Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing: On Drones, Counter-Insurgency, and Violence

Description

The deployment of remotely piloted air platforms (RPAs) - or drones - has become a defining feature of contemporary counter-insurgency operations. Scholarly analysis and public debate has primarily focused on two issues: the legality of targeted killing and whether the practice is effective at disrupting insurgency networks, and the intensive media and activist scrutiny of the policy processes through which targeted killing decisions have been made. While contributing to these ongoing discussions, this book aims to determine how targeted killing has become possible in contemporary counter-insurgency operations undertaken by liberal regimes. Each chapter is oriented around a problematisation that has shaped the cultural politics of the targeted killing assemblage. Grayson argues that in order to understand how specific forms of violence become prevalent, it is important to determine how problematisations that enable them are shaped by a politico-cultural system in which culture operates in conjunction with technological, economic, governmental, and geostrategic elements. The book also demonstrates that the actors involved - what they may be attempting to achieve through the deployment of this form of violence, how they attempt to achieve it, and where they attempt to achieve it - are also shaped by culture. The book demonstrates how the current social relations prevalent in liberal societies contain the potential for targeted killing as a normal rather than extraordinary practice. It will be of great use for academic specialists and graduate students in international studies, geography, sociology, cultural studies and legal studies. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of tables Acknowledgements 1. The cultural politics of the targeted killing assemblage: Introduction Defining assassination and targeted killing Biopolitics, security, and the liberal way of war Beyond liberal biopolitics: a return to culture Methodology and culture Problematisations and styles of thought The cultural politics of targeted killing: lines of flight 2. Beyond the exception: The legal problematisation of targeted killing Introduction Violence, the law, and the exception Differentiating assassination and targeted killing in legal problematisations Targeted killing in war: Jus ad bellum problematisations Jus in bello problematisations Problematising targeted killing under international human rights law National legal problematisations Conclusions 3. The politics of targeted killing: Introduction Assassination and targeted killing as biopolitical narratives of violence Manhunts: an opening into the cultural politics of assassination and targeted killing Culture, politics, and violence Political violence, assassination, resonance Biblical representations of assassination Judith, ambivalence, and the narration of assassination events Conclusions 4. Science, capitalism, and the RPA: Introduction The scientific way of warfare Science, war, and economic organisation Capitalism, science, and war Science Revolution, military transformation, the Rumsfeld doctrine, and the dawn of netwar The RPA: conditions of possibility RPA acquisition RPA deployment The shift from RPA to drone: ‘autonomous’ machines and deskilling Desire, spectacle, and RPA proliferation Conclusions 5. The aesthetic subjects of targeted killing: Introduction The RPA as aesthetic subject RPA operators as aesthetic subjects Populations of interest as aesthetic subjects Conclusions 6. The quotidian geopolitics of targeted killing strikes: Introduction Vertical geopolitics, ungoverned spaces, and the everywhere war Sacred places and counter-insurgency The geopolitics of the home The home and Islam Drone strikes and houses The geopolitical consequences of the destruction of homes Broader geopolitical impacts Conclusions 7. Concluding remarks on the cultural politics of targeted killing: Introduction Chapter overview The cultural politics of targeted killing Implications The future of the targeted killing assemblage? Index