The Spatial Politics of Drone Warfare

Abstract

This dissertation investigates drone warfare, which is the military's use of unmanned planes to strike enemy targets, an integral and relatively new strategy in the `war on terror'. The dissertation is composed of three unique research papers. The first gets to grips with how this warfare is represented in video games. These virtual spaces contain carefully crafted aesthetics that are important for widespread cultural participation, recruitment, and legitimization. The second paper investigates the use of U.S. military drones in the tribal regions of Pakistan, a historically `exceptional' territory that today finds itself the continued subject of colonial violence. The paper is motivated by understanding the logic of the legislation that enables such warfare, as well as the military's `fetishization' of the drone as an actor devoid of social relations. The third paper builds upon the second to take seriously the drone as an object of extreme political importance. The analytic is driven by `object-oriented philosophy' and argues that drones are metaphysical objects responsible for slicing and dicing the world into their own image. Overall, the main contribution of the dissertation is to signal and review the political importance of a new and deadly military zeitgeist: one that encroaches upon everyday life, geopolitics, and reality itself.