Drone Enlightenment: The Colonial Roots of Remote Warfare 0813949548, 9780813949543

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DRONE ENLIGHTENMENT

DRONE ENLIGHTENMENT The Colonial Roots of Remote Warfare

PETER DEGABRIELE

UNIVERSIT Y OF VIRGINIA PRESS Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press © 2023 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper First published 2023 987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: DeGabriele, Peter, author. Title: Drone Enlightenment : the colonial roots of remote warfare / Peter DeGabriele. Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022055984 (print) | LCCN 2022055985 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813949536 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813949543 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813949550 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Drone warfare. | Asymmetric warfare. Classification: LCC UG1242.D7 D46 2023 (print) | LCC UG1242.D7 (ebook) | DDC 623.74/69—­dc23/eng/20230206 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055984 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055985

Cover art: Title page from Hobbes’s Leviathan, Abraham Bosse, London, 1651. (00075583001; © Trustees of the British Museum)

FOR SOL AND BRUNO

CONTENTS Acknowledgments | ix

Introduction: Drone Warfare, Enlightenment, and Asymmetry

1

Sovereign (Ir)responsibility

29

1

2 Remote Occupation

62

3 Deferred Extermination

93

Epilogue: Publicity and Mediation

119

Notes | 129 Bibliography | 143 Index | 151

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a strange book that does not fit easily into a disciplinary category, and it felt like I was taking a risk to write it. From the beginning I wondered whether there would be an audience for it, or a publisher who would be willing to take a chance on it. My biggest debts, then, are to the people who gave unconditional encouragement to the project. The first person who made me feel this work was possible and legitimate was David Banash, who invited me up to Western Illinois University to give a talk and did not blink an eye when I said I wanted to try out something about Hobbes and drone warfare. A couple of weeks later, when I told him I was thinking about developing that talk into a book, he said I should just go for it. It was exactly the advice I needed at a time when I could easily have abandoned the talk as a one-­off and moved on to more traditional scholarship. It was also fantastic to have the consistent support of my department head, Dan Punday, who read drafts of most of the chapters and was always excited about my arguments and ideas. Beyond his very useful comments on drafts, his patience and encouragement were invaluable. Finally, I owe a huge debt to Angie Hogan at UVA Press, who saw the strangeness of this book as a strength. At a very late stage of the project, she made me feel that the idea could have an audience, and her support gave me the impetus to finally think of the manuscript as a book. A courageous and supportive editor is a wonderful thing.

Acknowledgments

x

In addition to the psychological support provided by those people who unconditionally encouraged this project, I was also fortunate to be invited to present parts of this work in various forums. In addition to the talk I gave at Western Illinois University, I also presented a version of chapter 1 at a symposium hosted by the Mississippi State University Department of English. Maggie Hagerman invited me to speak on the same topic at a lunchtime speaking series hosted by the MSU Department of Sociology. The questions and discussion at both of those events sharpened my thinking and opened up new possibilities for research. Bonnie O’Neill and Lara Dodds asked questions about US political process and complicity that made me look more closely at the details of drone policy and at Hobbes’s ideas about consent. Izzy Pellegrini pushed me to focus on the way drone attacks must seem random to those subject to them, while Braden Leap and Bart Moffat turned my focus to how my account of Hobbes related to the work of Bruno Latour. I also presented a version of chapter 3 at the American Society for Eighteenth-­Century Studies conference at Disney World in Florida (of all places). The reception of my work there convinced me that this strange book might have an audience among eighteenth-­century scholars, and it further convinced me of the openness of my fellow dix-­ huitièmistes to a surprising variety of work. The encouragement I received at these events spurred my continued work on this project. Much inspiration for this book also came from those people who posted memes to the Texts from Drone Tumblr page in 2012. The dark humor and critical perspective of the memes inspired my own thinking about drone warfare. In March 2016, while on a Lindsay Young Visiting Scholars Fellowship at the Marco Institute at the University of Tennessee, I wrote much of what would become chapter 2. At the time, when reading through early modern and Enlightenment natural law I was not thinking at all of drone warfare. My thanks to the Marco Institute for their hospitality and for providing me with time and space to write. Many people have read drafts of different chapters of this book. My first thanks in this regard goes to Dan Punday, who read all the body chapters of the book and gave such prompt and helpful feedback. This is a much better book for his help. My thanks also go to Shane Herron, whose reading of chapter 3 taught me much about Swift and who gave really strong advice on audience. Ruth Mack’s comments on chapter 1 were as perceptive as ever.

xi Acknowledgments

Tommy Anderson’s help with the introduction and Ted Atkinson’s reading of the epilogue helped me to get the manuscript over the line. Finally, I’d like to extend my thanks to the anonymous readers at UVA Press, who saw the potential of the book and what the book should be more clearly than I could myself. Their generous assessment of the manuscript and their suggestions for making it both more rigorous and more readable were crucial.

DRONE ENLIGHTENMENT

INTRODUCTION

DRONE WARFARE, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND ASYMMETRY

On July  1 , 2015 , Cecil the lion was killed in Zimbabwe by an American dentist named Walter Palmer.1 Palmer’s weapon of choice was a bow and arrow, a far cry from the high-­technology hunter-­killer drones with which this book will be concerned. However, the killing of Cecil the lion has some commonalities with the kind of drone warfare practiced by the United States. This is the case even if the killing of Cecil was both public and well publicized and produced an immediate eruption of outrage, as opposed to the highly secretive US drone program, whose very secrecy, along with the belated coverage of killings, tends to disarm any outrage in advance. Both drone warfare and the kind of big-­game hunting Palmer was engaged in tend to take place in territories that were formerly colonial (Cecil’s name underscores this), and both practices repeat the power relations of colonialism. Drone warfare exercises remote control over populations far from the centers of power, while big-­game hunting turns the natural life of formerly colonial territories into objects of pleasure for those who can afford to pay for it. More fundamentally, however, drone warfare is itself more like hunting, even big-­game hunting, than it is like the kind of warfare imagined by

Drone Enlightenment

2

international law or by classical theorists of war like Carl von Clausewitz or Carl Schmitt. As Gregoire Chamayou has argued, drone warfare “combines the disparate characteristics of warfare and policing . . . finding conceptual and practical unity in the notion of a militarized manhunt.”2 As the tasteless slogan of the United States Air Force, “we put warheads on foreheads,” proclaims, drone warfare is about hunting and killing specific human targets. In general, like the big-­game hunted by dentists like Palmer, the targets are “high-­value.” At least in theory, the US drone program aims to take out people with specific and important roles within major international terrorist organizations. However, it is precisely around the issue of targeting, how a target is chosen and what makes a target legitimate, that big-­ game hunting and drone warfare begin to be conceptually distinguished. This distinction, though, tends to work somewhat counterintuitively. While both big-­game hunting and drone warfare depend on specific notions of territory and borders in order to define the legitimacy of their actions, the killing of animals by humans is in some ways more precisely regulated and restricted than is the killing of humans by drones. Furthermore, what is most interesting about the case of Cecil the lion in comparison with drone warfare is the problem of the proper name. Cecil caught the public’s attention in part because he was identifiable and individualized, and this individualization was signified in his proper name. Cecil was not just any lion. He was a tourist attraction, a well-­known occupant of a wildlife reserve whose behavior was being tracked by scientists. In this sense, Cecil shares much with the “high-­value” target of drone warfare, although his name was supposed to guarantee him immunity from hunting. In drone warfare, however, the proper name, which is usually defined and represented in a signature, has been replaced with a different kind of signature, a behavioral signature that legitimizes what have come to be known as “signature strikes.” While Cecil’s name comes as a result of the scientific interest in his behavior, thus linking individuality with his surveillance, in the signature strikes that became a regular part of US foreign policy during Barack Obama’s presidency surveillance of behavior makes any individuation unnecessary.3 In these strikes, surveillance, both by drones and by other terrestrial means, identifies potential targets for assassination by drone based upon signature behavioral patterns that indicate potential belonging to a terrorist group. However, once this behavioral pattern has

3 Introduction

been recognized, there is no need for the targeting agency (often the CIA or the Joint Special Operations Command [JSOC]) to identify the name of the target. Behavioral signature thus replaces the proper name. Given the prominence of cell-­phone tracking in identifying targets for drone strikes, those involved in the prosecution of drone warfare have said that the United States is targeting cell phones, not people. From this perspective, Cecil the lion is more like a juridical person than are many of those people killed in drone warfare. His proper name guaranteed a trial over the legitimacy of his killing, whereas those killed in signature strikes remain anonymous, defined only by a behavioral algorithm that strips them of the status of juridical person. Indeed, this link between behavior and personhood, paradoxically maintained with regard to Cecil the lion and eviscerated in those humans killed in signature strikes, is one of the ways in which drone warfare dismantles some of the concepts inherited from the Enlightenment. Some Enlightenment theories of personhood, especially that of John Locke, link personhood to status as a juridical subject, as someone capable of moral reward or punishment. The technology of the drone thus undoes the link between morality, individuality, and the proper name imagined in classical liberalism. There is, for instance, an interesting inversion of Locke in the way that Cecil the lion compares to the “Lyon” or “Tyger” that Locke discusses in the Second Treatise. Locke uses lions and tigers as the bases of an analogy to explain the position of the criminal or murderer. He argues that in the state of nature every man has the immediate right to destroy any person who “hath by the unjust Violence and Slaughter he has committed upon one, declared War against all Mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a Lyon or a Tyger, one of those wild Savage Beasts with whom Men can have no Society or Security.”4 The savage beast, exemplified by the lion or tiger, thus figures the man who has made himself an enemy to mankind. In Locke’s conception, while a man may make himself into such an enemy, the wild, savage beast is fundamentally and naturally an enemy to mankind. However, it is clear that in the case of Cecil this relation does not hold and is even inverted. Cecil is not an enemy of mankind, and there is no natural right to kill him. Indeed, Cecil, with his proper name and integration into a scientific community, is more akin to a friend of mankind.5 If Locke’s view of lions and tigers is that they exist in enmity to mankind (and

Drone Enlightenment

4

this is a not an uncommon view in Enlightenment political philosophy), the contemporary world no longer necessarily holds to this vision of the animal. However, even if the literal referent in Locke’s analogy (the lion or tiger) can no longer figure enmity, this does not mean that such enmity has disappeared from the world. Indeed, those subject to drone strikes, and especially to signature strikes, have the status of enemy to mankind, which Locke explained and justified by analogy to the wild beast. Furthermore, the enemy in this sense approximates closely to the status of natural enemy, which Locke used to describe the wild beast. Those subject to signature strikes are enemies without having been first named as murderers or criminals, as the behavioral signature does not tie this suspicious behavior to a specific criminal identity. One consequence of this is that the people represented by these behavioral signatures are treated as enemies who cannot become friends. The victim of drone warfare is not named or identified in a quasi-­juridical determination of the subject as criminal or murderer, but subjected through the behavior of their body. This production of moral and political subjectivity through the behavior of the body, without the necessity of naming, is closer to Thomas Hobbes’s way of thinking subjectivity than to the liberal Locke’s. The first chapter of this book explores this difference between these two figures of the English Enlightenment. Another aspect of the case of Cecil the lion that is comparable to the way drone warfare disturbs Enlightenment concepts is the problem of territory as it relates to the right to kill or to wage war. The legal technicalities surrounding Cecil’s killing have to do with where he was shot. While it seems indisputable that Palmer paid to kill a lion and was entitled to do so, he should not have been able to kill Cecil, whose usual habitat was in the Hwange National Park, in which hunting is prohibited. However, Cecil’s range was not restricted to human-­drawn borders, and he happened to be on the private property of a neighboring farm when he was shot and killed by Palmer. This means that Palmer’s kill was not deemed illegal, despite the outrage over his having paid fifty thousand dollars to kill a named and famous lion. That the dispute over borders, here, was relatively simple is another index of the extent to which drone warfare undoes some of the norms we associate with territoriality and borders. One of the major features of the drone wars carried on by the United States is their general disrespect for national boundaries. Hunting or targeting is of people and

5 Introduction

is not, as in traditional warfare, related to those people’s relationship to a particular state or territory. Indeed, many drone attacks occur in territories with which the United States is not technically at war. Under the auspices of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which is still used to justify drone attacks, the theater of operations is at least potentially unrestricted by any national boundaries. This change in the way territoriality works from classical Enlightenment theories of war and international law is another defining characteristic of the drone, and I explore this in the second chapter. What is extraordinary about the case of Cecil the lion is that the norms of territory, individuality, and a right to life, things usually applied to human moral and political relations and inherited from the Enlightenment, are all here applied in an intensely affective way to an exceptional animal. Meanwhile, drone warfare challenges precisely these aspects of the liberal Enlightenment in the most striking and disturbing way. A territory is no longer sovereign if another nation can exercise the power of life and death over its inhabitants with an absolute minimum of risk and without needing to be physically present on that territory. Indeed, the drone undoes even the norms of physical presence. Individuality too seems irrelevant to the phenomenon of the drone, both on the side of the drone operators and on that of their victims. Drone operators are part of a long chain of command that diffuses any personal or individual responsibility for their actions, while their targets are often instead merely identifiable through a behavioral algorithm. Finally, as I explore in the third chapter, targets of drones are subject to a sovereign decision over their life and death that holds their right to life in abeyance. Life under drones is a perpetual expectation of death, a life indefinitely spared. War under drones holds in suspension any kind of end or goal and happens without the end goal of peace, suspending, indeed, the very distinction between war and peace. All the norms and regulations, then, that allow us to make judgments about the (in)justice of Cecil’s killing are absent or compromised in drone warfare. While Cecil’s killing seems explicable within the norms of Enlightenment thought about subjectivity, territory, and war, assassination by drone requires us to look again at these very norms and to reevaluate their relevance. Importantly, drone warfare, this book argues, also requires us to reevaluate Enlightenment itself and to unearth the complexity and tension that are covered

Drone Enlightenment

6

over when Enlightenment thought about territory, war, and subjectivity is reduced to normative, liberal concepts.

DRONE ENLIGHTENMENT Drone Enlightenment addresses the ultramodern form of drone warfare through three sustained engagements with texts and concepts from the Enlightenment. It examines the drone in the context of the Enlightenment’s concept of sovereignty, its moral philosophy, its theories of territorial occupation, and the way all these things are inflected by a racist colonial ideology. The book argues that Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Samuel Pufendorf, Hugo Grotius, and Jonathan Swift have much to tell us about what drone warfare means today and, conversely, that the phenomenon of the drone can help us understand and reenvision crucial concepts of the Enlightenment, such as sovereignty, moral responsibility, and territorial occupation. Chapter 1, entitled “Sovereign (Ir)responsibility,” takes its cue from a series of memes entitled Texts from Drone, which appeared on Tumblr in 2012. The memes are anti-­drone, and by depicting a series of text-­ message conversations between a Predator drone and either President Barack Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, they lay the blame for drone warfare at the feet of that (neo)liberal administration. What is most interesting about the memes, however, is that in seeking to attribute responsibility to human political actors, they personify a drone, who takes pleasure in following and even going beyond the orders of its masters. This raises questions about responsibility and accountability in drone warfare, and the chapter focuses on these questions. The gambit of this chapter is that the link between responsibility and political sovereignty, which the memes show as crucial to the problem of the drone, is at both its clearest and its most intense in Enlightenment moral and political philosophy. This chapter thus turns to the work of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes to discuss how questions of subjectivity and responsibility intersect with questions of sovereignty. It argues that for Locke, subjects can be held accountable for their past actions because of their self-­consciousness of having performed them. This idea that the consciousness of our actions makes us responsible agents is at the heart of the classical liberal ideal of

7 Introduction

subjectivity. In Hobbes, however, we see a decidedly different version of responsibility. Rather than locating moral responsibility in a self-­conscious subject, Hobbes spreads responsibility and agency out in a network of human and nonhuman causes not unlike that of Bruno Latour’s actor network theory. In some ways, this diffuse theory of causality and responsibility seems apt to deal with the problem of the drone; a vast and dispersed network of human and mechanical causes is involved in any drone strike, so that it is difficult to say with clarity who is responsible for a death caused by a drone strike. It is important, however, to place Hobbes’s theory of moral causality in the context of his theory of sovereignty, a theory in which the sovereign (and after him God) is at once the ultimate cause for all actions and absolutely outside any system of moral or political accountability. It is this aspect of Hobbes’s political philosophy that seems most appropriate to the problem of US drone warfare in particular, as drone strikes have become ultimately the responsibility of the Executive Office of the President (EOP), but without any check or balance that could hold the president accountable. Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty thus helps us understand, in a way actor network theory cannot, the significance of Obama’s infamous “Terror Tuesday” meetings, in which the president, after some personal moral deliberation, would decide whether individuals could be targeted for assassination by drone. These meetings were at once a display of private morality and responsibility and a complete negation of any political responsibility. They thus existed in the realm of sovereign (ir)responsibility and represented a return of a radical and unconditional Hobbesian sovereignty in the supposedly liberal twenty-­first century. Chapter 2 moves from a consideration of Enlightenment political philosophy to a discussion of Enlightenment legal theory. In particular, I examine the natural law theory of occupation, which not only grounded the legitimacy of European territories but also set out a framework for colonial occupation. Looking at Hume, Pufendorf, and Grotius, I argue that there is a theory of remote occupation at work in the Enlightenment, even as these theorists attempt to link occupation to a physical or corporeal occupying presence. The drone, in this connection, becomes the ultimate figure of remote occupation, and I argue that even without any boots on the ground, territories subject to consistent drone attacks must be considered occupied. Indeed, precisely because drones exercise with impunity the sovereign right

Drone Enlightenment

8

over life and death, those who live under drones are definitively subject to their sovereignty. This is a sovereignty in which airspace, or sovereignty over the air, is detached from territorial boundaries, so that those who live on sovereign territories can nevertheless be subject to a different sovereignty in the form of the drones that hover above them. The way drone warfare and Enlightenment legal theory interact in this chapter, then, is that the drone undoes or challenges the seemingly forceful Enlightenment insistence that occupation and physical presence must go together. However, at the same time, I argue, this connection between territorial occupation and physical presence was already under pressure in the colonial context of Enlightenment. The final part of the chapter explores this tension by looking at the way occupation is theorized differently when it is related to the different elements of land, sea, and air. After tracing the natural law concept of the free seas, in which the sea is deemed not capable of being occupied, I look at how early debates in the history of aviation law tried to apply this concept to the air. The air, these debates showed, was considered capable of being occupied, an element subject to sovereign dominion. Drone warfare hyperbolizes this form of aerial sovereignty by detaching sovereignty over the air from sovereignty over the territory below, making sovereignty unconditioned even by territoriality. The final chapter looks at the most striking image of airborne sovereignty from the Enlightenment period: the Flying Island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. This chapter reads Gulliver’s Travels as an extension of the destabilization of sovereign presence explored in the previous chapter, while also demonstrating that Swift’s work radically dislocates the temporality of sovereign violence. In particular, I show that while the third of Gulliver’s travels (to Laputa) deals with the exercise of sovereignty at a distance in space, the final part (in which Gulliver visits the land of the Houyhnhnms) describes the aim-­inhibited but seemingly perpetual nature of racist colonial violence. Precisely by holding in abeyance the decision to exterminate the Yahoos, the Houyhnhnms produce a permanent and extended present of violence and domination. It is this form of warfare that is also represented by the drone. Rather than attacking an enemy that can be defeated by being killed or subdued, drone warfare degrades the enemy to the point that it can be infinitely policed without ever being finally destroyed, but also without ever becoming capable of friendship.

9

FROM ETHICS AND LAW TO THE POLITICAL The phenomenon of drone warfare has proved fascinating to scholars from many disciplines, and there is now a plethora of academic and journalistic books about it. Drone warfare has been interrogated in its legal dimensions, in the historical context of both air warfare and surveillance, in broader cultural dimensions to do with vision and perspective, and in its philosophical and political contexts. It is no surprise that such a relatively recent phenomenon has provoked this plenitude of academic discussion. Indeed, the very first Predator drone strike by a CIA-­controlled drone, in October 2001, during the war in Afghanistan, was immediately met with the kind of bemused wonder that tends to inspire critical and philosophical thinking. Apparently, seeing a convoy of vehicles in Kandahar blown up by some unknown agent, General David Deptula, of the US Air Force, exclaimed: “Who the fuck did that?” 7 While Deptula probably literally wanted to know who had blown up the convoy, since he was supposed to know the origin of all the strikes coming in from the air, he also asked the question that has exercised more theoretical thinkers about the drone: who did that? Indeed, across the various kinds of investigations into drone warfare, the question of agency and responsibility is constant. This has been one of the cornerstones of ethical discussions concerning the drone both in the popular media and in academic books. Questions ranging from how drone pilots feel when they launch deadly missiles to which government agencies have responsibility for drone strikes have been consistent themes of the literature about drones.

Introduction

The refusal of a war of total destruction thus becomes the enabling condition for the prosecution of what Thomas Hippler calls a permanent low-­intensity war, a war that becomes almost indistinguishable from the concept of peace itself.6 Gulliver’s Travels thus shows how an unconditional theory of sovereignty and its technological counterpart (for Swift the flying island and for the contemporary world the drone) goes hand in hand with a racist colonial political technology. The Enlightenment, as Swift shows, is the site at which both of these things were imagined, and the drone is, in this sense, a dream of Enlightenment.

Drone Enlightenment

10

These questions have been approached primarily from legal, ethical, and psychological perspectives. For instance, Hugh Gusterson discusses in interesting ways the experience of the drone pilot as someone who is both intimately involved in battle and thoroughly removed from it. The drone pilot, Gusterson shows, spends much of his time immersed, via a video screen, in the world of battle and then returns, with little to no transition time, to the mundane details of family life.8 This focus on the psychology of drone warfare attempts to differentiate this phenomenon of war from previous military experiences. Both Gusterson and Chamayou detail debates within the air force about whether drone pilots are pilots in the same sense as those who fly fighter jets and whether they deserve medals. Both also focus on the impact of trauma on the drone pilot, with Gusterson showing that there are reports of drone pilots suffering PTSD, while Chamayou argues that the ideological effect of such diagnoses is to legitimize drone warfare.9 In this sense, the psychological or phenomenological experience of drone warfare bleeds into ethical and political considerations for this new type of combat. The ethical dimensions of drone warfare have been the subject of considerable debate. In the nonacademic sphere, this is one of the most hotly debated topics. Advocates for drones trumpet both their accuracy and their ability to hit much more specific targets than other forms of air warfare.10 Serious doubts have also been cast on the supposed accuracy and precision of drones. Medea Benjamin, for instance, has shown the discrepancies between official reports about the supposed accuracy of drones and the actual impact of drone attacks on the ground.11 This ethical dimension of drone warfare has also sparked considerable debate about the ethics of fully autonomous warfare, in which futuristic robots would not only perform the launching of deadly force but also target selection. Certain computer scientists would welcome this future, as they are confident that robots, who are passionless, could more strictly follow international law than humans.12 However fanciful and ideological this claim is, it forms one side of a debate about autonomous warfare. While governments remain unsurprisingly noncommittal about whether to promote or ban fully autonomous warfare, a group of academics have formed the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) in an attempt to preemptively ban autonomous killer robots.13 The phenomenon of the drone has thus led to an expansion of ethical discussions about the future of warfare.

11 Introduction

As the focus by groups such as ICRAC on humanitarian law and the laws of war indicates, the legal dimension of drone warfare has also been a subject of considerable debate. Of most concern to scholars of international law are the drone attacks that occur outside conventional battlefields. Hugh Gusterson differentiates between mixed drone warfare, in which drones are used alongside other arms and within conventional battle spaces, and pure drone warfare.14 The latter indicates the use of drones within territories that are not officially at war, often by paramilitary agencies (such as the CIA). This form of warfare, often serialized targeted killing, looks more like an assassination program than anything resembling conventional warfare. While Obama-­era officials insisted on the legality of drone warfare, even outside conventional battle spaces, legal scholars have generally been less convinced.15 Indeed, the attitude of powerful states to questions of legality under international law seems to be summed up by Daniel Reisner, one-­time head of the Israeli Defense Forces legal department, who claimed that “if you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. . . . International law progresses through violations.”16 To only a certain extent, then, especially given the attitude of the major powers, does international law remain theoretically relevant to the phenomenon of the drone. While drone warfare certainly creates interesting and necessary debates in the psychological, ethical, and legal domains of warfare, this book argues that it is primarily a political problem. That is to say, the very form and practice of drone warfare stands as a distinct challenge to both sovereignty and political subjectivity. This is because of its peculiar relationship to questions of sovereignty and the way it brings again into proximity sovereign power and the right over life and death. Because of the murky legal status of drones, they seem to be operated largely outside the norms of other forms of military combat. In the context of the United States especially, drone warfare is not necessarily conducted within the military chain of command; drones are used extensively by the CIA, as well as by the JSOC. They are thus even further outside the standard political processes that usually govern conflict. It is for this reason that the drone returns us to the Enlightenment and the debates about sovereignty, colonialism, and territory that established our modern political world. The proper context for the drone is thus the political thought of the Enlightenment, which both explains the significance of and is radically transformed by the phenomenon of remote killing.

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12

DRONES AND ENLIGHTENMENT SOVEREIGNTY Drone warfare is radically asymmetrical. Its mode of operation is to enable those who control lethal drones to harm others while reducing to a minimum their own risk of being harmed. One of the contentions of this book is that the asymmetry of drone warfare exemplifies and makes visible crucial asymmetries in Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment texts with which this book primarily works (Hobbes’s Leviathan, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the natural law tomes of Grotius and Pufendorf) share a concern with asymmetry. From the outset, it is worth distinguishing what I call asymmetry from mere inequality. Inequality implies some common measure that would allow inequality to be measured, to show that two things are unequal. For instance, within a civil society distinctions of rank or wealth are inequalities measured by status or money. Asymmetry, however, implies that there is no such common measure. Between different ranks in civil society there may be inequality, but between any member of civil society and a Hobbesian sovereign who reserves an unconditioned right over the life and death of his subjects, there is asymmetry. To read Enlightenment texts from the perspective of asymmetry is to push beyond what Jonathan Israel characterizes as the insistence on equality of the radical Enlightenment. Arguing that Spinoza is a better representative of radical Enlightenment than Hobbes, Israel claims that for Spinoza and radical thinkers who follow him what is important is “the establishment and preservation of liberty on the basis of equality.”17 His critique of Hobbes, meanwhile, is that his civil society does not make everyone equal but favors monarchical or oligarchical forms of government, which are based on inequality. This book insists that the sovereign relation is asymmetrical rather than unequal and that this kind of asymmetry is central to understanding both drone warfare and one aspect of Enlightenment thought. Some consequences of thinking in terms of asymmetry can be seen by looking at the legacy of Enlightenment theories of the relations between states, and especially at how drone warfare interacts with this legacy. Rather than a balance between sovereign states (often represented as a legacy of Enlightenment international relations), drone warfare forces us to think about a radical asymmetry between the Western states who practice drone warfare and the territories that are subject to it. On the one hand,

13 Introduction

then, drone warfare seems to be a complete break with all the norms and ideals international relations inherited from the Enlightenment, from a territorial understanding of sovereignty to the ideal of war as being subject to open declarations and participated in by sovereign states. On the other hand, however, we must be attentive to the way drone warfare bolsters or enhances sovereign violence and its claims to immunity and indivisibility and to the way it secures a right to life (precisely through the ideology of a national security) that always depends on an asymmetrical necropolitics that delegitimizes the life of a racialized other. The drone thus stands at once for a radically new form of warfare and political organization that moves beyond territoriality and the conflict between sovereign states and for the continuation of Enlightenment norms such as the exclusive right of the sovereign state to warfare and violence. Furthermore, the drone hyperbolically extends the tendency of Enlightenment to break with its own norms, especially in the context of colonialism. The kind of international laws of war we tend to associate with the Enlightenment, especially the idea that war is something openly declared between nation states and regulated by various rights of both victor and vanquished, were always already broken in the context of colonialism. Unsurprisingly, and not coincidentally, some of the worst excesses of drone warfare occur in territories previously subject to hyperbolic and extralegal colonial violence. Drone warfare thus exposes a fundamental and necessary asymmetry in Enlightenment thought in which the balance between the norms of war and the power of sovereignty is shown to have been always imperfect or even fictive. This asymmetry is also a persistent feature of the place of drone warfare in contemporary international relations. While most critics seem to agree that the twenty-­first-­century international order cannot be explained with reference to the concept of a balance of power between individual sovereign states, there is significant disagreement over the place of sovereignty within a more globalized international order. For some, the current order represents a stark break from the Westphalian model of sovereignty that is supposed to have held sway from the end of the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, while for others this model was always more a fiction than a description of actual practice.18 Similarly, for some critics, the role of sovereignty has been eclipsed by global flows of capital,

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14

which go beyond the borders of control of sovereign states, while for others sovereignty and territoriality remain crucial determinants of the action of the major powers, especially the United States. It is in these debates about the state of a global international order and its relation to Enlightenment norms that thinking about the drone can intervene. Drone warfare is a powerful agent of asymmetrical sovereign power that preserves and hyperbolizes the violence and logic of sovereignty for powerful states (and especially the United States) while rigorously undermining any competing claims to sovereignty that would temper those of the major powers. In doing so, it repeats the asymmetry characteristic of Enlightenment colonialism, in which any possible balance of power within Europe was always unbalanced by an irreducible asymmetry between Europe and the world beyond the line.19 The canonical and normative claim about the legacy of the Enlightenment is that it helped produce, both as an actual state of affairs and as an expanding future ideal or possibility, a stable international order with a balance of power between nominally equal sovereign states. This stable order, purportedly formalized in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, was also supposed to involve a limitation of warfare and its establishment as a conflict between sovereign states. This treaty ended the Thirty Years’ War, a war in which the antagonists were organized largely according to religious affiliation. What ensued was a balance of powers based on competing sovereign states. Jürgen Habermas writes that “limited war . . . became institutionalized as a legitimate means of solving conflicts via international law in the system of the balance of powers after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.”20 What is supposed to be characteristically modern about this organization of international law is that it is sovereign states who have the right to make war and peace. A balance of power between these states, along with an acknowledged mutual right of existence, is supposed to limit warfare. This is what Carl Schmitt (in his relentless commitment to the idea that there is a classical, normative form of war) calls the classical system of juridical warfare represented by the jus publicum Europaeum, which he argues was reestablished, after the defeat of Napoleonic France, at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–­15. Schmitt describes this system as one in which “war was waged between states, between regular state armies, and between sovereign bearers of a jus belli [right to war], who also in war respected each

15 Introduction

other as enemies, and did not discriminate against each other as criminals, so that a peace treaty was possible, and even constituted the normal, self-­ evident end of war.” Schmitt says that these laws of war deserve to be called “classical” because they “recognize clear distinctions, above all between war and peace, combatants and non-­combatants, enemy and criminal.”21 This juridical system of war, with its clear distinctions and its focus on the rights of sovereign states, then, is claimed as a legacy of the Enlightenment by thinkers as different as Habermas and Schmitt, even if Habermas focuses on this legacy as limiting the power of the sovereign state through the creation of international norms and organizations, while Schmitt sees the right of sovereign nations to make war (and thus the supremacy of the state form) as the more crucial consequence. Important to this vision of Enlightenment international relations is a kind of balance, or symmetry, in which states are equal to one another even as enemies and retain reciprocal rights. While landmark legal and political events such as the Peace of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna supposedly helped to establish this system, the Enlightenment also saw the philosophical codification of these principles of international relations and war. As Benjamin Bratton writes, Immanuel Kant’s articulation of cosmopolitan principles in his “To Perpetual Peace” provided “the philosophical leverage” that would bolster the growing international political system.22 Kant, indeed, was building upon a legacy of natural law theory as articulated by such thinkers as Grotius and Pufendorf. However, his teleological account of how a system of balanced sovereign nations would lead to perpetual peace both globalizes (at least in theory) the European system of international relations and makes peace a goal that exceeds the will even of sovereign nations themselves. Throughout the essay on perpetual peace, Kant treats nations as moral persons, arguing, for instance, that for one nation to swallow up another without its consent “denies its existence as a moral person [and] turns it into a thing.”23 This philosophical move means that it is not merely the ruler of a nation who counts as a moral person but a nation itself, and it is what allows Kant to imagine a federation of nations who work together toward peace. Just as moral persons work toward the establishment of law in civil society, so nations as moral persons can establish a federative state that allows for the teleological movement toward a perpetual peace that is not merely a cessation of war. Kant thus theorizes an international order that is not merely,

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16

as that imagined by Hobbes is, a situation in which every sovereign state is in a state of nature with every other sovereign state. This system of international right is based upon viewing the world as a globe, which is to say as an interrelated system that unites all peoples. Kant argues that nature has taken care that man can live everywhere on the earth (even in the harsh polar regions) and, through the mechanism of war, has ensured that men must live everywhere. War drives men apart, populating the globe, but after it has done this, nature also uses war to “[constrain] them to establish more or less legal relationships.”24 War is a means by which the globe is populated, but it also encourages groups of men, spread across the globe, to enter into mutual relationships with one another. In this sense, the world, which is subject to perpetual peace, for Kant, must expand radically beyond the limits of Europe, that is, beyond the limits of the states that would be politically guided by the principles laid out in the Peace of Westphalia. This is what makes Kant’s philosophical treatment of the problem of international right much more extensive and far reaching than the political solutions offered during the Enlightenment. Europe may well be an example, perhaps even an example with a special philosophical status, but for the principles of perpetual peace to work, they must be expanded to the globe, for it is the globe (in both its capacity to disperse peoples and its limited extent, which forces peoples to live together) that makes perpetual peace possible. Any balance or symmetry would happen on a global scale. This normative and canonical vision of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the contemporary world has, however, been convincingly challenged. This challenge has been articulated in at least three distinct forms: first, by negating the claim that the Enlightenment ever really established principles of clear sovereign rights and regulative norms of war, even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; second, by claiming that even if there were such norms in place from the Treaty of Westphalia through to the nineteenth century, the twentieth century saw stark changes in the organization of the international order; and third, by a postcolonial critique that focuses on the split, or asymmetry, within the Enlightenment itself according to which any norms and principles were only ever applied to Europe, and these norms indeed depended upon the persistence of extreme non-­normative colonial violence in the non-­European world. While these three categories of challenges sometimes overlap and vary in

17 Introduction

how determinedly they consign the norms of Enlightenment political order to history, they nevertheless provide a relatively clear way of accounting for how contemporary thinkers question the legacy of Enlightenment in the modern political order. The strongest proponent of the first category is Stephen Krasner, who has famously called the system of sovereignty “organized hypocrisy.”25 He argues that the norms that are associated with the Treaty of Westphalia, especially the idea that sovereignty involves unfettered control of domestic affairs and (in the international arena) mutual recognition between sovereign states of one another’s status as equal sovereign entities, have never been observed. Krasner argues that international relations, even as articulated in the Treaty of Westphalia itself, have always been radically contingent and have been consistently broken whenever it was in the specific interests of actors. For Krasner, this hypocrisy, that states promote certain principles and rules while consistently breaking them, is what is characteristic of the system of sovereignty. It defines how sovereignty functions and is not merely an imperfect practical manifestation of a stable theoretical norm. Importantly, for Krasner, this functioning still allows states to be the primary agents in international relations. As John Agnew argues, Krasner ultimately is “trying to rescue sovereignty for state-­centered purposes” rather than to break the link between states, sovereignty, and territoriality.26 Agnew, in a less polemical challenge to Westphalia but a more determined critique of state sovereignty, sees the Westphalian system as a myth of international relations theory, a discipline he sees as committed to maintaining links between sovereignty and territoriality. His critical geographical approach does not deny the importance of sovereign states, but argues that states have always coexisted with other forms of power that complicate the simple link between sovereignty and the territorial state. For Agnew, then, the issue is not that the contemporary world sees an erosion or relinquishing of sovereignty but that “sovereignty is actually only being redefined in terms of the balance between different agents and their geographical scope.”27 Agnew thus aims to unlink sovereignty from the territorial control of states. Scholars who represent the second kind of questioning of the normative relationship between the Enlightenment and contemporary politics argue that if the Westphalian model did exist (even if only as a philosophical

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18

ideal or as the heaviest weight in a balance with other forms of power), it is no longer relevant for describing either the international order as it now exists or contemporary manifestations of warfare. Carlo Galli, for instance, argues that the contemporary world exists in a decisively new spatiality of sovereignty, one that is no longer dominated by the state form. From Galli’s philosophical perspective, which associates the older idea of a stable international order and rules of war with both Kant and Schmitt, contemporary politics is “much more ‘global’ than it is ‘international,’ and . . . it therefore occurs in a different space—­a space that is neither the dual space of the Cold War nor the plural space of the Sovereign States’ multiplicity in the jus publicum Europaeum.” For Galli, this space is defined by the “residual but tenacious persistence of the State form” and by various international organizations, such as international corporations, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund.28 Galli, like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their influential Empire, sees a new smooth global space that is no longer capable of being controlled by states, even one as powerful as the United States. Globalization, for Galli, performs the “completion of the State’s decline” as the authoritative force that could distinguish peace from war, and the new global war that we now experience is a part of globalization that is no longer controllable by any state.29 Unlike for Krasner and Agnew, who focus on the way in which Enlightenment norms, even in Europe itself, were always compromised (maintained only as organized hypocrisy or always balanced with other non-­state forms of power), for Galli the system of states was once able to order international political space, but its power to do so has been eclipsed by globalization and the production of a global political space. Attending to the problem of drone warfare marks an obvious gap in the above approaches: the role of European colonization in the formation of the doctrine of sovereignty and its persistent effects in the contemporary world. Enlightenment ideas about sovereignty, war, and the relation between states were always marked by a fundamental asymmetry best exemplified in the relationship between Europe and the territories of the New World that it considered open to occupation and colonization. Scholars writing in a postcolonial tradition have long noted the reliance of the doctrines of international law and international relations on fundamentally colonialist notions of state and sovereignty, and it is no coincidence that drone warfare is practiced most ruthlessly in formerly colonized territories.

19 Introduction

As Antony Anghie has argued, the “mechanisms of exclusion” during the period of colonization, whereby it was decided that non-­European states did not have sovereignty in the same way that European nations did, are an “essential part of the sovereignty doctrine” that underlies modern international law.30 Anghie demonstrates that non-­European states during the colonial period were consistently either “expelled from the realm of international law” or granted a “quasi-­sovereignty” that allowed them to “transfer rights, property, and sovereignty” but not to maintain independence from European colonial powers.31 Navid Pourmokhtari similarly argues that “the colonial relation between the Occident and the Orient has informed the development and practice of sovereignty,” in which non-­ Western nations have consistently had their political capacities reduced to “a set of homogeneous deficiencies.” He argues that sovereignty, rather than being a given, becomes a “conditional virtue for non-­Western states.”32 What Anghie and Pourmokhtari claim, then, is that the colonialism of the Enlightenment period was crucial in developing the doctrine and practice of sovereignty and that the legacy of this colonialism remains in the contemporary world order. With a specific focus on the problem of war, Ian Baucom’s account of Enlightenment sovereignty draws a very clear relationship between “the dual regulation of war within the European state system and the legally sanctioned extension/suspension of the law-­of-­war in the juridically ‘free’ and empty ‘beyond the line’ of the Continent’s shores.”33 Baucom thus shows the relationship between the regulation, or balance, of war within Europe and the radical asymmetry between Europe and the colonial world. Through a specific legal doctrine of enmity, Enlightenment legal theorists, he demonstrates, were able to distinguish between European civil society, subject to limitations on war, and the state of nature that existed in the non-­European world, in which legal limits on violence could always be suspended. Baucom, in an argument that draws on Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth, traces a tradition of Enlightenment natural law from Alberico Gentili to Kant in which there is a stark distinction between a just enemy, against whom sovereignty must limit its violence, and an unjust enemy, or inimicus, against whom “the rights of the state are unlimited.”34 This latter form of enmity was used, Baucom argues, in specifically colonial contexts, such as that of the Cape in southern Africa, in order to remove limits on the violence enacted against “ ‘ lawless’ people,” who were

Drone Enlightenment

20

deemed to be fundamental enemies to European civil society and incapable of making treaties to enter that society.35 This tradition of enmity is central to the political thought of Carl Schmitt, as Baucom notes, and also informs Daniel Heller-­Roazen’s discussion of piracy and its relation to the modern inimical figure of the terrorist.36 What drone warfare takes from the Enlightenment is precisely this radical asymmetry between the kinds of violence that can be inflicted on different kinds of enemies and the technological asymmetry that makes such violence possible. More than norms or rights (whether ideal or fictional, hypocritical or outdated), it is the colonial asymmetry central to the Enlightenment that is crucial for understanding contemporary drone warfare. Furthermore, in reanimating the inimical enemy who exists beyond the line of Western norms, drone warfare bases itself on a conflict with an enemy who cannot become a friend. Drone warfare exists, then, in a global order based on a radical asymmetry between states whose power to make, police, and even expand their borders and strengthen their sovereignty is growing hyperbolically and states (especially those subject to drone warfare) that are increasingly subject to a policing of their populations and even a power of life and death exercised by other powers. In this order, the United States is exemplary as a nation that claims more and more unlimited rights to defend or secure itself, even in other sovereign territories, while simultaneously hardening its own borders and attempting to make itself immune to attack. As Stuart Elden argues, for instance, the US war on terror is partly justified by claiming that countries such as Afghanistan had insufficient control over their territorial borders, and their sovereignty was thus treated as contingent or conditional. The link between sovereignty and territoriality in Afghanistan is thus undermined. Meanwhile, the territory of the United States is “rigidly reinforce[ed].” This “forced double standard” is hypocrisy, but it is a hypocrisy made possible by an asymmetry of power between the West and its others.37 What contemporary sovereignty and the contemporary system of states looks like, then, is radically asymmetrical, dependent more upon what Derek Gregory calls uneven geographies than on any single system of international relations or state sovereignty.38 This asymmetry is one legacy of the Enlightenment, a legacy just as important as any ideal or reality concerning the balance of power between equal sovereign states, and it persists even in a supposedly global spatiality of politics.

21

Drone warfare also reinvigorates discussion of the ideologies of self-­ preservation and sovereign immunity, which intellectual historians and philosophers have long seen as central to the political imaginary of the Enlightenment. So much Enlightenment political thought begins its understanding of the political from the psychological and individual factum of a desire for self-­preservation, and this has become a central way of discussing the distinctiveness of the Enlightenment.39 In his Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss, for example, distinguishes modern natural right from classical largely through his claim that in Hobbes there is a perfect or absolute right to self-­preservation that oversets the balance between duties and rights that characterizes classical doctrines of natural right. As Strauss puts it, natural law in Hobbes’s paradigmatic modern conception must be “deduced from the desire of self-­preservation.”40 The desire for self-­preservation is a psychological factum that is elevated to the status of political axiom. Writing around the same time, but from a fundamentally different political orientation from Strauss, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno also see self-­preservation as the fundamental doctrine of the Enlightenment. They locate the doctrine of self-­preservation in Spinoza as well as in Hobbes and argue that it is at the basis of Enlightenment rationality. They contend that it offers, within the system of Enlightenment thought that they characterize as “mak[ing] all affects of equal value,” “the most plausible maxims for action.”41 Self-­preservation as a political axiom is crucial for thinking about drone warfare in part because the most basic ideological justification for the use of drones is as a form of self-­defense that preserves the self from harm. Drone warfare ups the ante of self-­preservation by promising immunity from harm allied to the ability to harm others and, in turn, increasing or hyperbolizing the claims to sovereign immunity of any nation who uses drones. Drone warfare is thus exemplary of the morphing of individual self-­preservation into sovereign, political immunity. This upping of the ante from the psychological motive of self-­preservation to the basis of a political immunity is also, for Roberto Esposito, the fundamental contribution of Enlightenment philosophy to modernity. Esposito makes what he calls the paradigm of immunity, whereby the political body

Introduction

SURVIVAL AND SELF-­PRESERVATION TO IMMUNITY

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introduces “within it[self] a fragment of the same pathogen from which it wants to protect itself,” the central concern of the modern world.42 He reinterprets the problem of sovereignty, especially in Hobbes, as a paradigm of immunity, arguing that for Hobbes life is incapable of preserving itself in a state of nature because the inevitable conflicts it enters into with others make it impossible for it to survive. In order to solve this problem, life has to give up its “acquisitive desire for everything that places itself in the path of a deadly reprisal” and hand over responsibility for the preservation of life to an external agent: sovereignty.43 The power to unreservedly kill has to become a right of the sovereign in order to provide protection or immunity for those who contract with one another. In this sense, modernity, as represented for Esposito by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, becomes identified with the paradigm of immunity. As Esposito also argues, this means that the central concern of modern political philosophy is security. Security becomes the imperative goal of modern politics and moves beyond the mere security of life, into the security of property and liberty, up to the point that political liberty “coincides with” security itself. In terms of political liberty, Esposito argues that in modernity, the immunitary paradigm transfers “its own semantic center of gravity from the sense of ‘privilege’ to that of ‘security.’ ”44 Liberty no longer means the privilege to act, but the security from having one’s autonomy undermined. While Esposito clearly writes at the level of political ontology, it is nevertheless clear that questions of self-­preservation have, in contemporary discourse concerning sovereignty, morphed into questions of security (especially national security). Esposito thus allows us to see the origins in Enlightenment thought of this prevailing concept of security. Drone warfare, based as it is on the ideology of national security, also allows for a radical expansion of the idea of immunity. If in exiting from the state of nature individuals gained security by not having to fight one another because the artificial body of the sovereign kept them apart and intervened in all conflicts, drone warfare makes conflict even between those who are not part of the contracting community remote. Drones immunize, give security, by keeping conflict even with those outside the umbrella of sovereign immunity at a distance, reducing even more hyperbolically (at least in its pure ideological form) any necessity for those within a particular sovereign community to risk life in order to obtain either liberty or security.

23

DRONES AND AUTOIMMUNITY While this description of autoimmunity involves the relation between the liberal subject and the sovereign, who both guarantees the liberty of the subject and threatens to take it away, Jacques Derrida argues that the structure of autoimmunity is also inescapable for democracy itself. As Martin Hagglund has shown, one of Derrida’s clearest examples of this structure is his discussion of the decision in Algeria in 1992 to suspend elections in order to avoid the election of parties specifically hostile to democracy. Hagglund argues that Derrida’s discussion of these elections in Rogues focuses on democracy’s being autoimmune because it is threatened not just by external forces “but also by internal forces that can corrupt its principles.”46 In this sense, democracy finds it necessary to suspend itself in order to save itself and, as Hagglund explains, there is no principle that could decide for us whether this suspension is legitimate, no way to “finally decide whether it is legitimate for democracy to attack or refrain from attacking itself, since either of those strategies may turn against it at any moment.”47 For Derrida, then, autoimmunity is a general structure that is the condition of (im)possibility for democracy itself. It is in this latter context that drone

Introduction

This move toward immunity and security is not without its problems. Esposito notes the necessity in Hobbes’s account of sovereignty that the sovereign, who is charged with protecting the rights of his subjects, necessarily and inevitably retain the right to kill his subjects without, in so doing, committing any injustice. The sovereign’s right of life and death cannot be contested by the subject, precisely because the subject, in contracting with the sovereign, has authorized this right.45 This represents another fundamental asymmetry, this time between sovereign and subject, an asymmetry that definitively replaces the supposed equality of people in the state of nature and their reciprocal right of self-­preservation. The sovereign, in this sense, founds and orders the immunitary paradigm but also undermines it by introducing in the society of immunity a necessary autoimmunity, which means that those subject to immunity are so only on the condition that they remain radically vulnerable to the asymmetrical power of the sovereign.

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warfare is legible. It is a form of warfare that exposes the link between an individual drive toward self-­preservation, which Strauss and Horkheimer and Adorno posit as definitive of Enlightenment political philosophy, with a necessary auto-­immunity. This structure of auto-­immunity comes out in two distinct ways in the details of the practice of US drone warfare: in the way drone warfare, while supposedly eliminating those who are hostile to the US in fact creates even more enmity and enemies of the Unites States; and in the way that drone warfare involves the positing of a right over life and death that, in the very act of positing this right, undermines any just basis for it, any mode by which this power to kill would enter under the umbrella of right. In his interview with Giovanna Borradori in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, which was conducted soon after September 11, 2001, and articulates a philosophical response to those attacks, Derrida outlines several ways in which this event is an example of autoimmunitary structures. Most relevant to drone warfare is the way he discusses the relationship between repression and regeneration. Derrida says of the “perverse effect of the autoimmunitary” that we “know that repression in both its psychoanalytical sense and in its political sense—­whether it be through the military, the police, or the economy—­ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm.” More specifically, he argues that the war on terrorism works “to regenerate, in the short term or long term, the causes of the evil [it] seeks to eradicate.” The bombs, Derrida writes in the era immediately before the drone, will “never be ‘smart’ enough to prevent the victims . . . from responding, either in person or by proxy, with what it will then be easy for them to present as legitimate reprisals or as counterterrorism.”48 In the era of drone warfare, one of the constant critiques of the US drone program, even by supporters of the war on terror, has been that it has become the best recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Indeed, in an open letter to Obama, then CIA director John Brennan, and then defense secretary Ashton Carter, four former drone operators wrote that “you have to prevent [terrorists] from being created.” With the drone program “we validate them, we keep this cycle going.”49 In his Sudden Justice, Chris Woods also details the spiral of repression, retaliation, and revenge that characterized US drone policy in Pakistan. He notes that as the program escalated, it became increasingly clear that many US drone attacks were directly intended as revenge for attacks on US

25 Introduction

operatives.50 What is most dangerous about this cycle, to return to Derrida’s terms, is the way all violence, on both sides, can come to be characterized as “legitimate reprisals.” Self-­preservation and immunity thus tip toward a cycle of autoimmunitary violence. If this is the case with regard to the global context of drone warfare, the autoimmunitary structure also surfaces in the way drone warfare affects questions of domestic sovereignty, especially a supposedly democratic sovereignty. Indeed, one of the most confronting things about drone warfare is the extent to which it returns the old sovereign power over life and death to unaccountable and nontransparent government agencies. This is especially the case with the development of US drone policy under President Barack Obama. In 2012, the media began to document Obama’s Terror Tuesdays. On those days he would meet with a select group of officials, including his counterterrorism adviser and later CIA director John Brennan, to decide which of a list of suspected terrorists could be killed or captured. As Amy Davidson Sorkin put it in the New Yorker, White House officials presented this as “a matter of taking responsibility” for the extrajudicial killings carried out, often by drones, in foreign territories with which the United States was not officially at war. However, as Davidson Sorkin argues, “responsibility involves accountability,” and for these decisions over life and death there was no accountability to Congress, to the American people, or to the governments of the countries in which strikes took place. Obama, Davidson Sorkin writes, “has not taken on a burden, but given the Presidency a novel new power.”51 This unconditional power, designed to protect US democratic sovereignty, also immediately undoes, in an autoimmune fashion, the norms of democratic transparency. The unconditional power of life over death has been concentrated in the Executive Office of the President, and the arrogation of this power threatens the very legitimacy of democratic sovereignty itself. The case of Anwar al-­Awlaki pushes this to the extreme by demonstrating that this power is not confined to foreign nationals deemed to be enemy combatants but is also held over American citizens. Al-­Awlaki was a radical Muslim cleric accused of being a chief propogandist for Al-Qaeda. His teachings were the inspiration behind several terrorist plots, including the Fort Hood massacre. He was located in Yemen and killed by drone strike in 2011. His killing followed some hand-­wringing within the White House about the right of American citizens to due process under the Fifth Amendment.

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However, as Jo Becker and Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times, the Justice Department “prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step [killing al-­Awlaki], asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”52 Even due process, then, is concentrated within the executive branch, and perhaps even within the internal moral deliberations of the president. It is remarkable and significant that in this case the president’s moral deliberations would be neither private nor public. They are not merely examinations of a private conscience because of their public consequences, but because they remain inscrutable and unchallengeable, nor are they public. The kinds of checks and balances usually associated with democratic process (such as congressional oversight or the right to a trial) are replaced with a sovereign who has the right to decide on the morality of killing. In order to preserve the community, the presidency takes on a power that allows it to kill members of that community, a strikingly Hobbesian feature of a supposedly liberal regime and a clear example of the autoimmunity of democracy. This unaccountability of the EOP with regard to the right to kill is merged with a lack of accountability in terms of going to war. This goes not only for the way in which drones ignore territorial boundaries and the sovereignty of certain other nations but also for the way in which the US administration justifies its acts of war. Analyzing four speeches from members of Obama’s cabinet, Hugh Gusterson argues that the Obama administration justified drone strikes on the basis of a right nations have “to use force to protect themselves and that they can act without international agreement against ‘imminent’ threats or in self-­defense.”53 Furthermore, all four officials, says Gusterson, argue that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) gives the administration the authority to use drone strikes without congressional approval or oversight. This stretching of the AUMF to a global and, it seems, temporally unlimited extent makes war a prerogative of an unaccountable sovereign power. Like the decision over who gets killed, the decision to go to war is in the hands of an unconditional sovereignty that decides on its own right to self-­defense or decides on the imminence of a threat without this decision being conditioned by any process, check, or balance. The security of US democracy is thus based on a fundamentally undemocratic and asymmetrical engagement both with the rest of the world and with US citizens. In the way that

27

ENLIGHTENMENT AND ASYMMETRY The autoimmunity characteristic of drone warfare means not only that there is an asymmetry between the Western powers who wage drone warfare and those territories subject to it but that it threatens Western liberal democracy itself, from the inside, by creating an asymmetry between an unaccountable executive power that orders drone strikes and the supposedly democratic populace in whose name they are ordered. Focusing on the asymmetry of drone warfare and thinking simultaneously about how it relates to the norms and ideals of the Enlightenment allows us to see that despite its concerns with balance, order, and equality, the Enlightenment itself was already subject to an asymmetrical split between a liberal conception of politics, war, and international relations, which aimed toward peace, stability, and moral rights; and a more violent practice and conception of politics, in which sovereignty is hyperbolically violent, territorial control is exercised at a distance from centers of power, and individuals are treated as moveable bodies rather than as moral persons. This latter version of the Enlightenment is both Hobbesian and colonialist, and drone warfare lets us see that this aspect of Enlightenment has always existed alongside its more liberal sibling. Indeed, the very fact that US drone warfare was accelerated and codified under a liberal administration shows that these two sides are closely related and codependent, not mere competing opposites. Asymmetry, then, names two orders that are heterogeneous (in the sense that they cannot be linked together under one larger form of measurement or evaluation) and codependent. There is no greater order that could synthesize the liberal Enlightenment with its violent and asymmetrical part, nor is there any way to think a liberal Enlightenment without attending to its asymmetrical violence. This book, then, does not merely seek to understand drone warfare in the terms of the Enlightenment, but to understand Enlightenment in terms of drone warfare. Drone warfare is a creature of Enlightenment thought,

Introduction

drone warfare is justified, in the way it selects its targets, and even in its (in)effectivity in preventing the terrorism it is supposed to combat, it is an autoimmune process that attacks the very democracy it is supposed to defend.

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a virtuality within Enlightenment itself. If this is true, it means that to grapple with the legacy of the Enlightenment is to grapple with remote assassination, with virtual control of territory, and with a potentially limitless warfare. Furthermore, it is to grapple with specific kinds of asymmetry. Three forms of asymmetry will continue to be important throughout this book. The first is the relationship between a sovereign who has the power of life and death and an enemy who could never become a friend and is thus permanently subject to deadly violence. The second is the asymmetry between the sovereign territoriality of Western powers, which increasingly tighten their own borders, and those places subject to drone warfare whose territory is always subject to violent and deadly incursion. The third is the radical asymmetry between the merely territorial sovereignty of most nations and the aerial sovereignty of those who practice drone warfare. Aerial sovereignty, which makes sovereignty over airspace not contiguous with the sovereign territory possible, allows for a remote occupation that gives those prosecuting drone warfare power over territory and those who live in it, without taking any responsibility for it. These three asymmetries are central to the phenomenon of drone warfare. In the epilogue I argue that they are allied to a rapid acceleration of the process of mediation in drone warfare, which is so much faster than the mediation of the public sphere that it introduces a radical asymmetry between mediation and publicity. In this sense, one more consequence of drone warfare is to weaken and even disable the public sphere, making debate and dissent lag decisively behind the action of killing.

1 SOVEREIGN (IR)RESPONSIBILITY

In the middle of 2012 , a Tumblr account called Texts from Hillary appeared, featuring what one Twitter user called “disturbingly fawning” memes about the then secretary of state.1 The memes capitalized on Clinton’s public image of wit and sassiness, presenting her as a no-­nonsense liberal culture hero. The Tumblr page is still available and comes across as just as fawning as ever.2 Not long after this, a Tumblr account called Texts from Drone appeared. Using many of the images from the Hillary memes, this account was anything but fawning. It presented Clinton, Joe Biden, and then President Obama in a series of text conversations with a Predator drone as the drone went about its murderous, destructive business. This Tumblr is no longer available. In one of the memes, President Obama leans casually back on a couch and texts “What’s up?” to the drone (named D-Ron). D-Ron replies, “Anyone ‘due’ for some ‘process’?” This simple exchange crystalizes some of the most important themes in the problematic of drone warfare. The drone, and not Obama, is the one who suggests or encourages Obama to send it on a strike, as if it is technology rather than humans who are the agents of drone warfare. Obama’s relaxed posture (he is in shirtsleeves) also indicates the seeming ease with which the United States

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Memes from the Tumblr page Texts from Drone (clockwise from top left): April 15, 2012; April 16, 2012; April 17, 2012, submitted by @ohtarzie; April 17, 2012

is able to engage in deadly conflict in foreign territories. These are decisions taken without any public debate and with very little hand-­wringing. Indeed, this simplified scene is a reimagining of Obama’s Terror Tuesday meetings, in which the president would meet with representatives of various security agencies to mull over their lists of terror suspects and decide

31 Sov er eign (Ir)r e sponsibil i t y

who on the lists could be assassinated. The meme replaces the official image of a morally serious group of adults working to maintain national security with a casual Obama being prompted to order killings by the machine itself. Moreover, D-Ron seems acutely aware of the fact that drone warfare makes a mockery of the liberal norms of the US Constitution. Placing due process in scare quotes is a succinct way of putting Attorney General Eric Holder’s specious and disingenuous legal argument that American citizens targeted by drones are entitled to “due process” but not “judicial process.”3 As this meme indicates, a due process, but not a judicial one, could be a casual text conversation in which a death is decided upon by a president in shirtsleeves leaning back on a couch. In this sense, the meme demonstrates the problematics of responsibility and agency, the increased ease of making war, and the hollowing out of the norms of law in favor of an undefined and potentially casual decision-­making process. While this series of memes is hardly the most potent of the various forms of anti-­drone protest in the United States, it is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it registers in a quite precise way the anxiety about responsibility when it comes to drone strikes. By giving the drone a life and a personality of its own, these memes suggest a killing machine out of the control of its masters. It gives us the image of the sovereign power over life and death being exercised mechanically, without competent oversight and with considerable pleasure. Drone strikes, in these memes, seem barely controlled by the norms of intentional agency, with overenthusiasm, joy, accident, and miscommunication taking the place of considered, rational decision making. Furthermore, Obama and Clinton are the main human protagonists, and even when Obama does not appear, it is clear that the drone is acting with (or without) regard to his orders. In this sense, the memes produce a zone in which Obama’s responsibility for drone strikes is portrayed as a fundamental irresponsibility, not so much in the sense that he acts without due consideration but in the sense that even when he does act with due consideration the president is not responsible—­not accountable—­for his actions. The drone in the memes takes responsibility from its masters not because of what it presents at face value, that is, a terminator-­like nightmare scenario in which it is self-­aware and killing its own targets. Instead, this nightmare scenario is merely a screen for the more mundane bad dream represented by drone warfare in which the

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sovereign decision over life and death occurs fundamentally outside a zone of responsibility. Indeed, the threat represented by drones is neither technological nor ethical, but political.4 To properly understand this, it is worth looking backward to one of the early Enlightenment’s strongest statements of the theory of sovereignty, that of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes’s Leviathan outlines a theory of sovereignty in which an indivisible sovereign power founds and guarantees the field of the political. This sovereign power is at once the ultimate judge in all causes and the ultimate bearer of injuries. As such, the sovereign is also the locus of responsibility, the one who is held responsible for any moral decision. However, while the sovereign may be the locus of responsibility, it remains unaccountable to any person. As Hobbes puts it, it would be repugnant to any system of sovereignty to hold a sovereign accountable to any law, as that would merely be to set up another sovereignty above that of the sovereign. Or as Derrida puts it, any pure sovereignty would have to be fundamentally irresponsible, deaf to the call of responsibility, because it can never be held accountable without losing something of sovereignty. To subject sovereignty to “rules, to a code of law” undermines its indivisibility because this is “to divide it, to subject it to partitioning, to participation, to being shared.”5 This is one of the paradoxes of drone warfare that this chapter explores in order to demonstrate the new form of political technology that it represents. The drone is a political technology because drone warfare functions through the enmeshing of political processes and the technological potentialities of the killer drones. Drones carry out a war that does not conform to the norms of democratic accountability but produces a direct link between the means of violence and a political power that is sovereign because unrestrained, unaccountable, and fundamentally (ir)responsible. The problems drone warfare poses are not solvable or fully thinkable from within the realm of technics, nor from a narrow perspective that would have us think about, for instance, the ethics of drone warfare. Better technology, or better guidelines for the use of this technology, will not make drone warfare just, humane, or legitimate. Instead, it is necessary to think how drone warfare is integrated into a political system that is designed to reduce moral and political accountability and that operates within specifically neoimperialist contexts. The political technology of the drone is

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the system that allows for, normalizes, and even legitimizes remote-­control killing while at the same time making it seem like the best, most efficient, even most moral way of entering into supposedly necessary armed conflicts. To counter this, we need to think not from within the bounds of the technology only but from a perspective that includes the way that technology is integrated into a political system and a practice of war and sovereignty. This perspective must recognize that drone warfare is specifically political because it claims a sovereign right over life and death that bypasses many of the norms that insulate the subject from this unconditioned sovereign violence. Both in Hobbes’s philosophy and in the phenomenon of drone warfare this political problem must be directly related to questions of moral philosophy. In this context, another aspect of Hobbes’s thought that is incredibly pertinent to the phenomenon of drone warfare is his moral determinism. Put briefly, this is Hobbes’s contention that our sense that our actions are motivated by a self-­conscious intentionality is merely wrong. We have no free will to choose but are instead motivated by a network of external causes (for this reason Hobbes’s position is sometimes called externalist) that impel us to direct ourselves in certain ways. On Hobbes’s account, humans are more like automatons or rats in mazes, pushed about by things external to us, than intentional moral agents. Just as the problem of sovereignty needs to be critically articulated with the phenomenon of the drone, this form of moral determinism seems to perfectly describe a world in which no one seems to have quite made (and would thus be morally responsible for) the intentional decision to kill an anonymous person by remote control half a world away. While recent criticism has sometimes embraced this kind of moral determinism as a way of exiting the liberal politics of responsibility and releasing the hold the form of the liberal subject has on moral thought, it is essential that this form of deterministic or externalist morality is carefully articulated (as it sometimes is not) with Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty. Hobbes’s deterministic moral philosophy is inseparable from his theory of an unaccountable and (ir)responsible sovereign power. A second problem this chapter explores, then, is how the phenomenon of the drone allows us to see the link between moral and political philosophy, how the problem of responsibility must always be thought as a problem of sovereignty. All these problems come up in the Texts from Drone series of memes.

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While this chapter explores the link between sovereignty (or the realm of the political) and moral philosophy with regard to the philosophies of both Hobbes and John Locke, it is Hobbes who is the central and crucial figure here. More than any other political philosopher, Hobbes argued for the necessity of a sovereign exception to the rule of law. This kind of claim has, since the very moment Hobbes pronounced it, been anathema to more liberal accounts of the political. Hobbes’s account of a sovereign who must maintain himself above the laws, however, has consistently resurfaced as a bugbear for liberal accounts of political organization. One of the strongest instances of this liberal ideology is the belief in the balance of powers between the judiciary, Congress, and the executive supposedly enshrined in the US Constitution. Each branch of government is supposed to be a check on the others, introducing accountability and responsibility throughout the system. If, in some ways, the creation of this system was Enlightenment liberalism’s great rebuke to Hobbes, the drone is his revenge. Drone warfare is a scandal to any claim that the powers of the executive are limited by either the judicial branch or Congress. Decisions on drone strikes in territories with which the United States is not at war, and sometimes against US citizens, are taken without the knowledge of Congress and at the behest of a president who is not and cannot be held responsible for extrajudicial assassinations. In this sense, the return of an exceptional and (ir)responsible sovereign right in the midst of a liberal constitution shows the persistence of Hobbesian political philosophy. Even more importantly, however, the liberal concept of a morality based on the free moral choice of the individual, which is witheringly critiqued by Hobbes’s moral determinism, is also, simultaneously with liberal political theory, eviscerated by the phenomenon of drone warfare. The last bastion of accountability in drone warfare seems to be nothing more than the moral conscience of the president in his shirtsleeves, as if somehow this private morality would be adequate to the political sphere for which he is supposed to be responsible. Drone warfare, we will see, shows precisely that this form of private, individual liberal morality is never adequate to the political, that liberal moral philosophy and liberal political theory are both paper tigers in the face of remote killing. Hobbes is important, then, as it is his version of the Enlightenment that emerges triumphant in the world of drone warfare, and any attempt to critique his account of sovereignty must begin from principles other than a starkly inadequate liberalism.

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Texts from Drone demonstrates the inability of liberal morality or a liberal political organization to work against the neocolonialist form of remote killing that is drone warfare. Indeed, these memes show that drone warfare is, precisely, a creature of liberalism. Texts from Drone demonstrates this in an interesting way. On the one hand, the memes outline the horror of a world in which a text message can unleash the full violence of sovereign power on a territory and its subjects. These subjects, indeed, are not granted even the minimal autonomy necessary to warrant a standard, diplomatic declaration of war or the procedures of criminal justice. On the other hand, and at the same time, the memes endow the drone who (or is it that?) performs these acts of sovereign violence with an all-­too-­human agency, including a pleasure in killing and a will that is not quite controllable by its texting masters. For instance, in one meme the drone replies to a text from Obama that inquires, “what’chu doin?” by saying, “nuttin much lmao jus blowin up kids for America.” In another, the drone is pictured flying through the air singing the lyrics to Far East Movement’s song “Fly like a G6,” while Clinton texts, “D-ron, are you even listening to me?” In both these examples, the drone has its own agency, and those who theoretically control it are merely playing catch-­up. Significantly, though, the meme is not concerned with how the drone might escape the control of those who are actually guiding it (namely, the drone pilots). It is concerned instead with the role of those who enact and carry out drone policy. The worry, here, is not that weapons technology will overtake human control, that intelligent machines will challenge human autonomy. This is a problem that some drone activists are dealing with, especially when it comes to the idea that a machine may decide who to kill and when.6 The concern is instead about the political technology of drone warfare, about how the technical capabilities of the drone enter into systems of sovereignty. Texts from Drone makes two related political statements. First, it critiques the violence of the neoliberal state. Second, it destroys the fantasy of there being a classical liberal subject who could be held responsible for the actions of neocolonial violence the memes represent. Giving the drone in the meme agency both enacts and critiques this fantasy, as it fulfils the wish to have someone, even a sentient machine, who would be responsible for the strikes. The series of memes involves a radical critique of a US

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TEXTS FROM DRONE

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foreign policy in which people in certain territories are classed as “unprivileged enemy belligerents” and in which the mode of dealing with them is either indefinite detention or drone strike. Indeed, one meme has the drone complaining to Clinton about the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which included provisions for indefinite detention. It texts, “Hey Hill, wtf is w this NDAA BS? Indefinite *detention*?” She replies, “CHILL, D-RON. There R enuf unprivileged enemy belligerents 2 go arnd.” Another has Obama texting the drone, “yo I gotta be the smiley face for empire can u handle this?” The drone replies “HYFR.” This latter meme especially makes the point that drone warfare is a technology specific to the liberal or neoliberal state. This abandonment of agency and responsibility to political and military technology is not the nightmare of totalitarianism but the reality of liberalism. This leftist antiliberal claim is amplified by the memes’ parodic attempt to create the fantasy of a responsible subject. Texts from Drone shows the useless desperation in trying to maintain the fiction of subjective agency and responsibility in a world in which the mechanization and automation of killing seems to have evacuated the ideology of the subject that makes the liberal state possible. In other words, it is precisely the liberal subject, who is in some sense defined by their accountability for their own actions, that is threatened by the political technology of the drone. It is in the name of this responsibility or accountability that Texts from Drone seems to critique the policy and practice of drone bombing, at the same time that the series of memes demonstrates that it is precisely liberalism (and its fantasy of a responsible subject) that is the problem here. This is the other reason why it is not really Clinton and Obama who seem in control in the memes, but the drone itself. The fantasy that is both parodically enacted and undone here is to make the drone a responsible agent, to maintain the fiction of personal responsibility in a situation in which the limits of agency are stretched so far that it no longer seems possible to know whom to blame should a drone (or its pilot) confess, as happens in one of the memes, to “accidentally” having “collateralled a couple of tweens oops lmao.” Indeed, the concept of collateral damage is designed specifically to blur the line between accident and intention. Giorgio Agamben has traced the concept of collateral damage as far back as the ancient world and shown it to be operative in medieval distinctions between specific and general

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providence. Modern governmentality, he argues, derives from these medieval theological discussions, and its primary procedure is the management and calculation of collateral damages. He writes that “every act of government aims at a primary target, yet, precisely for this reason, it can lead to ‘collateral damages’ which can be expected or unexpected in their specifics, but are in any case taken for granted.” For Agamben, then, “the computation of collateral effects is . . . an inherent part of the logic of government.” 7 The paradigm of the act of government in its pure form, he argues, is “the collateral effect,” and the act of government “represents an area of undecidability between what is calculated and what is not wanted.”8 Collateral damage thus names this zone of undecidability between the calculated and the not wanted. It is something that can not quite be called unwanted because any calculated act of government will produce it. It is within the calculated results of any act, but outside the direct intention of the act. While Agamben’s genealogy is typically long, the more recent history of collateral damage is directly related to modern aerial warfare. It does take advantage, however, of this same zone of undecidability between calculation and intention that is described by Agamben. The phrase seems to have entered common discourse with specific relation to aerial bombing. While it was certainly current before the late 1990s, public discussion of the NATO bombings of Serbia saw consistent reference to collateral damage, so much so that a German linguistic association called it the ugliest word of the year 1999.9 Collateral damage is a particularly insidious concept precisely because, as Eyal Weizman argues, following Agamben’s analysis of the philosophical and theological background to this concept, collateral effects in military contexts “are structural rather than accidental.”10 Bruce Cronin puts this slightly differently when he says that “collateral damage becomes a calculated strategy” of Western militaries.11 Indeed, Cronin argues that collateral damage is “an inevitable outcome” of what he calls the “Western method of warfare.”12 Collateral damage invents a line between the intended and the foreseeable consequences of an action that allows those ordering aerial bombardments to claim that certain damage in a given strike is intentional (destroying a military base), while other damage (destroying the school next door) is only foreseeable. That the latter damage is foreseeable but not intentional makes the strike fall within the legal bounds of warfare. Cronin argues that Western militaries use collateral

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damage to take advantage of a gray area in the law of war in order to strike a wider range of targets, and this gray area is produced precisely by the distinction between intended and foreseeable consequences.13 Neta Crawford, in a similar vein, writes that “many episodes of collateral damage are foreseeable, foreseen, and preventable, albeit strictly legal.”14 One feature of the distinction between the foreseeable and the intended is its attempt to preserve a certain language of morality, that of intentionality. Beyond its attempt to make more strikes fall within the laws of war, this concept also makes these strikes seem within the bounds of conventional morality because it maintains a purity of intention behind a strike despite the messy consequences that follow it. The messiness of these consequences is nicely captured by the name of the computer program used by the military to calculate risk to civilian lives in any particular air-­strike: BugSplat.15 While this terminology has been phased out, it appears that some drone pilots still refer to the zone of destruction around an intended target as bugsplat. It is not that people standing in that zone are intentionally killed (in the sense that the target of a missile is), but neither is any harm that comes to them accidental. It is part of the structural calculation of a strike. For Cronin, this method of warfare (which is characteristic of air warfare and not restricted to that carried out by drone), while legal, demonstrates “a reckless disregard for the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions.”16 A similar kind of calculus was practiced during the Iraq invasion, when the military came up with a complex calculation of how many civilians might be killed in any particular airstrike. If it was considered that fewer than thirty would be killed, the strike could proceed without any top-­level approval. More than that, and it would need to be approved by the secretary of defense.17 This moral calculus makes civilian casualties part of an intentional moral calculation and yet strips the value of each individual civilian life as long as the total number of lives does not exceed twenty-­nine. This kind of moral calculus uses the language of a liberal moral intentionality, but in such a way that it undercuts any possible moral agency or responsibility. Narrowing intentionality to include only directly intended harm absolves in advance those who make decisions about targeting from any responsibility for the lives taken in the bugsplat zone, the zone between intention and accident.18 While this kind of moral calculus is also

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present in conventional warfare, in drone warfare it is the central mode of operation. Every strike is at once a targeted and specific strategic act (which the military propagandizes as surgically precise) and a controlled accident, or bugsplat. Drone warfare is thus represented as the most responsible form of warfare, in which everything can be controlled by an intentional agent and their supplemental computer program. However, it is so only because the blurring between accident and intention in something like bugsplat makes the lives taken or injuries inflicted in the zone between accident and intention not subject to responsibility. Bugsplat (and collateral damage more generally) defines a zone in which there are lives and bodies for which one does not have to be responsible, and it is for this reason that the drone can appear as or be propagandized as morally responsible. While conforming to the traditional liberal language of moral intentionality, the structure of drone warfare works to remove moral responsibility.19 In a different way, the US government’s official policy of counting all males of military age as enemy combatants, unless they are posthumously proven to be civilians, means that the line between accidentally killed civilians and deliberately killed enemy combatants is even harder to police. This is especially the case, as Woods demonstrates, when American military personnel interpret the category of military-­aged male quite differently, with some operatives believing that children as young as seven could be classified as adolescents, and thus as “military aged males.”20 From collateral damage to the fragile line between innocent civilian and enemy combatant, then, the line between a morally accountable, intentional act of killing and an accident is increasingly fuzzy. In this context, Texts from Drone demonstrates how comforting it would be to return to an idea of personal agency in the age of the machine. It fulfils a wish to be able to hold someone or something responsible for an action that seems to be spread out in a network of causes, human and mechanical, that makes agency difficult to pinpoint. This kind of insulation against responsibility is something that most troubles those writers and activists who have been protesting the use of drones. Writers like Medea Benjamin and Gregoire Chamayou describe scenarios in which a complex chain of communications, running through a technological interface that is not always entirely reliable, makes it difficult to pinpoint who may have made particular decisions, and with what information.21 Chamayou argues

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that once robots are considered agents, there can be “no simple attribution of responsibility”; there is instead a “headless network of multiple agents” in which responsibility “tends to become diluted.” For instance, the “kill chain,” the series of people responsible for authorizing and using deadly force, includes pilots, data analysts, mission commanders, ground troops, generals, and the president, plus all the technological interfaces necessary to keep these parties in communication with one another. What might have been assessed as a war crime, argues Chamayou, gets reassessed as a “military-­industrial accident.”22 This overload of information processed through technology was central to an investigation into a drone strike in Afghanistan that mistakenly killed a caravan of civilians. A 2011 report in the Los Angeles Times made this one of the few cases concerning the deaths of civilians in drone strikes of which the American public was made aware. The incident involved drone pilots misrecognizing children as adults and benign objects as weapons. The response of the US Army and Air Force investigations was, in part, to recognize that “an abundance of surveillance information can lead to misplaced confidence in the ability to tell friend from foe. ‘Technology can occasionally give you a false sense of security that you can see everything, that you can hear everything, that you know everything,’ said Air Force Major Gen. James O. Poss, who oversaw the Air Force investigation. ‘I really do think we have learned from this.’ ”23 As Hugh Gusterson notes, Poss’s phrasing “suggests that technology itself might be to blame.”24 In this sense, it is the technology that inhibits decision making that is the problem, not the people who make the decisions. Built into the practice of drone strikes, then, is a diffusion of responsibility and accountability, so that the idea of there being an intentional moral agent in charge of the drones is as distant as if the drones were truly autonomous. There are so many agencies in the drone network that there is no intentional moral agent. One can see the parodic power of Texts from Drone’s personification of the drone and its granting it the kind of (im)moral agency that is structurally lacking in the procedural technology of drone strikes. This personification is, of course, the joke of the memes, and their insistent claim is that it is the drones’ masters (Obama and Clinton) who need to be held responsible for its actions. What I want to explore in the rest of this chapter is the paradox that requiring of an unregulated sovereign power the norms of liberal

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HOBBES AND LOCKE ON RESPONSIBILITY How modern state sovereignty relates to the norms of liberal moral responsibility is one of the central questions of Enlightenment moral and political philosophers. An illuminating way to approach this problem is by comparing the moral philosophies of Hobbes and John Locke. To see why this is a productive move, and how these thinkers can help us understand the world of the drone, it is worth beginning at Locke’s famous definition of personal identity in An Essay concerning Human Understanding. There Locke aims to define how personal identity, or the self, can persist through changes in material substance. To do so, Locke annexes the idea of the person to a consciousness of actions performed. We are the same person as the one who performed actions yesterday because today we are conscious of having performed those actions. What is remarkable about Locke’s analysis of personal identity is the extent to which it is juridical. The person, he remarks, “is a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law.”25 A person, as distinct from the idea of a man or a human being, is a legal entity, and, Locke insists, it is the person who is always accountable for their actions and susceptible to reward and punishment. The person, then, is a legal identity based on

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responsibility leads us to the same impasse as does the diffusion of responsibility in the procedure and technological matrix of drone strikes. On the one hand, in concentrating responsibility in a president whose powers are unchecked in terms of the authorization of lethal drone strikes, we enter a zone in which responsibility and irresponsibility become indistinguishable and in which we reach the functional limit of the responsible liberal subject and the liberal concept of responsibility. On the other hand, any attempt to think of responsibility and agency as diffused throughout a network rather than concentrated in individual actors ignores the problem of sovereignty and leaves sovereign power unaccountable and (ir)responsible. This is, as I demonstrate later in this chapter, the case with the work of Bruno Latour and others who work with actor network theory (ANT). The drone is thus a blind spot that exists at the juncture of the moral and the political.

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a present self-­consciousness of past actions. The same person is the same person because they remember and feel what they did as their own actions and can be held accountable for them. Even at this point we can see a tension between this juridical concept of the person and drone warfare. One characteristic of the action of the drone is that no one feels quite conscious of having performed it. As Chamayou puts it, for the drone pilot, “the filtered nature of perception, the figurative reduction of the enemy [to a blur without a face], the non-­reciprocity of the fields of perception [the enemy does not see you] . . . are all factors that . . . produce a strong ‘moral buffering’ effect.”26 Thus, one thing the technology of the drone introduces is a gap between the commission of an action and the moral consciousness of having committed it.27 Locke, indeed, is keen to reconcile his claim that the present consciousness of past actions is what defines a person with juridical practice. He takes as an example those strange cases in which someone is punished for something they may not have been conscious of doing, despite others’ insisting that they had. This would be the case if one committed a crime while too drunk to remember, or while sleepwalking. Locke argues that such cases are perfectly consistent with his annexation of consciousness of past actions to personhood because the laws punish these actions “with a Justice suitable to their way of Knowledge” (344). The law can prove the fact that a man did something, but it can never prove or disprove with certainty whether the person before the law is conscious of the fact. For Locke, our very sense of self is entirely wrapped up with our accountability, even legal accountability, for our actions. The self is juridical. For Locke, that the self must be accountable for its actions makes it subject to a system of reward or punishment, or the application of pleasure and pain. It is important to Locke’s argument that a person is conscious of, and thus “concerned and accountable” for, any actions that may be attributed to them because it is precisely these actions that may impact a person’s happiness or misery (346). To have a self, he argues, is to desire happiness for that self. Locke thus deems it essential that we are only to be held accountable for actions of which we are conscious, for “to receive Pleasure or Pain; i.e. Reward or Punishment, on the account of [a past action we had no consciousness of] is all one, as to be made happy or miserable in its first being, without any demerit at all” (346–­47). Locke is insistent

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that our happiness or unhappiness be related to our actions, such that we are rewarded for or pleased by good actions and punished for and hurt by bad ones. While this seems, in many ways, an obvious and conventional moral statement linking our actions to consequences for our selves, it in fact makes a particular claim. Subjects, Locke implies, have a responsibility for their own actions, but this responsibility is precisely limited by their consciousness of having committed them. We need to be held responsible, but only insofar as we are conscious of what we have done and, more interestingly, of the effects (good or bad) of what we have done. We cannot be held responsible for accidental or unforeseeable consequences of our actions, but only for ones we could or should have been conscious of. This is, as Sandra Macpherson has shown, a theory of limited responsibility, or more legalistically, limited liability.28 If this is the basis of liberal moral subjectivity, and of the liberal juridical subject, it is not the only position to come out of the late seventeenth century. Hobbes’s account of moral responsibility differs starkly from Locke’s, and it places emphasis not on the self-­conscious subject but on the chain of material causes that produces any action. Hobbes’s subjects are thus enmeshed in a chain of cause and effect. In this system, punishment and reward, rather than being doled out to self-­conscious subjects who are intentional actors, are used as links in the chain of cause and effect to alter the desires and aversions of embodied actors. Hobbes thus provides an alternative to the liberal concept of agency by producing a system in which intention is not the center of a chain of cause and effect. This kind of reading of cause and effect has been used by theorists such as Bruno Latour and Katherine Hayles to discuss the ways in which nonhuman actors can be agents in and responsible for actions. While Hayles and Latour either ignore or disavow the Hobbesian provenance of this kind of approach to moral causality, in this section I demonstrate the necessity of linking Hobbes’s deterministic and mechanistic moral philosophy with his political philosophy. As Jonathan Kramnick has demonstrated, following other readers of Hobbes, Hobbes holds to an externalist or determinist account of cause and consequence.29 This is to say, he argues that our own will or intention is not independent of external causes but rather entirely dependent upon them. We have no free will. Indeed, for Hobbes freedom and will

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form two different categories, and to yoke them together is simply a category mistake. Freedom refers only to our capacity to physically do that which we attempt to do, not to our intentions or desires, which are neither free nor unfree. If this seems abstract, it becomes clearer when we consider how Hobbes sets out systems of reward and punishment. Hobbes writes that “the use of Lawes . . . is not to bind the people from all voluntary actions; but to direct and keep them in such a motion, as not to hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashnesse, or indiscretion; as Hedges are set, not to stop Travellers, but to keep them in the way.”30 The laws do not bear on our will in the sense that they ask us to restrain our will to do harmful things. Instead, they set up an external system of rewards and punishments that guides our desires and passions in unharmful or beneficial directions. As Leopold Damrosch puts it, “Punitive laws can operate among the causes that influence [subjects] to abstain from crime.”31 The certain punishments set out by the law—­a nd they must be both swift and certain—­direct our passions away from the actions that would incur them. An example might clarify this. For Hobbes, unlike other conventional moralists of his own time (or ours), it is not that we need to suppress a want to do the wrong thing, such as stealing. Conventional moralists might formulate a series of reasons why stealing is wrong: it deprives others of the fruits of their labor; it destroys the foundations of property and civil society. For these reasons, we should stifle our desire to steal. Hobbes instead wants to redirect our passions so that the want to steal is replaced by a desire not to. For instance, laws make it not worth the risk because stealing will lead to a punishment worse than what we would gain by it. This is why punishment must be swift and certain. If we think we can get away with it, or if the punishment is not directly tied to the crime, space opens up for the desire to steal. For Hobbes, people are like those rats in mazes who don’t eat the food because they will get shocked, or who find their way out of the maze because bumping into the walls is painful or annoying. Hobbes thus thinks of people as perpetually in motion, and the laws as so many external causes (to be joined with other external causes, as well as with internal causes like our affections and passions) that guide our motions.32 The consciousness of the subject is thus not central to reward and punishment but merely one link in a chain of causes that will propel

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our bodies toward one action or another. For this reason, Hobbes says, every subject “ought by mediation of the Law, to rectifie the irregularity of his Passions continually” (210). The law thus guides the passions by changing the stakes of every action, making it more dangerous to murder an enemy than to let them live. Subjects, in the Hobbesian system, are punished (or sometimes rewarded) not on account of their durational self-­ consciousness but because they are moving bodies who participate in a long chain of cause and effect. The relation of cause and effect in Hobbes is a diffuse net. Laws (and various other things external to us) cause our passions, which guide or determine our actions, which produce other causes and consequences both for us and for the world at large. If we are to trace from effect back to cause in this system, we do not stop at the mind or consciousness of a person, but look further back at what caused a person to have a certain consciousness or state of mind. As Kramnick argues, “Hobbes . . . elaborates a concept of cause that binds atoms to thoughts to persons to kings to God. On this view, actions don’t so much begin with agents as fall backwards along a continuous web.”33 This produces a deterministic universe in which human intentions are largely irrelevant. As Damrosch puts it, “Once the chain of causation has been set underway . . . it must continue to unroll with implacable efficiency.” Conscious subjects are no longer the site of agency or responsibility, and it is bodies in motion, rather than persons, that are subject to both reward and punishment. To trace cause and effect is to say that everyone acts “under the influence of causes, and so on in infinite regress.”34 In some ways, this account of responsibility seems perfectly apt to deal with the kind of mechanistic warfare carried out by drones. Hayles argues that we need a concept of responsibility that removes the emphasis from the free will of human subjects and locates agency and responsibility instead in a network of human, mechanical, and social processes. In doing so, Hayles, like other theorists of technology, follows Latour’s concept of actor network theory, which argues for a distribution of agency that includes both human and nonhuman elements. Hayles argues that technical artifacts like seatbelts, hydraulic door closers, or Fitbits can “encourage moral behavior.” 35 Like the laws for Hobbes, these external things produce moral behavior rather than an internal moral intention. The chain of causes that guides human behavior is no longer centered in a durational

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self-consciousness of the Lockean liberal model but is instead spread out in a diffuse network in which things and humans form part of a single chain of cause and effect. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how actor network theory, as a significant new manner of thinking about cause, effect, and responsibility, relates to the kind of theory of sovereignty found in Hobbes. I want to emphasize the importance of returning to Hobbes as a way of understanding more fully than is possible through ANT the importance of the concept of sovereignty to sociological models of causality. On the one hand, it is relatively clear that Hobbes’s externalism is a clear ancestor for a form of thought such as ANT, which locates agency in a network of human, nonhuman, natural, and technological causes that are not governed by an intentional agent. However, Latour also describes ANT as quite distinctly different from the kind of system of sovereignty found in Hobbes. Indeed, Latour remarks in Reassembling the Social (a book designed as an introduction to the already existing practice of ANT) that “as long as we detect behind the collective the shadow of the Leviathan, no science of the social can move forward.”36 For Latour, this is because the collective, what functions as a network, has to be able to assemble and reassemble itself without being in thrall to a master association such as that of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Latour argues that networks are both more supple and less anthropological than the kind of association imagined in Hobbes’s model of the Leviathan. Importantly, Latour imagines networks as involving not merely people but also other animate and inanimate things put together in a series of more or less stable associations. Thus his work seems a useful entry point for a discussion about the long chain of cause, effect, and responsibility involved in drone warfare. He sees Hobbes, on the other hand, as theorizing a system of association based on the contract or promise between people and held together by a commitment to that promise. However, precisely because, as I have been arguing, the phenomenon of the drone is not merely a technical technology (or even a social one) but primarily a political one, it would be overhasty to discard Hobbes’s discussion of sovereignty. The importance of the particular kind of relation that is sovereign power becomes clear in Michel Callon and Latour’s discussion of Hobbes in an early essay on actor network theory. In “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan” Callon and Latour argue for a form of social relation, or association, that

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would not require the kind of primary and originary political contract imagined by Hobbes. However, the terms in which they discuss Hobbes can be misleading. They write, for instance, that in his discussion of the formation of the political bond “Hobbes omits to say that no promise, however solemn, could frighten the contracting parties enough to force them to obey. He omits to say that what makes the sovereign formidable and the contract solemn are the palace from which he speaks, the well-­equipped armies that surround him, the scribes and recording equipment that serve him.”37 Close readers of Hobbes would surely find this hard to swallow. In speaking of the bonds created by promises, indeed, Hobbes writes in Leviathan that “bonds . . . have their strength not from their own nature, (for nothing is more easily broken than a mans word,) but from Feare of some evil consequence upon the same” (93). Furthermore, the primary fear that holds men to their promises is precisely the fear of the force, power, or violence of the sovereign. Callon and Latour represent this as his palace and his armies, for Hobbes its metonym is simply the sword. In this sense, Callon and Latour see in Hobbes an anthropological investment in the word or language that simplifies his theory. They later write that contracting for Hobbes is “an exchange of words during a period of universal warfare.”38 They try to rewrite his scenario as one involving a broader network including military and information technology (the armies and recording equipment). It is certainly true that the technology of sovereignty is a more expansive network than that involved in a verbal promise. However, this is already true in Hobbes, for whom the sword, or arms in general, is vital. Furthermore, in broadening the scope of the political network, Callon and Latour also miss the specificity of the sovereign relation and its claim to a power over life and death. This becomes clear later in the article when they argue that in any given sociological situation there “is not just one Leviathan but many, interlocked one into another like chimera, each claiming to represent the reality of all, the programme of the whole” (295, italics in original). This description works well enough to describe the kind of sociological entities Callon and Latour are interested in. In this article their examples are Electricity of France, or EDF, which wanted to create a future of electric cars, and Renault, whose aim was to undermine confidence in this future. For Callon and Latour, both these entities are Leviathans who wish to make the world make sense according to their own paradigms, and

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to do so, both create scientific, economic, and technological networks to make their vision seem like a reality in which various actors (human and nonhuman) are caught up. For Hobbes, however, the Leviathan is not just any kind of relation (or association) but a specifically sovereign one, which is to say primarily a political and not a sociological relation. This difference is important, especially in the context of drones, which are not merely a technology mixed with various social elements but a specifically political technology. While Callon and Latour argue that all forms of associations between all kinds of human and nonhuman actors can create different and competing Leviathans, the Hobbesian system differs because it makes one form of association indivisible. This is the sovereign relation between force and right. Sovereignty treats, in Blaise Pascal’s terms, of the association of what is strong and what is just. Sovereignty does not simply associate any two things together but specifically claims a relation between force and justice and, with it, a right over life and death. The question is not whether networks are provisional associations between different sociological materials (human and nonhuman) or a result of an anthropological, linguistic, and unbreakable contract made between men. The question is what political relation, what power over life and death, and what link between force and justice underly any sociological network. This returns us to the problem of responsibility.

RESPONSIBILITY AND DRONES At first blush, it would seem that by removing the conscious and intentional subject as the primary node of responsibility, it is possible that accounts of action and agency such as that of ANT would allow us to rethink responsibility in the case of drones. Machines themselves could be held responsible for harm, made forfeit, as things were in the old legal form of deodand. As Sandra Macpherson explains, under deodand even objects can be held responsible for harm. She cites examples of deodand law in which, for instance, a horse that throws and kills its rider is “forfeit to the king.”39 Responsibility here is radically removed from human subjects. Failing a return to deodand law, we could trace modes of responsibility

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along a chain of agency without worrying about whether there was a conscious intention to harm or to act outside the law. The attraction of such a system of moral causality would be to counter the political technology of the drone in which the kill chain includes so many parts, human and machine, that it is difficult to assign fault or responsibility to any one part of the chain. However, just as ANT leaves aside the specificity of the sovereign association between force and justice, such an approach to drones would pay insufficient attention to how drones are articulated with this particular structure of sovereign power. Even mechanistic and externalist accounts of agency and responsibility are enmeshed in a web organized and guaranteed by sovereign power, a web that claims a relation between force and justice and a right over life and death. To ignore or dismiss this aspect of drone warfare is to miss its peculiar and frightening political technology. This is where the Hobbesian genealogy of this form of thought becomes important. Despite Callon and Latour’s attempt to distinguish ANT from Hobbes, it is precisely in his work that the idea of a network of cause and effect ungoverned by a human moral agent is promulgated. However, for Hobbes this is only possible because of the primacy of the political, sovereign relation. Hobbes demonstrates that any network is only possible through the primary construction of a political field and the production of an exceptional sovereign power that guarantees all other associations. The first association is between force and right. While Callon and Latour see the world, even after the Leviathan, as a continuing war of all against all in which various networks compete with one another, this is already a derived and watered-­down version of the Hobbesian war of all against all in which no network, no association at all, is possible without the previous establishment of an indivisible sovereign power. The sovereign produces the coherent field in which various networks compete with one another when the people contract with one another to lay down their arms and leave the sovereign in the exceptional position of retaining his. Now, this position of sovereign indivisibility must be ceaselessly deconstructed, but the power and necessity of its particular form of political association cannot merely be replaced by systems of sociological networks. The sociological networks of cause, effect, and agency traced by ANT are visible as such because of the coherent field of representation established by sovereign power and by

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the replacement of the war of all against all with a generalized struggle for social power. Given this relation between an externalist concept of cause and effect and sovereignty, it is no coincidence that, in Kramnick’s description, the chain of causality goes from atom to king, and from king to God, the heavenly and earthly sovereigns.40 It is thus essential for Hobbes’s externalist theory of action that the actions of the subject are entirely coordinated with an all-­encompassing political power. Indeed, this is perhaps an inevitable result of subsuming the subject within a chain of mechanical causes. In this sense, it is no surprise that in Macpherson’s discussion of deodand it is not only that things, more than subjects, can be held responsible for injuries but that the thing ultimately falls forfeit to the sovereign. What this means is that it is ultimately the sovereign, in his control of the entire field of materiality (and this includes both things and self-­conscious subjects), who guarantees and underwrites the form of responsibility that is deodand. In order for this law to be enforced, to have the force of law, there must be one who is excepted from it (even if this is by being, as the sovereign is for Hobbes, the ultimate bearer of all injuries or harms). Ultimate responsibility lies with sovereign power, and as Harry Truman (the president, not the sheriff) intuitively understood, only a sovereign power can say that “the buck stops here.” In the Hobbesian system, however, the idea that the sovereign would hold the ultimate responsibility presents a clear problem. While it is the sovereign who is the ultimate cause of action, just as it is the sovereign who is the ultimate recipient of all harm, the responsibility of the sovereign is questionable. Hobbes repeatedly argues that the sovereign is not accountable to the laws. In this sense, it is possible that removing the liberal subject entirely from the field of responsibility thus risks that the ultimate, and only, site of responsibility is the position occupied by the sovereign. The stakes of this risk become apparent if we turn to Hobbes, and especially to his consideration of crime. For Hobbes, a crime (unlike a sin) is something that is visible to the civil law. A mere intention, unaccompanied by action, can thus not be a crime. However, this also means that “the Civill Law ceasing, Crimes cease” (202). As Hobbes put it, “There being no other Law remaining, but that of Nature, there is no place for Accusation” (202). In this situation, a man may be his own judge and listen to his

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HOBBES AMONG THE DRONES: ASYMMETRY AND ENMITY In his book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, written prior to the era of the Predator drone, Manuel DeLanda distinguishes between two forms of military organization. One, he argues, attempts to centralize decision making and maximize certainty at the top of the command chain. This removes responsibility from those further down the chain, but, DeLanda shows, can produce uncertainty throughout the network due to the difficulty and time lag involved in receiving and processing information. The other form of organization distributes and disperses the uncertainty that is unavoidable in any war situation throughout the command chain, giving local responsibility to particular units. DeLanda argues that the military’s development of technology leads it to use increases in computing power to centralize command processes and to take humans out of the loop. He further argues that the military’s dream is to have artificial intelligence systems

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conscience, but there is no position from which anyone else can judge. Importantly, while this is the case for all people in the state of nature, it remains the case for the sovereign, who retains all the rights of the state of nature after the formation of civil society. Hobbes judges the opinion that “the Soveraign Power, is subject to the Civill Lawes” “repugnant to the nature of a Common-­Wealth” (224). He argues that since the sovereign makes the laws, he cannot be subject to them, because this would “setteth the Lawes above the Soveraign [and] setteth also a Judge above him, and a Power to Punish him; which is to make a new Soveraign” (224). In this sense, the sovereign remains in a zone of (ir)responsibility in which he is both the one upon whom all responsibility devolves and the one whose actions are unaccountable by any law other than that of his own conscience. It is, I suggest, exactly this kind of (ir)responsibility that is at issue in the political technology of the drone. This political technology combines, in a seamless way, a diffusion of responsibility among a network of human and nonhuman agents and an ultimate recursion of responsibility to the EOP, which is, in this instance, unaccountable even to Congress or the courts in its actions and decisions. It is this political technology that Texts from Drone represents so well.

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that would take decision making out of the hands of humans, even to the point that “target selection” would be performed by machines.41 Later writers, indeed, have argued that military commanders like drones because they can control every decision. There are stories of generals who, instead of delegating responsibility, insist on having drone feeds in their offices at all times. Chamayou argues that in the context of drone warfare, “instead of ‘man’ in general losing control to the ‘machine,’ here it is the lower ranking operators who lose their relative autonomy to the higher echelons of the hierarchy.”42 DeLanda’s context differs from ours in that he worries less about drone warfare than he does about nuclear warfare. He worries that the centralization of command will not adequately disperse uncertainty and that the network will self-­destruct, leading to nuclear war. The problem here is a maximum of destruction, whereas drone warfare is about a continued low-­level warfare. In the context of drones, then, the problem is different, involving a political threat as much as a military one. The centralization and concentration of responsibility means, paradoxically, a removal of accountability and responsibility all along the line. Rather than nuclear war, drone warfare risks the radical return of sovereign (ir)responsibility. Chamayou makes a similar point when discussing the evacuation of subjective responsibility in the age of the drone. He argues that the question that has become obsessive in the postmodern, neoliberal world is, “where is the subject who holds power?” Chamayou sees a concentration of power at the top and an increased responsibility at the top, and this is in some ways a good description of the political technology of the drone. While on the one hand there is a diffuse kill chain in which it is difficult to decide who or what is responsible for the actions of a drone, on the other hand it is increasingly only generals or the president himself who gives the orders that authorize particular killings. Indeed, one aspect of the political technology of drone warfare is particularly disturbing in this context. Activists and writers who critique the US policy of drone warfare are concerned to highlight the obscurity of the processes by which targets are selected and by which the relative successes of drone strikes are measured. They outline three separate but overlapping kill lists (prepared by the executive branch, the CIA, and the JSOC) on which individuals are placed who are subject to targeted assassination by drone. The president has the final say in weekly meetings about who may be

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targeted. This process is already problematic because of the lack of review of who may end up on a list, to say nothing of the legal problems of carrying out assassinations in foreign territories. More worrying for those concerned about the problem of automation, however, is the use of signature strikes. These strikes are decided upon using algorithms based on surveillance data to identify targets through behavioral patterns rather than personal identity. This means that a pattern of behavior (which could include meetings or phone calls with those already on a watchlist) could get someone placed on a kill list even if neither government nor intelligence agencies know so much as their name. Moral agency is related entirely to external actions, and to no identity, consciousness, intention, or, in Locke’s terms, “personality.” People are not treated as self-­conscious agents, but as mere bodies in motion. This method of determining targets means that the justice or relevance of this sovereign decision over life and death is not challengeable by any reason other than reason of state. The data is classified, and no one can defend someone who has no known identity outside that data. This is one example of a fundamental asymmetry in the political technology of the drone. Between the subject who may be killed and the sovereign who decides on life and death there is so little symmetry that the one targeted for killing need not even have a name. This is part of the transformation of the concept of enmity that occurs in drone warfare. It is, for example, a complete departure from traditional warfare, in which, although the enemy may never be named personally, they always represent a nation or institution. In this sense, the celebration of the tombs of unknown soldiers, which Benedict Anderson has linked to the rise of the nation-­state, gives the name of the nation to the soldier who has lost his own.43 In drone warfare, a name or personal identity is replaced with a behavioral algorithm, leaving an unnamed enemy vulnerable to all the violence of a representative sovereign power. The enemy in drone warfare, then, is nameless but distinct from the anonymous soldier who comes to represent his nation. This enemy is also distinct from the kind of enemy associated with war in the tradition of European public law, who always maintains some symmetry with his antagonist. One of the texts that establishes most clearly the status of the enemy in this tradition is Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, and Schmitt indeed is committed to the idea that the limitation of

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warfare within Europe by the jus publicum Europaeum was one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment period. As Rodolphe Gasché writes, for Schmitt “the clear distinction between friend and enemy in the jus publicum Europaeum . . . is instrumental to containing war.”44 Schmitt argues that the decision about who constitutes the enemy is the specifically political act. This act both defines the enemy as an existential threat to the political community and defines the political community against this external enemy. Precisely because it is constituted by a political act or decision, the enemy, for Schmitt, is contingent and not absolute. In contrast to the foe, the enemy is not an enemy for any transcendental or moral reason, but by the sovereign declaration that it is a specific threat to a political group. This Schmittian concept of enmity fits very neatly into the tradition of European public law, in which sovereign states declare war against other states; despite their enmity toward one another, they nevertheless recognize one another’s right to exist and thus grant some sort of symmetry to the relation of enmity. Importantly, this idea of enmity involves a limitation of hostility. Schmitt is very concerned, for instance, to insist on there being no possible war for the sake of humanity. To claim that one fights for humanity is only to make one’s enemy inhuman as an excuse to completely destroy him. War under such conditions, says Schmitt, makes the enemy “into a monster who must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. In other words, he is an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat within his borders only.”45 For Schmitt, as David Bates has argued, states on the European continent “recognized one another’s right to exist,” and war between such states was “like a duel between individuals.”46 As I discussed in the introduction, Ian Baucom has shown that even if, in European public law, there was an avoidance of creating an enemy who merely must be destroyed, this kind of enmity was the basis for the colonial wars of the Enlightenment period, which Schmitt himself characterized in The Nomos of the Earth as outside the legal and conventional norms of war. Even within the period in which European public law supposedly held sway, then, a more hyperbolic form of enmity existed. Any symmetry between European states was balanced against a fundamental asymmetry between Europe and the non-­European world, which was the site of colonialist and imperialist expansion.

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Drone warfare functions within this very asymmetry, and one of its characteristics is its refusal to limit or contain enmity. Drone warfare moves toward an absolute enmity by denying those it hunts the kind of telluric connection and intense political engagement that Schmitt wanted to grant even the partisan, a figure whose lack of affiliation with a nation-­state and fighting tactics Schmitt saw as pushing beyond the boundaries of classical, limited enmity.47 Because the enemy who is subject to drone strikes can be hunted and killed anywhere, regardless of the markings of territorial sovereignty, he can never be forced, as Schmitt’s phrase puts it, “to retreat within his borders only.” The enemy subject to drone strikes, like the war against him, knows no borders, and to a large extent the war follows the enemy. This is not to say that fighters for ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), the Taliban, or even Al-­Qaeda may not have territorial goals or do not fight for control over territory they think of as home. However, unlike even the partisan, who for Schmitt retains some connection with the earth and a territorial goal, the enemy of the drone is not defined for Western powers by his relation to his own territory, but rather by his perceived threat to the territory of the United States. Neither moral reform nor retreat is possible for this enemy. As Texts from Drone shows in the meme about the NDAA, the only option for such an enemy is either indefinite detention or death. This is an enemy with whom friendship is impossible, foreclosed as a possibility beyond or before any political decision. Drone warfare, then, moves beyond the kind of limitation to war idealized in European public law. Because the enemy it confronts is made to seem absolute and not the result of a contingent political decision, war against that enemy becomes both spatially and temporally unlimited, just as sovereignty itself becomes more absolute in its claim to the right to kill. It is a war against an enemy who finds himself outside the potential of moral reform, subject to a violence that does not aim to direct the movement of bodies, but merely to disable them from movement. Signature strikes, which target people based upon a pattern of behavior rather than knowledge of them as forensic or juridical individuals, have particularly disturbing consequences for the concept of enmity. The algorithm that determines what constitutes suspicious behavior is known only to those who control the drones and neither to those who are targeted by drones nor those in whose names drones kill. If we return to Hobbesian

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moral philosophy, we can see that these enemies are no longer treated with even the potential for moral reform. This means that some fundamental principles of Hobbesian morality are inapplicable to those who live under drones. Whereas Hobbesian morality requires a certain and swift punishment, along with a clear visibility of any legal and moral obstacles designed to influence behavior, living under drones must feel like being targeted randomly.48 One cannot predict precisely which behaviors make one subject to punishment. The political morality that pertains in places subject to drone warfare is fundamentally distinct from that which pertains in the kinds of civil society Hobbes describes. In the latter, the idea is to modify behavior to make subjects live in a certain way, with the threat of a power over life and death largely being exercised in a biopolitical way to “make live.” Those who prosecute drone warfare create something closer to what Achille Mbembe calls a “necropolitics.”49 They do not attempt to modify behavior, to make those living under drones live as model, capitalist, global citizens. The idea is merely to eliminate those who pose a threat, to treat people as merely subject to the right the sovereign has to put them to death. Indeed, as the filmmaker Madiha Tahir has said, “There is no cause and effect with the drone.”50 Attacks seem random, and there is no way to know how to avoid them. This is perhaps the starkest example of the asymmetry of drone warfare, as people are treated as less capable of moral action than rats in mazes, whose behavior can be altered by external effects. Incapable of ever becoming a friend, the enemy here is a body that must merely be killed. Another way to read this would be that drones police populations, not individuals, and that it is only the visible death of their neighbors (whose lives are only important insofar as their deaths provide a warning and an example) that can make those subject to drones alter their behavior. Either way, drones make dead. More fundamentally, nearly all writers on drone warfare have commented on the asymmetry of this kind of violence in the sense that those who are victims have no chance or capability to fight back against their killers. This is, for those who have drones, warfare without risk.51 In his book Governing from the Skies, Thomas Hippler shows this to have been characteristic of air warfare, especially air warfare carried out in colonial territories, since the beginning of aviation history. He argues that those who are subject to this kind of “riskless” warfare are those who, in one

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form or another, are not granted the basic status of human subject. Between these vulnerable bodies (which are not even subjects) and the drones and their masters is a complete gulf, an asymmetrical and nonreciprocal relation. Importantly, this asymmetry is also essential to a Hobbesian account of sovereignty. In a Hobbesian system subjects contract with one another, deciding together to lay down their arms and grant sovereignty to another. They do not contract with the sovereign, who does not give up any of his rights to violence. In this sense, the sovereign does not need to respond to (or take responsibility for) the claims of his subjects. As Derrida puts it, the sovereign (“if there is one”—­a caveat present in all Derrida’s discussions of sovereignty) always has “the right not to respond, he has the right to the silence of that dissymmetry.”52 The sovereign never justifies his contract, nor does he make treaties with his subjects. In this sense, the sovereign is fundamentally irresponsive and irresponsible, and the political technology of the drone produces and relies upon precisely this kind of sovereignty. What is interesting about Derrida’s account of sovereignty is that he claims that despite its power, despite what he calls its onto-­theological, godlike character, it is also dumb. This is meant both in the sense that it is unable to speak and in the sense that it is stupid; as Derrida puts it, the sovereign “looks a bit stupid [bête], he looks like the beast.”53 The sovereign is sovereign only insofar as he does not speak, because when he speaks (which he must) he enters the economy of language. As Derrida puts it, language “always introduces a sharing that universalizes. As soon as I speak to the other, I submit to the law of reason(s), I share a universalizable medium, I divide my authority.”54 Once the sovereign enters into the economy of language (which he must, which he always already has done) his indivisibility is subject to interpretation, difference, challenge. In a word, his indivisibility is divided. As Derrida points out, the sovereign is thus powerful and indivisible, sovereign only insofar as he does not engage in a world he nevertheless must engage in. Precisely because he must engage in the world, in language, the sovereign is subject to deconstruction. This is the autoimmunity characteristic of any sovereignty, and this comes out in Texts from Drone. In the memes D-Ron’s masters seem helpless and powerless, even as the drone does their bidding. The drone goes beyond their orders, getting involved in accidents and creating collateral damage that seems structurally

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unavoidable. The joke in these memes, which is fundamentally to personify the drone and give it language and agency, shows a breakdown in the chain of command in which the clarity of sovereign intention is diverted. The dark underside of this joke, however, is that what is really lost in drone warfare is not sovereign intention (it is not as if the problem of drone warfare is that it is a good idea badly carried out) but sovereign responsibility. The problem is that the system of drone warfare, its political technology, is to allow the sovereign not to respond, not to take responsibility for its actions. Because of this irresponsibility, drone warfare is a hyperbolic instance of the violence and asymmetry of sovereignty. Drone warfare destroys or unhitches the link between force and right, and this is why it is precisely in territories with which the United States is not technically at war and that are not occupied by boots on the ground, such as Pakistan and Yemen, that the violence of drones is at its most (ir)responsible. Where sovereignty has no right, where any action it takes demonstrates precisely its illegitimacy, what is left is only its violence. There is no right and thus no accountability. There is only the asymmetrical confrontation between a life devoid of (because deprived of) subjectivity and the violence of a sovereignty that kills others right at the point that it undoes its own legitimacy, which is to say its very claim to be sovereign. What is interesting about drone warfare with respect to sovereignty and moral philosophy, then, is not that it involves a network of actors that includes the human and the nonhuman. It is that the very peculiar relation between force and right that is characteristic of sovereignty is broken right at the point of a Hellfire missile. The very act that claims the right over life and death, the force of law, unhitches that force from right. This is a violence that does not attempt to constitute a new order, and if it attempts to preserve the order of the sovereign power of Western states, it does so by constituting an enemy who can never belong to it, who, like Locke’s wild beasts (but unlike Cecil the lion), is incapable of friendship.

DRONES FROM OBAMA TO TRUMP Drone use will be the lasting legacy of the Obama presidency. However, while this is certainly Obama’s signature contribution to foreign policy,

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drone policy has not stood still. Until his very public assassination by drone of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, drone use under Donald Trump, while apparently becoming more widespread, was considerably less visible and less transparent than it was even under Obama.55 Furthermore, Trump revoked an Obama-­era rule that required the government to issue public reports on the number of civilian casualties from US airstrikes outside official warzones. These strikes, often in places like Yemen and the north of Pakistan, were largely performed by the CIA. The New York Times reported that the CIA program broadened under Trump and that at the same time the public accountability for these actions was reduced almost to zero.56 Trump also lowered the threshold for who might be targeted by drone strikes. Now not only leaders but also “foot soldiers” are subject to assassination. Interestingly, one of the main policy changes made by Trump was to give a freer rein to generals and other field commanders to carry out drone strikes, without the kind of approval from the White House administration previously required under Obama. On the one hand, this seemed to remove the locus of responsibility for the drone program from the EOP, locating it more firmly within a military structure. On the other hand, however, this merely confirms the fundamental (ir)responsibility of the EOP, as drone strikes outside officially sanctioned battlefields can now proceed even without the knowledge of the White House. Comparing Obama’s liberal presidency with Trump’s authoritarian one throws up some surprising results with regard to drone warfare, with the liberal Obama more firmly in control of his acts of violence than the authoritarian Trump. It is from the perspective of the kind of moral philosophy I have been discussing here, however, that these results can be made to seem less surprising. In an article written for the Atlantic in 2018, Daniel J. Rosenthal and Loren DeJonge Schulman, who identify themselves as having helped develop the bureaucratic guidelines governing Obama’s drone program, lament Trump’s changes to drone policy. They begin with the hyperbolic (though perhaps true) statement that while Trump “dramatically expanded” his use of drones, “you—­and perhaps he—­would never know it.”57 This focus on the irresponsibility of the president for what was going on under his watch sets the moral tone of this article. Rosenthal and Schulman praise Obama both for his “evolving” thought about drones, in which he began to make some of their use more transparent to the

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public, and for the fact that while he “operationally expanded” the use of drones, he “bureaucratically constrained” them. This bureaucratic constraint amounted, as the authors describe it, to the development of internal rules that governed where and when drones could strike and whom they could target. Importantly, these rules were developed entirely within the executive branch of government and involved no oversight from either the public or Congress. In effect, they amounted to the EOP policing itself. Some of this becomes clear when the authors discuss their own role in drone warfare. They were part of a team that came up with “policy frameworks” that after a few years Obama “eventually shared,” along with “limited strike data,” with the public. Of course, before this information was shared, and even to a large extent afterward, the EOP was not accountable to anyone either for the content of these policies or for how they were followed. That is why the authors of this article say they “took pride in fastidious adherence to these administrative rules.” Only moral pride, a luxury available neither to those who are victims of drone strikes nor to those in whose name the drones kill, restrains the drone’s deadly violence. In a sense, what is characteristic of Obama’s liberal drone policy is precisely this moral fastidiousness that attempts to convert a problem of political technology into one of moral rigor. Indeed, the authors of this piece boast about the “healthy level of rigor” the guidelines brought “to strike decisions.” The boast here seems to be that unlike the Trump administration, Obama had moral adults in the room for all strike decisions, that all assassinations were contemplated with a serious morality. This replacement of a democratic politics with a kind of personal morality in which one can take pride is paradigmatically liberal and, far from being a constraint on drone use, is precisely what allows its political technology to work. A fastidious liberal morality is in fact part of the political technology of the drone, turning what used to be considered political assassinations into acts of moral calculus. What the political technology of the drone is based upon, then, is a responsibility, and a subject of responsibility, that is no longer locatable. There is not a central, coherent sovereign power who is accountable and responsible for the entire network of military technology. This is the case either because, as was reportedly the case under Trump, military commanders and CIA chiefs have the authority to work without specific orders

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or oversight from the EOP or because it is only a fastidious but politically unaccountable and thus irresponsible morality that holds drone killings in check. It is also because the kill chain is so diffuse and because the actions performed by a sovereign power are performed in a zone without symmetry and thus without any reciprocal responsibility. What we are left with instead is a radical evisceration of sovereignty and responsibility even as it is centralized and focused. This is because neither sovereigns nor machines can be held responsible. The sovereign, the one who decides on the exceptional extrajudicial killings, exists in a zone of (ir)responsibility because he exists beyond right in a zone of mere power. This is because the violence without responsibility (in the sense of accountability) characteristic of the practice of drone warfare undoes all relation between right or legitimacy and sovereign power. We have instead a kill chain that includes human and nonhuman actors, which simply diffuses and defuses responsibility. The nightmare of drone warfare is not the self-­aware machine that would kill autonomously and beyond human orders. It is instead that we have created a political technology in which violence exists beyond all concepts of responsibility and agency. The liberal concepts of responsibility are inadequate to deal with this problem, and more determinist accounts of moral agency devolve more power onto the (ir)responsible sovereign. In other words, networked theories of responsibility, however they may free us from liberal ideas of subjectivity, do nothing to limit sovereignty and in fact merely intensify its characteristic asymmetry and (ir)responsibility. If we can accept that it is perhaps futile to address the problem of drone assassination with traditional concepts of agency, what is difficult to deny is that the abandonment of subjectivity to a mechanical system threatens to expose it to the violence of sovereign power, by making it either a victim or an agent of sovereign violence. The idea of mechanical subjectivity may free us from the straitjacket of the autonomous liberal individual only to expose us, without recourse, to the joyful exercise of sovereign violence.

2 REMOTE OCCUPATION

In his Treatise of Human Nature , in the section entitled “Of the Rules which Determine Property,” David Hume recites a story originating in Plutarch’s Moralia: Greek Questions concerning the occupation of a colony. Here is the story as it appears in Plutarch. 30. What is the “Beach of Araenus” in Thrace? When the Andrians and Chalcidians sailed to Thrace to settle there, they jointly seized the city of Sanê, which was betrayed to them; but when they learned that the barbarians had abandoned Acanthus, they sent out two scouts. When these were approaching the city, they perceived that the enemy had all fled; so the Chalcidian ran forward to take possession of the city for Chalcis, but the Andrian, since he could not cover the distance so rapidly as his rival, hurled his spear, and when it was firmly implanted in the city gates, he called out in a loud voice that by his spear the city had been taken into prior possession for the children of the Andrians. As a result of this a dispute arose, and, without going to war, they agreed to make use of Erythraeans, Samians, and Parians as arbitrators concerning the whole matter. But when the Erythraeans and the Samians

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the Chalcidians, the Andrians, in the neighbourhood of this place, made a solemn vow against the Parians that they would never give a woman in marriage to the Parians nor take one from them. And for this reason they called the place the Beach of Araenus, although it had formerly been named the Serpent’s Beach.1

Hume cites the story because at his time of writing it was a classic example used by natural law theorists to discuss the ways in which it is possible to occupy a thing (either moveable or immoveable) and claim it as property. The legal conception of occupation was important because of the way these European theories of property were used to justify and conceptualize the process of colonization. At stake in the story from Plutarch are crucial questions for any colonialist thought: whether it is possible to occupy territory without being physically present on it and, a concurrent question, what it means to be physically present on or in a territory. Hume’s characteristic answer, which largely breaks with previous interpretations of this story and standard elaborations of the law of occupation, is that questions of property can only be judged by the imagination. He means by this that the physical act is not as important as the force with which it strikes our imaginations. If we feel that the spear in the gate constitutes an intentional and appropriate act of occupation, then we give the colony to the spear thrower. As Hume puts it, it was only because of fancy (or imagination) in the first place that the two men ran “to the gates rather than the walls, or any other part of the city.”2 We imagine the gates as a metonym for the city, and thus for taking ownership of it. The gates have no more material relation to propriety than any other part of the city, but the men ran to the gates because they “satisfy the fancy best in taking them for the whole.”3 Further, Hume says, neither the spear in the gate nor setting foot in a city is “properly possession” but merely forming a relation, and the relative forces of those different kinds of relations can only be determined by the imagination. Hume’s answer to this problem is idiosyncratic, and throughout this chapter I will look at other, more standard and canonical responses to this story and how they relate to conceptualizations of colonialism. However, Hume outlines the problem of Enlightenment thinking about occupation, especially colonial occupation, very well. The precise issue is that all

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gave their vote in favour of the Andrians, and the Parians in favour of

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forms of occupation—­and the kind of colonial occupation characteristic of the Enlightenment period perhaps merely gives us the key to understanding this—­are more or less remote. Indeed, colonialism is at once a grab for territory and a deterritorialization of the concept of territorial occupation. At the same time that European colonialism was occupying more and more territory, it was also making the conceptual grounds upon which territory—­any territory, including that at home—­was held or occupied more and more uncertain. In this sense, any theory or practice of remote occupation is inherently colonialist, and the more remote occupation is, the more distant and prosthetic the government or occupation of a territory, the more scope there is for colonial exploitation. The Enlightenment saw huge developments in both the theory and the practice of remote occupation, and it is the Enlightenment’s fraught conceptual discussions of occupation that this chapter focuses on. While Enlightenment thought set out to legitimize occupation (and often this meant limiting its extent), the theory of remote occupation that remained virtual within Enlightenment thought promises an occupation unlimited by any natural relation of body to thing. It is this virtuality of the Enlightenment theory of occupation that the drone makes actual. Furthermore, the practice of drone warfare expands occupation beyond the limits imaginable in the Enlightenment by making it possible to occupy not just airspace but an airspace that is not directly above one’s own territory. It literally deterritorializes occupation, not only making it possible to occupy the air but separating aerial occupation from territorial occupation. Thus, the drone makes it possible to police populations, to have jurisdiction over people, without having a terrestrial presence. This possibility opens the way for a new level of sovereignty available only to those nations capable of maintaining the networks necessary for drone warfare, an aerial sovereignty that would be more hyperbolically sovereign than the territorial sovereignty to which other nations are bound. The possibility of aerial sovereignty opens up a new asymmetry in international relations. In our contemporary world, the drone is thus the latest, most distant, most prosthetic of the technologies of occupation. Part of the claim of this chapter is that the problem of remote occupation has become a new and insistent problem in the wake of the global war on terror. As Gregoire Chamayou has argued, the old paradigm whereby, for a military empire,

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“ ‘projecting power’ meant sending in troops” is an “equation that now has to be dismantled.”4 As a response to this neoimperial world, a nearly hegemonic critical consensus has arisen that sees the current era as one of deterritorialization and globalization in which national entities and borders are no longer as important as nonstate actors, from terrorists who represent no particular country to multinational corporations that move wealth across borders without regard for national affiliation.5 However, as Stuart Elden has argued, this seeming deterritorialization has been subject to various reterritorializations that have reinstated or reinforced the importance of national borders and national sovereignty. As Elden explains, in the war on terror certain nation-­states have been held responsible for the actions of those within their borders, whether or not those actions have been supported or sanctioned by the state. The importance of the nation-­state is thus maintained to facilitate the declaration of war against certain territories, while the very value of the internal sovereignty of those territories is diminished.6 In a different way, the various walls between national borders (the existing wall between Israel and Palestine and the partly fantasized one between the United States and Mexico) have reinstated the firmness of the line between countries, especially when it comes to the movement of people. However, even this attempt to draw stark national borders begins to break down when we consider the myriad refugee camps at borders around the world. It is further stretched in cases such as that of Australia’s use of the small island nation of Nauru to detain and process people seeking asylum in Australia, a policy mirrored in current proposals to have people seeking asylum in the United States remain in Mexico during the processing of their claims.7 In both cases, territorial sovereignty is desperately maintained only by creating pockets of people subject to no certain jurisdiction of rights but to a very clear application of the force of national sovereignty. A sovereign right to detain people in camps, especially in the case of Australia, is extended beyond the borders of the nation in such a way that we see a radical expansion of the sovereign power of some nations rather than a diminution of national sovereignty in favor of a deterritorialized globalism. This also illustrates Etienne Balibar’s claim that national borders work to reinforce international divisions of class even as they uphold the idea of equality among citizens of a particular nation. 8 Territory, and

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the right and manner in which it is occupied, thus matters even in a globalized and deterritorialized world. That is why it is worth looking at the Enlightenment, in which the occupation of territory in a rapidly expanding colonialism interacted with a deterritorialization of the rights of occupation that influenced how occupation was conceptualized not just in a colonial context but in general. The debates about occupying territory in Enlightenment natural law, which I exemplify in this chapter by looking at Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Jean Barbeyrac, and Hume, are ways of stabilizing the law of occupation in the face of the deterritorialization of the practice of colonialism. The Enlightenment, despite the pressures of deterritorialization, never quite produced an explicit theory of remote occupation, a form of occupation detached from the connection between body and territory. Instead, drone warfare is the practical leap that produces remote occupation materially and demonstrates retroactively that it was toward an account of a remote occupation that would expand a sovereign right without jeopardizing national borders that Enlightenment natural law was working. Drone warfare, further, makes the almost unimaginable leap of expanding sovereignty over airspace without requiring boots on the ground below, thus detaching sovereignty and occupation from their terrestrial underpinnings. It creates a new asymmetry between states who can occupy the air and those who remain terrestrially bound.

DRONE OCCUPATION If we take seriously Hume’s claims about the importance of the fancy, or imagination, in determining both the right of occupation and the way we think about whether territory is occupied, it is easy to see why occupation is generally associated with “boots on the ground.” Just as it was the messenger whose boots landed on the ground of the abandoned city who was generally thought in Enlightenment natural law (though not in Plutarch’s story) to have the more successful claim to territory, a physical military presence seems, in the popular imagination, to constitute the necessary minimum to say that a territory is occupied. This military presence may or may not be linked to a political or administrative apparatus. Indeed,

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the debate in 2014 over the necessity of immunity for US troops in Iraq shows that it is quite possible for a military presence to act with sovereignty over life and death within a foreign territory even if that territory is nominally self-­governing.9 Examples of this abound, including not only the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq but also US operations in Latin America, such as the antidrug offensive in Colombia. Iraq in this sense—­and the same would go for Afghanistan—­is occupied by the United States as long as US troops have immunity to exercise power over life and death, even if Iraq is not governed or administered directly or even indirectly by the United States. This requires a rethinking of the concept of occupation so that it aligns more closely with the exercise of a sovereign right over life and death than it does with mere physical presence. While this link between a power over life and death and physical presence may have seemed natural and inevitable before, the drone demonstrates that these were always different things; when we speak of occupation now, we must not merely speak of presence. Furthermore, as Chamayou has shown, the drone as a weapon is precisely designed to give immunity, not only legally (in the sense that the United States remains invulnerable from legal consequences for drone use in states with which it is not even officially at war) but also from enemy reprisals.10 In this sense, the drone is an instantiation of sovereign immunity, a right and power to kill without check, hovering in skies that can only be occupied by a sovereign force. It is a technology of remote occupation that joins together the two sovereign functions of the right over life and death and immunity. This right and power to kill without check, the sovereignty of the drone, is most obvious in what Hugh Gusterson calls “pure drone warfare.”11 This is the kind of drone warfare that is not mixed with other military operations, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which US forces have boots on the ground, there is an official declaration of war, and drones are one part of a multipronged military presence. Instead, pure drone warfare refers to the US use of drones in a territory with which it is not officially at war and in which there is no other, or almost no other, form of military presence. As Gusterson puts it, this is warfare that happens “outside the legal framework that applies to an internationally recognized warzone.”12 Gusterson’s distinction is useful, although we must be careful not to overstate the conventionality or legality of various wars that did not or do not

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involve drones. Nor can we forget (as Gusterson reminds us) that while drones can fly remotely, they need to be maintained, launched, and landed much more locally, and this means that there are often boots on the ground very near to, sometimes even within, the very territories that drones patrol during “pure” drone warfare. Bearing this in mind means paying attention to the way drones radically alter the practice of warfare but also remembering that we must ourselves remain skeptical of both conventional and hegemonic accounts of the legality of war and also the claims of drones to be entirely remote. Despite these reservations about the purity of “pure drone warfare,” it is nevertheless possible to follow Gusterson and locate the clearest examples of this kind of drone warfare in the US operations in Pakistan and Yemen.13 These operations are characterized by their paramilitary form, in that they are largely orchestrated by the CIA rather than by regular military; by their extrajudicial status, in that they are carried out in territories with which the United States is not officially at war and based on ambiguous and secret agreements between the United States and foreign governments; and by their strategic form, in that they aim to assassinate particular people, rather than defeat a nation or government. Furthermore, they are the most remote of drone operations in the sense that without an official US presence in the territory, and sometimes without very much of an unofficial one, these operations are carried out seemingly without any occupation of territory at all. Pakistan and Yemen provide clear examples of this kind of drone occupation. The CIA’s drone operations in Pakistan began in June 2014 with an attack on one Nek Mohammed. With varying levels of cooperation between the US government and the Pakistani government, they have continued for the best part of a decade. In Yemen, there was one drone attack on an Al-­Qaeda leader named Qa’id Salim Sinan al-­Hirathi in 2002.14 After that, there was a long hiatus before drone operations started up again in Yemen in 2010. There too, cooperation between the government and the United States was both secret and ambiguous, with the Yemenis sometimes taking responsibility for US drone attacks and at other times condemning the US operations.15 Either way, the remote warfare carried out by paramilitarily operated drones seriously compromises the sovereignty of the territories involved and gives the United States a right of life and death over

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the citizens or residents of foreign territories and a right of (ir)responsible action in foreign territories. This right of life and death is sovereign in more ways than one. On the one hand, it is carried out without oversight on people who have no defense, either legally or politically and, because of the asymmetry characteristic of drone warfare, barely even militarily. On the other hand, especially since the strikes are secret and largely carried out by the CIA, the American people have little say in how the drone wars are conducted. In other words, the US government is sovereign in this instance because it is not accountable either for the lives it takes or to the people in whose name it takes them.16 In both these senses, even without any boots on the ground, any territory regularly subject to drone strikes must be said to be subject to the sovereignty of the nation controlling the drones. This is remote occupation. The practice of drone warfare by Western states has invented the remote occupation that Enlightenment theorists almost conceptualized. Its technology makes the task of sovereign occupation possible without any physical presence, without a contact between boots and the ground. It is an actualization of what remained latent but virtual, lurking but unrevealed, in Enlightenment thought. It is in this sense that airpower, and of course the drone, stretches the argument that occupation involves boots on the ground beyond the bounds of the Humean imagination. While it is easy to imagine occupation happening through boots on the ground, and thus easy to imagine that Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Palestine, are occupied territories, it is harder to imagine occupation (rather than merely control) happening from the air. Indeed, in discussing the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Eyal Weizman notes that for the Israeli establishment the withdrawal of Israeli troops after 2005 constituted an end to occupation, but not to control. The removal of boots on the ground supposedly led to a regime of “technology instead of occupation.”17 However, it is precisely the claim that not having boots on the ground means an end to occupation that the technology of the drone upends. While Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine seem as if they are or might be occupied territories, Yemen and Pakistan (especially Waziristan) are less often thought of or referred to as such. Chamayou, for instance, in describing an early scientific imagination of drone technology in which a robot would be used to perform tasks in a “hostile zone” writes that this zone

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“may . . . be exploited for its resources, but it is not, strictly speaking, to be occupied. One intervenes there and patrols it, but there is no suggestion of going to live there.”18 It is this question of what, strictly speaking, can be said to be occupied that I want to use Enlightenment natural law to answer. Far from finding there an orthodox definition of occupation against which the drone must be measured, we find instead strained debates that try, unsuccessfully, to make occupation less remote and more connected to living bodies. In Enlightenment accounts of occupation there was never a clear and orthodox claim that occupying a space meant going to live there. What the practice of remote occupation in drone warfare demonstrates to us is that it was, in fact, always remote occupation that Enlightenment natural law was theorizing. This means that the theory and practice of occupation was both always uncertain, prosthetic, and precarious and, at the same time, potentially unlimited and imperial. Strictly speaking, occupation is always already remote.

OCCUPATION IN NATURAL LAW The natural law account of occupation is about how property is originally acquired and what it means to own something. As Wolfram Schmidgen has argued, the capacity of natural law to ask these questions in the context of the rapid acquisition of colonial territories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to a resurgence of concern with it in England.19 The common law, which assumed that all land had always been occupied, left less room for colonialists to argue for the vacancy of land in the New World than did natural law accounts of occupation. While in colonial contexts the theory of occupation was often applied to lands or territory, this was not the case in the texts of natural law theorists such as Grotius and Pufendorf. In their work, occupation can refer as much to moveable things as it can to immoveable ones such as land, so that many of their examples of occupation treat the question of what it is to possess things (including wild animals) as well as what it is to occupy land. This application of the same kind of reasoning to things and to land has to do with the derivation of natural law from Roman civil law. Elden argues that the “Romans made a distinction between land and other kinds of property, but this was not

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especially significant.” He says that “the law on property applied to both kinds of things; the differences are matters of detail.”20 Andrew Fitzmaurice too argues that the “distinction between land and goods was not as important in Roman law as it would be in modern European law.”21 For this reason, it is not surprising that natural law texts focus as much on moveable things as they do on immoveables such as land, even if questions of land become much more important in modern natural law. In the colonial context, however, there is a potentially significant difference between territory and things. As we will see, Grotius especially aims to distinguish between occupying land and having jurisdiction over it, a distinction that would make little sense with regard to things. In Grotius’s view, this distinction with regard to land could make it possible to have jurisdiction over something without occupying it (as when a land within the borders of a political community is vacant) or to occupy something without having jurisdiction over it (as when one may claim the right to use vacant land in another’s sovereign territory without challenging their political rights).22 This potential unmooring of political jurisdiction from occupation is certainly not unchallenged in the natural law tradition (Pufendorf disagrees sharply with Grotius over this), but it does demonstrate the potential differences between the occupation of territory and that of things. Furthermore, it allows us to think about what drones can do in an important way. In the context of drone warfare, drones claim and enforce jurisdiction over populations without physical occupation. This remote occupation, enabled by another unmooring, that of airspace from the territory below it, is the novelty of drone warfare. Occupation is the process or action by which a thing that was not previously subject to a relationship of propriety becomes proper to a person or group. Occupying a thing, an object or a tract of land, involves removing it from what natural law theorists call a state of “negative community,” in which it is available to everyone and the property of no one, and making it proper to either a group or a person.23 As natural law theorists insist, property is a moral relation between persons, not a relation between a person and a thing. What is produced in private property (either individual or communal), then, is a right to a thing that excludes other people from it. The central question concerning theories of occupation is thus what kind of action needs to be performed in order to produce this exclusive

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right and what context needs to be in place to make this action successful, or felicitous.24 In natural law attempts to define such an action several difficulties occur. In the first place, although propriety is a moral relation between people, it does to some extent involve a thing, in particular the proximity to and power over a thing. In this sense, the natural law theory of occupation sometimes becomes as much an account of bodies and touch (questions of physicality) as an account of intention or will (questions of state of mind). Secondly, even when making property is a matter of will or intention, regardless of the physical relation between person and thing, there arises a problem of signification and what constitutes an adequate sign of the will to occupy something. In this sense, the action of occupation is necessarily linguistic and involves a series of signs, either verbal or physical, natural or conventional, that need to be comprehended by others. Even the internal, mental, or intentional side of thinking occupation is thus related to the physical world of signs and signification. Thirdly, whether an account of touch and the power of bodies or an account of the power of the will and verbal signification, the action of occupation involves, for many thinkers, some relation to convention, whether tacit, implied, or explicit, that must determine whether or not an action is successful (or felicitous). In order to explore these problems, and their various aporias, I will look at two quite different accounts of occupation. Grotius and Pufendorf have a conventionalist theory of occupation that relies, to a large extent, on a kind of corporeal intuitionism, by which the proximity of bodies to things ultimately performs propriety. On the other hand, Jean Barbeyrac, who edited and translated those thinkers into French and whose extensive notes were included in most eighteenth-­century English editions of their work, has a strongly intentionalist theory of occupation in which only the will to occupy is necessary to produce the moral relation of property. In the tension between these two irresolvable approaches to occupation there opens up the possibility, even the necessity, of a remote occupation that is not entirely limited by intention, convention, or the proximity of a body to a thing. For the most part, theories of occupation in the Enlightenment are concerned with original occupation, or how a thing came to be property in the first place, and then with the various rights and duties associated with

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propriety. While the occupation of land was a matter already largely governed by positive laws (although there are some exceptions, to which I will return), there were various tricky cases concerning the occupation of moveables, especially animals. Animals were often important test cases in natural law. Both wild and tame animals were subject to ownership, and natural law theorists thought carefully about what kinds of animals could become property and under what conditions. For Pufendorf, for instance, bees, despite being the object of labor, were wild animals that might decamp to another person’s property at any time, and the original owner of the hive would have no redress.25 Game, a particularly sensitive topic, was also given careful consideration, and questions about a boar wounded by an arrow on one property but finally touched and killed on another produced long debates about propriety.26 When it comes to immoveables, such as land, Pufendorf and Grotius had divergent views about the extent and permanence of occupation. These arguments had profound consequences for the prosecution of European imperialism. As Fitzmaurice has argued, the natural law theory of property “provided a powerful justification of expansion.”27 Indeed, it was in the colonial context that theories of occupation were most pressing, as territory (especially in the Americas) was not occupied under the norms of European positive law. This meant that any right to occupy that territory was, for European thinkers, a matter of debate within natural law. Richard Tuck has outlined one particular aspect of this debate that had important consequences for how Europeans thought about the right of imperial expansion: the right to occupy uncultivated (or “under”-­cultivated) lands. Tuck argues that for Grotius there was “a distinction between property and jurisdiction” when it came to taking possession of “waste lands.” Local (indigenous) authorities were thought to have jurisdiction over these lands, but there was a “general natural right to possess any waste land.”28 Because the right to possess waste land was natural, according to Tuck’s account of Grotius, any local political authority that would refuse a right to possession of the land would violate a law of nature and thus be (under Grotius’s terms) punishable by any power. This kind of jurisdictional sovereignty is thus weak and provides no bulwark against occupation. Occupation is a natural right that overrules any form of sovereign jurisdiction over un-­or “under”-­cultivated lands.

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Pufendorf, meanwhile, disagreed with this. He argued that there was no distinction between jurisdiction and property and thus, in Tuck’s words, “the waste lands in a territory occupied by a people are owned by the people collectively.”29 Acquiring jurisdiction is the same thing as occupying territory. In this sense, Pufendorf’s stronger concept of jurisdictional sovereignty (or of sovereignty as such) mitigates against the colonial occupation of territory. The deterritorialization of sovereignty (the literal splitting off of the concept of sovereignty or jurisdiction over people from the occupation of the land) was thus a way to open space for colonial occupation.30 In the context of drone warfare, this same splitting of jurisdiction and physical occupation of land has different consequences. The technology of the killer drone allows not only a weakening of jurisdiction of those on the ground but an expansion of the powers of life and death beyond the borders of territorial sovereignty. This aerial sovereignty allows a policing of populations without terrestrial contact, and with a minimum of vulnerability for the policing power. Looking at the debate about occupation in natural law is important because it is clear that this seemingly arcane discussion has direct consequences for the legal ideology of colonialism. When Grotius and Pufendorf interpret the story from Plutarch with which this chapter started, they are elaborating principles that still have consequences for the law of property, especially when it comes to considering the extent and permanence of a right to occupation. Furthermore, it is precisely the limiting of jurisdictional sovereignty by granting a foreign, remote power the immunity to decide over life and death that makes the remote occupation characteristic of the drone possible. This is an Enlightenment version of Elden’s claim that the contemporary world is producing conditional forms of national sovereignty in which some states are assumed to have jurisdiction over their territorial borders even while they are held responsible for elements of their populations that they cannot or do not control. This makes them subject to intervention by other sovereign powers, a condition or limit to their sovereignty, even as their jurisdictional right over their territory is supposedly not challenged. .

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We should return now to Plutarch’s story about remote occupation by spear. Importantly, both Grotius and Pufendorf present Plutarch’s story not as a text to be interpreted (as does Hume) but as a source of authority like a legal precedent. It is not only a story about how to occupy unoccupied territory but also an authoritative instance of the rules of occupation. This story is not just an example but a precedent that gives the law. Grotius and Pufendorf take credit, or invoke as a form of credit Plutarch’s authority, which decides in advance the stakes of the question and the answer to it. For his part, Grotius focuses not just on finding a thing or even on signifying that one has found it but on actually laying hold of it. He thus says (seemingly contrary at least to the majority decision in Plutarch’s text) that the deserted city is “adjudged to the Chalcidians, who first enter’d it, not to the Andrians who had first thrown a dart into it.” His reasoning has to do with appropriate forms of touch and contact. He writes that “the beginning of Possession is joining Body to Body, and this in Moveables is done usually by the Hands; but in Immoveables, by our Feet.”31 These modes of bodily action are clearly codified for Grotius, but how this convention came to be in force is not explained. The appropriate forms of contact are a kind of propriety preceding property and are presumably the result of a strangely detailed, yet silent and tacit contract regarding the forms of appropriation. Indeed, to some extent, it seems to be Plutarch’s story itself that is supposed to determine the appropriateness or propriety of forms of action (even if Grotius seems to disagree with the majority decision in the story). Pufendorf ’s commentary on this passage is similarly aimed at proving that possession “commenceth at our joining Body to Body, either immediately or by a proper Instrument.”32 For immoveables, “immediate” occupation is necessary. This immediacy, however, is far from simple. While Pufendorf seems to indicate that immediacy here has to do with a contact of the body without prosthetic mediation, this contact must also be mediated by its context, by the supposed and implicit agreement about the appropriateness of different forms of contact between body and thing. The focus on immediacy means that Pufendorf, like Grotius, insists on a certain propriety between bodies and things: “The regular Course therefore is, that the Occupancy of Moveables be made with the Hands;

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the Occupancy of Soil with Feet, with an intention of manuring it, and the Action of setting Boundaries to it” (391). This rules out the action of spear throwing as appropriate in the case of the deserted city. He writes that “whether Possession of an immoveable Thing may be taken by an Instrument, we may understand from the famous Story” in Plutarch (391). After reciting the story, Pufendorf concludes that “a Spear seems a very improper Instrument for the Occupancy of Immoveables, since we can strike many things with such a Weapon, which we can never approach so near as to touch with our Body” (391). His solution thus depends on an immediate touch, unmediated by any prosthetic instrument, even if this touch must always be mediated by a convention that will decide how and when touch is possible and legitimate. Importantly, occupation is here defined quite literally by boots on the ground: we occupy land by stepping on it with our feet.33 However, as with Grotius, the rule that dictates that we touch something immediately is itself already mediated by a prior convention. In this sense, even immediate occupation and immediate touch are remote, mediated by a convention prior to any act of occupation whatsoever. In their attempts to naturalize occupation by linking it immediately to the natural body, both Grotius and Pufendorf thus produce an aporia in which the more naturally connected to the body the moment of occupation is, the more it is necessary that an anterior convention guarantee this natural connection of body and territory. Mediation inserts itself into physical immediacy. The drone, as a technology that hyperbolizes mediation (between drone operators, their machines, and their targets; between those who order killings and those who press the button), acts as a lever to break apart the already shaky immediate and direct connection between body and territory in Enlightenment theories of occupation. Paradoxically, then, Pufendorf (and, implicitly, Grotius) relies on an immediacy of touch at one and the same time that he refers back to a necessary convention that would always mediate every act of touch. On the one hand, there is an insensible convention that bypasses intentionality and mediates any form of touch and contact; on the other hand, there is an immediate moment of contact that is supposed to produce the meaning of an action by itself. This paradox becomes clear in Pufendorf ’s engagement with Lambert von Velthuysen, a Dutch apologist for Hobbes, over the relation­ship between sight and touch in occupation. He quotes at length

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from a passage in which Velthuysen defends the necessity of an original contract in order to establish property. Part of this quotation includes an example of two men running to occupy something, which echoes the problem concerning the seizure of things that arises in Plutarch’s story of the Greek colony. Pufendorf quotes Velthuysen: “There is in Nature no more Reason why Men should desire a Right from the first Occupancy of Things, than from the first Discovery of them with the Eye. Therefore the difference must arise from the Institution of Men, ordaining, that the Right to a Piece of Land, for instance, should be in him who first took possession of it, not in him who saw it before others.” Velthuysen continues: “Let us suppose two Men, one swift, and one slow of Foot, ’tis evident what an ill-­match’ d Couple we have here, as to the business of acquiring property; and by consequence, that the Right by which he who first seizeth the thing, in this case, should be the true owner of it, is not borrowed from Nature, but from implicit Covenant or Agreement” (366, italics in original). For Velthuysen, the necessity of corporeal possession and the privilege of touch over sight with regard to property are conventional and not natural. There is thus no natural fitness of body to thing that makes property out of the application of one sensory organ to a thing and not another, and we could not, without a preceding convention, communicate our design to occupy a thing to others by means of any kind of physical action. Pufendorf comments that Velthuysen “might have said more briefly, upon Supposition that all Men had originally an equal power over things, we cannot apprehend how a bare corporal Act, such as Seizure is, should be able to prejudice the Right and Power of others, unless their Consent be added to confirm it” (367). For Pufendorf, then, the way the body interacts with things in order to produce propriety is entirely conventional. More than a bare corporeal act, the act of seizure is an act of signification, an act that requires context and convention. Pufendorf does little to explain, however, how it is, or what possible reason might be behind, the specificity of the convention that makes touch more important than sight. The closeness of the body and the necessity of touch, indeed the entire idea that there must be boots on the ground to produce occupancy, seems to be based upon little more than an invisible antecedent convention. This convention is remote from the body, and even remote from those subjects who are attempting to occupy something as they have no choice but to simply

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accept its terms. This means that the act of occupation is never immediate, no matter how hard Grotius and Pufendorf try to make immediate contact the condition of occupying something. The convention always mediates between the fact of touch and a felicitous act of occupation. Pufendorf and Grotius, in their interpretation of Plutarch’s problem, thus shuttle between the necessity of a prior conventionality that would guarantee the efficacy of an act of occupation and the necessity of an instant of touch that would produce property immediately. Occupation is a mediated immediacy in which the necessary act of touch is always distanced from itself. Occupation is thus always more or less remote, always proximate, but never immediate, and when tele-­technologies that extend the virtuality of touch beyond the range of a thrown spear intervene, the distance from which one can occupy something and the complexities of distinguishing the remote from the immediate only increase. This is especially the case when the drone—­a weaponized eye, as Chamayou calls it—­makes seeing something and being able to strike it simultaneous. In this prosthetic technology, remote touch and farsightedness combine in a deadly form. However, this does point to a difference between the drone, which destroys people and things with Hellfire missiles, and Plutarch’s spear, which is used not so much as an offensive weapon and more as a mode of signification. If the spear in Plutarch’s story signifies an intention to occupy or performs occupation, however, so does the Hellfire missile. Exactly because of its limited destructiveness and its claims to precision, the missile fired from a drone signifies a power of jurisdiction or sovereignty at the same time that it kills and destroys. The weaponized drone is able to police populations by exercising the power of life and death, needing to touch the ground only with violent explosions. Occupation is so remote that one barely needs even the land itself except as a target, as the air is sufficient to maintain a jurisdiction over those on the ground. If both weapons signify or perform occupation, though, there is also a decided difference in the way they relate to temporality. The spear in the gate is a punctual sign, made once and without need of repetition. The missile fired from a drone, however, is part of a potentially infinite series of strikes, and every missile signifies a power or potential for more strikes as much as it does a singular claim to occupation. This signifying of the continued potential for destruction, however, makes the Hellfire missile a powerful

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BARBEYRAC: REMOTE INTENTIONALISM Some of the problems associated with thinking through the remoteness of occupation become clear in Jean Barbeyrac’s responses to Pufendorf and Grotius. Barbeyrac translated the works of both authors into French, and his editions (which sometimes reordered the Latin) were the basis for many English editions. Beyond translating, Barbeyrac also appended long discursive and explanatory notes to his translations, many of which took serious issue with the authors he was translating. Indeed, these notes were often more disputative than explanatory, and this is especially the case when it comes to questions of original occupation. Unlike both Pufendorf and Grotius, Barbeyrac was staunchly against the idea that there needed to be a prior contract or convention in order to establish property. This latter position he saw as Hobbesian and therefore dangerously authoritarian. As a Huguenot exile living within memory of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Barbeyrac was especially wary of any arguments that enhanced the power and authority of sitting sovereigns. Indeed, as David Saunders has demonstrated, much of Barbeyrac’s work moved toward translating the natural law of Pufendorf and Grotius into a Lockean register and thus eliminating the need for a contract to establish property.34 Much of this disagreement comes out clearly in Barbeyrac’s commentary on the passages of Pufendorf and Grotius I have discussed above, and in this commentary Barbeyrac also develops, as Sophie Bisset has shown, a strongly intentionalist, or will-­based, theory of occupation that extends the potentiality of remote occupation far beyond the still physical theories of Grotius and Pufendorf.35 It is hard to overstate the strength of Barbeyrac’s objections to the idea that a convention is necessary to establish property. When Pufendorf writes that the exclusion of others from a thing can only proceed from a “mutual agreement,” Barbeyrac inserts a very long note that simply begins “No, in no wise” (365n4).36 What follows in this note contains much of

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signifier of occupation. One could hardly imagine, to speak like Hume, a clearer signal of sovereign jurisdiction than a missile that can kill with (ir)responsibility and immunity.

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Barbeyrac’s theory of the origin of property, and it cleaves very closely to Locke, whom he references specifically. Barbeyrac argues that “first possession” conveys an “immediate right” of property, without the mediation of an agreement. He writes that it is clearly the intention of God, who is the “Donor” of all things to men, that “those who come first shall gain a personal Right to those things that they have gotten, exclusive of the Pretensions of all others, without any Consent of theirs needful to be given.” It is merely “taking possession” that “hath in it an effectual Virtue” to make something property (365n4). For Barbeyrac, this virtue, or power of possessing something, carries with it a series of rights and obligations necessary to property. For example, when Pufendorf claims that a supposed or implied agreement is necessary to oblige someone to return property to its rightful owner, Barbeyrac claims that this obligation to restore another’s goods is “as natural a consequence of property as it is not to take them” and thus requires no agreement (454n1). Barbeyrac aims to establish a natural right to things that proceeds directly from God’s donation and does not require the intervention of a contract, and it is clear that he sees lurking behind the “agreements” of Grotius and Pufendorf the kind of contract with sovereign power theorized by Hobbes. Possession or occupation itself, then, is an action that is sufficient to make something into property, and no agreement or convention is necessary. However, for Barbeyrac, possession and occupation, despite their connotations of bodily contact, become something incorporeal and insensible. Barbeyrac’s commentary on Pufendorf ’s discussion of the difference between seeing and seizing something demonstrates the way convention and contact, mediacy and immediacy, combine in Pufendorf’s account of property. To Pufendorf’s argument that (without a compact to make touch capable of making property) seizure no more than seeing something conveys a right to property, Barbeyrac comments that the distinction between sight and touch has nothing to do with a prior agreement or consent. It proceeds instead, he argues, from the natural difference between these two actions. Seizing something, for Barbeyrac, can convey property because he who seizes something “declares thereby his intention . . . to appropriate it to himself” (366n6). Seizing reveals or signifies an intention. On the other hand, “The meer sight of thing can’t have the same Effect, because we see many things without any design of taking them to ourselves only” (366n2). Barbeyrac, while rejecting a corporeal and conventionalist theory

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of occupation, does so by instituting a natural body language in which certain actions can immediately make known our intentions. Barbeyrac thus maintains the distinction between sight and touch but does so by making touch not a conventionally agreed upon mode of producing property but a signifying, constative act. One judges the act of touch not by what it does or performs but by whether it adequately signifies the truth of an intention. Indeed, he claims that “if at the same time we perceive a thing first, and we discover any ways an intention of reserving it to ourselves, others may no more pretend to it, than if we were actually seized of it” (366n6). Barbeyrac thus makes the acquisition of property a matter of communication and signification of intentions. For Barbeyrac, occupation is about true signification, not felicitous performance. Before moving on, it is worth noting that the claim that we can see something without having an intention to occupy it makes more sense when we talk about unassisted human sight (if there is such a thing) than when we talk about the kind of machinic vision that is the hallmark of the drone.37 Humans indeed see many things without having any intention at all about them or, crucially, without even noticing them. We can thus see something in our field of vision without necessarily attending to it, let alone developing specific intentions about it. The drone, however, records everything in its field of vision (beyond even those things visible to the human eye). It provides an archive of things that may at any time be noticed or attended to. Furthermore, this archiving means that the drone has a kind of vision, a surveillance, that implies some kind of intentionality, as opaque as that intentionality might be. It does not merely see but claims a kind of control over what it sees either through the possibility of returning to archived recordings or, especially, because at any moment that vision can be turned into an act of violent and destructive touch. The drone sees intentionally, and its vision implies a right and power to prosthetically touch, and destroy, whatever it sees. In this sense, while Barbeyrac’s intentionalist theory seems to make the mode of occupation retreat into the mind of the human subject, the drone is a technology of prosthetic intentionalism, able to claim something by merely seeing it because its sight implies in itself, and without any other act of signification needed, an intention and power to occupy. To return to Barbeyrac, he argues that taking corporeal possession is only “a means to let all others know, that we have an Intention to appropriate such a thing” (386n2). He continues: “Indeed, that which properly

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makes the Right of the first Occupyer is, that he makes known to others his design to seize upon a thing” (386n2). Occupation for Barbeyrac thus works by signifying intentions and is more a constative than a performative statement. Barbeyrac therefore concludes that “if then [the occupier] declares his will by some other Act [i.e., not corporeal possession], as significative . . . he may then acquire the original Property without any actual possession” (386n2). Here, a prior convention is not required to give force to an act. Instead, it is the meaning of the action or speech, and the intention it signifies, that is important. This is what the drone, as a technology of prosthetic intentionalism, would call seriously into question. No other act is needed beyond sight and the accompanying threat of immediate destruction to occupy something. For its part, though, while Barbeyrac’s intentionalism aims to avoid the temporal problem of the prior convention in favor of a present, nonprosthetic intention, it also means that no touch, no boots on the ground, is necessary to make occupation happen. In this sense, Barbeyrac establishes a theory of incorporeal or remote occupation, which, when added to the prosthetic intentionalism of the drone, makes occupation almost unlimited and hyperbolically extensive. Indeed, if occupation can be achieved by verbal signification, one’s distance from a thing is immaterial. In making occupation entirely about communication between people, Barbeyrac loses all relation of proximity to a thing. He certainly realizes that this could lead to the possibility that one could simply claim property in everything one sees with no power, or perhaps even no serious intention, to use it. The problem of actually physically having or seizing an object that one claims to occupy emerges here. He thus adds a clause to his claim. He writes that in order to combat “the boundless Covetousness of most Men,” one “must be inclined to take what he declares his design to seize upon” (386n2). There must be an inclination that goes beyond the signified intention to claim something as property. However, the drone, which records what it sees, reserves the right of intention about what it sees. Any present sight can always be returned to, and the right to have an intention about what it sees is thus held in reserve, like a prosthetic and proleptic intentionalism. Occupation as a right, for Barbeyrac, remains problematic precisely because it is remote, or at a distance from the thing to be occupied, and it is this remoteness that the drone, as a technology of remote intentionalism, takes advantage of.

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In a sense, there is in Barbeyrac’s intentionalist system of occupation an unbridgeable difference between the occupier and the thing occupied. If there is original propriety, it is only in intention, not in the connection to the thing. Between the intention and the bodily connection to the thing, there remains a series of supplements and vagaries of interpretation. By retaining the pristine originality of intention, Barbeyrac paradoxically opens the propriety of occupation far beyond the kinds of physical limits that the more corporeal accounts of Pufendorf and Grotius set to it. The political technology of the drone expands those possibilities even further. The untouchability of intention replaces the insensible convention we saw in those thinkers, but the remote occupation allowed by Barbeyrac opens up the possibility for a more extensive and unlimited form of propriety, for a form of occupation that can happen at a distance, through intention, and without boots on the ground. Given this, it is unsurprising that Barbeyrac disagrees forcefully with the interpretation of Plutarch’s problem he found in Grotius and Pufendorf. It is precisely the idea that there is a prior convention and that there is a power in immediate touch that he takes issue with. He writes of Pufendorf that the “Determination . . . of our Author, is not at all Satisfactory” (391n2). In line with his will-­based theory of occupation, he claims that “when two Persons at the same time declare their Intention to seize a thing that belongs to neither of them, the thing is common to both” (391n2). Barbeyrac writes that what produces propriety is the fact that one “has declared, before some others, some way or another, his Intention to make a thing his own” (391n2). The clause “some way or another” grants considerably more liberty in how to occupy something than does the rather strict relation of a type of thing to a type of action or a part of the body that is drawn by Grotius and Pufendorf. This is both because, for Barbeyrac, there is no previous propriety of relation guaranteed by a tacit agreement and because it is not the signs that matter so much as the intention that is merely indicated by the sign. If Barbeyrac is able to adjudge occupancy equally to the spear thrower and the messenger who first stepped on the territory to be occupied, he demonstrates the potential of natural law to think occupation beyond the limits of the physical body. He outlines a form of sovereign, colonial occupation that would not need physical presence but merely a signified intention. The consequences of Barbeyrac’s theory become clearer

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in the world of drone warfare. Insofar as drones extend the sensors of the body, allowing their pilots and their masters to signify an intention of occupation by exercising the sovereign right over life and death, drones are able to produce a remote occupation that extends far beyond the limits of the corporeal body. The killing, with immunity, of civilians—­or even merely the surveillance of civilians and of territory accompanied by a power to kill—­is, in this sense, just as much a declaration of an intention to occupy as a standard declaration of war. In this policing of populations we see jurisdiction or sovereignty split off from boots on the ground occupation. This form of remote occupation, furthermore, is explicitly enabled by an asymmetrical aerial sovereignty in which sovereignty is not limited to the airspace immediately above one’s terrestrial dominions.

OCCUPATION AND THE ELEMENTS To say that the drone allows a kind of remote occupation is, as we have seen, to stretch the limits of what we mean by occupation in terms of a physical presence in a territory. The drone thus hyperbolizes and actualizes the concept of remote occupation that was already virtually present within Enlightenment concepts of occupation. However, this claim that drones allow for a remote occupation of the places in which they are active also challenges theories of occupation in a different way. Occupation has always been thought to be solely limited to the land. Indeed, it is precisely this territorial quality of occupation that lends such intuitive or imaginative force to the idea that a foot must strike the ground to be occupied. In many ways, the origin of Enlightenment natural law is precisely the idea that the open seas cannot be occupied. Grotius’s Mare Liberum (1609) set forth as its thesis that no country can occupy the oceans and that all nations have an equal right to traverse them. While not unchallenged, Grotius’s argument became orthodoxy and was subject to several refinements.38 One such refinement was Bynkershoek’s 1702 claim that the sea could be occupied as far as one could defend it from land.39 Thus a harbor, the entrance to which could be covered by cannon shot, could be claimed by a particular nation. Even during the eighteenth century this accepted refinement was subject to the general problem of the increasing range of weapons resulting from

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technological advances. Clearly, the drone blows all such calculations out of the water, and indeed long before the advent of the drone the formal limit of three miles from a coastline became the established limit for the occupation of the sea.40 A formal rule thus intervened against technology in such a way as to maintain both the freedom of the seas and the conceptual boundary between the elements of land and sea. One of the most interesting wrinkles in the idea that the sea cannot be occupied is, as Daniel Heller-­Roazen has demonstrated in The Enemy of All, the existence of the pirate, whose status as a figure not bound to the earthly territory has long been a problem for institutions of law and sovereignty. The pirate, as Heller-­Roazen has shown, belongs to an element not subject to earthly sovereignty and thus lives not only in unoccupied territory but in an element that cannot be occupied. The technology of the drone presents a similar problem to that of the pirate, but with regard to a third element: the air. While the pirate seems outside all territorial law, not bound to the occupied territories of the earth and imperfectly subject to the sovereignty of nations, the weaponized drone of Western militarism is a figure of sovereign power that, in its airborne state, is equally indifferent to the laws of territory. However, while the sea cannot be occupied, the way the law of the air developed means that the air is subject to sovereign occupation, although usually this occupation refers only to the occupation of the airspace above a sovereign territory by the nation that has sovereignty over the land. What the drone makes possible is a splitting off of the air from the ground below it and the potential for an aerial sovereignty exercised without any kind of boots on the ground. On a fundamental level, what the drone demonstrates is that the air is the exclusive province of sovereign power, that it can be occupied only by the most advanced and technologically capable sovereign powers. It threatens, indeed, a new division of sovereignties, between the limited sovereignty (which is thus not sovereignty at all) of telluric nations and the unlimited sovereignty of those nations that can claim control of airspace beyond their own territorial boundaries. Before looking at the way Heller-­Roazen discusses the figure of the pirate as it relates to the history of the law of the sea, it is worth looking at how the laws governing airspace developed in relation to technologies of flight. Once long-­distance flight became a real possibility, various legal obstacles

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to the burgeoning practice of aviation became clear. As Stuart Banner has chronicled in Who Owns the Sky?, one of those problems was the question of aerial trespass over private property. Because the common law and the civil law both held that the owner of a property owned the airspace all the way to the heavens, an aircraft’s right to fly through the airspace over private property was ambiguous at best. While Banner’s book follows the various twists and turns that led to the overcoming of this obstacle in the United States, it also touches on a question more germane to my argument: are the skies sovereign? More fundamental than the question of private property rights in airspace was whether sovereign nations had the right to exclude foreign aircraft from their airspace. Unsurprisingly, jurists looked backward for analogues to this new legal situation and found one in the debate about sovereignty over the seas. As Banner argues, it appeared that the sea and the air could be analogical and that if the law had enshrined a freedom of movement over the seas, it might do the same with regard to movement through the air.41 The question of aerial sovereignty was important both because of questions of what is now called national security and because of questions of jurisdiction. As Banner reports, lawyers questioned, for instance, what the citizenship would be of a child born while airborne or what nation would have jurisdiction over a murder committed in the air. Would it be the nation of which the alleged murderer was a citizen? Or was the victim’s nationality more important? Or was the crucial factor the territory over which the plane was flying when the crime was committed, the nation where the flight had originated, or the nation where the plane landed?42 These are questions, especially with regard to crimes, that had already been debated with regard to the law of the sea, and maritime law thus seemed a fruitful place to start when thinking about constructing a law of the air. However, while the debate about the law of the sea had been decided in favor of the free seas by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the debate concerning the law of the air in the early twentieth century quickly moved the other way. Some of this debate had to do with the law of occupation. As Banner explains, the French jurist Paul Fauchille claimed that in order to own something, “one must be able to occupy it in a real and continuous manner,” and he denied that this was possible in the case of the air.43 Flying through the air was not the same as occupying it.

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Others, however, argued that nations could occupy their airspace precisely because they would have a capacity to exclude others from it. This claim of exclusive right is another facet of the natural law of property. Indeed, in the early twentieth century Johanna Lycklanna and Harold Hazeltine outlined what would become the standard legal doctrine of the sovereign right to airspace. One is occupying something, each of them argued, if one can keep others from it. Furthermore, these jurists argued, states had the right to exclude airships from their airspace in order to protect their citizens. Even a friendly airship could crash, and while this is true of oceangoing vessels as well, a sinking ship poses little threat except to the people and things on board.44 Thus the analogy between sea and air began to be broken. Then, as Banner tells it, the outbreak and prosecution of World War I “removed all doubt that nations would need to exercise complete sovereignty over their territories,” and the “neo-­Grotian claim, that the air by its nature could not be possessed, virtually disappeared.”45 Very soon, the principle that national sovereignty extended up into the sky was enshrined in international law. This means that the drones that hover in the air above countries with which the United States is not at war are in a very different legal situation than the pirates who roam the seas. On the one hand, in both cases the legal situation is often unclear, especially when drones are used for extrajudicial killing. On the other hand, while pirates exist in a zone seemingly outside sovereignty, drones embody a mobile or remote sovereignty that decidedly unbalances the system of territorial sovereignty in a way that airplanes, which mostly pass through airspace, do not. Drones hover above territory as little islands of sovereign immunity. Indeed, drones contribute to and exacerbate what Stuart Elden has identified as a tiered system of sovereignty. Elden argues that some states, in line with the United Nations definition of sovereignty as territorial, are treated as sovereign nations, even when most international actors recognize, or claim, that these nations are not fully in control of their peoples or territories. The principle of inviolate borders is thus maintained, but these nations are treated as if not fully sovereign over their territories, at once responsible for the actions of their people and deemed unable to control their people without external help.46 Afghanistan and Iraq are examples of this form of sovereignty, but perhaps the clearest recent example is that of Pakistan, whose control of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, has

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always been in question. The control of airspace becomes crucial in these situations, and the drone allows a remote control or occupation of the airspace above an otherwise sovereign earthly territory that markedly reduces the territorial sovereignty of a nation. As remote islands of sovereign power, drones occupy the airspace and unbalance the system of territorial sovereignty that was supposed to be enshrined in UN charters. While territorial sovereignty is undoubtedly one legacy of the Enlightenment, so is the drone and its remote occupation. We must be alert to the fact that the drone is not simply an undoing of the territorial basis of sovereignty but also a way of maintaining sovereign borders, even when the rights of sovereignty (such as that over the life and death of one’s subjects) are exercised remotely by another power. As Elden has shown, the deterritorialization of borders has also implied a stark reterritorialization of national sovereignty. With respect to the significance of the drone’s challenge to the system of territorial sovereignty, it is worth looking at how Heller-­Roazen describes the relation of the pirate to territory. He traces the figure of the pirate in the law of nature and nations from Cicero’s declaration that the pirate is “common the enemy of all.”47 This figure, whom medieval jurists would call the enemy of humanity, thus exists outside the bounds of obligations that people in civil society owe to one another. As the pirate is, fundamentally, an oath breaker, one is not obliged to keep oaths to pirates. The pirate thus exists in a zone of (ir)responsibility, similar to that of the sovereign. He cannot be held responsible for his deeds by any particular system of laws, as his actions exists outside the reciprocal obligations that make a society of laws function. For this reason, as Heller-­Roazen explains, the pirate can be punished by anyone, as he is an enemy to all humanity.48 While a sovereign power is not as easily punished as a pirate, he (or she or it) is also not subject to specific civil laws, and any punishment would have to come either from a fragile international law or through a rebellion of subjects. In this sense, the sovereign and the pirate are mirror images, one existing in a zone of (ir)responsibility below the level of civil society, the other above it. The parallel or mirror image is reinforced in thinking about the elements that are “occupied” by these figures. As we have seen, natural law holds as one of its principles that the sea cannot be occupied. The sea has always been, both in law and in the imagination, the proper element of the pirate. Indeed, as Heller-­Roazen has argued, one of the major principles

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of law concerning pirates is that they commit their depredations at sea. Their ships are thus outside any national legal jurisdiction and therefore, as Heller-­Roazen explains, not subject, under international law, to any jurisdiction whatsoever.49 Carl Schmitt, for instance, in attempting to distinguish the pirate from the partisan, argues that the partisan remains “telluric,” or earthbound, while the pirate has no territorial ties.50 This linkage of the pirate to the sea was strained in various ways throughout the twentieth century.51 Heller-­Roazen argues that the US war on terror has produced, in the category of the “unlawful enemy combatant,” a new telluric figure of piracy. As he puts it, this new figure of enmity collapses “the distinction between criminal and political categories,” and the actions taken against him “involve the measures used in prosecuting both belligerents and criminals: procedures both of external relations and internal security, measures of politics and police.”52 Heller-­Roazen is writing specifically about the rounding up and imprisonment, particularly in Guantanamo Bay, of people classified as “unlawful enemy combatants” in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Certainly, the more recent move from a policy of capture to one of killing would only heighten the link that Heller-­Roazen draws between the pirate and the new figure of the unlawful enemy combatant, who, like their predecessor, is treated as an enemy of all, or an enemy of the human race. As I argued in the first chapter, the enemy in drone warfare is treated as incapable of becoming a friend, and the only options considered are indefinite detention and death. However, while Heller-­Roazen’s analysis focuses on the creation of this new form of subjectivity, who is not quite a political subject nor a criminal subject, it is also worth focusing on the new form of sovereignty that is capable of hunting it down. If the unlawful enemy combatant has no particular reference to a territorial state even as they live on the land, the drone occupies the air only because it belongs definitely to an earthbound sovereign power. If the sea is classically free, not occupied and thus the potential realm of pirates, the drone makes the air the element of sovereignty. Caren Kaplan has recently revised in a convincing manner the historical narrative that links aeriality to sovereignty and state power, demonstrating that aerial viewpoints can be as much about confusion as about control and that there are other aesthetic potentials in the aerial view than that of the state.53 In the case of the drone as a military weapon, however, sovereignty

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remains key.54 While drones themselves are relatively cheap in comparison with standard fighter and bomber planes (at least the Predator and Reaper models) and thus presumably reasonably accessible to nonstate actors or to the military apparatuses of smaller states, the infrastructure that makes a drone like the Predator or Reaper functional is not. Not only are hi-­tech bases at remote locations necessary but the airfields where drones take off and land need to be manned because a three-­second delay in video feeds means that remote pilots cannot perform those tasks. This is not to mention the huge amount of bandwidth necessary to transmit all the information generated by the drone’s sensors. Most importantly, though, to be functional as a military weapon the drone requires an almost total dominance of airspace. Because even the most basic of antiaircraft artillery or the most ageing air force would make short work of a drone, the drone is functional as a weapon only because of a sovereign dominance of airspace. The drone is a weapon of asymmetrical warfare. Thus, the drone is a flying figure of sovereignty, of an occupation of airspace that can be accomplished only by a sovereign power. If the sovereign and the pirate come together, it is because both act outside the bounds of the territorial, and remote occupation is the mode in which the drone allows sovereignty to do this, to deterritorialize itself from the classical concept of boots-­on-­the-­ground occupation. The drone thus unlinks sovereignty from territoriality. However, as Elden has argued, this deterritorialization (or aerialization) of sovereignty does not leave the earth or territorial boundaries behind. Instead, what is produced is a “contingent sovereignty” whereby the lines on a territorial map remain clear and a given state is responsible for what happens within those lines.55 However, the ability of that state to control its own territory is called into question in such a way that other countries are given the right to enter into it and act upon its population. As Elden puts it, in such cases “territorial integrity is split apart, in that there is a call for the preservation of existing territorial settlements but an insistence on wholly contingent sovereignty. The stress on territorial sovereignty [that a state is responsible for what goes on within its borders] is enforced most strongly at the very time territorial sovereignty is disrupted” by the incursion of foreign forces.56 The human result is, Elden argues, that the people within these territories become “victims from both sides,”

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from the terrorist groups (or their own governments) and from external forces who increasingly appear only as the explosion of a Hellfire missile. Pakistan is once again an emblematic example. Elden argues that even as early as the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Pakistan was able to avoid becoming subject to an invasion itself only by compromising its sovereignty. Pakistan had to agree to a list of demands articulated by Richard Armitage (then of the US State Department), some of which, like “blanket overflight and landing rights for all military and intelligence operations,” “effectively surrendered Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty.”57 With the advent of the drone, of course, these flying islands of sovereignty could more or less constantly and permanently maintain an aerial presence that, without changing the territorial integrity of Pakistan’s borders, eviscerated its sovereignty. This is the very paradigm of remote occupation. This system of contingent sovereignty returns to the problem of responsibility discussed in chapter 1. States that are subject to this contingent sovereignty are held absolutely responsible for everything that happens within their borders, even when parts of the territory enclosed by those borders are readily acknowledged to be outside any governmental control. Indeed, Elden calls the idea that all states are in control of all their territory a “sovereign fiction,” a state of affairs which never exists and yet which underlies all international law concerning states.58 By a robust application of this sovereign fiction, states with contingent sovereignty are thus made subject to a strict liability form of responsibility in which even unwelcome noncitizens who act in their territory are their responsibility. In a circular way, the inability to control one’s own territory renders one’s sovereignty contingent, not immune and absolute, and thus subject to interventions by other sovereign powers.59 Elden shows that this has led to a conception of “earned sovereignty,” sovereignty as something that some states have to prove a right to rather than as something absolute and nonnegotiable. In some ways, this system of contingent sovereignty is a way to limit sovereignty, and it is imperative to limit the absolute right to violence that sovereigns claim. However, the system of contingent sovereignty does this only by placing, as Hobbes demonstrated, another sovereignty above the sovereignty of contingent states. In the case of states accused of harboring terrorists, the other sovereignty is exercised by states such as the United States or Britain, who see themselves as actual or potential

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victims of terrorism. Their sovereignty, their right to immunity from attack and their right to life and death, is thus extended radically to the airspace and territories of other nations. Their sovereignty is not, of course, earned, and the question whether they are responsible for the nefarious actions of those within their borders is never raised. What emerges is a reaffirmation of sovereignty that strengthens its immunitary powers and radically extends its reach. It is also a sovereignty that is irresponsible, unaccountable both for the actions that take place in its own territories and for the actions it takes (even up to deciding on life and death) in the territory of others. This is the consequence of remote occupation. What the drone’s remote occupation shows is that the crude territorial dominance of Enlightenment colonialism, while brutal and violent, was also limited. It is instead from the not quite explored, not quite recognized theorization of remote occupation by Enlightenment legal thinkers that a more unlimited form of occupation and colonialism emerges. We did not have to wait for the drone for its theorization, but its actualization was definitively allowed by the radically asymmetrical aerial sovereignty characteristic of drone colonialism. The next chapter explores the relation between sovereignty and aeriality, once again beginning with an Enlightenment text—­Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—­that had already begun to imagine the consequences of aeriality for sovereignty and colonialism.

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Sever al authors who are critical of the US drone wars have approvingly quoted the US Army general Stanley McChrystal. Hugh Gusterson, for instance, quotes McChrystal in the epigraph to the first chapter of his book Drone: “To the United States a drone strike seems to have very little risk and very little pain,” McChrystal states. “At the receiving end it feels like war. Americans have got to understand that.”1 He claims, and this is a claim cited as strong evidence against the military use of drones later in Gusterson’s book as well as by other anti-­drone writers, that by using drones “you create a tremendous amount of resentment inside populations . . . because of the way it appears and feels. . . . What seems like a panacea to the messiness of war is not that at all. . . . And wars are ultimately decided in the minds of populations.”2 There is an implicit reference here back to the Vietnam-­era claim about the necessity of winning over “hearts and minds.” McChrystal’s critique of the drone is based on a conviction that the enemy matters and that to win is somehow to win the enemy over, to get it to acknowledge and live with the superiority of the victor, not just militarily but also culturally. On an even more basic level, McChrystal sees war as about winning, perhaps even as about ending war. Chris Woods quotes McChrystal as saying that “we’re going to lose the fucking war if we

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don’t stop killing civilians.”3 In this sense, McChrystal remains within the paradigm of the theory of war established by Carl von Clausewitz, according to which the aim of war is to make the enemy submit to one’s own terms and to thus end armed conflict.4 McChrystal’s comments, while comforting to certain anti-­drone writers, may simply reflect a misunderstanding of what the drone is and the kind of neocolonial political technology it represents. To be comforted by McChrystal, one must think that the drone is a mere weapon of war, that it does not fundamentally change the kind of war one can wage. However, the drone does just this. The point of drone warfare is that one does not need to win over the enemy, nor does one need to end a war. The remoteness and asymmetry of drone warfare means that it can potentially become permanent, such that neither the hearts nor minds of the enemy are important. Insofar as one can both observe and destroy, with impunity, the bodies of modern neocolonial subjects, their hearts and minds are no longer relevant. Blurring the boundary between war and peace and undoing the dialectical opposition between friend and enemy are two aspects of drone warfare. They produce an enemy who cannot and need not become a friend. Another facet of drone warfare, as many critics have noticed, is that it destabilizes notions of presence. As I explored in the previous chapter, one of the reasons that the drone does this is that it is a colonial political technology. Colonialism has always been about ruling at a distance and, in doing so, undoing the presence of the colonial power to itself. Eyal Weizman has recently demonstrated that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is the most advanced form of neocolonialism because of the way it enforces a separation of the occupied and occupying populations in a three-­dimensional political topography that he calls a politics of verticality. He has also demonstrated the way that a logic of the lesser evil, in which constant low-­intensity violence (often perpetrated by drones) is justified because it is supposedly a more humane alternative to massively destructive wars, has prolonged and perpetuated war and violence.5 The present of war is thus radically extended, with every drone strike or every use of rubber bullets justified as an act of restraint rather than violence.6 The specter of a massively destructive violence thus perpetuates violence in the present and maintains what seems to be an untenable political situation by a constant deferral of any long-­term solution through a continual series of acts of

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low-­intensity violence. The drone is the primary weapon in the cutting-­edge form of neocolonialism represented by the Israeli occupation of Palestine. If the conflict between Israel and Palestine is the frontline of drone warfare and neocolonialism in the twenty-­first century, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, of 1726, explores in a hyperbolic way the consequences both of a politics of verticality and of a logic of violence that perpetuates war. Indeed, Swift explicitly discusses a political structure in which certain populations are considered as not deserving of genocide, while also not being granted any kind of freedom or protection from state violence. He predicts our twenty-­first century situation: a state of war punctuated by acts of low-­intensity violence that is not supposed to end. It is perhaps unsurprising that Gulliver’s Travels, an Enlightenment text intensely concerned with the various technologies of colonialism (from telescopes to ships to gunpowder) imagines, in the weaponized flying island of Laputa, a terrifyingly prescient version of the drone. At the same time, Swift’s work also relies on a satiric procedure that dislocates both spatial and temporal presence. Like drone warfare, the satiric method of Gulliver’s Travels undoes the presence of the colonial power to itself. For its part, the drone does this by mediating between the territory of the occupying power, from which attacks are launched, and the occupied territory, which feels the force of the attacks. As it does this, as various writers have shown, the mediating technology of the drone makes it seem for drone operators that the violence of war is right here at home in what is theoretically a territory removed from violent conflict.7 For those living under drones, on the other hand, territory is remotely occupied, without boots on the ground but with all the present violence of war. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s satiric procedure undoes presence in a different way, and in doing so it produces an Enlightenment theory of remote-­control colonialism. Swift’s other Englands in the first three books of the Travels are spatially removed from England and yet (within the fiction of the satire) contemporaneous with it. There is thus a dislocation of the space of England. This dislocation of space is even more complex in book 3, in which Laputa is layered on top of Balnibarbi. These spatial dislocations, however, are only a part of the way in which Gulliver’s Travels dislocates presence. Brobdingnag and Lilliput, for instance, look like different versions of England. Lilliput is an allegory of England’s present, while

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Brobdingnag is an idealized version of England. Crucially, however, both these imaginary Englands exist without (or before) the invention of gunpowder.8 Gulliver’s descriptions of the wondrous destructive capabilities of gunpowder, furthermore, make this technology seem like something that has not been fully integrated into the English present, a present potentiality of destruction that still seems too horribly futuristic. Most importantly, however, the final book of Gulliver’s Travels presents us with a temporal dislocation that profoundly resembles our own. For the Houyhnhnms, the rational horses who rule over a race of degenerate humans called Yahoos, only one debate disturbs their perfectly administered society. They cannot decide whether to exterminate the Yahoos, and in lieu of deciding, they keep them indefinitely in subjugation. This indefinite suspension of the decision is in contradiction to their own reason, and in suspending or delaying a definitive act of violence, the Houyhnhnms create a quasi-­permanent state of racial domination. The present is not present to itself but is rather the time of suspension, a temporality that always holds off the destructive future. What Swift describes in Gulliver’s Travels, I will argue, is precisely the temporality of drone warfare. Drone warfare suspends a high-­intensity, potentially genocidal conflict by maintaining a permanent low-­intensity war. It puts off both a decision about peace, or the cessation of war altogether, and a decision about a higher-­intensity war that would definitively alter the relations between states and peoples. In doing so, the drone warfare prosecuted by Western powers maintains a racialized colonial relation between the sovereign powers that use drones and the territories of subjects who live under them, between those who are subject to drone attacks and those who are not. This, even more than his imagination of a destructive remote-­control flying island, is the final relevance of Swift’s work to the world of drones. His account of the colonial world is explicitly organized by racial division, and the immediate effect of the perpetual suspension of the decision about the Yahoos is to both produce and maintain this division.

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If colonialism is about the dislocation of presence, it is also fundamentally about the relationship between symmetry and asymmetry. Specifically, it relies on an asymmetry of force for the maintenance of the colonial relation. Gulliver’s Travels too is concerned with the disruption of symmetry, and this forms both a theme of the satire and part of Swift’s satiric method. This is relevant to the phenomenon of drone warfare because it is the most obvious and chilling instantiation of asymmetrical warfare. While causing such terror, drones are in fact relatively weak as far as weapons, especially aerial ones, go. Early Predator drones had modified snowmobile engines.9 They remain quite slow and liable to be blown off course by moderate winds, and like its younger sibling the Reaper, the Predator is easy for any halfway competent air force or air defense system to detect and shoot down.10 Indeed, even the Hellfire missiles with which these drones are fitted are routinely described by drone pilots and US military personnel as small weapons.11 (Compared with the huge power of the bombs and missiles that can be launched from more conventional planes, this is undoubtedly true, although one wonders how small these missiles feel on the ground, where they can destroy a couple of houses.) In this sense, what is disturbing about drones is not their powerful, destructive capability (as it is, for instance, in the case of nuclear weapons); it is rather that such a relatively weak weapon can wreak such havoc and be so effective. This is not merely a technological problem but a political one. It is only because of a neocolonial political system that this technology is an effective method of control. Drones are effective only against enemies who lack the kind of infrastructure associated with a twentieth-­century (let alone twenty-­first-­century) state military apparatus. Indeed, what is striking about drones is that they are effective at all. It is only a geopolitical field characterized by a heavily racialized asymmetry that makes drones potent weapons. Any account of the drone, then, needs to reckon with the problem of asymmetry, the radical distance (which is not merely physical but also political) between those who live under drones and those who direct them. It is in this context of asymmetrical power that Swift’s imagination of the island of Laputa is most interesting. The island of Laputa itself hovers over Balnibarbi, the territory below it, and is moved by means of a powerful

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magnet attracted to the land. The king of Laputa resides on the island, engaged with his nobility in mathematical and musical pursuits, and uses the power of this remote flying machine to control and subdue the population below. This remote flying machine has routinely been taken for a metaphor of colonial control. Srinivas Aravamudan, for example, sees the Flying Island as representative of the colonial “oppression engendered by state structures.”12 Christopher Loar’s argument that “Laputa offers us an image of a superiority that is merely technological, devoid of the power to civilize except through violence” draws attention to the asymmetry of power between Laputa and the territory over which it hovers.13 Any reading of the asymmetry of Laputa must also take into account the way that the form or technique of Swift’s satire, as well as the content of the entire book, is dependent precisely on exploring the relationship between symmetrical and asymmetrical political relations, as well as the reciprocal and nonreciprocal use of force. Swift prominently uses as part of his satire figures of symmetry, such as the differences in size, relative to Gulliver himself, of the peoples of Lilliput and Brobdingnag. However, Swift also demonstrates, and this is the radicality of his text as it veers toward the radical edge of Enlightenment thought, that the opposition between symmetry and asymmetry is not itself symmetrical. There is no higher level on which symmetry can be balanced against asymmetry, no dialectical sublation of these terms that would create a new balance or stasis. More practically, one could say that no political relationship of asymmetry can lead to or produce a new form of community that would no longer rely on asymmetrical violence. Asymmetricity is instead pertinent to an inextinguishable racist colonialism that both drives and undoes the Enlightenment project of the construction of order, balance, reciprocity, and symmetry. Gulliver’s arrival in Lilliput inaugurates Swift’s concern with reciprocal and nonreciprocal political relations. Gulliver immediately realizes the asymmetry of force that holds between himself and the tiny Lilliputians. He confesses, upon being partially unrestrained so that he can drink, that he “was often tempted, while they were passing backwards and forwards on my Body, to seize Forty or Fifty of the first that came within my reach, and dash them against the Ground.”14 His immense power, rather than any particular animosity toward the Lilliputians, tempts him to kill them en masse, as if this asymmetry of force by itself produces a radical distinction

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between the value of their lives and his own. Gulliver is restrained from this temptation, however, by a kind of reciprocity. First, he has felt the sting of their arrows, and he worries that “what I had felt . . . might not be the worst they could do,” but he also interprets his own submissive behavior when first addressed by the Lilliputians to consist of a “Promise of Honour,” meaning that he was “bound by the Laws of Hospitality” to them (26). Gulliver’s fear of the potential power of the Lilliputians to wound him and his sense of honor thus produce a reciprocity that ameliorates the asymmetry of force. Gulliver, indeed, muses that things might have been different. He says that had he not been treated with respect, but attacked, he would have broken his bonds in rage and fallen upon his captors “after which, as they were not able to make Resistance, so they could expect no Mercy” (28). Even mercy, here, somewhat counterintuitively, is made a function of a reciprocity of force, and the specter of killing without mercy forms the asymmetrical, nonreciprocal element of the politics of Gulliver’s Travels. In the first of Gulliver’s voyages Swift thus contains, without entirely suppressing, the destructive asymmetry of force that threatens mass destruction and the reduction of the lives of Lilliputians to the value of mere insects. In our twenty-­first-­century context it is drone warfare that supposedly contains or holds off mass destruction, while at the same time acting as that which delivers violence and maintains war. This concern with containing merciless destruction, the potentially horrifying effect of asymmetry, is characteristic of the satiric method of the first two books of Gulliver’s Travels. Indeed, the second voyage to Brobdingnag is like a symmetrical reversal of Gulliver’s time in Lilliput. Gulliver is now, relative to the Brobdingnagians, the same size as the Lilliputians were relative to him. Consequently, his life is precarious and little valued. Gulliver reflects upon his own mortification at being so small and inconsiderable but is more concerned that “as human Creatures are observed to be more savage and cruel in Proportion to their Bulk, what could I expect but to be a Morsel in the Mouth of the first among these enormous Barbarians who should happen to see me?” (82–­83). Gulliver thus associates size and power with cruelty and the kind of abandonment of mercy that he himself had considered while in Lilliput. He also reflects that “undoubtedly Philosophers are in the right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison” (83). This comparatism is

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what makes the satire of the first two books work, as if a change in perspective, like looking at the world through one or the other end of a telescope, could change or revalue the world entirely. Gulliver’s arrival in Brobdingnag, then, has a certain kind of symmetry with the first voyage, as Gulliver changes from “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World” (82) to being handled like a “small dangerous Animal” (83), just as Gulliver himself would have handled a weasel in England. Even within this symmetry produced by the second voyage, however, Swift maintains the specter of asymmetry, especially in regard to politics, and destruction. In his continued quest to increase his value in front of the giants who are almost beyond comparison with him, Gulliver offers to the king of Brobdingnag the gift of gunpowder. He promises a weapon that “would not only destroy whole Ranks of an Army at once, but batter the strongest Walls to the Ground, sink down Ships with a thousand Men in each, to the bottom of the Sea; and, when linked together by a Chain, would cut through Masts and Rigging, divide hundreds of Bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them” (124). Because Gulliver is in a country that is another present to England, contemporaneous with it but sharing none of its history, Swift can have Gulliver describe this weapon not as if it were really in existence but as a wonder of the future. This is for the benefit not merely of the Brobdingnagian king but also of Swift’s English readers. This kind of description gives the impression that the destructive power of gunpowder is something that Swift’s present has somehow not caught up with, a technology that, though present, is still in front of us, of the future. This is also the tone Swift will adopt in describing the not-­yet-­in-­existence form of airpower represented by the Flying Island of Laputa. Moreover, it is precisely the way we live under drones. They are technologies of the present that present to us a future not yet realized and yet somehow already here with us. However present this present is, it is still in the future precisely because we do not know how to deal with it, to understand it now. Just as the weapons of destruction present to Swift in eighteenth-­century warfare instantiate, in the present, a future of unimaginable destruction, drones are already everywhere around us, seeing and killing remotely.15 They are the vision of a future already here and thus represent an irrevocable split in our own present. Unfortunately, we do not have the recourse of the king of Brobdingnag, who can simply deny the future that already exists in the present. He

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LAPUTA IS (NOT) A DRONE Once Gulliver travels to Laputa, the question of asymmetry and nonreciprocity in political relations becomes stark and unavoidable. It is precisely through the metaphor of a flying island, which doubles as both royal territory and weapon, that Swift sharpens his discussion of asymmetry. What is interesting about Swift’s Laputa is the way in which his metaphor of the flying island (to the extent that it is a metaphor) goes beyond its various applications or referents. While Swift scholars have debated whether the island refers to England’s position vis-­à-­vis Ireland or to European colonialism more generally, I want to focus less on the tenor of the metaphor than on the vehicle itself. As Aravamudan argues with relation to Gulliver’s fascination with horses after his return from Houyhnhnm-­land, Gulliver “transgresses the rule of abstract metaphor by insisting on materialist

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rejects Gulliver’s offer, “struck with Horror at . . . the Proposal [Gulliver] had made” (125). The king is horrified not only at the death and destruction gunpowder would bring but at the radical political asymmetry that it would allow, making him “absolute Master of the Lives, the Liberties, and the Fortunes of his People” (125). Being simply from another present, the king can abuse Gulliver as a “grovelling . . . Insect” inhumanly “unmoved at all the Scenes of Blood and Desolation” he describes. Not being from a present already imbued with this future of destruction, the king can say to Gulliver that he “would rather lose half his Kingdom than be privy to such a Secret” (125). The king’s impossible, gigantic virtue is a way for Swift to sneer at the possibility of any such virtue in his own present. It is also, though, a fantasy of being able to deny that the future that scares us is already here.16 The stark descriptions of the destructive power of gunpowder seem like the fantasy of a future even as we know they are actualities. Precisely because we do not live in another present, but already in this destructive future, we cannot escape it, and the king of Brobdingnag is both an impossible moral paragon and another present, mercifully insulated from the already present future horrors of Swift’s readers’ world.17 The escape from the peril of radical political asymmetry is thus accomplished only because of an unlikely giant virtue, which lives in the temporality of a present that is insulated from the present-­future of gunpowder.

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metamorphosis.” He wants not just equine beauty but “equine dung and odor around him as well.” In this sense, Aravamudan argues, “the vehicle of the metaphor is just as important as the tenor.”18 The flying vehicle of Laputa too resonates beyond any particular tenor of the metaphor. Flight, and particularly aerial occupation, flies out of the context of all possible historical referents (even those attributed to contemporaneous accounts of flying machines, such as those so carefully explored by Loar).19 If we take the metaphor literally, insisting that what is important in it is the fact that Swift creates a remote weaponized flying machine, we see how it explores and anticipates precisely the kind of remote occupation characteristic of drone colonialism. In this sense, what is most interesting about Laputa is not the historical situation it may refer to but the radical, asymmetrical political potential unleashed by a weaponized aerial vehicle. The flying island of Laputa is able to dominate the land below it because of its mobility and because it is almost invulnerable. Indeed, it is because the island is almost (and in Swift’s imagination of the drone the difference this “almost” makes is important) independent from the land it dominates. Laputa thus represents a political relation that is almost (but at least in Swift, not quite) a relation of occupation without any reciprocal relation, a remote occupation that promises, almost, the drones of the future. Gulliver’s first vision of Laputa is as an obscurity. Rather than seeing the island, he sees the sky darkening “in a manner very different from what happens by the Interposition of a cloud” (146).20 Upon looking through his telescope, Gulliver is astonished “to behold an Island in the Air, inhabited by Men, who were able (as it should seem) to raise, sink, or put it in a Progressive Motion, as they pleased” (146). This first vision is a kind of reverse of the aerial visions from above that have become standard in histories of aviation, and of the military development of airpower. 21 Gulliver’s telescope, his “Pocket-­Perspective,” itself a technology designed to make the remote near (or, in reverse, to make the near remote), now renders him astonished and powerless at the sight of the mass of land above him. The island is a technology of a different order than the telescope. It is a “firm Substance” that is moved about, and not merely an alteration of perspective. If the telescope itself is an important navigational, military, and colonial technology, the flying island increases the potential for military action at a distance and is able to navigate above, if not independent of, the elements

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of the land and sea. Laputa joins the telescope’s ability to bring the remote near with the potential for direct military action, just as the Predator drone was revolutionary for being able to combine surveillance with bombing. Laputa represents the potential for remote occupation joined to military action, and its airborne nature anticipates the colonial matrix as the laboratory for the use of aerial warfare.22 The technology of Laputa allows it to hover above Balnibarbi and to move, raise, and lower itself with reference to the territory below. The island functions through magnets, with the movement of a large lodestone in the center of the island determining its direction. Thus, the specific technology of the flying island links it to the territory below. Similarly, the political structure of Laputan society means that it remains strongly related to the territory below.23 Gulliver tells us that the king could render himself absolute were it not for the fact that the ministry, “having their Estates below on the Continent,” will not join with him in any plan for the absolute “enslaving of their Country” (159). The Laputans, if perhaps not the king, thus have a political stake in the country below. What happens to it matters to them. The technology that links Laputa to the territory below thus neatly represents the colonial political structure of the country. It is in this sense that Laputa is not quite as remote as the drone. This becomes even clearer in Swift’s description of the reciprocity between Balnibarbi and the flying island. While the king is able to use the island as a form of asymmetrical airpower to dominate the land below, this asymmetry is not total. Laputa is vulnerable, even as a military engine. Swift goes to some lengths to demonstrate that there is not a total nonreciprocity of force between Laputa and the terrestrial cities of Balnibarbi. Gulliver describes two ways in which the king can use the island of Laputa to discipline his subjects: “The first, and mildest, course is by keeping the Island hovering over such a [rebellious] Town, and the Lands about it, whereby he can deprive them of the Benefit of the Sun and the Rain, and consequently afflict the Inhabitants with Death and Diseases. And if the Crime deserve it, they are at the same time pelted from above with great Stones, against which they have no Defence but by creeping into Cellars or Caves, while the Roofs of their Houses are beaten to Pieces” (159). This “mild” course of discipline demonstrates Swift’s prescient vision of airpower, in which, simultaneously, the surface

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of the earth is flattened out and becomes open and vulnerable to attack against which there is “no Defence”; and political space becomes three-­ dimensional, with the air and underground being occupied in different ways than the surface of the ground itself. Swift’s Balnibarbi, because of the aerial threat of Laputa, looks something like the hollow land of Palestine described by Eyal Weizman, in which Israel’s politics of verticality works by turning territory into a three-­dimensional space of separation. Indeed, Weizman’s claim in Hollow Land is that the politics of verticality makes the work of traditional cartography inadequate to describe the division of territory in which certain levels of the earth pertain to an occupier, and others to an occupied people. Such a claim is anticipated in Swift’s three-­dimensional map of Laputa and Balnibarbi. Readers of Gulliver’s Travels will be familiar with the maps Swift appends to the beginning of each of Gulliver’s journeys, all of which are parodies of relatively conventional maps that show the land and sea from an aerial, two-­dimensional perspective, with the addition of the odd ship or sea monster. The map of Balnibarbi is a little different. Since it is not possible to draw the island from above without obscuring the land below, the map in fact has two axes transposed into one. As is conventional, the top of the page represents north, with Balnibarbi presented as a flat surface covered with mountains, forests, and towns. However, the top of the page also represents height, with the island of Laputa and the course that it charts placed above Balnibarbi on this latter axis but not on the former. In other words, Laputa is above Balnibarbi not because it is further north but because it is higher. In this sense, Laputa’s politics of verticality, a phrase used by both Weizman and Achille Mbembe, distorts cartography, and it twists the two-­dimensional map into three dimensions, asking us to see it along two axes.24 Furthermore, the map of Laputa above Balnibarbi is a map of movement, showing us how the island progresses over the territory below it. Swift thus invents a new cartographic language to deal with the politics of verticality, demonstrating that thinking through the drone necessitates thinking through the problem of territory and occupation in more than two—­perhaps, if we take into account duration, more than three—­dimensions. In Balnibarbi, the king’s mild course of action would send subjects into hiding and take away their modes of livelihood. However, it is not, Gulliver tells us, the ultimate recourse of the Laputan king. The most extreme of

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Map of Laputa and Balnibarbi, from Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (London, 1726)

the king’s violent measures against his populace is “letting the Island drop directly on [the inhabitants’] Heads, which makes a universal Destruction both of Houses and Men” (160). Swift’s imagination thus goes beyond the permanent disciplining of subjects from the air, toward mass destruction and killing. Importantly, however, “this is an Extremity to which the Prince is seldom driven, neither indeed is he willing to put it in Execution” (160). This is for two distinct reasons. First, the king and his ministry are at odds on the use of the island as a military engine. While the king would proceed to this extremity, his ministers, whose estates and interests are on the island below, are reluctant to do so. There is thus a distinction between the military, or technical, aspect of the technology of the island and its political technology. The island’s technical capacities mean it could enslave or massacre the people of Balnibarbi. However, the political organization of this particular colonial relation involves a reciprocity between the colonizing force who live on the island and the territories below. The ministers depend on Balnibarbi for their own wealth and thus cannot crush it absolutely. In this sense, in any discussion of the potential of aerial technology to work as a political force, one must take into account not only the technology itself but also the political situation that makes its use possible. This means that the politics of verticality, discussed in much recent criticism, has to do not only with geography or topography; it also has to do with a sovereign control that would govern without grounded intermediaries. In Laputa, the ministers are these intermediaries, and the

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link between the sovereign and his flying island of destruction is thus to some extent ameliorated. In our world, drones themselves are the technology of mediation, acting as the intermediary between those living under drones and those who control them. The mechanization of the relationship of mediation removes any reciprocal stake in the territory for those who patrol it. This also means that in terms of political technology, the relation between Balnibarbi and Laputa is much less asymmetrical than that between, for instance, the United States and Waziristan. The second reason that the king is wary of proceeding to the last extreme is more a matter of military than political technology. His island is not invulnerable. He fears that “if the Town intended to be destroyed should have in it any tall Rocks . . . or if it abound in high Spires or Pillars of Stone, a sudden fall might endanger the Bottom or under Surface of the Island” (160). The king thus makes the island always descend with “great gentleness,” ostensibly out of a “Tenderness for his subjects” but really “for fear of breaking the Adamantine bottom” (160). Even more importantly, however, the passage concerning the rebellion of Lindalino, never published during Swift’s lifetime and often read as an allegory of Swift’s own resistance to the destructive colonial scheme of Wood’s halfpence, indicates that there is a point at which even the most murderous force of the flying island can be reciprocated.25 The people of Lindalino build four towers and place on top of each, in addition to a large rock, both lodestones and explosives, aiming either to fix Laputa in place or, failing that, to simply blow up the bottom of the island. The king, upon hearing that the people are in rebellion, moves rapidly through his escalating measures, attempting to bring the rebellious city back in line. However, the lodestones interfere with the navigation of the island, and this “Incident broke entirely the King’s Measures and . . . he was forced to give the Town its own Conditions” (162). If this is not enough for Swift to demonstrate the power of resistance to Laputa, he adds that Gulliver was told by a “great Minister, that if the Island had descended so near the Town, as not to be able to raise itself, the Citizens were determined to fix it for ever, to kill the King and all his Servants, and entirely change the Government” (162). If the relation of the flying island to the territories below it is a kind of colonial parable, then, it ends with the metaphor of flight being brought back down to earth and with a fantasy of revolution and bloody revenge. Mass destruction is, Swift seems to say, always a reciprocal possibility.26

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Although Swift is relentlessly concerned with mass destruction, Gulliver’s Travels also demonstrates the brutal effectiveness of perpetual low-­intensity violence for colonialism. Indeed, it is in relation to this latter form of violence that Swift more nearly imagines the contemporary condition of drone warfare. It is this topic that the remainder of this chapter explores. Especially with the ending of the few paragraphs about Lindalino, Swift merges military and political technology. It is because of, in the case of Lindalino, a reciprocity of force, here a mutual capacity for mass destruction, that the political relation is not entirely nonreciprocal. Part of this has to do with technology in the sense of technics. Laputa remains attached to the ground below it by the force of magnets. It cannot leave the arc of Balnibarbi, and its movement is governed by its attraction to and repulsion from the earth below. This is, of course, a nice metaphor for the relation of political reciprocity that exists between Laputa and its occupied territory. Twenty-­first-­ century drone technology, however, is much more remote from the territory it hovers over, surveys, and attacks. It is also much less destructive than Laputa, a point I will return to. While this kind of remoteness is always deconstructable, in the sense that one must always note a certain territorial dependence of the drone, between Swift’s flying island and the Reaper drone there is a qualitative change. The Reaper can hover, invulnerable, over territory for fourteen to thirty hours.27 Refueling (which can be done by manned aircraft, and perhaps soon by other drones) and other terrestrial tasks are performed away from the “battlefield,” or occupied territory below.28 The drone’s technology, in this sense, makes it much more remote from the place it surveys and occupies than Swift’s island. More importantly, however, the political technology represented by the drone makes this technical remoteness matter. Precisely because there is no (again, this “no” must always be deconstrucable) reciprocal relation between the territory and population below and those who control the drones, there is no limit to the asymmetry between drone and target, between occupied territory and occupier. This is a crucial aspect of drone warfare, especially as it eludes most definitions of conventional war, including Elaine Scarry’s influential and perspicacious definition of war as reciprocal injuring. 29 Without this reciprocity, the drone seems to escape traditional

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BETWEEN UNIVERSAL DESTRUCTION AND PERPETUAL LOW-­INTENSITY WARFARE

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concepts of warfare. It cleaves much more closely to the paradigm of asymmetrical colonial wars than to that of the kinds of wars between states theorized in most philosophies of war. Even more than a traditional colonialism, however, the drone is fundamentally part of a neocolonial political technology in which remote occupation of territory is possible and desirable precisely because the productive capacity, the capitalization, of the land and citizens below is largely unimportant to the colonial force. It is in this sense that a remote occupation, without “boots on the ground,” is allowed by drone warfare. As I argued in chapter 2, it is important to maintain the word occupation here, even if the more traditional aspects of colonial occupation, such as the extraction of resources or the administration of government, are missing. Writing about an early manifestation of airpower, the British control of Iraq in the 1920s, Caren Kaplan, following Sven Lindqvist, refers to the British approach of controlling territory through airpower as “control without occupation.”30 Surely, the idea that such control over territory does not constitute occupation is a claim that could only be made by an occupying power. Bypassing the sovereignty of these formerly colonial territories, these drone operations repeat, as Thomas Hippler has argued, the pattern of colonial “police” bombing that constituted one of the early uses of airpower.31 Indeed, it is in the first, “gentle” phase of the flying island’s domination of the ground below, rather than in the possibility of genocidal destruction, that Swift’s imagination of airpower links up with the future of colonial aerial domination. What drones enable, for Hippler, is a “perpetual low-­intensity war” that resembles a police action more than it does a traditional war strategy.32 In part, this is because it does not necessarily aim at peace, or at the end of war. Whereas Swift’s imagination moved gradually toward a more and more destructive form of domination, the twenty-­first-­century drone, and its more extreme remoteness, allows for a more or less permanent fixing of Swift’s first stage of dominance. Drones can hover indefinitely over a territory, killing those below when necessary. Hippler distinguishes this kind of war from classical air warfare, which involved heavy and very destructive bombing. He likens perpetual low-­intensity warfare to the kind of colonial police bombing practiced by the British Empire in the 1920s in Iraq, as well as in territories like Waziristan, which is now, of course, subject to

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ASYMMETRY AND RACE The final book of Gulliver’s Travels explicitly introduces racial distinction into the problem of colonial rule. This form of asymmetry is crucial to understanding the problem of the drone and the way in which Swift’s Enlightenment political imagination is linked to our present moment. Drones solve the problem of ruling at a distance only through the intense asymmetry between those who use drones and those who are subject to them. In another echo of the early history of aerial warfare, in which it was the colonial territories and peoples that were at first uniquely subject to aerial bombing, drone warfare is used only on racialized subjects, the value of whose lives is always an open question.37 Indeed, as Woods and others have argued, the very status of civilian is not open to those people of North

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the CIA’s covert drone program. This perpetual low-­intensity warfare is “conducted in regions that are officially at peace,” and Hippler argues that it is thus “tempting to say that imperial perpetual peace now coincides with a perpetual low-­intensity war.”33 On the one hand, this kind of warfare is nothing new. It is paradigmatic of a colonial form of conflict that never respected the laws or ideals of warfare between nation-­states and especially the idea that peace is the end of war. Indeed, Mary Favret has argued that British citizens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived in a perpetual state of remote warfare, while Eyal Weizman has argued that the “militarization of all spheres of life” in 1970s Israel means that “war was only over because it was now everywhere.”34 What drones allow, however, is a hyperbolic extension of this perpetual low-­intensity war, because even those doing the killing do not have to risk their lives. The asymmetry is so hyperbolic, and the capacity to extend remote, drone occupation so little limited, that the global regime of drone colonialism can indeed appear perpetual. Drones are police-­like, because they discipline societies theoretically at peace, but they conduct policing activities on a global scale and with a military force that, through its very remote operation, insulates the policing agent from reprisals or from serious resistance.35 They are, as Hippler insinuates, a technological solution to the political problem posed by colonialism, that of ruling at a distance.36

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Africa or the Middle East who are subject to drone warfare.38 What makes the remote occupation characteristic of the drone possible, then, is not only a technological asymmetry, in the sense that the territories patrolled by drones have no air defense systems at all, in contrast to the highly advanced systems of the United States, but also a political technology of racism. This latter technology is an inheritance of the Enlightenment and creates, at the same time that a universal humanity is proclaimed, a system of distinctions between humans. Eyal Weizman demonstrates how the discourse and logic of humanitarianism in the Israeli politics of separation has become folded into the military logic of separation itself.39 In this sense, the idea of a universal humanity is politically ambiguous, and certainly weaker, as a locus of resistance to state power, than the various political modifications of the category “human,” such as civilian, citizen, or even, as Hannah Arendt demonstrated with regard to post–­World War II refuges, criminal.40 As Achille Mbembe has argued, the logic of sovereignty, especially in its colonial guise, is dependent on race. For Mbembe, who follows Foucault in this sense, race is a “technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, ‘that old sovereign right over life and death.’ ” This form of racially based biopower is, he argues, at its most hyperbolic in the colonies. “The colony,” he states, “represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of power outside the law . . . and where peace is more likely to take on the face of war without end.”41 He writes that this colonial situation of lawlessness “stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native.”42 This asymmetry is so extreme that, Mbembe argues quoting Hannah Arendt, when “European men massacred them [natives of colonial territories] they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.” Echoing Hippler’s concern about a perpetual low-­intensity war, Mbembe writes that “peace is not necessarily the outcome of a colonial war. In fact, the distinction between war and peace does not avail.”43 This logic of racialized colonial sovereignty is certainly operative in the political technology of drone warfare. As Chris Woods points out, even though the United States claims to be involved in a global war on terror, the majority of those killed by drones outside the hot battlefield have been Pashtuns, Yemenis, Afghans, and other people from the Gulf States or northern Africa.44 Drone war thus has a decidedly colonial form in which, explicitly or implicitly, there is a clear racial

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distinction between those who are subject to this new technology and those who are not. Even Woods’s own book, which is otherwise a staunch critique of drone warfare, lists as an appendix only the “Westerners” killed by drones. Drone warfare thus seems to tally nicely with Mbembe’s description of the late modern colonial political situation. If drone warfare shares this racist logic of colonialism, however, it is also somewhat different because the presence of the occupier is, at least potentially, merely virtual. While even the late modern colonialism represented either by South African apartheid or, still more recently, by the Israeli occupation of Palestine is based upon a physical presence of the occupier in the occupied territory, drone warfare is a form of remote occupation. Western drone warfare undoes the concept of the presence of the occupier, allowing the conditions of occupation to persist even without an occupying presence. One of the difficulties in discussing drone warfare in terms of colonialism is terminological; it is precisely, as I examined in chapter 2, whether such a remote presence can still be called occupation. This very debate is a function of the way drone warfare works. In order to follow the contours of this debate, it is worthwhile to examine further Mbembe’s account of late modern colonialism as well as Weizman’s brilliant description of Israel’s architecture and technology of occupation in Palestine. What these accounts share is an increased focus on verticality, on the idea that colonial sovereignty is no longer exercised in a two-­dimensional way on the surface of the earth. Weizman in particular shows that in the various systems of tunnels and bridges and even the digging of wells, the landscaping and the architecture of Israeli settlements perform a kind of occupation that divides territory vertically, separating Israelis from Palestinians as completely as possible even as they live on the same stretch of earth. As he puts it, “The principle of separation has turned ninety degrees . . . with Israelis and Palestinians separated vertically, occupying different spatial layers.”45 This is an occupation that also deconstructs the presence of the occupier in that the radical separation performed by this politics of verticality means that as far as possible, Israelis and Palestinians do not live present to each other, even as they live in the same territory. Indeed, this is the primary distinction that Mbembe draws between the occupation of Palestine and the South African system of apartheid. Clearly seeing Israel’s vertical sovereignty as a brutal advance in the technology of

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colonial occupation, Mbembe compares it with the earlier form of colonial occupation represented by apartheid. Mbembe writes that apartheid in South Africa is a perfect example of colonial occupation, which is a matter of “seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physical geographical area.” It is, Mbembe writes, following Frantz Fanon, “regulated by the language of pure force [and] immediate presence.” In this sense, to some degree the occupiers share the territory with the occupied. Colonial occupation “was, ultimately, tantamount to the production of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the subversion of existing property arrangements; the classification of people according to different categories; resource extraction; and, finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries gave meaning to the enactment of differential rights to differing categories of people in the same space.” In this classical form of colonialism, then, the technology of racism was used to create a system of separation, apartheid, within a territory physically occupied by more than one category of person. Colonialism in this paradigm is about the territory of the surface of the earth. As Mbembe puts it, “Space was the raw material of sovereignty.”46 When, following Weizman’s lead, Mbembe moves to talk about the form of occupation Israel performs in Palestine, he turns to the concept of vertical sovereignty. Rather than being merely about the territory, and the surface of the earth, this kind of occupation works in three dimensions. It is this form of three-­dimensional verticality that Swift’s flying island literalizes. Mbembe argues that “under vertical sovereignty colonial occupation operates through schemes of over and under-­passes, a separation of airspace from the ground.” He thus shows the way in which the occupation of the skies is essential to a late modern colonialism. For Mbembe, this form of occupation works toward a new form of apartheid, what he calls a “splintering occupation, along the lines of the splintering urbanism characteristic of late modernity (suburban enclaves or gated communities).”47 What Mbembe, writing in 2003, focuses on is the network of roads, including overpasses and underpasses, that separate as fully as possible Israeli communities from Palestinian. Following Weizman, he shows how this system uses verticality to produce a separation of people. Mbembe, however, does not write about drones in “Necropolitics.” This is possibly because drone warfare was not as prominent in 2003 as

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it has since become. Weizman, in the final chapter of Hollow Land, which was published in 2007, talks about the technological advances in drone warfare, and how that has produced a new form of vertical occupation in Israel after the withdrawal of Israeli boots from the ground of the West Bank. Weizman notes that Israeli military planners referred to the phase that would follow the withdrawal of Israel from the West Bank as “the occupation that will follow the Occupation.”48 In this form of occupation the old ideal, according to one Israeli Air Force commander, that “victory equals territory [is] anachronistic.”49 It is in this sense that the aerial occupation of Palestine, carried out by drones, but also by other forms of airpower, most resembles the Laputan domination of Balnibarbi. It is about control of population rather than about staking a physical claim on territory. In this context, Weizman makes an argument about contemporary Israeli politics that aligns with the concept of sovereign (ir)responsibility, discussed in chapter 1, as well as with my claim that any politics of verticality is also a politics of a sovereign decision as little mediated as possible. Weizman argues that Israel’s program of targeted assassination from the air (in which drones are involved in surveillance, killing, or both) involves a new system of “fast-­tracked political decisions” in which a special ministerial committee deliberates, typically for no more than fifteen minutes and typically without objections, on the validity of a target for assassination.50 The immense amount of information collected by drones, as well as its real-­time applicability, thus speeds up the political process of targeting. This increase in velocity fundamentally changes the political technology of democracy by removing distance (in the form of judicial, political, or ethical checks and balances) between a sovereign decision and an act of violence. This political technology is not incidental to drone warfare but is its corollary and condition of possibility, and it is only by thinking through a deconstruction of the sovereign decision that the deadly politics of verticality, in the sense of both airpower and sovereign power, can be combatted. This decision is central to the final book of Gulliver’s Travels.

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HOUYHNHNM ASYMMETRY Having spent some time looking at the political and racial technologies that are the conditions of possibility for drone warfare, let us now return to Gulliver’s Travels, this time to Gulliver’s final voyage. Interestingly, Swift presents us in this voyage with a radical form of asymmetry between the all-­too-­human Gulliver and his perfectly rational Houyhnhnm masters. At the same time, he represents a society entirely controlled by a racialized logic, in which both Houyhnhnm society itself and the relation between the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos are primarily organized according to ineradicable and immediately visible racial distinctions. As Aravamudan writes, “The Houyhnhnms segregate according to clearly demarcated racial criteria.”51 The racist resonances of this kind of segregation cannot be explained away by Rawson’s detailed reading of the relation between the Houyhnhnms’ inter-­species (rather than inter-­racial) difference from the Yahoos nor by his claim that the distinction maintained between different classes of Houyhnhnm is a distinction of class or rank rather than race.52 (I will return to this latter point.) Despite the clear and asymmetrical distinction between the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos, however, the domination of the Yahoos is not the result of a high-­speed process of political decision making. Instead, the Houyhnhnms’ coexistence with the Yahoos is maintained in the extended temporality of an interminable decision. The only subject of debate in Houyhnhnm society, Gulliver tells us, is what to do about the Yahoos. If Swift’s vision in Laputa imagined something of the technological future of drone warfare, it was mediated by a political reciprocity that ameliorated the asymmetry between those on the island and those subject to its rule. In the final voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms, Swift’s imagination anticipates the racist and colonial political future in which, however swiftly political decisions are made, it is the indefinite deferment of a decision to radically exterminate the racialized colonial subject that produces the brutal colonial present, a present that is maintained by killing, a killing that always stops short of extermination. As readers of Gulliver’s Travels know, the final voyage presents us with a society that Gulliver sees as perfectly ordered. Indeed, after leaving Houyhnhnm-­land and returning to England, Gulliver is so disillusioned with the horrors of humanity that he can hardly bear to be around humans

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and spends most of his time talking to domesticated horses. It is an open question to what extent Swift endorses this radical misanthropy.53 What must be noted, in any case, is that Gulliver is “made to observe” by his Houyhnhnm master “that among the Houyhnhnms, the White, the Sorrel, and the Iron-­Grey, were not so exactly shaped as the Bay, the Dapple-­ grey, and the Black; nor born with equal Talents of the Mind, or a Capacity to Improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of Servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own Race, which in that Country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural” (236). Gulliver, as he does on most of his travels, thus adopts the vision or point of view of the Houyhnhnm, learning to observe difference and hierarchy among horses. The visibility of status difference among the Houyhnhnms undergirds both an aesthetic and a social order and precludes any kind of social mobility or aesthetic mixture. Importantly, this status order is domestic to Houyhnhnm society, but Swift borrows it from the emerging colonial technology of race. This is indeed what Gulliver finds attractive about the Houyhnhnm system of status difference. This well-­ordered society with minimal social mobility recalls an earlier passage in Gulliver’s Travels concerning asymmetry. While in Brobdingnag, Gulliver had boasted to giants many times his size, waving his tiny sword, that he could take on any monkey that dared to attack him. He reports, however, “that my speech produced nothing else besides a loud Laughter” and that this “made me reflect how vain an Attempt it is for a man to Endeavour doing Himself Honour among those who are out of all degree of Equality or Comparison with him. And yet I have seen the Moral of my own Behavior very frequent in England since my Return, where a little contemptible Varlet, without the least Title to Birth, Person, Wit, or common Sense, shall presume to look with Importance, and put himself upon a foot with the greatest Persons of the Kingdom” (115). Here we see the specific concern with social mobility in England. Even though the contemptible varlet is completely unequal in all his parts, there is no clear visible marker that would force him and others to recognize this inferiority immediately. For that reason, England is plagued by attempts to move, or match, out of “race.” In Houyhnhnm-­land the technology of racial difference, discovered in the colonies, becomes a fantasized solution for the more racially homogeneous but increasingly class-­mobile

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society of England.54 Despite Rawson’s insistence that distinctions among Houyhnhnms are not racial, it is the colonial technology of racism that acts as a solution to problems of status mixing.55 If Gulliver seems to enjoy the idea of an obvious visible system to distinguish contemptible varlets from their betters, the relation between the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos is both more violent and more ambiguous. While the Yahoos are recognizably human creatures, they are also human creatures who bear specifically racialized features. Gulliver writes, “I observed, in this animal, a perfectly human Figure; the Face of it indeed was flat and broad, the Nose depressed, the Lips large, and the Mouth wide. But these Differences are common to all Savage Nations” (213).56 The Yahoos, then, do not simply represent humanity as such, but a humanity of the savage nations, those nations specifically subject to colonial rule and, of course in many cases, to the slave trade. While Rawson, for instance, is surely correct in arguing that for Swift the Yahoo represents us all, our commonality with the Yahoo is made visible only through the detour through the racialized other. Race, in this sense, does double work in the fourth voyage. It both divides and orders the Houyhnhnms’ own social relations and produces an absolute gap between the rational horses and the beastly Yahoos, a gap that makes the Yahoos subject not only to forced labor but potentially also to elimination.57 As stated above, Gulliver tells us that the Houyhnhnms, who are otherwise so rational that they are unable to see the point of disputing over anything, nevertheless have one major subject of debate: what to do about the Yahoos. Strikingly, the temporality of this decision is in stark contrast to that of all their other decisions, something that becomes clear in Gulliver’s description of their quadrennial General Assembly. Gulliver tells us that this assembly, which seems purely administrative rather than political, involves decisions that are barely, or not at all, worthy of the name. He says that the Houyhnhnms “inquire into the State and Condition of the several Districts; whether they abound or be deficient in Hay or Oats, or Cows, or Yahoos? And wherever there is any Want (which is but seldom) it is immediately supplied by unanimous Consent and Contribution” (248). The immediacy is important here, as it demonstrates that there is no deliberation but that the distribution of goods is something merely subject to calculation. In this sense, this is not at all a political decision. On the

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other hand, during the assembly held in Gulliver’s time, the Houyhnhnms resumed “their old Debate” (248). In contrast to the handling of administrative particulars, this debate is seemingly interminable, pure deliberation without the possibility of coming to a decision or solution. It was, Gulliver tells us, “indeed the only Debate which ever happened in that Country,” and it concerned “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth” (249). There is in the Houyhnhnms’ inability to come to a decision a suspension of the political, similar to the refusal of the United States to officially declare war on, or even admit that they are acting within, territories they nevertheless attack by drone. The political technology of the drone (not simply the technical aspect of the drone itself but also the entire administrative apparatus that allows for its operation) is thus made possible by the radical suspension of the political.58 The Houyhnhnms thus suspend a decision in order to maintain a seemingly untenable political situation. They are certain that the Yahoos are unteachable and naturally degenerate. However, the Houyhnhnms, for all their rationality, have grown used to Yahoo labor and “have very imprudently neglected to cultivate the Breed of Asses, which were a very comely Animal, easily kept, more tame and orderly, without any offensive Smell, [and] strong enough for Labour” (249). The Yahoos are thus contemptible but also useful or indispensable, and their survival depends entirely on the impossibility of deciding, definitively, to exterminate them. The Yahoo present is thus the extended time of Houyhnhnm deliberation, a present punctuated by forced labor and violence but extended indefinitely. This is a specific temporality that involves the deliberate deferment of extermination. More than just a “tease sustaining an already considerable readerly discomfort,” Swift’s silence about the outcome of the Houyhnhnm debate produces an extended present.59 This deferment of decision is, further, not only a way of maintaining the satiric point that the Yahoos (us) deserve extermination, as Rawson argues, but the production of a present in which continual lower-­level punishments and humiliations are justified. Deferring extermination produces and maintains the radical asymmetry that characterizes the relationship between the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. This is the colonial present of those subject to the logic of the drone. While outright extermination is precluded, the lives of those under drones are so little valued that an extended present punctuated by acts of violence and

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constant surveillance seems, within this logic, unavoidable. It is here that the technology of race allows the drone to function and that the technology of the drone extends the racist and colonial present indefinitely. Indeed, the drone is the prosthesis of extension, not just of the senses of the drone operator, who can see and act from half a world away, but of the present itself, rendering the possibility of permanent surveillance punctuated by death possible. If, in the first chapter, we saw a decision that happened in a zone of sovereign (ir)responsibility, looking at Swift’s account of the Houyhnhnms opens up another dimension of the political decision characteristic of the drone. The decision to kill via drone is always a substitute or placeholder or deferral of another decision, a decision that cannot be made because it seems unthinkable, outside the neoliberal logic of the drone. However, not making this decision to exterminate the people whose lives have nevertheless been rendered unworthy of the status of civilian, citizen, or even active combatant makes possible the constantly repeated decision to kill those same people one by one. Each killing by drone is thus now and present but also haunted by a future that cannot come but that nevertheless produces the killing in the present. Drone warfare exists not just in an asymmetrical space, in which those in particular parts of the world are vulnerable to the radically asymmetrical violence and power of drone warfare, but also in an asymmetrical temporality, in which the actual violence of the present is allowed and justified by the suspension of a hyperbolic spectral future violence of extermination.

EPILOGUE

PUBLICITY AND MEDIATION

It is tragically appropriate that one of the last acts of the US war in Afghanistan was a drone strike that killed ten civilians, including seven children. Seemingly an attempt to eliminate an “imminent threat” to those trying to leave the airport at Kabul, and carried out in the wake of the earlier attack on the airport that killed both Afghani civilians and US military personnel, the strike did not kill anyone associated with either the original attack or the imminent threat. Instead, it killed someone who had helped the United States during its occupation of Afghanistan.1 What was perhaps different about this attack, compared with the many others that characterized this war, was its very public nature. Initially announced by the Pentagon as a successful strike, this particular attack was immediately open to the scrutiny of the public sphere. That the strike happened in Kabul rather than in a remote region of Afghanistan aided this. Indeed, many journalists, from both local and international agencies, were quickly able to debunk the Pentagon’s claims that the strike had killed a member of ISIS-­K (the Afghanistan affiliate of ISIS). Upon early reports that several civilians and children had been killed, the Pentagon pushed back on claims

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that this had been a botched drone strike. General Mark Milley claimed that despite the killing of children and civilians, it had been a “righteous” strike. Pentagon intelligence, he claimed, showed that they had killed their intended target. Very quickly, though, even this cartoonishly theological rhetoric could not cover up the fact that only civilians had been killed and the Pentagon intelligence was far from foolproof. In many ways, then, the last act of the war was an indictment of the drone. Indeed, the very failure of the two decades–­long occupation demonstrated the inability of this weapon, in many ways a metonym of the war, to exist with an independent polity and that any attempt to create a polity policed by drones will fail. Such an outcome will not be a surprise to many. Nor will news of the botched strike come as a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the numbers of civilians killed by drones in Afghanistan or to the ways intelligence about lethal strikes is gathered and interpreted. However, this event, which seems to show the failure of drone warfare, is also the measure of its success. The fact that it is out of the shadows, an open part of public discourse that the Pentagon can publicly boast about, shows that drone warfare has been absolutely normalized. Even though targeting is obviously as haphazard as ever and even supposedly righteous strikes can still kill seven children (a fact Milley did not deny while calling the strike righteous), drone warfare is now part of American public discourse. The idea that the US government assassinates people from airborne robots is no longer treated with secrecy, nor is it subject to scandal. Drone warfare used to be practiced almost exclusively under the cloak of secrecy. If at first this was perhaps because of a certain ethical squeamishness about killing people by remote control, this kind of shamefacedness is disappearing. We did not need to wait for this strike in Kabul to know this. It was already clear enough after the Trump administration’s glee at having killed an Iranian general by drone strike.2 The Biden administration’s open acknowledgment of the killing by drone of Al-­Qaeda leader Ayman al-­Zawahiri confirms this.3 Drones are public knowledge. It is difficult to see, however, how such a technology could be consistent with the public sphere. Of course, the public sphere is supposedly one of the most important legacies of the Enlightenment. Taking advantage of the spread of new media technology (especially print), the public sphere is supposed to be a space that mediates rational debate. However, this public mediation, in which a virtual

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public space enables the transparent exchange of ideas, contrasts markedly with the kind of mediation characteristic of the drone. Indeed, the drone itself is an agent of mediation that extends the senses of the human body (making sight and touch work at a distance and adding, through its sensors, new ways of engaging with the world through cell-­phone tracking and heat sensing). One final consequence of drone warfare I want to explore is the way that it requires us to draw a distinction between mediation and publicity. Drone warfare shows that these two legacies of the Enlightenment are heterogeneous, and the kind of intense acceleration of the process of mediation represented by the drone introduces a radical asymmetry between mediation and publicity. William Warner and Clifford Siskin claim that the Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. In particular, they argue that the Enlightenment saw a radical change in how human experience and knowledge were mediated. For instance, when Siskin and Warner discuss Francis Bacon’s contribution to the Enlightenment, they do so by focusing on Bacon’s insistence that human reason needs to be mediated through tools, in particular what he called the “mechanical arts.”4 For Bacon, they explain, the state and potentiality of knowledge was radically changed by the recent discoveries of the printing press, gunpowder, and the nautical compass.5 Strikingly, the latter two of these three revolutionary pieces of technology are also in many ways central to the drone, a technology unthinkable without both highly accurate GPS and very destructive munitions. Add to this triumvirate of early modern inventions the telescope, and the drone, a mobile destructive eye, is well enough described. These technologies also indicate several of the drone’s mediations. It extends the ability to harm, extends the field of vision, and makes infinitely more precise our sense of space. The drone’s various sensors, capable of picking up heat signatures and cell-­phone activity, also augment the kinds of senses with which the human engages in the world. Especially in the way it tracks cell-­phone activity, the drone’s mediation capitalizes on the extent to which other technologies of mediation make the human body enter into larger networks, such as cell-­phone, satellite, and social media networks, which mediate its presence. If drone warfare capitalizes on this technology, though, it works, as in other things, asymmetrically. While counting on the way all our lives are mediated by large networks of information, those who prosecute drone

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warfare rely on keeping their information and methods secret. As we have seen throughout this book, military drone policy selects and justifies its targets in secret processes, and the mediated data used to control drones is resolutely not publicly available. This is not, of course, entirely new for warfare, as any form of warfare involves secrecy about information, tactics, and methods. What makes drone warfare different is the combination of a reliance on an increasingly networked world, in which a person’s life can be traced through accessible data, and the secrecy about the decisions made based on that data. There is thus a strong contrast between the radical technological mediation relied upon in the technique of drone warfare and the possibility for reasoned, public debate about it. Mediation and publicity are heterogeneous. Drone warfare thus requires that mediation and publicity be thought of as distinct. In some ways this situation finally gives the lie to Kant’s distinction in “What is Enlightenment?” between the public use of reason (which must remain unrestricted and unconditioned) and the civil or official use of reason (which can always be conditioned and forced to obedience by a public magistrate). Kant argues that it is not contrary to the spirit of the Enlightenment for a person with a civil post to do things inconsistent with his own reason under the orders of a magistrate, insofar as he can speak unconditionally according to his reason in public. Kant distinguishes, in this sense, between what he calls the private reason of a man acting in a civil post and his public reason, in which he speaks “before the entire literate world” in the guise of a scholar. In speaking of man’s private reason, which is somewhat counterintuitively exercised in his capacity as a public official, Kant repeatedly uses mechanical metaphors. He says that in the “affairs conducted in the interests of the community, a certain mechanism is required by means of which some of its members must conduct themselves in an entirely passive manner” to produce “an artificial unanimity.” In this case, he says, a man “must not argue” but obey. He refers to man in this capacity as “part of the machine.”6 As Warner and Siskin point out, the depreciation of the mechanical in Kant stands in contrast to Bacon’s claim that the move forward for knowledge requires human reason to be meditated by tools.7 However, Kant’s distinction between the mechanicity of private reason and the free use of reason in public is not entirely about knowledge. It is also about ethics or morals. In the terms that I have used

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to discuss drone warfare the man who is part of this machine is part of a network of agency in which his complicity or responsibility for the various decisions and effects produced by this machine is diffused. It is against this complicity, and even as an antidote to the necessity of this complicity, that Kant proposes the public use of reason. The free use of public reason is a compensation for “private” immersion in a mechanical network of action. While Kant may have been right that the free public use of reason once compensated for the complicity of one’s reason and agency in the mechanical operation of authority structures, under the conditions of drone warfare the public use of reason is overmatched by the radical mediation of agency and action. There is a profound asymmetry between how the drone mediates and how reason can be used in public. The move in drone warfare (both ideologically and practically) toward a situation in which every human body can be traced, subjected, and mediated through data that is not available publicly introduces an asymmetry between mediation and publicity and makes it impossible for any public use of reason to keep up. One reason for this is that public reason by definition cannot have all the necessary data available. The data is for the most part actually inaccessible, but it is also structurally secret. Even when a particular drone strike can be challenged, and even if some of the information about that strike has been leaked, there always remains the possibility that the sovereign authority can merely say there is yet more secret, classified data that they cannot reveal, which tells a different story. Indeed, this approach was attempted even in the very clear case of the drone strike in Kabul with which I opened this epilogue. That the military was finally forced to admit an error in this case should be seen as a lucky and exceptional accident, not as a rule that demonstrates that drone warfare can be adequately policed and disciplined by the public media. The second reason that public reason and mediation are so starkly distinguished in drone warfare is that the question of complicity, which Kant was able to sidestep in “What is Enlightenment?,” returns with full force in drone warfare in such a way that, once again, a Hobbesian theory of action is more appropriate for thinking about the drone than a liberal, Kantian account of reason. In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant sees both the necessity to obey against one’s better judgment when exercising

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private reason and the complicity in undesirable outcomes that may result from, for instance, obeying an order from a superior officer that may be “inappropriate” as compensated fully by the freedom to use one’s reason publicly. It is precisely this distinction between a mediated, mechanical form of action and agency and an autonomous use of reason only mediated by the transparency of the public sphere that drone warfare radically challenges. Warner and Siskin, in reading Kant’s account of the Enlightenment and knowledge, find it appropriate to move backward to Bacon for a mechanical account of knowledge production. In order to look at an account of mechanical agency and complicity, it is, as this book has argued, worth returning to Hobbes. Hobbes is significant in this context because of the way he narrows to almost nothing the gap between complicity or forced consent and free choice. Hobbes, for instance, argues that any promises made under duress must be fulfilled even after the conditions of duress have passed. In a notorious passage from Leviathan, Hobbes argues that even in a civil state “if I am forced to redeem my selfe from a Theefe by promising him money, I am bound to pay it. . . . For whatsoever I may lawfully do without Obligation, the same I may lawfully Covenant to do through feare.”8 Hobbes’s principle here is that a forced promise is still a promise, a forced consent still a consent. This stems from his mechanistic theory of agency, whereby there would always be some external cause beyond that of one’s own conscience, or “free will,” that determines our choices. As we saw in chapter 1, the web of external causation envelops every subject, every body, in a network of causes from which it cannot simply escape, not even with a free and public use of reason. Both this freedom and this publicity are already thoroughly conditioned and mediated by the network of causes in which one acts. One consequence of Hobbes’s principle is to redraw the distinction between mediation and publicity. Kant sees the Enlightenment as consisting in the compensation of a restriction (a mechanistic mediation) in private reason with the free and autonomous use of reason in public. Hobbes’s paradigm makes it clear that this autonomous use of reason is always conditioned by something, by the subject’s or body’s placement in a network of causes that restricts it. Drone warfare shows why this is more than a merely theoretical distinction between free will and determinism. The immense reach and power of mediation in drone warfare, the extent of the technological and mediating networks on which it relies, are asymmetrical with

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and dwarf any use of public reason. This is not, of course, to say that a person may not, as Kant would have it, speak in public before the literate world as a scholar. Indeed, in many parts of the world this freedom to speak as a scholar is guaranteed and even taken for granted in a way that Kant could barely have imagined. However, it is precisely the power and significance of such public speech that our current moment (exemplified by the phenomenon of drone warfare) must surely call into question. One of the most powerful acts of public speech about drone warfare in recent times was the December 2021 publication in the New York Times of a series of articles about civilian deaths in the US air wars in Iraq and Syria. Alongside these articles, the Times made public “hundreds of the Pentagon’s confidential assessments of reports of civilian casualties resulting from U.S.-­led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.”9 These files give the public some insight not only into the strikes themselves but also into how Pentagon officials went about investigating reports that there were civilian casualties as a result of the strikes. They thus provide some challenge both to claims that there were few civilian casualties as a result of these airstrikes (many of which were made by drones) and to claims that the Pentagon has investigated in a responsible manner reports of civilian casualties. Beyond this archive, the reporting itself is the most important and necessary kind of work, uncovering as it does many of the consequences of drone warfare, especially for civilians, but also the kinds of processes that go into the approval and investigation of a drone strike.10 It delves, then, into the nitty-­ gritty of drone warfare. However, the thoroughness that makes this work important and fantastic—­the visiting of particular sites of drone strikes, the interviewing of survivors—­is also what demonstrates its asymmetry with the way drone warfare is carried out. The move to the public media, to publicity, to accountability is so much slower than the mediation of the drone, which arrives at decisions so quickly. This difference in speed is so asymmetrical that it makes mediation within drone warfare completely distinct from the necessarily slow speed of mediation in the public sphere. Another critical example of this is the contrast between the necessary and important public speech of ICRAC, the group of academics committed to stopping the rise of autonomous warfare, and the unerring movement toward the use of autonomous drones to target and kill. As in so much to do with drone warfare, the future is already here, in advance of any public discussion about its ethical or moral consequences. Various

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kinds of weapons capable of autonomous targeting already exist. In a presumably intentionally provocative piece of irony, such weapons are called lethal autonomous weapons systems (or LAWS). One of the more publicized LAWS is the Turkish-­made Kargu-­2 drone. This drone is small and designed to be used as an antipersonnel weapon. Machine learning algorithms allow it to distinguish targets on its own, meaning that it can attack without intervention by a human user.11 In June 2020, media reports emerged that the Kargu-­2 had carried out an autonomous strike in a conflict in Libya. However, as several commentators pointed out, the UN report on the matter (the original source for all other reports) confirms that an autonomous drone carried out a strike, but it does not explicitly say that anyone was killed in the attack.12 Among experts cognizant about this topic, there is some confusion about why this particular report gained media traction. This is because there have already been various instances of automated attacks, often by loitering munitions, which, unlike drones, are single-­use missiles rather than vehicles that launch munitions. Furthermore, National Public Radio quotes Jake McDonald, a lecturer in war studies at King’s College, London, as saying that the UN report is not clear on whether the drone in question was actually operating autonomously at the time.13 On the Twitter page of Ulrike Franke, who works with the European Council on Foreign Relations, there is a thread that explains her confusion as to why this is being reported as something new and unique, especially as it is not clear whether the Kargu-­2 drone was even an active participant in this battle.14 While these expert clarifications are important, they tend to miss the point. That is to say, such confusion, ambiguity, and uncertainty works to actively ensure that drones with autonomous targeting capabilities will be working before they become subject to public debate; indeed they are already. Public reason is thus already behind technological advances, structurally late to the party. The Enlightenment of technological mediation is too fast, too powerful for the Enlightenment of reasoned public debate. Some anxiety about this phenomenon is voiced by Vivek Wadwha and Alex Salkever in an article for Foreign Policy about the reports of the Kargu-­2 strike. They worry that consumer technology has outpaced “military adoption of advanced technologies” and that cheap, autonomous killer drones could thus become easily available to all kinds of nonmilitary groups.15 It is clear, though, that for Wadwha and Salkever the greatest anxiety is

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not about these drones themselves but about the possibility that their use will not be monopolized by Western militaries. Indeed, they somewhat gallingly worry that actors who are not concerned about collateral damage may get hold of new kinds of autonomous weapons, when, as we have seen, for the US military a strike that kills seven children can still be deemed righteous. Furthermore, it is clear that the development of drones by non-­ Western countries and their deployment in battles outside the sphere of Western control also fundamentally undermine any free public speech about, for instance, the necessity of banning autonomous weapons. This is partly because any precedent in usage becomes an immediate reason or justification for their continued use. Accepting that the news about the use of drones is not new news normalizes their use and provides a strong reason for Western nations to continue development of such weapons systems. More importantly, the very fact that this debate is about Turkish-­ made drones being used in a conflict in Libya shows that technological networks of agency not only outpace but also overspread the limits of the public sphere. While intellectuals in the Western world are able to debate drone use and debate (as does this book) its relation to Western sovereignty, action in other parts of the world is already shifting the debate beyond the use of drones by powerful Western nations. Drone warfare demonstrates, in this sense, that the mechanical networks of agency produced by technological mediation are no longer (if they ever were) compensated for or even challenged by the possibility of the free use of reason in public. All of this is not to say that public speech about drone warfare is not necessary. Indeed, the publication in the New York Times of reports about collateral damage does much to shed light on the kinds of techniques used to decide who can be bombed and when, and they certainly challenge the ideology that drone warfare does not produce significant collateral damage. Such work is essential, and only by its entering the public sphere can drone policy be challenged. Such work, though, is always behind, excellent because of its meticulousness but for that reason no match for the reckless speed of drone assassination. In this sense, drone warfare, in capitalizing on one aspect of the Enlightenment (its revolution in the mediation of knowledge) radically undermines another (the mediation of the public sphere). This is yet another asymmetry of drone warfare with which we must grapple.

NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. For a report on the killing see Rogers, “American Hunter Killed Cecil.” For an

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

0. 2 21.

analysis of the aftermath of the killing see Actman, “Cecil the Lion Died amid Controversy.” Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 32. For a description of signature strikes see de Luce and McLeary, “Obama’s Most Dangerous Drone Tactic.” Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 274. My thanks to one of the anonymous readers for UVA Press for pointing this out. See Hippler, Governing from the Skies. For a description of this attack see Woods, “Story of America’s Very First Drone Strike.” See Gusterson, Drone, 79–­81. See Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 106–­9; and Gusterson, Drone, 79–­81. For just one representative example in the popular media see Lewis, “Drones.” See Benjamin, Drone Warfare. See, e.g., Arkin, Governing Lethal Behaviour in Autonomous Robots. For a description of the work of this group see Asaro, “On Banning Autonomous Weapons Systems.” See also the group’s website, https://​www​.icrac​.net/. See Gusterson, Drone, 14–­15. For an excellent summary of this debate see chapter 4 of Kaag and Kreps, Drone Warfare. Daniel Reisner, quoted in Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 167. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 274. For the latter view see Elden, Birth of Territory. Elden writes that Westphalia “did not introduce a uniform and universally recognized system” (323). For an articulation of the distinction between the laws of war in the European world and in the New World beyond the “amity line” see Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth. Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace,” 167. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 9.

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22. Bratton, The Stack, 6. 23. Kant, “To Perpetual Peace,” 108. 4. Kant, “To Perpetual Peace,” 121. 2 25. Krasner, Sovereignty. 26. Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty, 80. 27. Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty, 91. 28. Galli, Political Spaces and Global War, 109. 29. Galli, Political Spaces and Global War, 160. 0. Anghie, “Evolution of International Law,” 741. 3 31. Anghie, “Evolution of International Law,” 745, italics in original. 32. Pourmokhtari, “Postcolonial Critique of State Sovereignty in IR,” 1767, 1768. 33. Baucom, “Financing the Enlightenment, Part Two,” 338. 4. Baucom, “Financing the Enlightenment, Part Two,” 351. 3 35. Baucom, “Financing the Enlightenment, Part Two,” 353. 36. See Heller-­Roazen, Enemy of All. 37. Elden, Terror and Territory, 4. 38. See Gregory, Colonial Present. Palestine is one of Gregory’s clearest examples of an uneven geography. Palestinians live with neither the rights nor the privileges of the modern state, while Israel aggregates more and more hyperbolic rights of sovereignty to itself in the name of the survival and immunity of its state. This inequality in the state system is enforced in Israel by the drone, among other technologies, and it is the drone that allows the United States to police the domestic spaces of other sovereign territories without needing to take any responsibility for the civil life of those spaces. 39. David Bates has argued convincingly that eighteenth-­century thinkers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu only truly discovered a concept of the political once they had made the political independent of self-­preservation, thinking the existence of the state as more than a mere analogue to the self who desires to survive. See Bates, States of War. The rhetoric and practice of drone warfare, however, tends to bring back this analogy between self-­preservation and the political in a hyperbolic way. 0. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 181. 4 41. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 71. 2. Esposito, Bios, 46. 4 3. Esposito, Bios, 59. 4 4. Esposito, Bios, 74, 72. 4 5. Esposito, Bios, 62. 4 6. Hagglund, Radical Atheism, 13, italics in original. 4 47. Hagglund, Radical Atheism, 13–­14. Giorgio Agamben also notes this tendency in the way dictatorial powers are discussed within democratic constitutions. Agamben writes that theories of constitutional dictatorship “remain prisoner in

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1. SOVEREIGN (IR)RESPONSIBILITY 1. UndocumentedAdmin@The Tarquin, “Response.” 2. See Texts from Hillary. The page also won a Shorty award for best Tumblr blog of the year. 3. For an account of Holder’s claims see Gusterson, Drone, 124. 4. In making this claim I am following to some extent the methodology of Gregoire Chamayou, for whom the aim of understanding drones is “not so much technical as political.” See Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 15. 5. Derrida, Rogues, 101. 6. See esp. Asaro, “On Banning Autonomous Weapons Systems.” See also International Committee for Robot Arms Control (co-­founded by Asaro), “Mission Statement.” 7. Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 119, italics in original. 8. Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 141. 9. See Herold, “ ‘Collateral Damage’?,” 20. 10. Weizman, Least of All Possible Evils, 3. 11. Cronin, “Reckless Endangerment Warfare,” 180. 12. Cronin, Bugsplat, 2–­3. 13. Cronin, Bugsplat, 32. 14. Crawford, Accountability for Killing, 40–­41. 15. See Crawford, Accountability for Killing, 130. See also Cronin, Bugsplat, 2–­3. 16. Cronin, Bugsplat, 26. 17. For more detail see Woods, Sudden Justice, 241. See also Weizman, Least of All Possible Evils, 129–­33. 18. For an analysis of the “moral hazard” of drone strikes see Weber, Kill Boxes, 214–­16. 19. For suggestions about how to expand traditional moral categories to address this problem see Crawford, Accountability for Killing. Crawford argues for moral categories to include responsibility for harm that is foreseeable, if not intended,

NOTES TO P A GES 2 4 – 3 9

the vicious circle in which the emergency measures they seek to justify in the name of defending the democratic constitution are the same ones that lead to its ruin.” Agamben, State of Exception, 8. 48. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 99, 100, 100. 49. Pilkington and MacAskill, “Obama’s Drone War a ‘Recruitment Tool.’ ” 0. See Woods, Sudden Justice, 165–­66. 5 51. Davidson Sorkin, “President’s Kill List.” 52. Becker and Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List.’ ” 53. Gusterson, Drone, 121.

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and for responsibility to be conceptualized at levels of group organization, and not merely at that of the individual. 20. See Woods, Sudden Justice, 254–­55. 21. See Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 49–­51. Chamayou describes the limitations of technology to distinguish threatening from nonthreatening behaviors, and he repeats a joke supposedly current in Pentagon corridors that “when the CIA sees three guys doing jumping jacks, the agency thinks it’s a terrorist training camp.” Medea Benjamin outlines the extent of these problems, especially in early testing of drones, in Drone Warfare, 24–­25. 22. Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 211. 23. See Cloud, “Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy.” 4. Gusterson, Drone, 69. 2 25. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 346. 26. Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 119. 27. The moral lives of drone pilots have been a subject of considerable debate, both in the popular media and in academic writing. Gusterson, for instance, argues that there is an intimacy in remote killing that makes the work of the drone pilot particularly difficult, certainly much more difficult than other kinds of killing from a distance. Drone, 70–­79. Chamayou argues, however, that the attempt to link drone pilots with PTSD is largely military propaganda intended to undercut the morally horrendous statements in the early years of drone warfare in which pilots would enthuse about Playstation-­style killing. Now, he says, all public statements from drone pilots tend to emphasize that they kill with care rather than with gleeful abandon. Theory of the Drone, 107–­8. 28. See Macpherson, Harm’s Way, 20. 29. See Kramnick, Actions and Objects. 0. Hobbes, Leviathan, 239–­40. 3 31. Damrosch, “Hobbes as Reformation Theologian,” 347. 32. For a discussion of Hobbes as thinking of people as bodies in motion see Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 84–­85. 33. Kramnick, Actions and Objects, 33. 4. Damrosch, “Hobbes as Reformation Theologian,” 346, 347. 3 35. See Hayles, Unthought, 35. For a more historicist example of this see Sandra Macpherson’s critique of the liberal account of responsibility in Harm’s Way. Macpherson explicitly discusses how even objects can come to be blamed for harms caused. Macpherson links the early English novel to the ethos of tragedy. In doing so, she demonstrates that the eighteenth century also built a theory of strict liability in which the subject was held responsible not only for what they intended but also for the consequences of actions that might well have been unforeseeable. Strict liability, she argues, can think accountability without needing to think about the intention behind an action, without

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needing to link responsibility to the mind or to the kind of self-­consciousness Locke describes. The advantage of this, for Macpherson, is that it removes mental states from any consideration of liability and “makes all harms—­even harms complicated by the presence of affection, desire, or consent, even harms produced by good people and experienced by bad—­count as harms” (15). Macpherson sees this concept of responsibility as a way to escape the limitations placed on responsibility, on holding people responsible for unintended harmful consequences, characteristic of liberal legal and moral theory. 36. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 163. 37. Callon and Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan,” 285. 38. Callon and Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan,” 288. 39. Macpherson, Harm’s Way, 156. 0. Hobbes indeed sees God only as a kind of immortal sovereign. His description 4 of the sovereign as a mortal god should perhaps be read as a prudent way to say this. 41. DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, 46. 2. Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 215. 4 3. See Anderson, Imagined Communities. 4 4. Gasché, “Partisan and the Philosopher,” 10–­11. 4 5. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 36. 4 6. Bates, States of War, 26. 4 47. In The Theory of the Partisan Schmitt faces the challenge that this figure poses to his earlier concept of enmity and tries to reinscribe the partisan within the order of the political. This would maintain a concept of enmity that would allow war to remain within contained limits and not turn into the kind of absolute war in which the only way to defeat an enemy would be to destroy him. Schmitt thus defines the partisan as clearly as possible, attempting, as Gasché puts it, “to construe him as a political figure (that is, as a form of contained enmity).” “Partisan and the Philosopher,” 12. Schmitt, for instance, reads the partisan’s irregularity as making sense only in opposition to regularity, thus maintaining the partisan’s relation to regular warfare. Most importantly, Schmitt defines the partisan as someone who has a particularly intense political engagement, which would distinguish him from a thief or violent criminal, and this engagement involves a specific defense of territory against a foreign invader or enemy. For further analysis of the relation of Schmitt’s concept of enmity to the partisan see Anidjar, “Terror Right”; and Derrida, Politics of Friendship. 8. For an account of life under the threat of drone strikes see International Human 4 Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, Living under Drones. See esp. pp. 80–­88, which describe the constant anxiety produced by the knowledge that one is being perpetually surveyed and targeted. People feel that strikes could happen at any

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time and thus are not specific responses to observable offences against some law or moral code. 49. See Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” 50. Madiha Tahir, quoted in Weber, Kill Boxes, 172; see pp. 170–­80 for an analysis of drone warfare as a cruel death penalty. 51. Cronin demonstrates that the contemporary Western style of warfare (of which drone warfare would be a central example) involves considerable risk transfer, whereby the military transfers the risk to its own personnel onto the civilian population. Bugsplat, 9. 52. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, 57. 53. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, 57. 4. Derrida, Rogues, 101. 5 55. Texts from Drone predicted the use of drones against Iran. 56. See “Secret Death Toll of America’s Drones.” 57. Rosenthal and Dejonge Schulman, “Trump’s Secret War on Terror.”

2. REMOTE OCCUPATION 1. Plutarch, Moralia: Volume IV, 211–­13. 2. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 326n73. 3. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 326n73. 4. Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 12. 5. For an example of this critical claim see Shaw, Predator Empire. Shaw argues that US military strategy is increasingly based on “a borderless form of dominance” (9). For an important counterpoint that shows the shortcomings of this hegemonic analysis and the continuing significance of territory and borders as modes of analysis see Elden, Terror and Territory. For a critique of this vision of the globalized world as a myth of contemporary international relations see also Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty. 6. See Elden, Terror and Territory, 144–­45, 156–­59. 7. For more information on Australia’s policy of offshore processing see Refugee Council of Australia, “Australia’s Offshore Processing Regime.” For information on the Trump administration’s policy of forcing people to remain in Mexico while US courts heard their asylum claims see Tackett, Dickerson, and Ahmed, “Migrants Seeking Asylum Must Wait in Mexico.” 8. See Balibar, “What Is a Border?” 9. For some examples of this debate see Bowman, “Under Attack by ISIS”; Lake and Rogin, “Obama Does a U-Turn”; and Reiss and Feaver, “What Happened to Immunity for U.S. Troops in Iraq?” It is significant that the question of immunity for US troops pushes the limits of the right of decision the Iraqi government

135 NOTES TO P A GES 6 7–74

has within the Iraqi constitution. As Reiss and Feaver write, it is debatable whether the Iraqi parliament ever did, or needed to, validate an agreement for US troop immunity. Indeed, as Bowman details, it seems the agreement was finalized through diplomatic notes. Granting a foreign country the right to have troops kill people in your own country with full immunity would surely have to be one of the clearest examples of sovereign autoimmunity. For details see Associated Press, Baghdad, “US Troops in Iraq Will Get Immunity from Prosecution.” 10. See Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 130. 11. Gusterson, Drone, 15, italics in original. 12. Gusterson, Drone, 15. 13. Gusterson also notes that these kind of extrajudicial strikes have been carried out in Somalia, Libya, and even the Philippines. Drone, 17. 14. See Woods, Sudden Justice, 55. 15. For more detail see Woods, Sudden Justice, 45–­70. 16. On this problem see Medea Benjamin’s Drone Warfare, in which she writes: “For Americans these unaccounted for acts of aggression represent an erosion of democracy. Declarations of war are no longer determined by elected officials acting on behalf of the American people, but by unknown, anonymous contractors and government assassins who kill with regularity but face no requirement of responsibility of responding to those Americans, you and I, in whose name they so easily, effortlessly, press the ‘shoot’ button” (125). 17. Weizman, Hollow Land, 239. 18. Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 22–­23. 19. See Schmidgen, Eighteenth-­Century Fiction and the Law of Property, 32. 0. Elden, Birth of Territory, 221. 2 21. Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property, and Empire, 35. 22. For an account of this distinction see Tuck, Rights of War and Peace; and Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property, and Empire. 23. As the property of a group it enters into a state of positive community; as the property of a person it becomes private property. 4. Readers of J. L. Austin will recognize the term felicitous from his description of 2 performatives. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words. As will become clear, the act of occupation is in many ways a performative in Austin’s sense. 25. Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 389. 26. Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 392. 27. Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property, and Empire, 86. 28. Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, 106. 29. Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, 158. 0. John Locke, for instance, saw the occupation of North America as legitimate 3 because the people who lived on the land there had not, he thought, improved it

NOTES TO P A GES 7 5 – 8 9

136

as much as Europeans would. In his view, that they did not make good use of the land made it not perfectly occupied, and not subject to the rights of propriety under natural law. Because the indigenous population had no use for money, he argued, there was more land than they could make use of (to the standards of European productions), and so that land “lies waste” and therefore “lies common.” Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 299. According to Locke, wherever there was more land “than the Inhabitants possess and make use of any one has liberty to make use of the waste” (392). 31. Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, 639–­40, 640. For a discussion of other natural law theorists who focus on the foot as a tool of occupation of land see Schmidgen, Eighteenth-­Century Fiction and the Law of Property, 40. 32. Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 391. 33. For other examples of the idea in natural law that we occupy land by stepping on it see Schmidgen, Eighteenth-­Century Fiction and the Law of Property, 40–­41. 4. See Saunders, “Natural Jurisprudence of Jean Barbeyrac.” 3 35. See Bisset, “Jean Barbeyrac’s Theory.” See also Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property, and Empire, 129: “An important modification by Titius and Barbeyrac from Locke and previous writers on occupation was the claim that occupation is constituted by an intention, not taking up with the hands or feet.” 36. To the passage quoted above in which Grotius insists that occupancy implies a tacit agreement, Barbeyrac appends a note that refers the reader to this note in his edition of Pufendorf. 37. On the history of machinic vision, especially its military applications, see Bousquet, Eye of War, 21–­41. 38. For a brief and lucid history of the debate over Grotius’s claim about the freedom of the seas, see Heller-­Roazen, Enemy of All, 119–­31. The most direct and significant challenge to Grotius was John Selden’s Mare Clausum (1635). 39. See Heller-­Roazen, Enemy of All, 123. 0. See Heller-­Roazen, Enemy of All, 125; and Banner, Who Owns the Sky?, 48. 4 41. See Banner, Who Owns the Sky?, 42–­69. 2. See Banner, Who Owns the Sky?, 43–­4 4. 4 3. Paul Fachile, quoted in Banner, Who Owns the Sky?, 49. 4 4. Banner, Who Owns the Sky?, 55. 4 5. Banner, Who Owns the Sky?, 63. 4 6. See Elden, Terror and Territory, 162–­63. 4 47. Heller-­Roazen, Enemy of All, 16. 8. Heller-­Roazen, Enemy of All, 130. 4 49. Heller-­Roazen, Enemy of All, 130–­31. 0. See Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 70. 5

137

3. DEFERRED EXTERMINATION 1. General Stanley McChrystal, quoted in Gusterson, Drone, 1. 2. McChrystal, quoted in Gusterson, Drone, 109. Gusterson contextualizes McChrystal’s quote by surrounding it with traditional military thinkers complaining about the long-­term effects and outcomes of drone warfare in ways that lament its ineffectiveness. For other anti-­drone writers who approvingly quote McChrystal see Woods, Sudden Justice, 149; and Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 60. 3. Woods, Sudden Justice, 149. 4. See Clausewitz, On War. 5. Weizman writes that proponents of this lesser-­evil logic within the Israeli military “believe that targeted assassinations are the moderate alternative to the devastating capacity for destruction that the military actually possesses.” Weizman, Hollow Land, 252. For an extended elaboration of the logic of the lesser evil see Weizman, Least of All Possible Evils. 6. See Weizman, Hollow Land, 252. 7. See, e.g., Gusterson, Drone, chap. 3, “Remote Intimacy”; and Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 120–­24. 8. Claude Rawson argues in Satire and Sentiment, 1600–­1830 that this temporality is fundamental to Swift’s satire. Gulliver’s knowledge of modern technology in lands that are unacquainted with it allows for a vicious satire of Swift’s own technological modernity. See also Loar, Political Magic, 155, for an elaboration of the colonial valence of this temporal structure. 9. See Woods, Sudden Justice, 2.

NOTES TO P A GES 8 9 – 9 7

51. As Heller-­Roazen shows, the rapidly increasing number of air hijackings in the late twentieth century led to the redefinition of piracy, in some quarters, as pertaining to the air as well as the sea. Equally incapable of being occupied, the air seems to be the other element in which the pirate can thrive. See Enemy of All, 171–­80. 52. Heller-­Roazen, Enemy of All, 177. 53. See Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths. 4. See Bousquet, Eye of War, which remains within the old classic narrative Kaplan 5 challenges. Bousquet shows that this narrative retains interpretive force. 55. Elden, Terror and Territory, 139. 56. Elden, Terror and Territory, 69. 57. Elden, Terror and Territory, 77. 8. Elden, Terror and Territory, 91. 5 59. Elden, Terror and Territory, 162–­63.

NOTES TO P A GES 9 7– 1 0 6

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10. See Gregory, “Dirty Dancing,” 27. 11. Woods notes that Hellfire missiles are the biggest weapons that can be launched by the relatively fragile Predator drones and that CIA analysts worried that they could kill everyone inside a targeted building. Sudden Justice, 40. 12. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 144. As Christopher Loar indicates, more traditional readings have seen Laputa and Balnibarbi as “an allegorization of Anglo-­ Irish relations.” Political Magic, 173. 13. Loar, Political Magic, 146. 14. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 26. 15. Claude Rawson makes an argument about Swift’s ability to imagine the future horrors of genocide, saying that his works suggest “Swift’s intuitive sense of the depths of potential human depravity.” God, Gulliver, and Genocide, 258. My point here is that Swift’s uncanny temporality shows that the horrors of warfare are always both in the future, unimaginably futuristic, and right here in the present. 16. Gusterson’s Drone ends with an epilogue that presents us with two future scenarios, one in which drones will become unregulated weaponized tools of both states and nonstate actors and another in which their use will be tamed and regulated. Gusterson’s interesting exercise in dystopian fiction seems to be another attempt to deal with a future that is already the present. 17. As Loar argues, “Gulliver cannot respond to [the display of civic virtue indicated by the Brobdingnagian king’s militia because] he is enmeshed in a modernity that does not know how to read beyond the surface of things.” Political Magic, 160. We are, to our detriment, stuck in Gulliver’s position. 18. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 142. 19. See Loar’s discussion of the military and civil imaginings of eighteenth-­century flight that might have influenced Swift’s writing about the flying island in Political Magic, 170–­73. 0. For a reading of Gulliver’s astonishment at Laputa as a political affect, see Loar, 2 Political Magic, 174. 21. Caren Kaplan’s, Aerial Aftermaths argues that in the early history of aviation the sovereign, controlling vision we associate with aerial viewpoints was not yet hegemonic, and indeed, views from above were often experienced by early balloon aviators as somewhat disorienting. 22. For an exploration of the connection between the history of aerial warfare and the colonial matrix see Hippler, Governing from the Skies. See also Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths. 23. Loar also notes the geographical dependence of Laputa on the island below, arguing that “it cannot aspire to universal empire.” Political Magic, 174. 4. See Weizman, Hollow Land; and Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” 2 25. In 1724–­25 Swift published a series of letters now known as The Drapier’s Letters, in which he posed as an Irish drapier protesting the scheme of Wood’s

139 NOTES TO P A GES 1 0 6 – 1 1 0

halfpence. Under this scheme, an industrialist named William Wood had been awarded a patent by the English government to produce copper coins that would have value only in Ireland. Swift saw that this would undermine the Irish economy for the profit of the English, and his letters are widely credited with the eventual abandonment of the scheme. For more information on this scheme and on Swift’s part in preventing it see Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 145–­56. 26. Christopher Loar also discusses this potential for universal destruction in book 3 of Gulliver’s Travels. He argues that in imagining using technology to break the power of walled cities, Swift presents a particularly modern form of centralizing sovereignty whose logical conclusion is massacre. Political Magic, 168. As we will see, the more peculiarly modern form of sovereignty that Swift imagines is the holding in suspension of massacre and the production of a temporality in which a low-­intensity form of killing is maintained in an extended present. 27. See Woods, Sudden Justice, 2. The time between refuelings depends on how many munitions the drone carries. The US Air Force fact sheet on the Reaper puts its range at 1,150 miles. United States Air Force, “MQ-­9 Reaper.” 28. On the near possibility of aerial refueling see Macias, “Boeing Wins $805 Million Pentagon Contract.” 29. See Scarry, Body in Pain, 63. 30. Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths, 175. 31. See Hippler, Governing from the Skies, prologue. 32. See Hippler, Governing from the Skies, 193. 33. Hippler, Governing from the Skies, 200. 4. Weizman, Hollow Land, 86. See also Favret, War at a Distance, and the 3 discussion of that book in Caplan, Aerial Aftermaths. 35. Etienne Balibar argues that the problem with sovereign acts of war becoming more like police actions is that they are executed by a state with no legal authority over the territory they act upon. This means that these acts of war “have a tendency to oscillate around the notion of war, in the direction of police but also in the direction of counter-­terrorism, or state terror.” Balibar, “What’s in a War?,” 385. 36. Hippler, Governing from the Skies, 204–­5. 37. As Kaplan argues, while debate raged in the 1920s about the morality of bombing civilian populations in Europe, no such concerns were raised about “the bombing of largely civilian populations in colonized or Mandate zones.” Aerial Aftermaths, 175. 38. See Woods, Sudden Justice, 154–­57. In general, the US government’s position that all military-­aged males (a term that included children as young as 14) in places subject to drone strikes were considered enemy combatants until posthumously proven not to be evacuates the category of civilian entirely for those people.

NOTES TO P A GES 1 1 0 – 1 1 7

140

39. See Weizman, Hollow Land, 152. For more on the perverse logic of humanitarianism see Weizman, Least of All Possible Evils. 0. See Arendt, “Decline of the Nation-­State.” 4 41. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 17, 23. 2. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 24. Mbembe insists on lawlessness, but this under4 states to some extent the way in which law itself is an instrument of colonial and sovereign power. In this sense, there is not, I think, “absolute lawlessness” in the colony so much as a flexible, sovereign form of law that does nothing to restrain sovereign violence but, precisely, produces sovereignty as a right over life and death. 3. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 24, 25. 4 4. Woods, Sudden Justice, 121–­22. 4 5. Weizman, Hollow Land, 11. 4 6. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 25, 26, 26, 25. 4 47. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 28. 8. Weizman, Hollow Land, 237. 4 49. Weizman, Hollow Land, 238. 0. Weizman, Hollow Land, 241. 5 51. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 137. 52. See Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide, 151. 53. I refer here to the debate between the “hard” and “soft” schools of interpretation of Gulliver’s Travels. The hard school of interpretation sees the Houyhnhnms as an ideal with which Swift compares humans, and finds them wanting. The soft school sees the Houyhnhnms as an impossible ideal and argues that the target of the satire here is Gulliver himself, who thinks he can so overcome his humanity as to become another species altogether. For a good recent account of this debate see Keenleyside, Animals and Other People. 4. For an excellent account of how the colonies taught the metropolis about the 5 technology of racism see Boulukos, Grateful Slave. 55. See Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide, 151–­52. 56. Swift may well include Ireland among the savage nations, and the next line indicates that Gulliver sees these differences as cultural rather than natural: “The Lineaments of the Countenance [in savage nations] are distorted by the Natives suffering their Infants to lie grovelling on the Earth, or by carrying them on their Backs, nuzzling with their face against the Mother’s Shoulders” (213). 57. Several critics have noted that the Yahoos are like the helots to the Houyhnhnm Spartans. See Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide, 260; and Higgins, “Swift and Sparta.” 8. My thanks to Shane Herron for his help in making this formula explicit. 5 59. Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide, 258.

141

1. 2. 3. 4.

Stewart and Ali, “U.S. Says Kabul Drone Strike Killed 10 Civilians.” BBC News Service, “Qasem Soleimani.” Plummer and Murphy, “Ayman al-­Zawahiri.” Siskin and Warner, “This Is Enlightenment,” 6. Siskin and Warner are quite determined to limit the scope of the Enlightenment, arguing that the radical changes in mediation that they discuss can be limited to a period from around the 1730s, when mediation was expanding and proliferating, to the 1780s, when, they argue, new forms of mediation had reached a point of saturation. Despite this, they recognize that the expansion of mediation in the eighteenth century was sometimes a result of a delay in the coming to fruition of certain concepts or inventions. They thus acknowledge a broader timeline, defined by important intellectual figures, that runs from Francis Bacon to Kant. 5. Siskin and Warner’s quite optimistic reading of the Enlightenment use of tools as mediation stands in contrast to that of Horkheimer and Adorno, who write that “the ‘many things’ which, according to Bacon, knowledge held in store are themselves mere instruments: the radio as a sublimated printing press, the dive bomber as a more effective form of artillery, remote control as a more reliable compass. What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings.” Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2. Horkheimer and Adorno clearly see the way media of communication seamlessly integrate with weaponry, and their dystopian reading of the Enlightenment already anticipates drone warfare. 6. Kant, “Answer to the Question,” 42. 7. Siskin and Warner, “This Is Enlightenment,” 4. 8. Hobbes, Leviathan, 98. 9. Khan, Hassan, Almukhtar, and Shorey, “Civilian Casualty Files.” 10. Khan, “Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes.” See also part 2 of the reporting, Khan, “Human Toll of America’s Air Wars.” 11. Nasu, “Kargu-­2 Autonomous Attack Drone.” This article contains a brief description of the Kargu-­2, as well as some discussion of the ethical considerations surrounding its use. 12. For the UN report see Choudhury, Aoun, Badawy, de Albuqueurque Bacardit, Marjane, and Wilkinson, “Final Report of the Panel of Experts on Libya.” 13. Hernandez, “Military Drone with a Mind of Its Own.” 14. Ulrike Franke (@RikaFranke), https://​twitter​.com​/RikeFranke​/status​ /1399670512784187392. 15. Wadhwa and Salkever, “Killer Flying Robots Are Here.”

NOTES TO P A GES 1 1 9 – 1 2 8

EPILOGUE

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INDEX accountability. See responsibility and accountability actor network theory (ANT), 7, 41, 45–­46, 48–­50, 61 Adorno, Theodor, 21, 24, 141n5 Afghanistan: drones striking civilians in, 40, 119–­20, 123; sovereignty of, 20, 87; US drone policy in, 67, 69 Agamben, Giorgio, 36–­37, 130–­31n47 agency: in actor network theory, 45–­46, 48–­49; collateral damage and, 38–­39; Hobbes and, 7, 43–­45, 124; mediation of action and, 123–­27; technology and networks of, 39–­41, 49, 61, 123; in Texts from Drone, 31, 35, 36, 39–­40. See also responsibility and accountability; sovereignty Agnew, John, 17, 18 airspace and aerial power: asymmetry in, 28, 56–­57, 64, 84, 88; collateral damage and, 37–­38; colonialism and, 108, 109, 112; as element of sovereignty, 8, 89–­90, 113; remote occupation of, 28, 64, 69–­71, 74, 84, 85–­91, 102; Swift’s Laputa and, 102–­4; territorial control via, 108; unconditional sovereignty of drone over, 8, 85–­86; views from, 102–­3, 138n21 al-­Awlaki, Anwar. See Awlaki, Anwar al-­ Algeria, 1992 elections in, 3

al-­Hirathi, Qa’id Salim Sinan. See Hirathi, Qa’id Salim Sinan al-­ Al Qaeda, 24, 25, 55 al-­Zawahiri, Ayman. See Zawahiri, Ayman al-­ Anderson, Benedict, 53 Anghie, Antony, 19 animals and ownership, 1–­5, 58, 73 anonymity, 3, 33, 53 ANT. See actor network theory apartheid (South Africa), 111–­12 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 98, 101–­2, 114 Arendt, Hannah, 110 Armitage, Richard, 91 artificial intelligence, 51–­52. See also autonomous warfare assassinations and killings: of animals, 1–­5, 58; centralization of military command and, 52; drone pilots and, 9, 38, 132n27; international law on, 11; mechanization and automation of, 36; morality of, 60; public mediation of, 28, 120–­27; of racialized colonial subjects, 114–­18; remote occupation and, 68, 84, 87, 113; target selection and, 52–­53, 59, 113, 137–­38n5; in Texts from Drone, 31 asymmetry of sovereignty: actor network theory and, 61; aerial power and, 28, 56–­57, 64, 84, 88;

Index

152

asymmetry of sovereignty (continued) borders and territoriality and, 5, 12–­13, 28, 65–­66, 87–­88; colonialism and, 54, 96, 97, 109–­13; drone occupation and, 68–­69, 85–­86, 90, 107–­8; drone warfare and, 12–­14, 20, 26–­28, 51–­58, 94, 97, 109, 117–­18; as Enlightenment legacy, 13–­14, 16, 18–­20, 27–­28; in Gulliver’s Travels, 97–­104, 106, 114–­18; inequality distinct from, 12; Israeli occupation of Palestine and, 130n38; between mediation and publicity, 121–­27; race and, 97; self-­preservation and, 23; signature strikes and, 53, 56; United States and, 20, 26–­27, 91–­92, 130n38, 134n5; Western states and, 12–­14, 20, 27, 28, 69, 85, 96, 111, 127 Austin, J. L., 136n24 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF, 2001), 5, 26 autoimmunity, 23–­27, 57, 134–35n9 autonomous warfare, 10, 51–­52, 125–­26 aviation law, 8, 85–­86 Awlaki, Anwar al-­, 25–­26

Bacon, Francis, 121, 122, 124, 141n5 Balibar, Etienne, 65, 139n35 Banner, Stuart, 86–­87 Barbeyrac, Jean, 66, 72, 79–­84, 136nn35–­36 Bates, David, 54, 130n39 Baucom, Ian, 19–­20, 54 Becker, Jo, 26 Benjamin, Medea, 10, 39, 132n21, 135n16 Biden administration, 120 Bisset, Sophie, 79 bodies and touch: drone as agent of mediation for, 121; occupation and,

72, 75–­78, 80–­81, 83, 84; subjectivity and, 4 borders and territoriality: asymmetry of sovereignty and, 5, 12–­13, 28, 65–­66, 87–­88; capital and, 13–­14; Cecil the lion’s killing and, 4; deterritorialization of, 64–­66, 74, 88, 90, 134n5; in drone warfare, 2, 4–­5, 20, 28, 55; Enlightenment conceptions of, 5, 6, 27, 55; enmity and, 54, 55; signature strikes and, 56–­57 Borradori, Giovanna, 24 Bousquet, Antoine, 137n54 Bowman, Tom, 134–35n9 Bratton, Benjamin, 15 Brennan, John, 24, 25 BugSplat (computer program), 38

Callon, Michel, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan” (with Latour), 46–­49 Carter, Ashton, 24 cause and effect, 43, 45–­46, 56. See also actor network theory Cecil the lion, killing of, 1–­5, 58 cell-­phone tracking, 3, 53, 121 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): extramilitary drone use by, 11, 59, 68–­69, 109, 138n11; target selection and, 3, 52–­53 Chamayou, Gregoire, 2, 10, 39–­40, 42, 52, 64–­65, 69–­70, 131n4 civilian casualties: in Afghanistan drone strikes, 40, 119–­20; calculating risks of, 38; classification of, 39, 109–­10, 118, 139n38; enmity from, 93–­94; in Middle East and North Africa drone strikes, 109–­10; New York Times report on (2021), 125; remote occupation and, 84; Trump

153

Damrosch, Leopold, 44, 45 Davidson Sorkin, Amy, 25 DeLanda, Manuel, 51–­52 democracy: autoimmunity and, 23–­24, 26–­27; dictatorial powers and, 130–­31n47; drone warfare as threat to, 27–­28, 32, 113, 135n16 deodand law, 48–­50

Deptula, David, 9 Derrida, Jacques, 23–­25, 32, 57 determinism, 33–­34, 43–­4 4 deterritorialization, 64–­66, 74, 88, 90 drone pilots, 9, 10, 35, 38, 40, 42, 84, 132n27 drones: autonomous, 10, 125–­27; as dream of Enlightenment, 9, 64; fragility/weakness of, 97; Gulliver’s Travels and, 95, 101–­7, 113, 114; infrastructure for, 90, 97, 139n27; Kargu-­2, 126; as political technology, 32–­33, 46, 51–­53, 60–­61, 94, 107–­9, 117–­18, 131n4; Predator, 6, 29, 90, 97, 103, 138n11; Reaper, 90, 97, 107, 139n27; regulation of, 2, 11, 138n16; sight and, 81, 82, 121; in Texts from Drone meme series, 30, 35, 36, 40–­41 drone warfare: executive branch power in, 34, 41, 59–­61; Gulliver’s Travels and, 96, 99, 100, 107–­9; Hobbesian responsibility and, 45–­48; mediation and publicity of, 121–­27; moral pride and, 60–­61; perpetual low-­intensity violence of, 107–­9; as political problem, 11, 32–­33; secrecy of, 1, 68–­69, 120, 122–­23; self-­preservation and, 21, 130n39; subjectivity and, 11, 36, 58, 61; temporality of, 8, 78, 96, 99, 101, 114, 116–­18; in US public discourse, 120–­21 due process, 25–­26, 29, 30, 31

economy of language, 57–­58 Elden, Stuart, 20, 65, 70–­71, 74, 87–­88, 90–­91, 129n18 England: Gulliver’s Travels and, 95–­96, 100–­101, 114–­16; natural law

Index

and reporting of, 59. See also collateral damage Clausewitz, Carl von, 2, 94 Clinton, Hillary, 6, 29, 30, 35, 36 collateral damage, 36–­39, 127. See also civilian casualties colonialism and colonial occupation: aerial power and, 108, 109, 112; asymmetry of sovereignty and, 54, 96, 97, 109–­13; Barbeyrac on, 72, 83; drone warfare integrated under, 32–­33; Enlightenment basis for, 11, 13, 27, 54, 63–­64, 66, 69, 72–­73, 92; European public law and, 54; Gulliver’s Travels as parable of, 9, 98, 106; natural law theory of occupation and, 7, 70–­74; peace as low-­intensity warfare under, 109; perpetual low-­intensity violence and, 107–­9; racism and, 96, 98, 109–­16; remote occupation and, 7–­8, 64–­65, 70, 83–­84, 92, 94, 108–­9, 111–­12; sovereignty doctrines and, 16–­20 common law, 70, 86 congressional oversight, 34 Congress of Vienna (1814–­15), 14–­15 contingent sovereignty, 17, 20, 90–­92 Crawford, Neta, 38, 131–­32n19 crime and intentionality, 3, 50–­51 Cronin, Bruce, 37–­38, 134n51

Index

154

England (continued) resurgence in, 70. See also colonialism and colonial occupation Enlightenment: asymmetry of sovereignty and, 13–­14, 16–­20, 27–­28, 98; colonial occupation and, 11, 13, 27, 54, 63–­64, 66, 69, 72–­73, 92; drone warfare from thought of, 3–­5, 27–­28, 34; jus publicum Europaeum and, 14, 18, 54; mediation and, 121–­22, 141nn4–­5; public sphere as legacy of, 120–­23; racism as legacy of, 110; remote occupation and, 4–­5, 69, 88, 92; right to life and, 5–­6; self-­preservation and, 21–­24. See also specific philosophers enmity: drone warfare and, 53–­58, 89, 93–­94; Enlightenment doctrines of, 19–­20; in Europe vs. New World, 19–­20, 129n19, 139n37; political partisans and, 55, 89, 133n47, 133n49; signature strikes and, 55–­56; sovereignty and, 54–­55, 89–­90; war on terror and, 89 Esposito, Roberto, 21–­23 European colonialism. See colonialism and colonial occupation Executive Office of the President (EOP), 7, 25–­26, 41, 51–­53, 59–­61. See also specific presidential administrations externalist concepts of sovereignty, 33, 43–­46, 49–­50

Fanon, Frantz, 112 Fauchille, Paul, 86 Favret, Mary, 109 Feaver, Peter, 134–35n9 Fitzmaurice, Andrew, 71, 73 Fort Hood massacre (2009), 25 Foucault, Michel, 110

Franke, Ulrike, 126 free will, 33, 43–­4 4, 124. See also agency; intentionality and intentionalism; responsibility and accountability

Galli, Carlo, 18 Gasché, Rodolphe, 54, 133n47 globalization, 18, 65, 134n5. See also deterritorialization Gregory, Derek, 20 Grotius, Hugo: Barbeyrac and, 79–­80, 83, 136n36; drone warfare’s meaning and, 6; Kant and, 15; on occupation of seas, 84–­85; occupation theory of, 7, 66, 70–­78, 135n23 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 8–­9, 95–­118; aeriality in, 92, 104–­6; asymmetry of sovereignty in, 12, 97–­104, 106, 114–­18; Balnibarbi in, 95, 97, 103–­7, 113, 138n12; Brobdingnag in, 95–­96, 99–­101, 115; colonial occupation and, 9, 106; complete vs. low-­ intensity warfare in, 107–­9; drone warfare and, 8, 96, 99, 100, 107–­9, 118; hard and soft interpretations of, 140n53; Houyhnhnms in, 8, 96, 101–­2, 109, 114–­18, 140n53, 140n57; Laputa in, 8, 95–­114, 105, 138n12; Lilliput in, 95–­96, 98–­99; Lindalino in, 106, 107; maps in, 104, 105; presence and space dislocated in, 95–­96; racial asymmetry and dominance in, 8, 96, 109–­15; satiric method of, 95–­100, 117, 137n8; sovereignty in, 8, 92, 105–­6, 113, 118, 139n26; symmetry and asymmetry in, 97–­101; Yahoos as targets in, 8, 96, 114–­18, 140n57 gunpowder, 96, 100–­101, 121

155

Habermas, Jürgen, 14, 15 Hagglund, Martin, 23 Hardt, Michael, 18 Hayles, Katherine, 43, 45 Hazeltine, Harold, 87 Heller-­Roazen, Daniel, 20, 85, 88–­89, 137n51 Hellfire missiles, 58, 78–­79, 97, 138n11 Hippler, Thomas, 9, 56–­57, 108, 109 Hirathi, Qa’id Salim Sinan al-­, 68 Hobbes, Thomas: actor network theory and, 46–­50; agency and, 7, 43–­45, 124; asymmetry of sovereign relations in, 12, 57; contingent sovereignty and, 91; drone warfare’s meaning and, 6; on God as immortal sovereign, 133n40; Kant compared to, 16; Leviathan, 12, 32, 47, 124; Locke compared to, 4, 34, 41–­48; mechanical agency and, 124–­25; moral determinism of, 33–­34, 43–­44; political violence and, 27; on responsibility, 6–­7, 41, 43–­48; self-­preservation and, 21, 22; signature strikes and, 56; sovereignty theory of, 7, 32–­34, 46–­51, 57; on subjectivity, 4, 44–­45, 50, 57 Holder, Eric, 31 Horkheimer, Max, 21, 24, 141n5

humanitarianism, 11, 54, 110 Hume, David, 7, 66, 69, 75, 79; Treatise of Human Nature, 62–­63

identity: Locke’s definition of, 3, 41–­42; signature strikes and, 53 immunity: airspace and, 87, 92; autoimmunity and, 23–­27, 57, 134–35n9; drone warfare and, 13, 21–­26, 79; as Enlightenment legacy, 21–­23; Israeli occupation of Palestine and, 130n38; remote occupation and, 79; right over life and death and, 7–­8, 23, 24, 47–­49, 55, 67–­69, 74; of US troops in Iraq, 67, 134–35n9; imperialism. See colonialism and colonial occupation individuality, 5, 34, 61 intentionality and intentionalism: collateral damage and, 37–­39; crime and, 50–­51; Hobbes on, 43–­46; in natural law, 72; occupation and, 72, 79–­84, 136n35; in Texts from Drone, 58. See also responsibility and accountability International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), 10–­11, 125–­26 International Monetary Fund, 18 Iraq: British police bombing in (1920s), 108–­9; sovereignty of, 87, 134–35n9; US drone strikes in, 125; US invasion of, 38, 67, 69 ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), 55 Israel, Jonathan, 12 Israeli-­occupied Palestine, 69, 94, 104, 111–­13, 130n38

Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), 3, 11, 52–­53

Index

Gusterson, Hugh: on accountability for drone strikes, 40; on drone pilots, 10, 132n27; on extrajudicial drone strikes, 135n13; on future of drone warfare, 138n16; on military justifications for drone warfare, 93, 137n2; on mixed vs. pure drone warfare, 11, 67–­68; on Obama administration justifications for drone strikes, 26

Index

156

jurisdiction. See sovereignty jus belli, 14–­15 jus publicum Europaeum, 14, 18, 54

Kant, Immanuel, 15–­16, 18, 122–­25; “To Perpetual Peace,” 15 Kaplan, Caren, 90, 108, 137n54, 139n21, 139n37 Kargu-­2 drone, 126 killings. See assassinations and killings Kramnick, Jonathan, 43–­4 4, 45, 50 Krasner, Stephen, 17, 18

Latour, Bruno: on actor network theory, 7, 41, 45–­49; on cause and effect, 43; Reassembling the Social, 46; “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan” (with Callon), 46–­49 lawlessness, 19–­20, 110, 140n42 laws: of airspace, 8, 86–­88; asymmetry of sovereignty in, 19; colonialism and, 18–­19; deodand, 48–­50; on drone killings, 11; Hobbes on, 44–­45, 50–­51; Roman civil, 70–­71; sovereignty and exception from, 34, 50–­51, 140n42; Treaty of Westphalia and, 14, 15; warfare and, 14–­16. See also natural law lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), 126 liberalism: drone warfare and, 3, 27, 35, 36; Enlightenment split of order and violence in, 27; neocolonialism vs., 35; president’s sovereign powers and, 41; responsibility and, 43–­4 4; sovereign subjection to rule of law in, 34; Texts from Drone and, 31 Lindqvist, Sven, 108

Loar, Christopher, 98, 102, 138n12, 138n17, 138n23, 139n26 Locke, John: analogy of savage beasts to explain criminality and murder, 3–­4; Barbeyrac and, 80; drone warfare’s meaning and, 6; An Essay concerning Human Understanding, 41–­42; Hobbes compared to, 4, 34, 41–­48; on occupation of North America, 135–36n30; on personhood, 3; on responsibility, 6–­7, 41–­43, 46; Second Treatise, 3 Lycklanna, Johanna, 87

Macpherson, Sandra, 43, 48–­50, 132–­33n35 Mbembe, Achille, 56, 104, 110–­13, 140n42 McChrystal, Stanley, 93–­94, 137n2 McDonald, Jake, 126 mediation: drones as technology of, 105–­6, 121–­27; Enlightenment as event in history of, 121–­22, 141nn4–­5; occupation and, 76–­78; vertical politics and, 113. See also publicity and public sphere meme series. See Texts from Drone Middle East and North Africa drone warfare, 109–­10 Milley, Mark, 119–­20 Mohammed, Nek, 68 moral philosophy, 6, 33–­34, 43, 56, 60, 131–­32n19

National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA, 2012), 36, 55 natural law, 12; airspace and, 87; Barbeyrac and, 79, 80, 83; enmity doctrine and, 19–­20; of free seas, 8;

157

Obama administration: drone policy under, 11, 25, 58–­60; signature strikes and, 2; Terror Tuesday meetings of, 7, 25, 30–­31; in Texts from Drone meme series, 6, 29–­31, 30, 36 occupation of territory or property. See colonialism and colonial occupation; remote occupation

Pakistan: aerial sovereignty and, 87–­88, 91; perpetual low-­intensity warfare in, 108–­9; US drone policy in, 24–­25, 58, 59, 68–­70 Palestine: Israeli occupation of, 69, 94, 104, 111–­13, 130n38; Swift’s Balnibarbi compared to, 104 Palmer, Walter, 1–­2, 4 Pascal, Blaise, 48 peace, 5, 15–­16, 109 personhood and personal identity, 3, 41–­42 pirates, 85, 87–­89, 137n51 Plutarch, Moralia: Greek Questions, 62–­63, 74–­78

political use of drones. See drones Poss, James O., 40 Pourmokhtari, Navid, 19 Predator drones, 6, 29, 90, 97, 103, 138n11 president, office of. See Executive Office of the President publicity and public sphere, 28, 121–­27; distinction between mediation and, 121–­22; knowledge production and complicity, 123–­24; open discourse about drone strikes, 119–­20, 125–­27; public reason vs. technology and power of mediation in drone warfare, 124–­25 Pufendorf, Samuel: Barbeyrac and, 79–­80, 83; drone warfare’s meaning and, 6; Kant and, 15; occupation theory of, 7, 66, 70, 71, 72–­78, 80–­81

race and racism: asymmetry of sovereignty and, 97; colonialism and, 6, 96, 98, 109–­16; drone warfare and, 96, 110–­13; Gulliver’s Travels and, 8, 96, 109, 114–­18; as political technology, 110, 112, 115–­16; sovereignty’s dependence on, 110–­13 Rawson, Claude, 114, 116, 117, 137n8, 138n15 Reaper drones, 90, 97, 107, 139n27 refugee camps, 65 Reisner, Daniel, 11 Reiss, Mitchell B., 134–35n9 remote occupation, 62–­92; Barbeyrac’s occupation theory, 79–­84, 135n23, 136nn35–­36; colonialism and, 7–­8, 64, 83–­84, 92, 94, 108–­9, 111–­12; drone warfare and, 7–­8, 66–­71, 76, 78–­79, 81–­84, 108–­10, 113;

Index

Kant and, 15; negative community and, 71; of occupation, 7, 12, 62–­63, 66, 70–­74, 83; self-­preservation and, 21. See also Grotius, Hugo; Pufendorf, Samuel nautical compass, 121 necropolitics, 13, 56, 112–­13 Negri, Antonio, 18 neocolonialism, 35, 94–­95, 97, 108 New York Times on civilian deaths from drone strikes (2021), 125, 127 nuclear war and nuclear armaments, 52, 97

Index

158

remote occupation (continued) in Enlightenment, 4–­5, 7, 69, 88, 92, 135–36n30; Grotius’s occupation theory, 7, 66, 70–­78; in Gulliver’s Travels, 102–­3; Hume’s occupation theory, 62–­64, 66, 69, 75, 79; natural law and, 72, 74, 77; permanence of, 94, 108–­9; Pufendorf’s occupation theory, 7, 66, 70, 71, 72–­78, 80–­81; racism and, 111–­12; sovereignty and, 74, 79, 84, 91. See also colonialism and colonial occupation responsibility and accountability: autoimmunity and, 25; centralization of military command and, 52, 59; collateral damage and, 37–­39; drone warfare and lack of, 5, 32, 36, 39–­40, 48–­52, 58–­61, 118; expanding categories of, 131–­32n19; Hobbes and Locke on, 41–­48; intentionality and, 38–­39, 131–­32n19, 132–­33n35; moral behavior vs. moral intention, 45; moral determinism and, 33; personhood and, 42–­43; pirates and, 88; remote occupation and, 91–­92; sovereignty and, 6–­7, 22, 32–­34, 41–­48, 51, 57, 61, 88, 91–­92, 113; strict liability, theory of, 132n35; system of checks and balances for, 34; technology and diffusion of, 5, 40, 42, 51–­52, 60–­61, 123–­25; in Texts from Drone, 6, 31–­32, 35–­36 right over life and death: asymmetry of sovereignty and, 12, 13, 58; drone warfare’s claim to, 5, 11, 13, 33, 49, 67–­69; Executive Office of the President and, 25–­26; remote occupation and, 5, 7–­8, 84; self-­ preservation and, 22, 26; sovereign

immunity and, 7–­8, 23, 24, 47–­49, 55, 67–­69, 74; Terror Tuesdays and, 25; United States’ view of its immunity and, 91–­92 Roman civil law, 70–­71 Rosenthal, Daniel J., 59–­60 rule of law. See laws

Salkever, Alex, 126–­27 Saunders, David, 79 Scarry, Elaine, 107 Schmidgen, Wolfram, 70 Schmitt, Carl, 2, 14–­15, 18–­20, 53–­55, 89, 133n47 Schulman, Loren DeJonge, 59–­60 seas, occupation of, 8, 84–­86, 88–­89, 136n38, 137n51 secrecy of drone warfare, 1, 68–­69, 120, 122–­23 security, 22, 40, 86 Selden, John, 136n38 self-­preservation, 21–­25, 130n39. See also autoimmunity; immunity Serbia, NATO bombings of, 37 Shane, Scott, 26 signature strikes, 2–­4, 53–­57, 132n21 Siskin, Clifford, 121–­22, 124, 141n4 Soleimani, Qasem, 59 South African apartheid, 111–­12 sovereign immunity. See immunity sovereign right over life and death. See right over life and death sovereignty: actor network theory and, 46, 48–­51; aerial, 8, 28, 86–­87, 89–­90; capital and, 13–­14; colonialist notions of, 18–­19; contingent, 17, 20, 90–­92; deterritorialization and, 74, 88, 90; drone occupation and, 69; drones establishing, 8, 49; drone warfare’s challenge to, 5, 11,

159

Tahir, Madiha, 56 Taliban, 55

target selection: analogy to Cecil the lion as “high-­value” target, 1–­5; autonomous, 125–­27; centralization of military command and, 52; signature strikes and, 2–­4, 53–­57, 132n21; surveillance and, 113; Terror Tuesday meetings and, 7, 25, 30–­31; Trump administration and, 59–­60 technology: asymmetry between drone users and target territory, 20, 110; occupation of seas and, 84–­85; public sphere mediation of, 126–­27; of remote occupation, 102–­3; responsibility diffused in, 5, 40, 42, 51–­52, 60–­61, 123–­25; Swift’s satire and, 137n8. See also drones; gunpowder telescopes, 102–­3, 121 territoriality. See borders and territoriality terrorists and terrorism: deterritorialization and, 65, 91; drone warfare reproducing, 24; enmity doctrine and, 20; police actions under guise of counter-­terrorism, 139n35; signature strikes and, 2–­3, 53–­57, 132n21. See also war on terror Terror Tuesday meetings, 7, 25, 30–­31 Texts from Drone (Tumblr meme series), 29–­31, 30, 35–­36, 57–­58; agency in, 31, 35, 36, 39–­40; enmity and, 55; Hobbes and, 33–­34; intentionality in, 58; Obama administration in, 6, 29–­31, 30, 36; political technology of drones in, 51 Texts from Hillary (Tumblr account), 29, 131n2 Thirty Years’ War, 14 touch. See bodies and touch Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 14–­17, 129n18

Index

25, 88; economy of language and, 57–­58; Enlightenment norms of, 6, 13–­14, 17–­20; enmity and, 54–­55, 89–­90; force and right associated in, 49–­50; in Gulliver’s Travels, 92, 105–­6, 113, 118, 139n26; Hobbes’s theory of, 7, 32–­34, 46–­51, 57; occupation under natural law and, 73–­74, 80; remote occupation and, 74, 79, 84; responsibility and, 6–­7, 32–­34, 41–­48, 51, 57, 61, 88, 91–­92, 113; self-­preservation and, 21–­23; sovereign fiction of states, 91; vertical politics of, 111–­13; violence and, 32–­33, 55, 58, 61, 65–­66, 91–­92. See also asymmetry of sovereignty; immunity Spinoza, Baruch, 12, 21 state of nature, 3, 16, 19, 22 states. See sovereignty Strauss, Leo, 21, 24 strict liability, theory of, 132n35 subjectivity: bodies and, 4; drone warfare’s challenge to, 11, 36, 58, 61; Hobbes on, 44–­45, 50, 57; responsibility and, 43–­4 4, 48, 61 surveillance, 40, 53, 81, 113, 118, 133n48 Swift, Jonathan: The Drapier’s Letters, 138–39n25; drone warfare’s meaning and, 6; on Ireland as savage nation, 140n56; mass destruction concerns of, 107–­9, 138n15, 139n26; satiric method of, 95–­100, 117, 137n8; symmetry and asymmetry in, 98. See also Gulliver’s Travels symmetry. See asymmetry of sovereignty Syria, US drone strikes in, 125

Index

160

Truman, Harry, 50 Trump administration, 59–­61, 120 Tuck, Richard, 73

United Nations, 18, 87–­88, 126 United States: Afghan civilians killed in drone strikes by, 40, 119–­20, 123; asymmetry of sovereignty and, 20, 26–­27, 91–­92, 130n38, 134n5; balance of powers in, 34; classification of combatants by, 39, 139n38; enmity toward, 24; foreign policy critiques of, 35–­36; war on terror, 20, 24, 89, 91–­92, 110–­11 United States Air Force, 2

Velthuysen, Lambert von, 76–­77 verticality, politics of, 94–­95, 104–­6, 111–­13 violence and force: autoimmunity and, 25; complete vs. low-­intensity, 96, 107–­9; in Enlightenment concept of sovereignty, 27, 49; lesser evil logic in, 94, 137n5; sovereignty and, 32–­33, 55, 58, 61, 65–­66, 91–­92; temporality of, 8, 78, 96, 99, 101, 114, 116–­18; in Texts from Drone

meme series, 35. See also drone warfare; warfare

Wadwha, Vivek, 126–­27 warfare: autonomous, 10, 51–­52, 125–­26; Clausewitz on, 94; collateral damage and, 37–­39; drones and transformation of, 53–­54, 67–­68, 94, 108–­9, 122, 134n51; institutionalized limited war, 14; jus belli, 14–­15; jus publicum Europaeum, 14, 18, 54; Kant on, 16; military centralization and, 51–­52; Schmitt on, 14–­15, 53–­54, 133n47. See also drone warfare; terrorists and terrorism Warner, William, 121–­22, 124, 141n4 war on terror, 20, 24, 64–­65, 89, 110–­11 Waziristan, Pakistan, 69, 106, 108–­9 Weizman, Eyal, 37, 94, 104, 109–­13, 137–­38n5 Wood, William, 138–39n25 Woods, Chris, 24, 39, 109, 137n11

Yemen, US drone policy in, 59, 68–­70

Zawahiri, Ayman al-­, 120