Apartheid drone: Infrastructures of militarism and the hidden genealogies of the South African Seeker

Abstract

In the 1980s and 1990s, South Africa was considered a global leader in the development of unmanned aircraft largely because of the Seeker, a drone created by the state-controlled armaments industry during apartheid. This article examines how military power, state-enforced racial hierarchies, and global exchange are made visible and obscured through the drone’s unmanned system. It advances the concept of drone infrastructure, which updates theories of the drone that focus on optics and verticality. Drone infrastructure studies the web of relations organized by aircraft systems and articulates how the interplay of visibility and invisibility affectively and materially structures drone systems. The study starts with the ‘invisible’ transfer of drone technology that led to the Seeker, pointing to a shared genealogy of warfare linking South Africa, Israel, and the United States, as well as the ‘secret’ use of the Seeker in the South African Border Wars. It then turns to how, in the post-apartheid era, the Seeker was refashioned as a technology of national protection and democratic advance, a ‘visible’ symbol of the new state. Contemporary efforts to use drone aircraft in South Africa for wildlife conservation in the 2010s aim to overwrite these earlier uses, describing the air platform as international aid. Yet, the Seeker’s militarized infrastructure continues to shape drone use and the logics of white supremacy persist in the networks of relations organized by contemporary drone use in South Africa.

Making a Killing: Israel’s Military-Innovation Ecosystem and the Globalization of Violence

“…Israeli weapons companies, then mostly state-owned, focused on technologies relevant for maintaining the military occupation of Palestine and war with Lebanon, and targeted like-minded regimes for weapons sales. Chandler (2022) meticulously details how military drone technology was advanced by both South Africa and Israel in relation to Apartheid and border war violence. For Israel, this strategy was successful and by the 1980s it had established a global arms industry.…”

“…Yet Israel’s regime of Apartheid and military occupation is far more bureaucratically entrenched, technologically advanced, and globally embedded than African Apartheid ever was. Moreover, Israel’s largest trading partners—Europe, the USA, China, India and the UK—show no interest in holding Israel accountable for violence; rather, there is evidence to suggest that they look to Israel’s military-innovation ecosystem as an example to replicate (Chandler, 2022). It seems Israel, and its global partners, will continue to operate with unprecedented impunity to enact, innovate and monetize violence.…”

“…They include military and state agencies, tech start-ups and private companies, universities and research institutes, as well as banks and venture financing. As Chandler (2022) shows, they also enrol actors not conventionally involved in weapons development, such as public research funding agencies, via ‘dual-use’ technologies with civil and military application.…”

Technoliberalism and the Complementary Relationships between Humanitarian, Conservation, and Entrepreneurial Dronework in Indonesia

“…For those in positions of political power, the military drone’s capacity for enhanced vision, mobility, and force-from-afar, collapses time and space in lethal, planetary, and computational executions (Chamayou, 2015; Gregory, 2011; Shaw, 2016). Drone monitoring for wildlife poaching (Chandler, 2022; Lunstrum, 2014; Sandbrook, 2015) and in humanitarian interventions (Sandvik and Lohne, 2014), is interpreted as militarizing space and preying on the impoverished. Agricultural drones, we are invited to consider, are unable to differentiate ‘an aphid on a soybean or a terrorist suspect carrying an assault weapon’ (Bolman, 2017: 130, 143).…”

“…In these and other instances, drones are conceived of having the capacity to amplify the contradictions of social inequality as they exist for civilians, suspected criminals, refugees, potential poachers, poor people, animals, and insects. These humans and nonhumans are easy prey for drones whose underlying militaristic origins exacerbate marginalization (Chandler, 2022).…”