About the Event:
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly the medium through which people encounter political information, make sense of international events, and form judgments about war and peace. How would an AI reason about a just end to the Russo-Ukrainian War? And would ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or DeepSeek give the same answer?
In this presentation, Dr. Arseniy Kumankov examines how different large language models reason about justice, victory, and peace when confronted with the moral and political dilemmas surrounding the war’s end. Trained on vast amounts of human text, these models inevitably reproduce existing frameworks — yet they also recombine them in unexpected ways. By presenting identical dilemmas to multiple models, we can trace whether they converge on a common conception of a peace and justice or diverge along fundamentally different lines of argumentation. The results reveal which political narratives survive algorithmic processing and which are silenced.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Arseniy Kumankov specializes in war studies, ethics of war and peace, political and social theory. Currently, he is a research fellow at MALVA Center for the Study of War, Language, and Memory at the University of Mainz, Germany, where he works on the projects “Discourses on War in Post-Soviet Russia: Strategies for Justification of War and Maintaining its Rationale” and “Intellectual History of Victory in Post-Soviet Russia.”
Dr. Kumankov received his Ph.D. in philosophy from HSE University, Moscow in 2014. Before coming to Germany, he taught at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, and at HSE University (2013-2022), where he also served as deputy dean for research at the Faculty of Humanities and associate professor. Later, he held research and teaching positions at Princeton University (2022-2024) and UMass Amherst (2023-2024).
Dr. Kumankov has authored numerous articles in Russian and English, as well as three books in Russian, and is the editor of the book series of the New Literary Observer (NLO) publishing house. He is a member of EuroISME, Concerned Philosophers for Peace, and the Independent Institute of Philosophy.