How can NATO integrate Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) into the Cyber Defence Framework? In this article, Christopher Macartney highlights the developments and capabilities of UGVs during the Russia-Ukraine War and strengthening UGV network defences as a strategic asset for NATO in the future of warfare.
Canada and France are amongst NATO’s leading countries in advancing gender parity. With their Armed Forces compromising between 16-17% of women actively serving in the military. Despite these achievements both countries continue to face significant challenges with recruitment and retention specifically amongst women with strong backgrounds in STEM and cybersecurity. The underrepresentation of women in defence and cybersecurity presents a critical challenge to long term defence readiness and resilience.
Canada’s new plan to name a new Women, Peace and Security (WPS) ambassador is a positive signal, considering WPS and Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) have historically been a reflection of Canadian values, as champions of peace and multilateral cooperation. Isabelle Zhu argues that Canada’s current “middle power” strategy would allow it to move forward as the new champion of FFPs and WPS, enhancing its position within the Alliance and on the international stage.
Can democratic states effectively counter disinformation without undermining the principles they seek to protect? Dominique Arseneau-Bruneau examines how legality, legitimacy, and institutional complexity shape democratic responses in the information environment.
On Monday, May 25, 2026, the NATO Association of Canada hosted a panel discussion titled “AI and Warfare: When Machines Make Decisions”. The discussion brought together experts from defence, academia, policy, and industry to examine the growing role of artificial intelligence in modern warfare. This report provides a detailed overview of the event’s discussions.
As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in modern warfare, it is reshaping how states conduct war and raising urgent questions of ethics and accountability regarding the potential absence of human judgment in lethal decisions. If machines can decide when force is used, who ultimately remains accountable for the decision to take a human life in war?
As economic security becomes increasingly central to international policymaking, trade law is being reshaped by sanctions, export controls, and other security-based economic measures. In this article, Hassan Ahmed examines how the WTO’s national security exception has evolved from a narrow safeguard into a more routine justification for strategic economic action, and how allied states increasingly coordinate such measures through informal alignment rather than unified legal frameworks. Using examples ranging from semiconductor export controls to sanctions coordination following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the article explores the growing intersection of trade law, strategic competition, and alliance politics, including the implications for middle powers such as Canada.
In this special report, Soha Sarfraz examines how Iran and Russia use influence operations and information warfare to weaken democratic cohesion across NATO societies. Particularly by targeting key institutions through digital disruption, narrative manipulation, and the covert exploitation of grassroots mobilization. She argues that these campaigns threaten not only institutions themselves, but also the social trust, political consensus, and informational resilience that sustain collective defence, underscoring the need for stronger democratic resilience and alliance-wide responses to hybrid threats.
How can allied democracies inadvertently amplify each other’s friendly-fire of confusion and panic? What existential threat does this pose to content creators, journalists, or news anchors? Ji Young Kim examines how AI-generated misinformation shapes interpretation in the context of recent geopolitics and modern media culture.
In this article, Soha Sarfraz explores how the rise of deepfakes is placing new strains on democratic resilience, using Denmark’s developing legal and policy response as a case study of how states may preserve trust and political legitimacy in the age of fake media, Soha examines what lessons Canada might draw from that model. She argues that deepfakes increasingly threaten not only individual reputations, but also electoral integrity and the broader information environment, contending that the challenge is no longer merely a technological, but fundamentally political and strategic.