East Asian Attitudes Towards Defence Autonomous Technologies: Understanding the Cultural Drivers

This article investigates how cultural and ideational frameworks shape attitudes towards autonomous weapon systems (AWS) and the military adoption of Robotics, Autonomous Systems and Artificial Intelligence (RAS-AI) in East Asia. While strategic pressures, technological capabilities and security threats strongly influence military modernisation, states differ in how they interpret, govern and integrate autonomous technologies. Focusing on Japan, South Korea and China, the article adopts a comparative interpretive approach to examine how cultural traditions, technological imaginaries, public attitudes, military doctrines and national innovation ecosystems mediate these processes. It critically assesses four culturalist hypotheses concerning attitudes of trust and resistance towards autonomy, perceptions of AI-related risks, preferences for technology governance and the integration of RAS-AI across civilian and military domains. The analysis shows that cultural factors matter, but not as deterministic or independent causes: their influence is mediated by strategic circumstances, political institutions, demographic pressures and innovation capacity. The three cases reveal distinctive combinations of cultural narratives and material constraints that help explain differences in the legitimation, governance and adoption of defence autonomy. These findings qualify both purely materialist and essentialist accounts of military technology diffusion and highlight the value of cultural analysis for understanding emerging security practices in East Asia.