The idea of measurement (of bodies and identities) is a guiding principle of globalized surveillance in the War on Terror. Nevertheless, this inherently scientific notion is so naturalized in public and academic discourse that its meaning and implications are left undiscussed. This paper builds on quantum theory to present an immanent critique of measurement in surveillance. Foregrounding surveillance's transdisciplinary conceptual foundations, it argues that a notion of identity measurement centered on ambiguity and embodiment, rather than fixity and abstraction, reshapes the scope for political action and opens new avenues for critique. I suggest that a lack of critical engagement with the concept of measurement accounts for Surveillance Studies’ and International Political Sociology's difficulty in exploring the relation between the material–affective dimension of surveillance and its identity-fixing function. Challenging unquestioned notions of measurement in social science, quantum theory highlights the interconnected importance of ambiguity and embodiment in processes of identity measurement. Through the case of airport security, I illustrate how quantum measurement departs from recent critical accounts of surveillance—concerned with the fixity of unambiguous identities and the digital abstraction of bodies—and foregrounds the ambiguity of affect to postulate new forms of agency and resistance to the politics of surveillance.

Following a widespread fascination with drones, the materiality of aerial warfare – its bodies, embodied experiences, technologies – has received increasing attention in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This article pushes for a deeper, political theorisation of air in the study of war in its material and embodied dimensions through a critical reading of the Abyssinian War (1935–1936) – a central yet largely neglected conflict in the colonial history of world politics. Exploring the joint deployment of aeroplanes and mustard gas in Ethiopia via a mosaic of sources – literature, strategic thought, cartoons and memoirs – I argue that aerial relations expose the production of a racialised global order underpinned by more-than-human war experiences. Bringing together geographer Derek McCormack’s concept of ‘envelopment’ and Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe’s idea of ‘the weather’, I show how Italy’s imperial desires – and their international perceptions – cannot be theorised in separation from aerial experiences that are conceived as excessive of human bodies, sensing and imagination. This analysis thus makes two central contributions to the critical study of war in IR. First, an aerial reading of the Abyssinian War highlights the political importance of war experience beyond the human. Second, it challenges studies of drone warfare that reduce discussions of air to either the strategic, technical and ontological plane or to the intimate, embodied and phenomenological one. Instead, the more-than-human aerial experiences of the Abyssinian War call for a theorisation of air as both material and affective, technical and embodied, and grand strategic and intimate.

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