The Urbanization of drone warfare: policing surplus populations in the dronepolis

Abstract

Abstract. This paper explores the urbanization of drone warfare and the securitization of the "surplus population". Defined as a bloc of humanity rendered as structurally unnecessary to a capital-intensive economy, the surplus population is an emerging target for the post-welfare security state. If we now live in an age of a permanent conflict with uncertain geographies, then it is at least partly fueled by this endemic crisis at the heart of the capitalist world system. Of key significance is the contradictory nature of the surplus population. The "security threat" generated by replacing masses of workers with nonhumans is increasingly managed by policing humans with robots, drones, and other apparatuses. In other words, the surplus population is both the outcome and target of contemporary capitalist technics. The emerging "dronification of state violence" across a post-9/11 battlespace has seen police drones deployed to the urban spaces of cities in Europe and North America. The drone, with its ability to swarm in the streets of densely packed urban environments, crystallizes a more intimate and invasive form of state power. The project of an atmospheric, dronified form of policing not only embodies the technologization of state security but also entrenches the logic of a permanent, urbanized manhunt. The paper concludes by discussing the rise of the dronepolis: the city of the drone.

The Great War of Enclosure: Securing the Skies

“…“Thinking drone war with police violence,” argues Wall (:2), “helps to challenge the apparent ‘exceptionality’ of the drone by usefully locating the drone within one of the most pervasive, insidious, yet mundane rationalities and mandates of emergency power: police”. With or without drones, the police will continue to surveil, hound, and hunt an economically “surplus population” (Shaw ). Crucially, the composition of this surplus population is violently uneven, reflecting “how the geographical dynamics of accumulation have become increasingly racialized” (McIntyre and Nast :1466).…”

Contesting Digital Futures: Urban Politics, Alternative Economies, and the Movement for Technological Sovereignty in Barcelona

“…Geographers have offered insightful critiques of the smart city as a techno‐capitalist model of entrepreneurial urban governance (Luque‐Ayala and Marvin ; Wiig ), and as a new form of securitisation, surveillance, and control (Klauser et al. ; Leszczynski ; Shaw ; Vanolo ). Others have examined how digital media and devices “augment” the experience of urban spaces, mediating relationships of power (Graham et al.…”

Theorizing the advent of weaponized drones as techniques of domestic paramilitary policing

“…Peter Lieb (2012: 634–635) adds that British counterinsurgency operations in Mesopotamia were ‘heavily influenced by racist stereotypes of a populace that would only react to the language of force, coercion, and suppression’, a condescending yet curiously mixed empathic–punitive–pastoral view of Arabs and Kurds as ‘semi-civilized’ peoples who had been schooled into savagery by long years under the Ottoman yoke, but who could yet be civilized by more civilized colonial rulers. A latter-day variant of this empathic–punitive–pastoral understanding can be discerned in the intensive domestic policing of largely racialized ‘surplus populations’ (Shaw, 2016a) in the global North today, which registers the historic collective trauma of slavery and discrimination but only to infer that in its angry aftermath the language of coercion is best suited to conducting the conduct of these particular populations.…”

“…Rather than providing a staunch defence, a stinging critique or even an exhaustive account of Chamayou’s position (see also Arthur Bradley’s article in this issue for a discussion of the Hobbesian dimension), I intend here to approach it from a different angle by prioritizing this example of an artisanal land-based killer drone deployed by police on US soil. I aim to contribute to a developing discussion that seeks to envisage drone theory’s plausible ‘domestic’ future forms (Bradley, 2019; Neocleous, 2014; Shaw, 2016a, 2016b, 2017; Wall, 2016): ‘drones in the house’.…”

“…Vital though it is for a critical drone theory to query the inflated rhetoric used to promote this technology, and to analyse the political meanings and productive fantasies enfolded in such claims, and so to be vigilant about unwittingly reproducing deadly hype, it is nevertheless also worth asking, with Benjamin Noys (2015: 3, 16), why the drone has come to be so fetishized and freighted, so charged with ‘metaphysical “aura”’, and I shall return to this point later. The most far-reaching drone theory (Chamayou, 2015; Shaw, 2016a, 2016b; Wall, 2016) takes a techno-cultural, a synecdochic and to some extent an anticipatory approach: the drone is worth analysing in itself but also because it stands in for something bigger of which it is a significant functioning part and because it can be considered a harbinger of a still more sinister configuration of power – the ‘Predator Empire’ (Shaw, 2016b), the ‘drone-state’ (Chamayou, 2015: 18) or the ‘emerging dronepolis : the city of the drone’ (Shaw, 2016a: 19). The drone is thus understood synecdochally as a defining techno-cultural element within an emergent new form of political rationality, though I argue that what exactly this emergent form is has yet to be satisfactorily identified, and I endeavour to contribute here to its elaboration.…”