The Routledge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and International Relations
Edited By Diego Brasioli, Laura Guercio, Giovanna Gnerre Landini, and Andrea de Giorgio
Routledge, 2025

The transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on virtually every facet of human society presents unprecedented challenges and opportunities for the international system. The Routledge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and International Relations, expertly edited by Diego Brasioli, Laura Guercio, Giovanna Gnerre Landini, and Andrea de Giorgio (2025), arrives as a seminal and comprehensive volume dedicated to systematically exploring this critical intersection. Bringing together a diverse array of international scholars, the handbook undertakes the ambitious task of mapping the multifaceted ways in which AI technologies are reshaping the core concepts, practices, and structures of International Relations (IR). This review provides a detailed overview of the handbook’s structure, content, and its significant contribution as a foundational resource for understanding the AI-IR nexus.

The editors position the handbook as an essential resource for scholars, students, and practitioners navigating the complex terrain where rapidly evolving AI technologies meet established and emerging dynamics of global politics. Its primary objective is to provide a broad, multidisciplinary examination of AI’s implications across the spectrum of IR concerns. Recognising the inherent interdisciplinarity of the subject, the volume explicitly incorporates perspectives beyond traditional IR, drawing from law, ethics, security studies, political economy, sociology, and elements of computer science. The editors emphasise grounding the analysis in critical IR theory, seeking to understand AI not merely as a neutral tool but as a phenomenon deeply embedded in social, political, and economic power structures, capable of reconfiguring agency, sovereignty, security, governance, and global inequality.

The handbook is meticulously organised into six coherent parts (each examined below), including 29 thematic encompassing chapters, each addressing a distinct dimension of the AI-IR relationship.

Conceptualising AI and IR – Foundations and Frameworks

The foundational section establishes the conceptual bedrock for the entire volume. It explores the fundamental nature of AI and its core technologies (machine learning, neural networks, etc.) in terms accessible to an IR audience. Here, chapters rigorously examine how AI challenges and potentially redefines core IR concepts such as power (hard, soft, structural), sovereignty (state capacity, territoriality, informational control), agency (of states, non-state actors, and potentially AI systems themselves), and the nature of the international system. It delves into the epistemological and methodological challenges AI poses for IR research and theory-building, discussing how big data and algorithmic analysis might inform or transform the study of global politics. Foundational ethical considerations and the integration of critical theoretical perspectives (e.g., postcolonial, feminist) into the analysis of AI are introduced here, setting the tone for subsequent sections.

AI, Global Economy, and Development – Shaping Prosperity and Inequality

The book analyses AI’s transformative role in the global political economy and its implications for development pathways. Chapters survey the dynamics of global AI competition, focusing on the strategies of major powers (US, China, EU) and the quest for technological leadership and economic advantage. The significant impact of AI on labour markets globally is explored, including automation trends, job displacement, the creation of new roles, and the imperative for workforce reskilling. AI’s potential contributions to economic growth, productivity enhancements across sectors, and innovation are discussed, alongside the risks of exacerbating existing inequalities – both within and between nations (i.e., the “digital divide”). It examines the specific opportunities and challenges AI presents for developing countries, considering its use in areas like public service delivery, agriculture optimisation, and healthcare, while also addressing barriers such as infrastructure limitations, skills gaps, and data scarcity, with Big Tech’s influence (as a powerful actor shaping the global AI economy and its governance) being a recurring theme.

AI, Security, Military and Warfare – Transformations in Conflict and Defence

The book comprehensively addresses the profound impact of AI on international and national security, with detailed analysis provided on the revolution in military affairs, including autonomous weapons systems (AWS), their strategic implications, and the intense debates surrounding their regulation and potential ban (e.g., discussions on meaningful human control). The role of AI in intelligence gathering, processing, analysis, and prediction is thoroughly explored. Here, cybersecurity emerges as a critical theme, examining AI’s dual role in enhancing cyber defences (threat detection, response automation) and empowering novel, sophisticated offensive cyber operations by state and non-state actors. Furthermore, the implications of AI for nuclear command and control, strategic stability, arms races (particularly the US-China dynamic), arms control verification, and the changing nature of deterrence are investigated alongside the evolving landscape of hybrid warfare, disinformation campaigns powered by AI, and the security challenges posed by non-state actors leveraging accessible AI tools.

Security of Data in Cyberspace

The chapter “Security of Data in Cyberspace” establishes that the pervasive digitisation of global society has transformed data into the central currency of power in international relations, positioning its security as a paramount national security concern that is inextricably linked to a state’s economic vitality, military superiority, and geopolitical influence. It meticulously argues that AI serves as the pivotal force amplifying every facet of this new reality, functioning as a profound dual-use technology that, on the one hand, offers revolutionary defensive capabilities — such as predictive analytics for pre-empting threats, automated systems for real-time neutralisation of attacks, and advanced encryption techniques like homomorphism encryption that preserve privacy — while on the other hand, furnishes adversaries with an unprecedented offensive arsenal capable of launching AI-driven cyber-attacks that adapt in real-time, orchestrating hyper-scale disinformation campaigns with deep fakes, and automating the discovery of critical vulnerabilities, thereby creating a perpetually evolving battlefield.

AI, Global Governance, and Law – Navigating the Regulatory Maze

The book also confronts the complex challenge of governing AI technologies at the international level. It surveys the current fragmented landscape of AI governance initiatives, involving a multitude of actors: states, international organisations (UN, OECD, UNESCO, EU, Council of Europe, GPAI), industry consortia, and civil society groups. The development and contestation of international norms, principles, and ethical frameworks for “responsible AI” (e.g., fairness, accountability, transparency, human oversight) are central topics. Chapters analyse the significant challenges in regulating AI internationally, including the difficulties of defining AI, achieving regulatory harmonisation across jurisdictions, balancing innovation with risk mitigation, and enforcing standards. The adequacy of existing international legal frameworks (International Humanitarian Law, Human Rights Law, arms control treaties) in addressing AI-specific issues, particularly autonomous weapons and algorithmic bias, is critically examined, as well as the role of international organisations as forums for norm-setting, coordination, and technical assistance in AI governance.

AI and Societal Challenges – Broader Impacts and Ethical Dilemmas

The book’s final section widens the lens to consider the broader societal implications of AI with significant international dimensions. The pervasive challenge of AI-driven misinformation and disinformation campaigns (“deepfakes,” algorithmic amplification) and their impact on democratic processes, social cohesion, and international relations, is extensively covered. Furthermore, the expansion of surveillance capabilities through AI (facial recognition, predictive policing, social scoring) and its profound implications for privacy, civil liberties, and human rights on a global scale are investigated. Here, the chapters specifically address the gender dimensions of AI, exploring issues of bias in datasets and algorithms, AI’s impact on gender equality and work, and the gendered aspects of AI development and governance. Broader ethical considerations surrounding bias, discrimination, accountability for algorithmic decisions, transparency (“black box” problem), and the potential long-term societal transformations driven by advanced AI are woven throughout as well as the environmental footprint of AI like energy consumption of large data centers, and its potential role in mitigating climate change (optimisation, modeling) are discussed, highlighting the sustainability challenge.

Evaluating the Central Theme

Across the diverse contributions within the handbook, several overarching and deeply interconnected themes emerge, painting a complex portrait of AI as a transformative force in international relations. The analysis consistently positions AI not as a neutral tool, but as a potent amplifier of existing power dynamics. This manifests in its capacity to exacerbate entrenched economic, digital, and geopolitical inequalities, reinforcing the dominance of powerful states and massive technology corporations, while creating new vectors for stratification within societies themselves, such as through biased algorithmic decision-making in justice or social services. This concern over concentrated power and its discontents directly fuels a central tension between the enduring concept of state sovereignty and the inherently transnational nature of AI technologies, data flows, and the corporate entities that control them. This clash raises profound questions about the future of effective global governance, as national regulatory frameworks struggle to keep pace with borderless technological advancements, necessitating unprecedented international cooperation.

In response to these formidable challenges, a foundational ethical imperative is championed throughout the volume, arguing that the protection of fundamental human rights — from privacy and non-discrimination to freedom of expression — must be proactively embedded into the very architecture of AI systems, their development, and their governance frameworks. Crucially, the handbook demonstrates that grasping this intricate AI-IR nexus demands an essential multidisciplinary imperative. It requires the integration of insights from computer science to understand the technology’s capabilities, law to craft responsive regulations, sociology to assess societal impact, and ethics to provide moral guidance, moving far beyond the traditional confines of political science. Underpinning this entire examination is a strong, unifying critical perspective. This lens encourages rigorously questioning dominant, often technologically deterministic narratives, exposing the hidden power structures and value judgments baked into AI systems, and consciously integrating marginalised voices and impacts to deconstruct power and ensure a more holistic, equitable, and just understanding of our algorithmic future.

The Routledge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and International Relations (2025) stands as a monumental achievement and an indispensable resource. Editors Brasioli, Guercio, Landini, and de Giorgio have successfully curated a volume of remarkable breadth and depth, offering unparalleled coverage of how AI is reshaping the theory and practice of international relations. By bringing together diverse scholarly perspectives and rigorously examining AI’s impact across security, economics, governance, law, and society, the handbook provides a vital conceptual map for navigating this complex and rapidly evolving landscape. Its strength lies in its comprehensive scope, systematic organisation, and commitment to a multidisciplinary and critically engaged approach. The volume effectively illuminates the profound challenges — ethical, legal, security-related, economic, and societal — posed by AI, while also acknowledging its potential benefits. It serves as an authoritative foundation for students embarking on studies in this area, an invaluable reference for scholars across IR, law, ethics, and related fields seeking to understand the multifaceted AI-IR nexus, and a crucial source of insights for policymakers and practitioners grappling with the realities of AI integration into global affairs. This handbook is not merely a snapshot of a moment; it establishes the essential frameworks and identifies the key questions that will guide research, debate, and policy responses in the critical years to come as AI continues to transform the international system.

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