Drone warfare and the making of bodies out of place

Wilcox, Lauren

doi:10.1080/21624887.2015.1005422

Cited by 23 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Government and military spokespeople in these countries refer to drones as precise weapons that manage to accurately identify and kill insurgents while leaving civilians in targeted areas largely unscathed. However, research from nongovernment organizations (NGOs), independent monitoring groups, journalists, and academics has challenged this official narrative, revealing that drone violence has inflicted significantly greater harm on civilians than official statements by government and military spokespeople would lead their citizens to believe (Amnesty International, ; Benjamin, ; Enemark, ; Feroz, , ; Gregory, ; Open Society Foundations, ; Reprieve, , ; Shaw, ; Shaw & Akhter, ; Stanford Law School/NYU School of Law, ; Wilcox, ; Woods, , ). These harms are both physical and psychosocial and go largely unacknowledged by U.S.‐led coalition governments and military officials.…”

Section: Limitations Of Existing Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lack of concern for lived experiences is also characteristic of the majority of drone violence scholarship in IR, which has focussed on drone violence's effects on nation‐state sovereignty, international law, and developments in military technologies. Even feminist and postcolonial IR scholars, who have been concerned with the people on the receiving end of drone attacks (Gregory, ; Holmqvist, ; McSorley, ; Shaw & Akhter, ; Wilcox, ), have not yet brought sufficient attention to the wide range of psychosocial harms that drone violence inflicts. The reasons for this are manifold and specific to drone violence, so require unpacking.…”

Section: Limitations Of Existing Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

Edney-Browne

2019

Political Psychology

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The U.S.-led drone program has severe and wide-ranging psychosocial and political effects on people in targeted areas. This article draws upon the author's interviews with people living under drones in Afghanistan to argue that drone surveillance and bombardment causes social isolation and self-objectification. Interviewees reported that social gatherings, and any activities that involve nighttime travel, are shortened or avoided out of fear that drone surveillance will spot so-called "nefarious activity" and bombardment will follow. Drawing upon feminist and postcolonial scholarship, the article contends that drone surveillance constitutes a form of psychological colonization. Civilians are frequently made to think of how they look to drone operators and change their behaviors accordingly-therein "self-objectifying." Narratives of "precision" warfare allow citizens of Western liberal democracies leading/supporting the drone program to avoid psychologically confronting these effects, while people living under drones face relentless psychological insecurities.

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Section: Limitations Of Existing Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Limitations Of Existing Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

Edney-Browne

2019

Political Psychology

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“…From the combinatoric manipulation of these various anonymous and ‘dividualized’ traces of communication, geolocation and activity, an archive of overall ‘patterns of life’ can be derived (indicating bodily movements and rhythms in space and time, gatherings of bodies, networks of speech and chatter, durational intensities of social connectivity and so on). The interrogation of this multidimensional data topography is then conducted via algorithmic inquiry, including forms of social network analysis, time series analysis and rhythmanalysis, with the hermeneutic goal of identifying patterns of suspicion and anomalies linked to particular networked nodes and ‘bodies out of place’ (Wilcox, 2015). Via ‘cross-sensor cueing’ (Chatterjee and Stork, 2017), emergent targets may also become subject to further granular and more intense visual surveillance, including full-motion video feeds which are watched by drone personnel and ultimately inform the triggering of strikes.…”

Section: Predatory Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predatory War, Drones and Torture: Remapping the Body in Pain

McSorley

2019

Body & Society

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Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that war is a vast and reciprocal swearing on the body, with corporeality key not only to its brutal prosecution but also to the eventual ending of the political 'crisis of substantiation' that war entails. However, her work has not been extensively explored with reference to significant transformations in the embodied experiences of contemporary warfare. This paper thus analyses a particular articulation of late modern warfare that I term predatory war, whose current signature motif is the drone strike, through the lens of Scarry's work. Here, the associated modes of embodiment are radically non-reciprocal, the woundscapes of conflict are profoundly asymmetric, and the affective mediation of bodily injury does not substantiate any ending to the conflict. As such, I argue that the ontology and phenomenology of predatory war increasingly resembles what Scarry identifies as the underlying structure of torture.

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“…This type of security rationale assumes that everyone is potentially dangerous until proven otherwise (this is why everyone has to go through a metal detector before entering a government building or boarding a flight) (Elias, 2014). Importantly for us here, the fact that less attention is given by scholarly critique to this type of security suggests these critiques accept the claim that this mode of security is less discriminatory (Aradau & Van Munster, 2007;Bigo, 2006Bigo, , 2007Wilcox, 2015). The fullbody scanner at the focus of this article is predominantly a uniform-risk based technology, and our argument should be read as pertaining to this particular field of security.…”

Section: Demarcating the Terms: Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

In-secure identities: On the securitization of abnormality

Amir

Kotef

2017

Environ Plan D

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Highly securitized sites, such as airports, are increasingly using screening methods designed to purge racial profiling from their practices. In these contexts, not only are profiling methods seen as unlawful, but are also perceived as ineffective from a security perspective. Instead of basing security screenings on a perceived ‘dangerousness’ of social categories, these new screening methods aim to rely on automatic and objective criteria. This paper examines the shaping and effects of these security procedures, claiming that this redesigning of security technologies in accordance with practices which are presumably scientific, measurable and objective, has resulted in the creation of new categories of ‘threatening’ persons. Specifically, we show how the category of ‘normal’ has become central to security sorting and how, therefore – unintentionally yet necessarily – these procedures and technologies have become apparatuses of social normalization. People who deviate from given norms are thus singled out as potential security threats and are subjected to extended security probing, if not to outright violence. Tracing the effects of the increasing centrality of normalization processes to the management of securitized sites, this paper examines this reconfiguration of (ab)normality and explores the consequences of the securitization of social deviance.

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Drone warfare and the making of bodies out of place

Cited by 23 publications

References 5 publications

The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

Predatory War, Drones and Torture: Remapping the Body in Pain

In-secure identities: On the securitization of abnormality

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