Life in the Age of Drone Warfare

This volume's contributors offer a new critical language through which to explore and assess the historical, juridical, geopolitical, and cultural dimensions of drone technology and warfare. They show how drones generate particular ways of visualizing the spaces and targets of war while acting as tools to exercise state power. Essays include discussions of the legal justifications of extrajudicial killings and how US drone strikes in the Horn of Africa impact life on the ground, as well as a personal narrative of a former drone operator. The contributors also explore drone warfare in relation to sovereignty, governance, and social difference; provide accounts of the relationships between drone technologies and modes of perception and mediation; and theorize drones’ relation to biopolitics, robotics, automation, and art. Interdisciplinary and timely, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare extends the critical study of drones while expanding the public discussion of one of our era's most ubiquitous instruments of war. Contributors. Peter Asaro, Brandon Wayne Bryant, Katherine Chandler, Jordan Crandall, Ricardo Dominguez, Derek Gregory, Inderpal Grewal, Lisa Hajjar, Caren Kaplan, Andrea Miller, Anjali Nath, Jeremy Packer, Lisa Parks, Joshua Reeves, Thomas Stubblefield, Madiha Tahir

"This truly interdisciplinary work will challenge conventional understandings of a quickly emerging academic area. Those seeking a purely empirical analysis of how drone technology has changed the landscape might be left seeking slightly more, but they will be exposed to a series of well-constructed, timely arguments throughout this volume. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.", "An extensive and thorough compendium.", "A masterful document, as fraught and anxiety‑inducing as its topic is, the book is, as they say, required reading. . . . I am eager to read more from any one of the authors included in it.", "A comprehensive feminist and critical intervention. . . . A decisive feminist and anti-racist contribution to security and surveillance studies that provides a diverse range of interdisciplinary lenses.", "The collection of essays in Life in the Age of Drone Warfare offers a nice corrective to the over-proliferation of studies and artistic practices using drones in contemporary media studies . . . Taken together, the pieces map a fairly comprehensive landscape of the discourse and lived realities around the drone war, in particular the militarization of consumption across the racialized divides of the Global North and the Global South."

Lisa Parks is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author and coeditor of several books, most recently, Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis, and the author and coeditor of several books, including Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above, also published by Duke University Press.