character, effects and experience of war.
3. Remembering and forgetting war
   How do civilians, organisations and militaries make and use the memory of war?

Read an introduction to the paradigm of participative war here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400800032_Participative_War_the_new_paradigm_of_war_and_media