Technostrategic discourse aff
Technostrategic discourse aff ......................................................................................................... 1
1AC – Distancing .............................................................................................................................. 4
Technostrategery .......................................................................................................................... 19
Links ........................................................................................................................................... 20
Drone Use Up ........................................................................................................................ 21
Drones Gone Domestic.......................................................................................................... 25
Distancing .............................................................................................................................. 26
Fetishization .......................................................................................................................... 33
Colonialism ............................................................................................................................ 36
Racism.................................................................................................................................... 39
Biopolitics .............................................................................................................................. 40
Biopolitics – Surveillance I/L .................................................................................................. 44
Gender ................................................................................................................................... 48
Hegemony ............................................................................................................................. 50
Technostrategy I/L ................................................................................................................. 52
FATA....................................................................................................................................... 54
Impacts ...................................................................................................................................... 57
Civilian Casualties .................................................................................................................. 58
Distancing – Responsibility .................................................................................................... 62
Distancing – Accountability ................................................................................................... 64
Distancing – Violence ............................................................................................................ 65
Distancing – Public................................................................................................................. 72
Biopolitics .............................................................................................................................. 74
Violence Generic.................................................................................................................... 78
Targetting = Indiscriminate ................................................................................................... 80
Technostrategic Discourse – Violence ................................................................................... 82
Technostrategic Discourse – Thought ................................................................................... 85
Social Justice .......................................................................................................................... 86
Nuclear War........................................................................................................................... 87
PTSD....................................................................................................................................... 93
WOT Bad ................................................................................................................................ 96
A/T: International Law Checks ............................................................................................... 97
Solvency ................................................................................................................................... 102
Affect Solves ........................................................................................................................ 103
Feminist GT Solves ............................................................................................................... 105
GT Art solves ........................................................................................................................ 106
Ethnography solves ............................................................................................................. 108
Deconstruction solves ......................................................................................................... 112
Cyborg Solves ...................................................................................................................... 117
Gender ......................................................................................................................................... 121
Links ......................................................................................................................................... 122
Generics – IR ........................................................................................................................ 123
Tickner Cards ....................................................................................................................... 124
Military Technologies .......................................................................................................... 130
Technostrategic Discourse .................................................................................................. 132
Security ................................................................................................................................ 144
Protector/Protected Binary ................................................................................................. 146
Institutions Need Investigation ........................................................................................... 148
Impacts .................................................................................................................................... 151
Everything ............................................................................................................................ 152
Paternalism .......................................................................................................................... 153
Degradation ......................................................................................................................... 154
Women ................................................................................................................................ 155
Nuclear War......................................................................................................................... 157
War ...................................................................................................................................... 160
Terrorism Turn ..................................................................................................................... 161
Solvency ................................................................................................................................... 163
Embodied Analysis............................................................................................................... 164
Ungender IR Key .................................................................................................................. 165
Feminist Critique Key........................................................................................................... 168
Coalitions Solve ................................................................................................................... 171
Internationalism Solves Terrorism ...................................................................................... 173
Internationalism key to US legitimacy ................................................................................. 174
Internationalism solves Genocide ....................................................................................... 175
UN Fails now ........................................................................................................................ 176
UN Does okay ...................................................................................................................... 177
Patriarchy = Prerequisite ..................................................................................................... 178
Blocks........................................................................................................................................... 180
AT Framework ..................................................................................................................... 181
AT The STATE Good ............................................................................................................. 183
AT Realism ........................................................................................................................... 184
AT Drones better than others.............................................................................................. 186
Misc ............................................................................................................................................. 187
Monological interp .............................................................................................................. 188
Technology / strategy / security stay together ................................................................... 189
Terrorist tech increasing...................................................................................................... 190
Private sector key to tech .................................................................................................... 192
Tech doesn’t solve terrorism ............................................................................................... 194
Reject nuclearization alt? .................................................................................................... 195
Queer Robots? ..................................................................................................................... 197
Nuclear .................................................................................................................................... 199
Proliferation discourse otherizes......................................................................................... 200
Light Weapons Hurt Women ............................................................................................... 204
Can’t talk about Nuke effects – associated with women .................................................... 206
Prevents Disarm .................................................................................................................. 208
1AC – Distancing
Drone warfare occurs in the context of sanitized technological killing—the
distance enacted by the phenomenological dimension of drone weapons
delivery establishes a radical separation between the bureaucratic
machinations that justify and order that killing and the concrete human
dimensions of those same murderous practices.
Addey et al 11 (Peter Addey, Mark Whitehead, Alison Williams et al. "Introduction: Air-target
Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality." Theory, Culture & Society 28.7-8 2011).
The target of aerial war and security could be understood in a manner that Eyal Weizman (2002)
might describe as holographical. An assembling of disparate elements, the air-target adds up
to a representation yet is built by techno-cultural practices that overlay one another with
multiple details and perspectives. The result appears to be a reconfigured reality, augmented
and abstracted, yet heightened at the same time. In the place of the cadastral maps, which
were assiduously produced under previous regimes of aerial governmentality, we have the
modularized GIS data sets, which are able to instantaneously fabricate the target as a
simulacrum. Real objects and com- plex environments come to be grasped in this way,
analysed by distant audi- ences in a form that can be acted upon with speed but in a way in
which the violence involved in making-abstract is increasingly obscured. This is partly because
of the concatenation or telescoping of the aerial target and the chain of targeting, which leads
Ryan Bishop to suggest that the destruc- tion of aerial war is obscured by the conflation of
senses, technologies and perceptions, thus closing ‘the gap of perception’ and erasing the
‘distinction between apprehension, thought and action’ (Bishop, 2009). The processes of
‘sensing and tracking’, ‘perception and action’ that Bishop locates pre- cisely within the
automation of the targeting process elsewhere must then be excavated within the evolving
assembling and extension of the aerial tar- geting process. This process is itself subject to ever
increasing processes of rationalization and optimization by flow monitoring and the
sequencing of its activities in order to produce the dream of ‘continuous coverage’ (Ha, 2010)
or ‘persistent presence’ (Williams, 2011c) that is an unblinking eye ^ an omnipresent view
provided by efficient UAV cycles and sequences that seeks to observe an asymmetric yet
omnipresent threat with the capacity to unpredictably surprise and disrupt.¶ Thus what
Anderson, Gregory, Saint-Amour and Bishop show us in this section is quite different from the
imagery mentioned at the start of the editorial. Let us recall Judith Butler’s evocative description
of the first Gulf War from the 1990s:¶ . . . transported from the North American continent to
Iraq, and yet securely wedged in the couch in one’s own living room. The smart bomb screen is,
of course, destroyed in the moment that it enacts its destruction, which is to say that this is a
recording of a thoroughly destructive act which can never record that destructiveness, indeed,
which effects the phantasmatic distinction between the hit and its consequences. Thus as
viewers, we verita- bly enact the allegory of military triumph: we retain our visual dis- tance
and our bodily safety through the disembodied enactment of the kill that produces no blood
and in which we retain our radical impermeability.¶ (1992: 11)¶ Butler takes this further: the
smart bomb renders distant television audiences ‘absolutely proximate, absolutely essential,
and absolutely distant’ in a way that protects the viewer while securing ‘a fantasy of
transcendence, of a disembodied instrument of destruction’, protracted and filtered through
distance and censored by the fact that the ‘aerial view never comes close to seeing the effects
of its destruction’, for as the bomb comes tantalizingly closer to its target ‘the screen
conveniently destroys itself’ (1992: 11). As Gregory shows, today’s processes of aerial targeting
co-involve other actors, publics and objects in more complex relationships that do not simply
escape the consequences of violence or remain safely ensconced in the arm- chairs of
spectator warfare.¶ Appearing to empty the target’s subject of all of its content, rational,
scientific and legal expertise are meant to take over and enact what artist Wafa Bilal describes
as the sharp edge of the comfort^conflict divide (on this see Ingram, 2010) in his work Shoot an
Iraqi. In this special section we see this view questioned. For instance, Ben Anderson’s article on
coun- terinsurgency and PSYOPS explores the US targeting of a ‘pre-insurgent’ population
through airdropped leaflets, propaganda bombs and broadcasts. Targeting here is about
immersion in the lives of the population. It is target- ing of the potential to become dangerous
by touching the passions, interests and environment of the population.¶ This military theatre,
in earlier views, might appear comfortable and calm in relation to the messy and passionate
world that it punishes. One might suggest that refining the object of the target’s sights through
the pro- cessual stages described in the articles in this special section also filters out the ethical
decisions and orientations such an encounter would bring if it were a face-to-face encounter
(think of the smiling faces on the postcard [Figure 1] in Anderson’s article). Indeed, the critique
of the aerial target is the distance such an abstraction reinforces from the life it puts at threat.
Without the fidelity of a Levinasian encounter with the Other’s face, any possibility of ethical
recognition will be gone. Thus, aerial targeting seems to work precisely because it subjects its
users to a distanced and rational bureaucratic orientation, so that the effects of their actions
can never be fully realized. However, the assumption that passion must somehow lie out- side
of these apparatuses is no doubt problematic, as is the comfort^conflict disjuncture. The sense
in which the coldness of the target and targeting holds the processes of waging war from the
skies together should be con- trasted with the affects that might threaten to undo this and,
furthermore, the increasing likelihood that the drone operators will see the horrors that result
from their actions. Gregory shows how these issues are particularly important to the formation
of realism and comradeship, as drone operators recognize or become familiar with the faces of
their compatriots captured by the drone’s camera.¶ Paul K. Saint-Amour’s article crucially shows
that the visual practices involved here are less ordered and not perfectly sequential. Looking to
the origins of aerial photography he shows how the processes involved in early targeting
depended on pastiche, the composing of mosaics of multiple per- spectives that are blended
and full of errors. To what extent, then, might a targeting system be marked not by smooth
consensus but the discord of synaesthetic and contrasting imagery, information and evidence?
Even while Bishop (2009) has noted how the goal of targeting systems has ‘been control and
containment from a distance’ and precisely ‘not dissemination, dispersal, autonomy and
resistance’, we should not assume that these char- acteristics have escaped or been removed
from the chain. Indeed, they may be endemic to the processes themselves as we learn more of
the stress, strains and fatigue of those doing the targeting and the flying, those wit- nessing the
effects of a missile launched in high definition resolution. The affects that make the targeting
processes uncomfortable may also lie at the heart of the indeterminate, aleatory and
‘turbulent’ (sometimes literally) dynamics that animate and befuddle contemporary air power,
issues both Ryan Bishop and Paul K. Saint Amour explore in their articles.
This technologized war-at-a-distance normalizes violence in the context of the
everyday lives of warfighters and warplanners. Drone warfare reduces the
world to a picture whose being is just being targeted by the US.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The ensconcing of war operations, and the everyday deployment of lethal drone attacks,
within US cities such as Langley, Virginia gestures to a mutation in the conduct of war. The
manner in which drone operators can¶ exterminate human targets during their assigned
combat sessions, via their ensemble of tele-mediating technologies and military hardware, and
then go home to take the kids to soccer or have a drink at their local bar, works to normalise
war as something that is effectively part of the civic continuum of everyday life practices. This
continuum of practices is facilitated by the euphemisms of war: the screen media that display
the atornisation and incineration of bodies by drone missiles are called by the military 'Kill TV',"
and the material violence inflicted on human targets becomes merely 'kinetic activity'," as
though killing were just another form of gym exercise. The televisual and video game
dimensions of these killing operations help facilitate the transition from exterminatory
combat operations to civic sites and practices. In the words of an air force colonel of a Predator
drone¶ squadron: 'It teaches you how to compartmentalise it [the reality of war].'" The
everyday returns to civic locations of 'home' after a series of technologically mediated killings in
another country can, in fact, be seen to be inscribed by the forces of technological dis/location
that drive the¶ operations of drones: 'The more powerful and violent the technological
expropriation, the delocalization,' Derrida notes, 'the more powerful, naturally, the recourse to
the at-home, the return towards home.'o The violent deterritoralisation, delocalisation and
dissociation experienced in the drone Ground Control Stations provokes the reaction: 'I want to
be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own, close to my friends and family.' Drone
operators have remarked on how the trip home from their Ground Control Stations enables
them to transition from battle field to civic mode, with the hour's drive back to their home
giving them 'that whole amount of time to leave it behind. They get in their bus or car and go
into a zone - they say, "For the next hour I'm decompressing, I'm getting re-engaged into what's
it's like to be a civilian"."' This return to a safe home is, of course, the privilege and prerogative
of the drone-enabled resident-soldier of the Global North. In the target countries of the Global
South - Afghanistan or Pakistan - the at-home is open to the anomic violence of drones and, as I
discuss below, the ever-present risk of obliteration of home, friends and family.¶ Philip Alston
and Hina Shamsi have drawn critical attention to what they term:¶ the 'PlayStation mentality'
that surrounds drone killings. Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now
kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their
actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life? How will commanders and
policymakers keep themselves immune from the deceptively antiseptic nature of drone killings?
Will the standards for intelligence-gathering to justify a killing slip? Will the number of
acceptable 'collateral' civilian deaths increase?"¶ The bracketing off that is enabled by the
parenthetical logic that governs these screen technologies can be appositely situated within
Heideggerian terms. 'The fundamental event of the modern age,' writes Martin Heidegger, 'is
the conquest of the world as picture.'4 Underscoring this epistemic shift to viewing the world
as picture has been the dominance of screen technologies in mediating virtually everything that
can be seen in terms of 'world'. The parenthetical bracketing off of the world that I have been
examining can effectively be understood as a form of 'enframing' the world. In his discussion
of the term, Heidegger posits the process of enframing as a positive aspect of our relation to
technology, as in this understanding technology works to reveal the truth of the 'real'. I want to
resignify this Heideggerian term in order to mark the manner in which screen technologies
operate literally to bracket off the 'real' and to transmute it into object. Conjoining this
resignified understanding of enframing to Heidegger's meditation on the 'conquest of the
world as picture' effectively brings into focus the levels of epistemic and physical violence
enabled by the militarised use of tele-technologies.¶ In his theorisation of the epistemic shift to
viewing the world as picture, Heidegger notes that the process of representation is crucial to the
construction of the world as picture. What is particularly relevant to my analysis of the
parenthetical logic of screen technologies and the lethality of drones is the manner in which
Heidegger's analysis of the relation between representation and the world as picture
underscores the role of objectifying violence: 'Representing is ... a laying hold and grasping of
what it is that is being viewed; in this scopic process, Heidegger emphasizes. 'assault rules'.45
The 'assault' on what is being viewed is legitimated by its transmutation into 'object':
'Representing is making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters ...
That which is ... has the character of an object.'4 6 This process of objectification of the 'real' is
undergirded by the play of science and technology: 'Science sets upon the real. It orders it into
place to the end that at any given time the real will exhibit itself as an interacting network."' The
'real' in the context of drone technologies is precisely that which 'exhibits' itself through the
tele-techno mediations of an 'interacting network' constituted by pilots/sensor operators,
satellite links and drones. The enframing of the world as picture through 'entrapping
representation' ensures the 'real becomes secured in its objectness'."¶ Everything in this
Heideggerian exposition can be clearly transposed to illuminate the operations of drone screen
technologies in order to entrap and reduce the surveilled human figure into object that can be
effectively and¶ antiseptically liquidated from a distance. The antiseptic vision of war that is
produced by the parenthetical logic of the use of drone technologies is enhanced further by
the clinical language deployed by the drone operators in the identification of suspect targets.
The Predator drone's infrared camera, with its digitally enhanced zoom, enables the sensor
operators to detect the heat signature of a human body from significant distances (from an
altitude of up to 3 kilometres). The term 'heat signature' works to reduce the targeted human
body to an anonymous heat-emitting entity that merely radiates signs of life. This clinical
process of reducing human subjects to purely biological categories of radiant life is further
elaborated by the US military's use of the term 'pattern of life':¶ The CIA received secret
permission to attack a wide range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not
known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border
region. The expanded authority ... permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as
'pattern of life' analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras or unmanned aircraft.
The information was used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities were not
known.... Previously the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names
were on an approved list ... some analysts said permitting the CIA to kill people where names
were unknown created a serious risk of killing innocent people."
This means that there is no value to life in the status quo—technological
distancing reduces life to nothing more than something to be targeted and
destroyed by militaristic impulses.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12. Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
Representation, a social practice and strategy through which meanings are constituted and
communicated, is unavoidable when dealing with militarism and military activities. Armed
Forces, and defence institutions, take great care in producing and promoting¶ specific
portrayals of themselves and their activities in order to legitimize and justify their¶ activities
in places, spaces, environments and landscapes (Woodward 2005:729). In this section, we
argue that the ramping up of drone deployments is justified¶ by a distinctive targeting logic. As
Paul Virrilo (1989) has long argued, there is never war without representation, which is to say,
the deadly materiality of war is always coiled within a discursive system (see also Shaw 2010).
In this sense, the drone performs a well-rehearsed imaginative geography (Bialasiewicz et al
2007;¶ Gregory 2004) that is underwritten by targeted kills across neat isometric grids and¶
algorithmic calculations (Amoore 2009), far removed from the brutal Real (Jones¶ and Clarke
2006), and in a peculiar relation with the visceral imagery of previous wars (Tuathail 2003). The
official “definition” of a targeted kill is not agreed upon¶ under international law. Yet as a recent
UN report on targeted killing reveals, it can¶ be thought of as follows:¶ A targeted killing is the
intentional, premeditated and deliberate use of lethal force,¶ by States or their agents acting
under colour of law, or by an organized armed group¶ in armed conflict, against a specific
individual who is not in the physical custody of¶ the perpetrator. In recent years, a few States
have adopted policies, either openly or¶ implicitly, of using targeted killings, including in the
territories of other States. Such¶ policies have been justified both as a legitimate response to
“terrorist” threats and as a necessary response to the challenges of “asymmetric warfare”. In
the legitimate struggle against terrorism, too many criminal acts have been re-characterized so
as to justify addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict. New
technologies, and especially unarmed combat aerial vehicles or “drones”, have been added into
this mix, by making it easier to kill targets, with fewer risks to the targeting State (Alston¶
2010:3).¶ The means and methods of killing vary, and include sniper fire, shooting at close¶
range, missiles from helicopters, gunships, drones, the use of car bombs, and poison¶ (Alston
2010:4)¶ The drone is heralded by the US military as the apex of a targeting logic— accurate,
efficient, and deadly. This logic traces a distinct genesis. In 1938 Martin¶ Heidegger wrote of
the “age of the world picture”, in a classic essay on the split between subject and object. For
him, today’s world is conceived, grasped, and conquered as a picture—and what it means “to
be” is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing. In this modern age of
humanism, a subjective¶ “worldview” arises for the first time—humans appear as Cartesian
subjects and the¶ world as a calculated picture, engineered by science and technology. Ray
Chow¶ (2006) extends this metaphysical analysis to contend that the world has further¶ been
produced as a “target”. In the wake of the atomic event of Hiroshima, the entire globe is
rendered as a grid of targets to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible.
The distance between the person who kills with drone technology and the
person killed is not merely the geographical space between them. Rather, the
technological dimension of drone warfare inserts an ontological and moral
distance between the drone and the drone pilot.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
In her profound meditation on political economies of violence, Hannah Arendt writes that
extreme forms of violence are 'never possible without instruments'." 'Violence,' Arendt notes,
'is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification
through the end it pursues."' In other words, violence, in its most murderous and
instrumentalised forms, cannot be exercised without technology. The Predator drone
exemplifies the instrumentalisation of violence and the law of war through a complex process
of parenthetical disassociation. This process is predicated on suspending lines of causal
connection between an ensemble of technologies and their human agents. It effectively
suspends, circumscribes and holds parenthetically in abeyance the relation between
executioner and victim, cause and effect. Jeff Macgregor, in his meditation on the
transmutation of life into an instrumentalised video game, writes: 'erase the pain given and
taken, reduce the grunt and the struggle to the push of a button ... and the game, the war, is no
more than a fast-twitch exercise - a battle fought without personal cost. It is cause without
effect, a victory only for technology and opposable thumbs'.22¶ In the first instance, the
Predator drones, in the execution of their targets, can be said to be blind-seeing technologies
of death: as inanimate objects, they cannot 'see' what they execute; rather, they execute what
must be seen for them by their sensor operators. A rift opens up in this schema between the
blind executor and the human-seeing agent that is inscribed with both spatial and temporal
dimensions. This causal disconnect between the doer and deed is, in fact, something on which
Friedrich Nietzsche meditated in the context of his critical analysis of what he termed the
'seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which
conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a
"subject"'.. Nietzsche draws attention to the network of discursive relations - juridical,
legislative and philosophical - that are¶ constitutive in the creation of what Foucault terms the
'subject effect' and its relation to deeds, actions and events:¶ there is no "being" behind doing,
effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a function added to the deed - the deed is
everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the
deed of a deed; it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect.
Scientists do no better when they say 'force moves,' 'force causes,' and the like - all its coolness,
its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading
influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the 'subject.'¶ The
parenthetical logic of drone killings, and its structural disassociation between the doer and the
deed, is perfectly captured in this Nietzschean critique: the doer, in this scenario, is functionally
coextensive with the deed and only becomes separated by the 'seduction of language' and its
subject-predicate structure. The 'doubling' of the deed and the production of the doer/deed
effect are what enable the conceptual partitioning of the technology from the human subject.
Couched in Nietzschean terms, one can say that the drone does the killing and that the sensor
operator who presses the 'fire' button is merely a type of afterthought that can only be
retrospectively constituted as separate from the deed. As I will argue, following Nietzsche's
problematisation of the dualistic doer-deed formula, the viewing of the human
subject/technology nexus in prosthetic terms effectively works to interrogate the parenthetical
logic that inscribes the conceptual apparatus of drone technologies.
Technological distance reduces targets to numbers and mere biological life.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The military term 'pattern of life' is inscribed with two intertwined systems of scientific
conceptuality: algorithmic and biological. The human subject detected by drone's surveillance
cameras is, in the first scientific schema, transmuted algorithmically into a patterned sequence
of numerals: the digital code of ones and zeros."o Converted into digital data coded as a
'pattern of life', the targeted human subject is reduced to an anonymous simulacrum that
flickers across the screen and that can effectively be liquidated into a 'pattern of death' with
the swivel of a joystick. Viewed through the scientific gaze of clinical biology, 'pattern of life'
connects the drone's scanning technologies to the discourse of an instrumentalist science, its
constitutive gaze of objectifying detachment and its production of exterminatory violence.
Patterns of life are what are discovered and analysed in the Petri dish of the laboratory. In this
way, the targeted human subjects of Afghanistan and Pakistan are represented as types of
bacteria and other low- life organisms that be exterminated with absolute impunity. The CIA's
Counter-terrorism Centre's chief has boasted that, thanks to its drone- automated execution
program: 'We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them.' Analogically,
the human subjects targeted as suspect yet anonymous 'patterns of life' by the drones
become equivalent to forms of pathogenic life. The operators of the drones' exterminatory
attacks must, in effect, be seen to conduct a type of scientific ethnic cleansing of pathogenic 'life
forms'. In the words of one US military officer: 'Our major role is to sanitize the battlefield."' As
Iwill presently discuss, inscribing this clinical discourse on drones is the Derridean figure of
immunisation against foreign and pathogenic bodies. As mere patterns of pathogenic life, these
targeted human subjects effectively are reduced to what Giorgio Agamben would term 'a kind of
absolute biopolitical substance' that can killed with no concern about the possibility ofjuridical
accountability: they are 'bare life' that can be killed with absolute impunity." Anonymous
'patterns of life' signify in contradistinction to legally named persons; they exemplify the
'ontological hygiene' legislated by US government policy in order to secure the reproduction of
the 'principle of scarcity with respect to agency and personhood'."¶ Situated in this Agambenian
context of the extermination of human life with absolute impunity, the Predator drones must
be seen as instantiating mobile 'zones of exception': wherever the drones operate, they have
the capacity to suspend the rule of law and juridical accountability even as, paradoxically, the
US Department of State, as discussed above, argues that these attacks are conducted under
formal laws of war. 'One of the paradoxes of the state of exception,' writes Agamben, 'lies in the
fact that in the state of exception it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from
the execution of law.' In his theorisation of the state of exception, Agamben maps a space
within which the agentic subject of law 'neither executes nor transgresses law, but inexecutes
it'." 'Every fiction of a nexus between violence and law disappears here: there is nothing but a
zone of anomie, in which violence without any juridical form acts.' Agamben's 'zone of anomie'
perfectly captures the zone of violence that designates the anonymous 'patterns of life' that can
be liquidated by drones with absolute impunity. I want to reaccentuate Agamben's concept of
the inexecution of law by staging a parenthetical qualification. By placing a parenthetical bracket
over the prefix 'in', in the term '(in)execution,' I want to argue that there is operative in these
lethal drone attacks at once an execution of US Department of State law and an inexecution of it
through the generation of mobile states of exception that articulate extrajudicial spaces beyond
the redress of law. Even as these drone attacks execute US law (of war), they violate with
impunity both international law and the sovereignty of nations such as Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
These distances form a spatial hiatus which desensitizes us to drone killing—
drone operation becomes a video game with fantastic special effects, and war
becomes nothing more than button-pushing.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The killing at a distance operations of the Predator drone ensemble of technology and human
agents work to articulate a spatial hiatus and parenthetical disconnect between this place - that
is, the Ground Control Station (GCS) located in, for example, Nevada - and that place - the to-kill target located in Afghanistan. Working
in tandem with this spatial rift is a temporal disconnect generated by satellite technology.
Although the killing of the designated target is supposedly conducted in terms of what the
military literature terms 'real time', the mediating effects of satellite and imaging technologies on 'live' and 'real time'
signify that, in effect, there can only ever be 'an allegation of "live" and of "real time". Discussing the metaphysics of presence
in the contemporary configuration of 'tele-techno- mediatic modernity' and its celebration of
such things as 'live' satellite- televisual transmissions, Jacques Derrida sardonically remarks that
'we should never forget that this "live" is not an absolute live, but only a live effect
[uneffectdedirect],an allegation of"live"'.25It is an allegation of live that animates the operation of drones, as 'to allege' signifies, in legal
terms, 'to assert without proof and, simultaneously, to 'cite, quote'.26 In other words, the very act of 'live' and 'real time'
drone Predator executions must undergo a series of tele-techno mediations that structurally
ensure that the 'absolutely real present is already a memory': 'there is no purely real time
because temporalization itself is structured by a play of retention or of protention and,
consequently, of traces ... The real time effect is itself a particular effect of "diff6rance".' 2 7 In other words, there opens up
here a temporal rift between the 'now' - a moment of 'retention' as experienced, for example, at Creech Ground Control
Station, Nevada - and the 'then' the relayed moment of protention that unfolds in Afghanistan as
already a 'memory' for those located at the GCS in Nevada. This temporal rift is, in effect, acknowledged by the
military's use of the term 'latency' in order to identify the micro-delay that inscribes the command sent by the remote pilot to the airborne drone and
its consequent response.¶ The structure of this tele-techno mediation can be envisioned as triangulated: the
human operators at
their ground stations are interlinked with the drone on the other side of the globe by the
interposition of the satellite in space. This triangulated structure of interlinked communication
graphically evidences the series of mediations and micro-diachronic hiatuses that transmute
the 'live' image into a latent 'memory', into a retrospective artefact of 'real time'. The micro-diachronic
hiatuses that effectively turn the 'live' into 'memory' are marked, in passing, by former President George W Bush's celebratory speech on UACVs:¶
Innovative doctrine and high-tech weaponry can shape and then dominate an unconventional conflict. Our commanders are gaining a real-time picture
of the entire battlefield, and are able to get targeting¶ 28 information from sensor to shooter almost immediately. ¶ The qualifier 'almost immediately'
succinctly names the 'latency' effect discussed above, while also underscoring the micro-rift between 'live' and 'real time' and their tele-techno
mediation into retrospectively constructed spatio-temporal visual artefacts. In
the techno-military literature on drone
technologies, everything is driven on ultimately 'decreasing the time between sensor and
shooter' and thereby 'shortening the "kill chain"'." The military term 'kill chain'
diagrammatically underscores the impossibility of a synchronicity that, because of the
unavoidable tele-techno mediations, is not always already marked by the micro-hiatus that separates yet conjoins¶ one link from
another in the 'kill chain'.¶ The prosthetic status of this triangulated structure can be elaborated in ¶ the context of the multiple dimensions it
embodies: human-machine-human, life-technology-death and agent-machine-victim. As I will discuss in some detail below, this triadic structure is
topologically conjoined by a series of prosthetic grafts that suture one seemingly autonomous entity to its absolute other. The prosthetic relations that
I have been mapping here can be situated within Michel Serres' theorisation of topology 'as the science of nearness and rifts'." Serres names this
topology the 'fold' - as that topological figuration of space-time that is productive of simultaneous rifts and nearness. Giles Deleuze effectively
elaborates on the complex logics¶ operative in the topology of the fold by describing the 'duplicity of the fold' in terms of 'a tension by which each field
is pulled into the other'.' The topology of the fold at once captures the complex spatio-temporal effects generated by drone technologies and the
contradictory tensions that inscribe their field of operations by marking the indissociable relation between seemingly antithetical categories. Viewed in
this context, the geometry of the triangulated structure that I have drawn upon in order to describe the drone ensemble can be seen to offer only a
static image of what is in actuality a dynamic process of topological relations between rifts and nearness, the other and the same, human and
technology. As I discuss below, these topological relations are fundamentally negotiated or mediated through the figure of the prosthetic. ¶ What
results from the process of tele-techno mediations that I have been mapping, regardless of 'real time' and 'live' claims, is what Derrida terms 'traces'.
This is not to reduce the murderous consequences of the drone attacks to insubstantial remains; rather, it is to underscore the artefactual status of the
images/traces of the killings that the GCS sensor operators work with and consume, and that structurally distance and disassociate them from the
victims of their actions. Critically, it
is the combined effect of the parenthetical suspension of the 'real' and
the 'live' produced by this tele-techno thanatological economy of war that transmutes killing
into the stuff of video games and that establishes a type of causal disconnect, and consequent
disavowal, of the human operators' relation to the killing that transpires on the ground in
'remote' Afghanistan or Pakistan. The following remarks by Predator drone operators located at a
GCS in Nevada exemplify this spatio-temporal disconnect: 'It's antiseptic. It's not as potent an emotion as being on the battlefield'; 'It's like
a video game. It can get a little bloodthirsty . But it's fucking cool' ; 'Most of the time, I get to
fight the war, and go home and see the wife and kids at night.' 'Another talked about flying
missions in Afghanistan, and then getting home in time to watch reruns of the TV sitcom
Friends.'" 'You have some guy sitting at Nellis [GCS Nevada] and he's taking his kid to soccer. It's a strange dichotomy to
war.'34 This strange dichotomy of war is enabled by a parenthetical logic that brackets off causal
relations through a series of tele- techno mediations that, in turn, transmute the 'real' into
Baudrillardian simulacra." This strange dichotomy of war resonates on yet another level. On the one hand, negotiating the materiality of
geography is one of the key predicates of successful warfare; on the other, drone warfare effectively ensures that 'the limitations of geography are
taken out of the war that a soldier goes off to experience'. 6 For
the drone soldier, the experience of geography is at
once unbounded and simulated via the ensemble of screen technologies and circumscribed by
the very materiality of the civic sites and spaces of his or her everyday life.
This technostrategic distancing also erases any possible ethical dimension to
warfighting—the ontological dimension of cyborg warfare instrumentalizes
bodies such that they are nothing more than possible operands of violence.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
This seemingly indivisible prosthetic relation between drones and their human operators
evidences, in effect, the emergence of a new type of war that could be termed 'cyborg war'.
Drawing on Donna Haraway's celebratory trope of resistance and overturning of oppressive and
destructive regimes and epistemologies of power, I re-code the term in order to evidence its
violent assimilation and co-option by the very phallogocentric, militaristic and instrumentalist
authorities it was designed to contest:¶ To recapitulate certain dualisms have been persistent in
Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of
women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals- in short, domination of all constituted
others ... Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature ...
High- tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and
who ismade in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what
body in machines that resolve into coding practices."¶ In the drone-human relation, it is not
clear 'who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine'. The graft of
the prosthetic blurs this boundary. Moreover, in the context of the digitised codes that
interlink humans and drones in their operational schema: 'It isnot clear what is mind and what
is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.' The prosthetics of this new law of war,
and its ensemble of human agents grafted to their drone technologies via screens, joysticks and
satellite links, perfectly embodies the figure of the cyborg as the abject other to Haraway's
utopian trope. In keeping with the cyborg logic of the prosthetic, there is no 'proper' body in
contradistinction to the machine; rather, couched in Derridean terms, 'this prosthetic structure
is not something we add to the "proper" body but that it is already our experience of what is
most proper to us, it is already the possibility of the prosthetic ... thus technology or techn is
already originally in place in our own body, in what is most proper to us'. 68¶ This profound
Derridean meditation on the infrastructural dimensions of the prosthetic effectively enables the
critical interrogation of the categorical separation of the drone from its human agent. Belying its
negative and reductive nomenclature, the drone cannot be reduced to a mindless machine of
purely robotic acts; rather, the drone-as-prosthetic articulates a 'prosthetics of origin',"9 to use
Derrida's titular term, that conjoins it inseparably, through grafting, to its embodied agents of
cognition, reflection and intent. Cyborg war, in this schema, instrumentalises bodies into lethal
machines via a prosthetic structure that operates in tandem with a parenthetical logic of
disassociation between the doer and deed: machine/human, doer/deed are at once tactically
conjoined in the acts of surveillance, targeting and killing, and simultaneously disjoined from
the ethical consequences of these same acts. The interstice that opens up between this
parenthetical and prosthetic relation must be seen as a critical fault line that compels
examination. This fault line marks the radical asymmetries of power operative in the use of
these drone killing technologies and their ethical ramifications.¶ For the United States, the use
of the drones is justified because it means that its soldiers are not placed in potentially fatal
ground operations of war: no flesh and blood is lost, merely machines. This dualistic logic is, of
course, violently asymmetrical. For the targets of this drone war, it is flesh and blood that is
shed, without the possibility of traditional combat counter- retaliation: drones kill silently, firing
their missiles from a 2 mile distance. With nothing to lose but machines, the United States is
now in a position to wage war without the usual weighing up of the human cost. The US
military, in fact, terms UCAVs as 'attritable': 'This means a commander can afford to lose one
through attrition.'o Qualms have been expressed by military personnel such as this unnamed
Iraq combat veteran 'who helped design much of the military's doctrine for using unmanned
drones': 'There's something important about putting your own sons and daughters at risk when
you choose to wage war as a nation. We risk losing that flesh-and- blood investment if we go too
far down this road."' The parenthetical logic of drone war brackets off the ethical questions
concerning the waging of war while also suspending the flesh-and-blood risks entailed by
those fighting in the field. PW Singer terms these new warriors 'cubicle warriors', ensconced in
cubicles outfitted with computers, joysticks and ergonomic furniture: For a new generation,
'going to war' doesn't mean shipping off to some dank foxhole in a foreign land to dodge bullets.
Instead, it is a daily commute in your Toyota Camry to sit behind a computer screen¶ 72 and
drag a mouse.¶ The cubicle warrior is a cyborg warrior prosthetically grafted, through satellite
feeds, to his or her drone and yet effectively quarantined, through the parenthetical
bracketing that is enabled by his or her cubicle location and¶ screen technologies, from the
risks and violence of the battlefield.¶ The fault line or rift that results from these two
contradictory spatio- temporal schemas operating simultaneously is effectively captured by the
jargon term for drone pilots flying planes over 7000 miles away from their location: 'remote split
operation'." Remote split operation refers to the manner in which drone pilots, located at their
Ground Control Stations in the United States, are connected via satellite links to their flying
charges¶ thousands of miles away. I want to resignify this term so that it underscores the split or
contradictory forces at work in the ensemble of figures and technologies that constitute drone
operations. Remote split operations encapsulate the fault line that at once parenthetically
brackets off the drone personnel from the locus of the battlefield while they are simultaneously
prosthetically grafted to their drones via satellite links. The contradictory forces that inscribe
drone technologies are not the product of accident; rather, they must be seen as having been
produced by the design demands of the US military. In its brief to the teams of designers
employed to produce UCAVs, DARPA 'wanted "intelligent function allocation" to allow the UCAV
to operate autonomously, while stressing the idea that the human controller would be expected
to provide executive-level mission management to "remain in the decision process"'." In this
schema, the drone is an entity that 'operates' autonomously, and thus independently of its
operators, and simultaneously is instrumentally grafted to its human controller who will
continue to make key decisions regarding its operations. The 'autonomous' operations of
drones exemplify the conceptual shift from 'technofetishism to technoanimism' - which, as
Vivian Sobchack has argued, constitutes one of the key attributes of the prosthetic once it is
personified so that it 'is seen to have a will of its own'."
The biggest internal link to all these distancing impacts is the way that
technologized violence removes the emotional, affective element from the
calculations of warplanning.
Grayson 12 (Kyle, Senior Lec. At Newcastle University in Critical Geopolitics and International
Politics, “Six Theses on Targeted Killing,” Political Studies Association, Vol 32,
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01434.x/abstract>)¶
Space can be conceived as the four-dimensional environment (length, width, depth¶ and time) in
which ‘objects and events occur, and in which they have relative¶ position and direction’
(Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 2; see also Simonsen, 1996).¶ The majority of attention that has
been placed on the spatial dimension of targeted¶ killing has focused on its territorial
positioning via cartographic practices that¶ operate on a register of difference that delineates
through the category of the nation¶ state. Locations of targeted killing are dutifully recorded
and positioned within¶ these national boundaries and linked to broader geopolitical
narratives regarding¶ global counter-insurgency. Of particular interest has been the possibility
for tar-¶ geted killing to be enacted by RPAS pilots located in excess of 7,000 miles away¶ from
the immediate theatre of operation.¶ Beyond standard territorial locations and the distortion of
time and space in con-¶ temporary counter-insurgency, Eyal Weizman (2007) draws our
attention to the¶ forms of spatial management and sovereignty that are constitutive of
targeted¶ killing. Primarily, he demonstrates that in contemporary counter-insurgency it is¶
important to denote how the practices of control have extended upwards into¶ the
stratosphere as a means of managing populations and their circulation on the¶ ground. This
development reflects broader changes in military strategy over the¶ twentieth century that
equated air power with dominance over ground territory.¶ But as Weizman (2007, p. 239) notes,
this has created a reliance on air-based¶ military technologies as a means of managing
‘problematic’ spaces and populations¶ and the enactment of a policy that has been called
‘control without occupation’ by¶ the Royal Air Force.¶ As a result, counter-insurgency and
insurgency war-fighting in places like Israel-¶ Palestine are ‘increasingly manifested by a
creeping progression along a vertical¶ axis’ that involves ‘two spheres of extraterritorial
sovereignty’ (Weizman, 2007,¶ pp. 253, 258). Practices like targeted killing that attempt to
provide ‘control without¶ occupation’ are predicated on having both unimpeded access and
control of air-¶ space as well as possessing the technology to operate within this theatre of
opera-¶ tion. In response, one can see the use of ‘subterranean warfare’ by insurgency¶
movements – literally going under the ground to circumvent aerial interference – a¶ practice
that gained currency during the Vietnam War as a response to these¶ counter-insurgency
measures (Weizman, 2007, pp. 253–258).¶ In addition, targeted killing alters and intensifies
forms of spatial management¶ through its ability to redefine everyday places, particularly
those in which indi-¶ viduals seek sanctuary from political, economic and social pressures. In
geography,¶ place refers to those spaces that are ‘invested with understandings of behavioural¶
appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth [in which] we act’ and which¶ we imbue
with value (Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 3). Insurgency – in part –¶ gains its political and
affective impacts by initiating violence within public places¶ that have been declared secure
by an entity that claims sovereign power – both legally and symbolically – over such places. In
contrast, targeted killing produces¶ political and affective impacts by transforming private
sanctuary places like the¶ home into a public theatre of counter-insurgency warfare.
Moreover, as a spatial¶ incursion from afar that cannot be easily countered or avenged, it places
the¶ interface of violence much closer to places of sanctuary for the ‘enemy’. Targeted¶ killing
as a practice can thus defile sanctified places. The symbolic power comes not¶ just from the
ability to defile but also from the a-temporal character of defiled space¶ – as Feldman (1991, p.
67) notes, ‘defiled space never goes away’. Thus, as a tactic,¶ targeted killing demonstrates how
counter-insurgency also ‘seeks to violate the¶ spatial constructs that function as armatures of
the victim’s social order’ (Feldman,¶ 1991, p. 75).
Technostrategic discourse manifests itself in the necropolitics of dividing the
populations who receive the sovereign right to life and death, and those who
don’t. In the Feb. 2010 Uruzgan drone strike, this is demonstrated by the
discourse that removes what is foreign, intangible and violent and, instead,
associates it with the familiar question of masculinity and femininity. Here, the
drone operators feminize and thus are able to target their victims.
Allinson 12. (Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.
com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
The particular interlude prompted by the demand for weapons to be seen at 5:18 leads to a
highly revealing exchange between the Predator team and the screeners, which is worth
quoting at length: ¶ At 0529D the Predator pilot states to the crew ‘does it look like he is ho'n
something across his chest. It's what they've been doing here lately, they wrap their
*expletive* in their man dresses so you can't PID it.’ Then on the radio to [redacted] he says
"looks like the dismounted pax on the hilux pickup on the east side is carrying something, but
we cannot PID what it is at this time but he is carrying something’. After the Predator crew
prompted the twice in mIRC, the screeners call out a possible weapon and then ask the crew to
go white hot to get a better look. The response from the sensor operator is ‘white hot is not
going to give us anything better, that truck would make a beautiful target’. The Predator pilot
then at 0534D made this radio call "All players, all Players from [redacted] from our DGS, the
MAM that just mounted the back of the hilux had a possible weapon, read back possible rifle.'
During their post strike review, the screeners determined that this was not a weapon. At 0624D
the screeners called out a weapon, this the only time that the Screeners called out a weapon
without being prompted by the Predator crew. At 0655D, the Predator pilot called [redacted]
and told him that the Screeners called out two weapons. The Screeners had not made any call
outs of weapons. At 0741 the Predator pilot calls [redacted] and says ‘there's about 6 guys riding
in the back of the highlux, so they don't have a lot of room. Potentially could carry a personal
weapon on themselves.’¶ A great deal is to be understood about the necropolitical logic at
work in the occupation of Afghanistan through this passage. As an indicator of the role of
Orientalist fantasy in the tendency of Western militaries to ‘effeminise the men of the
[occupied] population through both symbolic and practical emasculation’ the Predator pilot’s
characterization of the Afghan man’s clothing is quite stark: ‘their mandresses’. Nor does this
phrase refer solely to the Predator pilot’s notion of what men ought to wear (presumably
trousers), and the implied denigration of those whose clothing does not meet this norm. It
also reveals the drawing of a caesura, a mental and political cordon around those whose
actions inherently render them part of the population it is acceptable to put to death.¶ We can
consider this act of delineation at the basic level of pronouns. The Predator pilot describes
how ‘what they’ve [my emphasis] been doing round here lately’ is to ‘wrap their *expletive* in
their man dresses so you can't PID it’. Before this he asks for confirmation that the man on the
screen does indeed look like he is holding something across his chest. Now, it may be objected
that ‘they’ is simply a pronoun here⎯which it is, but this usage is in no sense simple. The pilot
could have said ‘that’s what the Taliban have been doing round here lately’, or ‘the enemy’ or
‘the insurgents’ or a similar noun. By using ‘they’ the pilot shows that he already considers the
man he is looking at to be one of ‘them’, and this ‘they’ have very definite characteristics,
culled from the imaginary of what Patrick Porter calls ‘military orientalism’. ‘They’ are effete,
exotic, and treacherous in transgression of the gender boundaries by, for example, their
wearing ‘mandresses’. Nor is the mandress, however comfortable or stylish it may sound by
comparison to US military uniform, a simple piece of clothing. It is itself weaponized, a tool of
the MAM’s underhand concealment of the arms he is assumed to bear, and which the action
of carrying something across the chest inadvertently reveals. ¶ The unspoken frustration
behind the Predator pilot’s ascription of a motive to the Afghan man’s concealment of a (nonexistent) weapon is doubly instructive. Why do MAMs hold things across their chests and
inside their clothes? They do so ‘so you can’t PID it.’ This implies that the pilot believes that
the Taliban are manipulating US rules of engagement to the degree that they know what
constitutes a positive identification of a weapon for a drone pilot and that they are
deliberately preventing this identification, and therefore hampering the use of lethal force
against them. The pilot therefore inverts the rules of engagement by evoking the tactical
wrapping-up of objects in the ‘mandress’: an Afghan male without a visible weapon thereby
becomes grounds for threat.
Therefore, we affirm the affective dimension of drone technology.
Bringing the affective dimension back into drone warfare displaces the logic of
efficiency which erases the concrete experience of warfare and enables the
violent distancing which causes the worst atrocities in modern technologized
war.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and GeoInformatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
The critical project that aims to bring bodies and emotions back in GT practices entails several
important elements. As feminist GT practitioners, we can appropriate the power of GT,
contest the dominant uses of these technologies, and reconfigure the dominant visual
practices to counter their objectifying vision. We can experiment with new geospatial
practices that better articulate the complex realities of gendered, classed, raced, and
sexualized spaces and experiences of individuals. These new practices should help us
understand emotions in terms of their ‘‘socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as
entirely interiorized subjective mental states’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 3). While
being attentive to how emotions, subjectivities, and spaces are mutually constitutive in
particular places and at particular times, these new practices should also take into account the
existence of different kinds of bodies (e.g., pregnant, disabled, old, mutilated, dead) and their
socially encoded meanings in relation to specific spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts (Rose
1993; Laws 1997; Domosh and Seager 2001; Longhurst 2001). In the arena of public policy,
feminist GT practitioners have a role in questioning decisions that privilege detached
rationality and the ‘‘logic of efficiency’’ over emotions (Anderson and Smith 2001, 8). As
feminist GT practitioners we deeply care about the subject(s) of our research and are
‘‘emotionally committed to our work,’’ and our geospatial practices should be infused with a
sense of ‘‘emotional involvement with people and places’’ (Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 2005,
2). We can develop GT practices that entail this emotional involvement and help express meanings, memories, feelings, and emotions for our subjects. We can draw on the emotional power
of moving images and the techniques in narrative cinema to create GIS movies or
visualizations that tell stories about the lives of marginalized people, highlight social injustice,
and—we hope—effect social change (Aitken 1991; Aitken and Craine 2006). In the three
sections that follow, I discuss several GT projects to illustrate the specific ways in which bodies
and emotions can be brought to bear on geospatial practices. Drawing from my recent
experimentations and those by feminist scholars in cultural studies and media art, I explore
how these projects contest the dominant meanings and visual prac- tices of GT. As these
projects are more expres- sive than representational or analytical, taking the form of creative
visual or artistic work (e.g., GPS-assisted travelogues and 3D GIS video), they are in a certain
sense ‘‘affective GT per- formances’’ that seek to transform GT into affective practices by
incorporating the subject- ivities and emotions of the practitioner and research participants as
an integral element of the project. Through the use of GT as a medium of self-expression and a
means of re- sistance, and to articulate emotional geogra- phies and convey emotionally
provocative messages, these nonrepresentational practices hint at ways of using GT that
transcend the conventional duality between subject and ob- ject, design and use, author and
reader, and representation and practice (Del Casino and Hanna 2006).
The critique of technostrategic thought is a prerequisite to policymaking.
Current technocratic thought inherently produces detached knowledge, which
views humans as dots on a map. Their impacts of violence are inevitable in a
world where humans are dehumanized.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and GeoInformatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Geospatial technologies are designed, created, and used by humans, and a large proportion of
their application is for understanding or solving problems of individuals and social groups.
Bod- ies, however, are often absent or rendered irrelevant in contemporary practices of GT.
This ‘‘omission of the body’’ occurs in two different but related senses ( Johnson 1990, 18).
First, although bodies are involved in the development and use of GT, there is little room in
these technologies to allow for any role of the practitioner’s subjectivities, emotions, feelings,
passion, values, and ethics. Second, despite the fact that a large number of bodies are affected
by the application of GT (e.g., people profiled by geodemographic application, and civilians
who were annihilated as ‘‘collateral damage’’ by GPS-guided smart bombs that missed their
tar- gets), bodies are often treated merely as things, as dots on maps, or even as if they do not
exist (Gregory 2004; Hyndman 2005). The dominant disembodied practices of GT, however, are
contestable as they are largely the result of a particular understanding of science and
objectivity (Kwan 2002a). This historically specific and socially constructed notion of science,
as Donna Haraway (1991) argues, is predicated on the positionality of a disembodied master
subject with transcendent vision. With such disembodied and infinite vision, the knower is
capable of achieving a detached view into a separate, completely knowable world. The kind of
knowledge produced with such disem- bodied positionality denies the partiality of the
knower, erases subjectivities, and ignores the power relations involved in all forms of
knowledge production (Foucault 1977). Haraway (1991, 189) calls this decorporealized vision
‘‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.’’ Closely associated with this view of science
is a gendered notion of knowledge production and academic scholarship that privileges
rational thought over ‘‘irrational’’ emotionality (Bennett 2004). This ‘‘marginalization of
emotion,’’ as Anderson and Smith (2001, 7) put it, ‘‘has been part of a gender politics of
research in which detachment, objectivity and rationality have been valued, and implicitly
masculinized, while engagement, subjectivity, passion and desire have been devalued, and
frequently feminized.’’ Geography in particular has tended to ‘‘deny, avoid, suppress or
downplay its emotional en- tanglements’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 1). Yet, to
paraphrase Anderson and Smith, there are times and places where lives are explicitly lived
through pain, love, hate, anger, hope, fear, and passion. If the world is imbued with complex
emotional geographies, GT practices are more relevant to real lives if they allow us to take the
spatial, temporal, and social effects of feelings into account. To neglect how our research and
social life are mediated by feelings and emotions is to exclude a key set of relations through
which lives are lived, societies made, and knowledge produced (Anderson and Smith 2001).
Technostrategery
Links
Drone Use Up
Since 1982, when the US first started contracting UAV from Israel Aerospace
Industries, the number of drones, strikes, deaths, and dollars committed to the
technology has grown exponentially.
Allinson 12. (Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.
com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
Unmanned weapons systems are not as novel as they may appear: one could argue that the
‘Doodlebug’ V-2 bomber was the first UAV to be used to lethal effect. The lineage of the
present generation of UAV drones reveals the deep entanglement of this technology with US
strategy in the Middle East, asymmetrical warfare and counter-insurgency. The Israeli
weapons manufacturer Israel Aerospace Industries was the first to develop a fully operational
reconnaissance drone for combat, in reaction to the shock of the 1973 October War . The
‘Scout’ drone first saw action in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, precipitating a visit by US
Navy and Marine officers to Israel Aerospace Industries to discuss UAVs . IAI engineers later
helped develop the Predator drone that was to become the US military’s favoured UAV in the
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan .¶ Israel has thus been using drones for the best part of
four decades, and remains the world’s largest exporter of drone technology, deployed and
honed throughout the occupations of Gaza, South Lebanon and the West Bank . The US
Predator drone, developed with the aid of Israeli expertise, was first used for reconnaissance
over Bosnia in 1995 and in the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 . The
drones remained at this point an instrument of surveillance rather than punishment. Drones
were designed to provide the information used to launch air-strikes. It was not until the US
invasion of Afghanistan in 2011 that the functions of killing and seeing were unified: on the
23rd of November, Mohammed Atef became the first person to be killed by a flying warrobot.¶ Since that point drone use has grown enormously. In 2002 the US spent around $550
million on UAVs, a figure that had risen to $5 billion in 2011. US forces by 2008 held 5,331 such
drones in its inventory. There are two UAV programmes operated by the US : one overt and
under the command of the military, the other covert and under the command of the CIA,
working in states in which the US is not legally engaged in any conflict. The Bureau of
Investigative Journalism reports that there have been 344 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, killing
between 2,562 and 3,325 people and between 40 and 50 CIA drone strikes in Yemen, killing
between 60 and 166 people. ¶ The two kinds of drones most used by the US for killing missions
are the Predator and the Reaper. The Predator, a relatively large piece of equipment about the
size of a bi-plane, carries hellfire missiles on top of a chassis originally intended for
reconnaissance . From 2007, the US began to replace Predators with ‘MQ-9’ or ‘Reaper’ drones
built more specifically for lethal purposes: the Reaper has a wing-span of 64 feet, carries 15
times as much explosive weaponry as the Predator and can fly 3 times as fast. The US Air
Force holds 268 Predator drones and 79 Reapers, which number is planned to increase to 400
– the number of CIA drones is unknown. The drones flown by remote control by ‘pilots’
located in the US or any one of a reported sixty bases around the world – often with a local
technician involved as well. ¶ President Obama proved far more willing to use aerial drone
attacks, for example in assassinating US citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen, than his
predecessor George W. Bush. Whereas President Bush sanctioned, on average, one drone
attack every forty-seven days, the average for President Obama was one every four days. Of
the 308 drone strikes since 2004, 256 took place under Barack Obama. Many of these strikes
have been in Yemen or Pakistan: the advantage of the drone being that it can be used to carry
out killings in countries in which the US is not officially involved in conflict and without
introducing ground troops. The Pentagon has begun to reconfigure the location of its overseas
bases, mostly around the Arabian peninsula and East Africa, to permit most effective drone
use.¶ The most significant advantage of drone warfare, perhaps, is that it is comparatively
cheap. Drones cost much less to build and operate than manned aircraft: a 24-hour manned
reconnaissance mission requires 8 F-15 planes, 15 pilots and 96 mechanics whereas a similar
UAV mission requires only 3 drones, 4 operators and 35 mechanics. One ‘Reaper’ drone costs
ten times less than an F-22 ‘Raptor’ fighter . Indeed, so impressive has the cost-effectiveness of
drones been, that in 2006 the US Senate Armed Forces committee mandated that spending
must be specially justified when it is not on unmanned technology. The US plans to spend $30
billion on drones up to the year 2020. ¶
Under the Obama administration the use of Drone warfare has increased
dramatically, resulting in the deaths of at least 2,593.
Holmqvist, 2013. (Caroline, Holmqvist. Centre for International Studies, London School of
Economics, UK Swedish National Defense College, Sweden. Undoing War: War Ontologies and
the Materiality of Drone Warfare. May 1, 2013. http://mil.sagepub.com/content/early
/2013/04/30/0305829813483350. P. 5-6)
The main focus of this article, however, is on the use of combat-enabled unmanned weapons
systems in the air, commonly referred to as drones or drone warfare. Commentators are careful
to point out that unmanned weapons systems are not entirely new: they were used by Israeli
armed forces in the 1973 October War and by the US in Vietnam, and the famed US Predator
was first used in the war in Bosnia in 1995. While much drone warfare is shrouded in secrecy
(not least given the vast proportion of drone missions under CIA control), it is beyond doubt
that their use has increased substantially over the past half-decade. Under the Obama
administration, both the number of drone sorties and actual attacks have escalated
dramatically. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that between 2593 and 3365
people have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan during 2004–12.16 Drone technologies
have proliferated over the last decades, and the interest within US military circles for
developing them further shows no sign of waning. Rather, the US Army regularly issues new
versions of their ‘Roadmap’ for ‘Unmanned Aircraft Systems’, encouraging ‘a broad vision’ for
their continued development, as well as their deployment ‘along the full spectrum of
operations’. Importantly, the trend towards robotic warfare is part of a wider shift in concepts
of operation within the US military towards ‘shadow war’ involving the increased use of US
Special Forces (notably the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC). Forming a dense matrix
of secret operations designed for night raids of targeted killings (in 2011 estimated at 40 raids
per night in Afghanistan, i.e. over 1000 raids monthly), Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)/drone
technologies have come to fit snugly with the current pat- tern of Special Forces deployment –
in particular, JSOC’s networked capabilities.18 Bob Woodward in The War Within (2009)
highlights the fusion of technological innovation with plans for targeted killings, most
ostentatiously under the US military’s Clandestine Tagging, Tracking and Locating (CTTL)
programme used to develop methods for tracking individuals using nano- and biotechnology for
the creation of sensors, tags and biochemical (thermal) biometric ‘signatures’ of individuals.19
This development is set to continue, with US officials in October 2012 alluding to a new
blueprint for pursuing ‘terrorists’ in the form of a ‘disposition matrix’ – a next-generation
targeting list designed to ‘go beyond existing kill-lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of
subjects beyond the reach of American drones’.¶ The standard narrative of the trend towards
shadow war fought with drone technology and secret operations is for these developments to
be depicted as a reaction to the costly large-scale man-intensive counterinsurgency campaigns
that have dominated US (and UK) military ventures in the past decade. Instead, the two trends
evolved in tandem: the ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency warfare that evolved in Iraq and
Afghanistan around 2005–7 was from the outset accompanied by reliance on secret operations
featuring military robotics designed to target key individuals for capture or death. In other
words, the proclaimed ambition of strengthening ‘governance’ structures, winning ‘hearts and
minds’ through the communication of an appropriate message and gaining legitimacy
amongst Iraqi and Afghan local populations was always and already intertwined with the
increasingly mechanized killing of individuals. US General Stanley McChrystal expressed it thus:
The idea was to combine analysts who found the enemy (through intelligence, surveillance
and reconnaissance); drone operators who fixed the target; combat teams who finished the
target by capturing or killing him; specialists who exploited the intelligence the raid yielded,
such as cell phones, maps and detainees; and the intelligence analysts who turned this raw
information into usable knowledge. As we shall see, in this complex human–material
assemblage, the local populations have also become a ‘body’ of a sort in contemporary war.
Targeted killings through robotic warfare and population-centric counterinsurgency are not
different in kind but two sides of the same coin: they testify to a similar instrumentalisation of
the populations amongst whom wars are fought.
Drones are becoming big business all over the globe
Webb, Wirbel, and Sulzman 2010 (Dave Webb, Convener of the GN board, Loring Wirbel,
Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, Bill Sulzman, Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, From
Space, No One Can Watch You Die. Peace Review, 22(1), p.33)
Drones are big business and, according to Visiongain, a London- based market-research firm,
global sales of UAVs are expected to increase by over ten percent this year, to more than $4.7
billion. About sixty percent of this will be spent by the United States, and the Department of
Defense says it will spend more than $22 billion between 2007 and 2013 to develop, buy, and
operate drones. Israel ranks second in drone development and among the European leaders of
this form of technology are Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. China is also believed to
possess a substantial drone fleet. In June 2005, a full-scale demonstration model of an
Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle, called the Neuron, was unveiled in Paris. Dassault Aviation
leads a J400 million program that is managed by the French armaments agency DGA. France is
providing about fifty percent of the funding, while Italy has a twenty-two percent share with
Sweden as the third largest stakeholder. The other partners are Switzerland, Spain, and
Greece. Saab is overseeing the overall design of the fuselage, avionics, fuel system, and part of
the flight testing. Hellenic Aerospace Industry (HAI) is responsible for the UCAV’s rear fuselage,
exhaust pipe, and test rig. The European Aeronautics Defence and Space (EADS) will provide
expertise in wing design, groundstations, and datalink integration. Wind tunnel testing and the
weapon interface will be carried out by RUAG Aerospace, Switzerland. Alenia Aeronautica of
Italy will design the weapons bay, the electrical power system, and the airborne data system,
and will contribute to part of the flight tests. Dassault will be responsible for the general design
and architecture, the flight control system, final assembly, ground tests, and flight tests. Italy is
currently using the Reaper and has expressed interest in buying four more, along with three
ground control stations, for some $330million. Germany has made a request to purchase five
Reapers and four mobile ground stations for $205 million, although they will not be armed as
that step is not deemed to be acceptable in Germany.
History and capabilities of drones
Webb, Wirbel, and Sulzman 2010 (Dave Webb, Convener of the GN board, Loring Wirbel,
Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, Bill Sulzman, Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, From
Space, No One Can Watch You Die. Peace Review, 22(1), p. 31-32)
Guided by and communicating through space satellite technology, drones are now an integral
part of ‘‘network centric warfare’’ whereby information is shared and battle management
conducted through computer and space technologies. Ground-based stations, armed units,
and intelligence systems around the world are also plugged in to this system that allows the
United States and its allies to project power and ‘‘full spectrum dominance’’ across the globe.
Drones were first used by the United States in the 1950s as target practice for fighter pilots. In
the 1960s, they were used to spy over China and Vietnam, and also for surveillance in Bosnia
and Kosovo in the 1990s. They were deployed in 2000 on CIA secret missions to look for Osama
bin Laden, and have been used with increasing frequency ever since. In 2003, the United States
logged around 35,000 UAV flight-hours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this increased to over
800,000 hours last year. The New York Times recently reported that in 2004, the CIA secretly
hired Blackwater to locate and assassinate top Al Qaeda operatives from hidden bases in
Pakistan and Afghanistan using drones. Drones come in all shapes and sizes; some, as small as
toy planes, are launched by hand to spy over hills or buildings, helping to identify and provide
information on targets. The United States has around 5,000 of these. Others are much larger
and deadlier. Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk is about the size of a corporate jet and is
used for high-resolution radar surveillance. The latest version can gather data on objects the
size of a textbook from about twice the altitude of passenger jets (18,000 meters), through
cloudy skies, night or day, for periods of thirty-two hours. Following the North Korean nuclear
test earlier this year, the United States declared that Global Hawks would replace its U-2 spy
planes in South Korea. Big drones are very expensive, costing as much as $60 m each and,
although pilotless, each involves a support team of some 20–30 people. The Predator drone
(from General Atomics) is about half the size of the Global Hawk. It can, however, be armed
with two Hellfire missiles. It was a Predator that was used to monitor the movements of the
Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq and assist the attack on his house by U.S. jets. A
later version, the Reaper, is the first U.S. hunter-killer drone. It can carry fifteen times more
weapons than the Predator, including up to fourteen Hellfire missiles and two 500- pound
laser-guided bombs, and travel at over 450 kmph—about three times the speed of its
predecessor. The Reaper was also designed to spy and is fitted with an array of sensors and
three cameras that can operate day or night.
Drones Gone Domestic
Domestic use of Drones Provides for a Future of Uncertainty in Technological
Surveillance and Public Control
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
The deadly situation in FATA has illustrated how the U.S. uses the Predator to perform an
exception in a far-away sovereign nation. But these exceptional tools are fast becoming
everyday tools. The U.S. has a history of transferring military technology to the domestic
sphere. Since 2006, three Predator drones have been used to monitor the Arizona-Mexico
border by the Border Patrol (Lavandera 2010). The police in the U.S. and U.K. are keen to use
these robots in the sky to monitor criminals on the ground. In true Orwellian fashion, these
drones will be deployed ‘…for routine monitoring of motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves
and illegal dumping’ (United Press International 2010). Perhaps the most bizarre creation is the
‘mosquito’, a controversial U.K. drone that emits a high-frequency sound to disperse
‘suspicious people under 20’. At political rallies in Washington and New York, mechanical-like
‘dragonflies’ have been spotted spying on protestors – and these robobugs are reminders of
the slow march of the drone army in cities and towns across the world, where everyone will
soon be watched, targeted, and tracked. But just how long before these drones start acting
together in autonomous, self-aware, self-healing, self-recharging SWARMs? And how long
before they are equipped with ‘non-lethal’ weaponry to subdue the public? Such questions
are no longer in the realm of alarmist fantasy. ‘The difference between science fiction and
science is timing’ (Colonel Christopher B. Carlisle, quoted in U.S. Army 2010:4).
Distancing
Maintaining masculinity of drones is being protected—operators take beta
blockers in order to remove emotions from their war
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The social imaginary around drones graphically evidences this assertion: their gleaming, hard
metal armour, their lethal capabilities and their electronically enabled muscular power are all
conducive to their hyper- masculinisation and phallogocentric eroticisation. The
phallogocentricism that inscribes drones is perhaps best evidenced by the military terminology
used to describe them: the 'unmanned' status of drones needs to be crucially supplemented by
the prosthetic recoding of drones as 'phantom members'. The prosthetics of this hypermasculinisation of war are, moreover, assuming psychopharmacological dimensions through
the US military's possible use of beta-blocker drugs such as propanolol." Jonathan Moreno has
drawn attention to the experimental use of beta-blockers, originally used to treat heart disease,
in order to 'block neurotransmitters that consolidate emotion with long-term memory' so that
soldiers can circumvent the experience of post-traumatic stress after witnessing the horrors of
battle." Edmund Howe, a medical ethicist, outlines what is at stake in the military use of betablockers:¶ If you have the pill, it certainly increases the temptation for the soldier to lower the
standard for taking lethal action, if he thinks he'll be numbed to the personal risk or
consequences. We don't want a soldier saying willy-nilly, 'Screw it. I can take my pill and even if
doing this is not really warranted, I'll be OK.'"¶ Drone operators, despite their remote locations,
also claim to experience post-traumatic stress, due to the sharp resolution of the images that
they are compelled to witness - images that 'can be pretty graphic, pretty vivid, and these are
the things we try to offset'." The parenthetical logic that inscribes drone killing operations can,
in effect, be greatly enhanced precisely by the use of psychopharmacological prosthetics by
drone pilots and the consequent numbing of their emotional response to the 'remote' killings
they cause.
Video Games have Become the Virtual Space for Military Recruitment and
expansion, Blurring the Lines of the Real and the Digital
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
Starting with video games is no coincidence. For millions of people across the globe, the ‘war
on terror’ is only known through the virtual spaces they enter and exit on a daily basis. Video
games are therefore essential sites for military recruitment, consent, and legitimization. Since
their inception, video games have passed far-too-easily under the radar of critical human
geography. But this is changing: with the advent of realistic graphics, multi-million dollar
budgets, and sales revenues in the billions, video games are now seen as important cultural
artifacts. Indeed, the U.S. Army was so convinced of their significance it developed its own
game called America’s Army, a recruitment tool played by 8 million people. Playing war has
never been so serious. ¶ Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September
11, 2001 video games about the ‘war on terror’ have become increasingly popular (Ouellette
2008). The recent November2009 release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a cause célèbre.
The game follows the U.S. Army’s fictional trials and tribulations against a new Russian
ultranationalist terrorist organization across diverse geographies, from Afghanistan to
Washington D.C. It set a new worldwide sales record of approximately $550 million over just
five days and the controversial game has now grossed in excess of $1 billion. It is within this
virtual world of this game that players are able to pilot a drone and deliver their very own
missiles to ‘terrorists’ below. These images in the video game are eerily similar to those
broadcast by the military from the UAVs in the Middle East. ¶ The Predators that are circling
in the Pakistani skyline and the Predators that are processed in gaming consoles are now
blurring together in a virtual embrace, their images both resonating in violent concert. As U.S.
Army Officer Michael Macedonia (2002: n.p.) explains: ‘The military is undergoing a major
cultural shift in its approach to simulation. The use of entertainment technology is not a new
phenomenon in the military … What is different today is the emergence of a culture that accepts
computer games as powerful tools for learning, socialization, and training’. Video game users,
from children to adults, are now sought by the U.S. Army as playful warriors in a ‘…war
deprived of its substance – a virtual war fought behind computer screens, a war experienced
by its participants as a video game, a war with no casualties’ (Žižek 2002: 37). These intimate
and everyday spaces of the home computer are now instrumental to the post 9-11 cultural shift
in the ‘war on terror’ (Gregory 2008). ¶ The U.S. Army’s cultural turn focuses on the civilian
sphere as a site of consent and consumption, and involves recruiting play as an intimate
technology of participation. Video game play is fundamentally a type of active participation in
a virtual space. In the case of games like Modern Warfare 2, the player is able to assume the
role of soldiers combating a digital ‘war on terror’. My argument in the first paper is that video
games are ‘transitional spaces’. Using the psychoanalytic methodology of Donald Winnicott ¶
(1971), I provide an interpretative framework of what it means to ‘play’ – the co-mingling
between self and world – and how this co-mingling is always-already a political moment, locked
within a military representational logic. In this sense, war video games need to be thought of as
spaces in which imperial architectures and players interact. Such everyday occurrences for
millions of players around the world is analytically important, and has for too long slipped under
the radar of critical human geography. ¶ The first paper in the dissertation therefore takes aim at
understanding the ‘military entertainment complex’ and the oriental representations it
authorizes, and why playing war is a political invitation to a wider (and everyday) colonial
present (Gregory 2004).
Video Games Have Trained and De-Sensitized Gamers Into Accepting that War
is a Game by Training Players in use of Drones and Making Them Fun
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
But it’s not just trained pilots that are able to control these Predator drones. In millions of
homes around the world there exists another computer screen and joystick, only this time the
kills displayed are entirely virtual and the deserts wholly digitized. Call of Duty: Modern
Warfare 2 is a video game that lets you pilot a UAV and deliver your very own Hellfire missiles
to ‘terrorists’ below. These images in the video game are eerily similar to those broadcast by
the military from the UAVs in the Middle East (see Figure 1). On video-sharing website
YouTube, there is an archived news report from CNN documenting the first time a U.S. Army
drone killed a human being in 2007 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhDnO6Y0hG4). The
reporter states: ‘It may look like a video game, but it’s very real’. On the comments section
below the video, one user writes: ‘I am going to see the Air Force recruiter in the morning
about signing up for Predator drone duty! I am excited!’ With this bleeding between reality
and virtuality, it is hard to know whether video games are becoming more like war, or war is
becoming more like video games. Certainly, for millions of players across the globe, war is a
game.
The Intersection of the Real World and the Digital World of War Simulation
Video Games Causes a Blurring that Connects Players Directly to the War on
Terror
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
Although this divide between representation and play is certainly present in game studies, the
evolution of the discipline has muddied these lines (Consalvo 2009), with scholars critical of the
‘magic circle’ view of video games as separable from everyday life (Malaby 2007). As Yee (2006:
68) states: ‘Video games play important roles in the increasingly blurred intersections of our
social, economic, and political spheres, and articulating those blurred boundaries in the
microcosm of video games reveals larger trends in our digitally mediated world’. Such a hybrid
approach is gaining ground in game studies, with play seen as a type of Deleuzian (1993)
‘event’ that brings together a multiplicity of human and non-human forces in a ‘mangle of
practice’ (Steinkuehler 2006). Similarly, the stability and fixity of player is overturned by ‘…a
more fluid version of the ego, the self as pure becoming’ (Cain 2008: 62), in which: ‘…the
intangible yet real, embodied yet distributed, monstrous, operations of human parts—
perception, imagination, creativity, anxiety, play—without always already reducing these to
the reassuring synechdoches of ‘identity’ and ‘subjectivity’(Giddings 2009: 156). In short,
distinctions between player and game space collapse in the process of play. ¶ These
understandings of play as a type of ‘becoming’ are ontologically illuminating and lay the
much-needed foundations for taking play seriously. But it appears game studies is going to
great lengths to state something simple: play is a creative moment, and one that undoes a
ludological-narratological divide. Winnicott’s (1971) concept of a ‘transitional space’ provides a
clearly written and useful account of play. For the English psychoanalyst, play is a moment of
experimentation between self and world. What we gain by using the concept of transitional
space is the ability to connect the moment of play into wider geographies of the ‘war on
terror’.
Play as a Transitional Space Blurs the Line Between Fantasy and Reality,
Creating a Unique Experience that Influences Our Lives
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) was a renowned British pediatrician and psychoanalyst. ¶
Reworking ideas from Kleinian ‘objects-relations theory’, Winnicott argues that children (and
adults alike) use objects and spaces to transition between the inner world of psychic fantasy
and the outer world of objective reality. This idea of a ‘transitional space’ of inbetweeness
radically unhinges Western rational thought (i.e. Enlightenment dualisms) and leads to the:
‘…radical dissemination of subjectivity that undermines any fixed or normative
understandings of space, sex, gender and sexuality’ (Kingsbury 2003: ¶ 354). In early
infanthood, Winnicott notes that babies discern objects as belonging to the same inner
mental reality as their own. A transitional object is the first object that a baby uses in
transitioning out of this narcissism. But at the same time Winnicott notes a paradox, since the
infant never fully assimilates itself into an objective state of reality. As such, the infant is
suspended between fantasy and reality, in a ‘third space’ of play and experimentation. ¶
Transitional spaces are therefore playful spaces. Essentially a creative experience, when we
play we experiment with the space between subjective fantasy and objective reality. Much of
the fun found in play is the blurring of these lines into a mixture of objects and sensations that
are not quite ‘self’ or ‘world’. In Winnicott’s (1971: 51) words, ‘Playing is inherently exciting due
to the interplay in the child’s mind of that which is subjective (near-hallucination) and that
which is objectively perceived (actual, or shared reality)’. Play is neither a psychic invention nor
a matter of external reality; it is instead a transitional space where both forces co-mingle and
produce an emergent, immanent and affective experience.
Military Simulated Video Games Receive Approval Through Co-Opted
Academia, Creating Institutionally Supported Transitional Spaces
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
The military entertainment complex (Der Derian 2001; Herz 1997) is the name given to the
increased cooperation between the entertainment industry and the military. In the context of
this paper, it refers to the interactions and co-productions between the video game industry
and the U.S. Army. The post-9/11 appetite for Manichean ‘good versus evil’ narratives is
increasingly structuring video games (Ouellette 2008). Quilting these narratives is the ‘war on
terror’, a cultural substrate that oils a vast engine of digital networks, spaces, and
representations – inviting users across the globe to play in a virtual colonial present (Gregory
2004). ¶ The link between the military and commercial gaming is by no means a new
phenomenon and indeed there are several academic sources that trace its history in more detail
(Der Derian 2001; Halter 2006; Herz 1997; Herz and Macedonia 2002; Power 2007; Rentfrow
2008). The initial crossover between commerce and military began with the introduction of
Mech War in the 1970s to the Army War College, and has continued to accelerate ever since the
Department of Defense recognized the strategic potential of wargaming. In 1996 the Marine
Corps Modeling and Simulation Management Office adapted the popular game Doom II: Hell
on Earth into Marine Doom for training U.S. soldiers. It was in this moment that video games
truly assimilated into mainstream military practice, technology, and training. Aside from the
pivotal 2002 release of America’s Army, the September 2004 release of Full Spectrum Warrior
on Microsoft’s Xbox allowed players to command two U.S. fireteams – Alpha and Bravo of the
159th Light Infantry squad, conducting military operations in the fictional Middle Eastern
nation of ‘Zekistan’. This latter game is noteworthy, and not just because of its flagrant
orientalism and support of the ‘war on terror’, but also for the game’s development at the
Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California. It is here that
the military entertainment complex receives its educational stamp of approval. ¶ The ICT is
contracted by the U.S. Army to research and produce virtual simulations and video game
worlds that aid soldier training, development and even post-traumatic healing (Morie 2009).
The ICT was funded ‘…in 1999 with a multi-year contract from the U.S. Army to explore a
powerful question: What would happen if leading technologists in artificial intelligence,
graphics, and immersion joined forces with the creative talents of Hollywood and the game
Industry?’ (ICT 2009a). Blending a desire for technological innovation and accurate virtual
reality, with the parallel aim of simulating human emotion and behavior, ICT provides the digital
architecture for the U.S. Army’s new cultural sensitivity: ‘Most simulation-based training
systems focus on doctrine, strategies and procedures. What sets ICT apart is our emphasis on
human relationships, culture and emotions’ (ICT 2009b). For example, the Mission Rehearsal
Exercise (MRE) system is designed to immerse the participant in a virtual learning environment
by displaying visuals on an eight-foot-tall screen in a 150-degree arc with a 12-foot radius (ICT
2004). Here, different ‘cultural scenarios’ are deployed in virtual space to test and recreate a
variety of human behaviors and emotional algorithms. The user is able to talk with virtual
humans, recreating the interactions with enemy civilians and combatants. Training soldiers to
be more culturally and emotionally sensitive is documented across a range of ICT publications,
most of which deal explicitly with the sensory experience and psychological feelings involved
with a digital other (Core et al. 2006; Gratch and Marsella 2004; Morie and Williams 2003;
Morie at al. 2002; Riedl and Stern 2006; ¶ Swartout et al. 2004). This emotional-affective
research hits its bizarre high note with the implementation of a prototype collar that releases
different scents depending on the player’s virtual location (Tortell et al. 2007). ¶ What then are
we to make of this $45 million partnership between the ICT and the U.S. Army? Certainly, this
institution is emblematic of the military entertainment complex (or as Leonard (2004)
suggests, a ‘military-academic-entertainment’ triangle), a formation that goes well beyond
simple exchanges between the military and game producers. There exists a concerted
academic engagement with understanding human learning, language, behavior, emotion, and
affect – and how to digitize these complexities into the binary architectures of virtual war.
From people to polygons, the cultural turn in the ¶ U.S. Army’s ‘war on terror’ is constructed
across a variety of everyday virtual geographies – from the eight million that play America’s
Army to those fighting in a multitude of other war games (Full Spectrum Warrior, Kuma\War,
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). What is crucial in all these virtual spaces is the human
experience, whether its U.S. soldiers interacting with animated enemies through a gigantic
screen at the ICT, or millions of teenagers participating in the ‘war on terror’ with keyboards and
mice. How these transitional spaces of play are engineered is intimately bound to the video
game’s aesthetics. Understanding the underlying logic of the representations used by video
games is vital in understanding the ideological work the military entertainment complex is
capable of.
Incorporating drones into video games further distances the player from
experiencing or having affective awareness of his participation in the
destruction of human lives
Gregory ’11 (Derek, Distinguished professor of geography at University of British Colombia,
From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War." Theory, Culture & Society 28.7-8)
For this reason, characterizations of the drone missions as moments in a ‘video game
war’ that inculcates a ‘Playstation mentality to killing’ may well be wide of the mark
(Alston, 2010: 5; Fellowship of Reconciliation, 2010). Critics often point to Grossman’s
(1995) study of ‘learning to kill’, which identified distance as a powerful means of
overcoming the resistance to killing. He argued that in the Second World War ‘pilots
and bombardiers were protected by distance’ from seeing the effects of their bombs
(1995: 78): ‘From a distance I can deny your humanity, and from a distance I cannot
hear you scream’ (1995: 102; see also Gregory, 2011). Although Grossman was writing before
UAVs were armed and so could not directly address the drone wars, he did point to firstperson shooter video games as particularly powerful agents of conditioning through
which players become ‘hardwired’ for killing, and his anatomy of killing listed not only
physical distance but also emotional distance, including social, cultural, moral and,
crucially, ‘mechanical’ distance: the screen that separates the gamer from the game
(1995: 188^9).16 It seems a small step to infer that long-distance killing from a UAV would
radicalize those affective protections.
Drones are a violent prothestic that extends far beyond the reach of the
operator. These prosthetics are used to amputate individuals and societies—
privileging the prosthetic of the operators over those of the victims
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
In the course of this article, I have attempted to delineate the mutating terrain of contemporary
war, and the increasing reliance of the United States on forms of automated killing at a distance
technologies. In this new field of war, US combatants remain securely ensconced on home turf;
US conduct of war and killing is now enmeshed within the continuum of the civic practices of
soldiers' everyday lives. In this way, war, killing and maiming become coextensive, and thus
normalised, with civic practices. With drone technologies, US military personnel or CIA agents
venture into the field of war through an ensemble of tele-techno mediations that prostheticise
them to the killing machines deployed in the war-torn dominions of US empire. Caught up in
these drone-generated killing fields are anonymous targets and civilians who have no right of
response or recourse to judicial process as the drones fire their missiles from the skies. The
New American Foundation has drawn attention to the 'high rate of civilian casualties' caused by
drone attacks, and it has calculated the figure of civilian casualties to be 'around 32 percent'" In
Pakistan alone, since President Obama took office, there have been 2292 civilians killed by US
drone strikes; of these fatalities, 168 were children, including 69 children killed in a single attack
on a madrassah in 2006." The Brooking Institute has revealed that 'drones killed an average of
ten civilians to one militant'. 0o¶ In the context of this high-tech, prostheticised terrain of drone
warfare that I have been mapping, I want to bring into focus the constitutive relation between
war, prosthetics and the very civilian targets and victims caught up in the ongoing imperial war
in Afghanistan. In her critique of certain accounts of 'technology as prosthesis', Sarah Jain draws
critical attention to the manner in which technophilic readings of the prosthetic trope
celebrate 'technology as antidote' while 'the wounding ingredients of technological¶ 2¶
production remain continually under ontological erasure'.¶ this type of 'ontological erasure'
that I want to disrupt by juxtaposing my mobilisation of the prosthetic trope with the material
literality of prosthetics: drones, as the militarised prosthetics of empire, violently generate
civilian amputees in need of prosthetic limbs. In their tracking of the conditions of emergence
of modern prosthetics, Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz have underscored the
constitutive relation between prosthetics, war and its victims: 'The modern development of
prosthetics has been traced with frequency to the challenges of war. The Civil War, for example,
ushered a new era for prosthetics because of the enormous scale of human damage that was
inflicted by new technologies.""'¶
Fetishization
The Drone is a Fetishized Object – It’s Relationship with it’s Equally Objectified
Targets are Used to Mask the Pain and Suffering it Causes
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
In this sense, the drone is fundamentally a fetishized object. And we mean this in the ¶ Marxist
sense of the concept – the object’s human relations are mystified and masked - as the drone
presents itself to the world as an autonomous agent, isolated from the imperial and military
apparatus behind it. Marx used the concept of the fetish in numerous ways to describe the
exchange of commodities: ¶ ¶ A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it
the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon
the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own
labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but
between the products of their labour (Marx 1991:28) ¶ ¶ The commodity fetish is a two-fold
phenomenon: the commodity transcends the labour that produced it and appears as a
separate and objectifiable ‘thing’, and consequently, its social origins are masked as its value
appears contained in the ‘thing-itself’. Power and autonomy are presumed to exist within
commodities themselves, rather than within their productive relations. Marx thus argues that
the commodity is reified with an almost supernatural and quasi-religious status: ‘Its analysis
shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties’ (Marx ¶ 1991:26). This fetishization extends from commodities into the
cultural circuit more generally, as the work of cultural theorists Jameson, Adorno, Benjamin,
Baudrillard, and Debord have differently illustrated. ¶ The primary relationship evoked in most
discussions of drone warfare is between a drone and its battlefield of objectified targets,
rather than the relationship between the team of technicians operating the drone as agents of
American empire and the unsuspecting bodies surveilled and slaughtered on the ground in
neo-colonial Pakistan. In other words, drone warfare is thought of as a relationship between
things, rather than between people. And the supernatural element is never far away. As Colonel
Theodore Osowski of the U.S. Air Force reveals in his Biblical allegory on drones: ‘It's kind of
like having God overhead. And lightning comes down in the form of a Hellfire’ (quoted in
Mockenhaupt 2009). It is therefore through fetishization that drones bomb sovereign Pakistani
territory without the legal and territorial consequences of ground war. Far from ‘sitting there’,
the drone performs the military logic of a ‘war without the war’ to its extreme, which is to say,
a war without bodies, a war of machines, and a war of discrete and surgical strikes from the
sky. ¶ A critical geography must therefore intervene to dismantle the production and
maintenance of the drone fetish; a project allied to the work of feminist geographies and
geopolitics that reinsert a disavowed corporeality (England 2003, 2006; Fluri 2009; Hyndman
2001, 2007; Massey 1994; Nicely 2009; Sharp 2007). Indeed, much of the military discourse is
molded by the iron cast of paternalism: a feminized FATA ‘rescued’ by masculine U.S. forces –
without mention of the human pain and suffering. ¶ Objects, commodities, and technologies
have always mattered to the unfolding stories of our lives (Kloppenburg 1988; Latour 1993,
2005; Mintz 1985; Schivelbusch 1987; Robbins 2007; White 1996; Winner 1977), as have their
hybrid couplings (Haraway 1991; Whatmore 2006). The key point is that although the drone is
capable of reconfiguring political and legal life, it does so through a network. As Latour
(2005:56) writes: ‘An ‘actor’ in the hyphenated expression actor-network is not the source of
an action but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming around it’ (Latour
2005:56). In other words, the autonomy and exceptional status of the drone is always-already
a production. The Obama administration’s touting of the drone as the ‘magical solution’ to the
war-on-terror is a fetishization that occludes its unbearable humanness.
Drones are fetishized because of no material connection from those who
deploy the drone to the drone itself. This cloaks its origins and fundamentally
changes warfare where only the drone object and the enemy object exist.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12. Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
In terms of their ability to target, future drones will be highly sophisticated.¶ Keeping in tune
with the science fiction overture: “Future sensors will provide¶ the capability to track specific
individuals, recognized through automatic target¶ recognition capabilities, including if they
are carrying weapons or other equipment.¶ They also will be able to distinguish between
males, females, and children, as well¶ as different types of animals” (US Army 2010:90). The
drone performs the logic of¶ targeting, enacting a better-than-human efficiency ethic.¶ This
deliberate engineering of autonomy has significant political consequences.¶ Consider, for
example, that when a Predator drone crashed in Pakistan in September¶ 2008 (an object
manufactured by General Atomics of the USA), and photos of its¶ burned—but still
identifiable—wreckage were broadcast across Pakistani television,¶ Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff AdmiralMichael Mullen was forced to comment.¶ His reply: “It wasn’t a U.S.
UAV”. Such barefaced denial reveals much about the¶ drone. Of course the drone was US
manufactured and US controlled. But because¶ there was no human flesh in the pieces of the
drone’s wreckage, the accountability of the US military was suspended, and a brazen denial
enacted (“there was no¶ pilot!”).¶ In this sense, the drone is fundamentally a fetishized object.
And we mean this¶ in the Marxist sense of the concept—the object’s human relations are
mystified and¶ masked—as the drone presents itself to the world as an autonomous agent,
isolated¶ from the imperial and military apparatus behind it. Marx used the concept of the¶
fetish in numerous ways to describe the exchange of commodities:¶ A commodity is therefore a
mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of¶ men’s labour appears to them as
an objective character stamped upon the product of¶ that labour; because the relation of the
producers to the sum total of their own labour¶ is presented to them as a social relation,
existing not between themselves, but between¶ the products of their labour (Marx 1991:28).¶
The commodity fetish is a two-fold phenomenon: the commodity transcends the¶ labour that
produced it and appears as a separate and objectifiable “thing”, and¶ consequently, its social
origins are masked as its value appears contained in the¶ “thing-itself”. Power and autonomy
are presumed to exist within commodities¶ themselves, rather than within their productive
relations. Marx thus argues that¶ the commodity is reified with an almost supernatural and
quasi-religious status: “Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in
metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx 1991:26). This fetishization extends
from¶ commodities into the cultural circuit more generally, as the work of cultural theorists¶
Jameson, Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Debord have differently illustrated.¶ The primary
relationship evoked in most discussions of drone warfare is between a¶ drone and its
battlefield of objectified targets, rather than the relationship between¶ the team of technicians
operating the drone as agents of American empire and¶ the unsuspecting bodies surveilled
and slaughtered on the ground in neo-colonial¶ Pakistan. In other words, drone warfare is
thought of as a relationship between¶ things, rather than between people.
And this fetishization constructs the drone as a supernatural being that
obscures the realities, consequences, and casualties of its operation.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12. Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
And the supernatural element is never far away.¶ As Colonel Theodore Osowski of the US Air
Force reveals in his Biblical allegory¶ on drones: “It’s kind of like having God overhead. And
lightning comes down¶ in the form of a Hellfire” (quoted in Mockenhaupt 2009). It is therefore
through¶ fetishization that drones bomb sovereign Pakistani territory without the legal and¶
territorial consequences of ground war. Far from “sitting there”, the drone performs¶ the
military logic of a “war without the war” to its extreme, which is to say, a war¶ without bodies,
a war of machines, and a war of discrete and surgical strikes from¶ the sky.¶ A critical
geography must therefore intervene to dismantle the production and¶ maintenance of the
drone fetish; a project allied to the work of feminist geographies¶ and geopolitics that reinsert a
disavowed corporeality (England 2003, 2006; Fluri¶ 2009; Hyndman 2001, 2007; Massey 1994;
Nicely 2009; Sharp 2007).
Colonialism
Drones reinforce colonialism by viewing the ground as something to be
controlled (the colony) and the atmosphere as something to be defended (the
colonizer).
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12. Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
The sky is the space in which technology masters the world. It is clean, disembodied, and a
place where nobody dies (that just happens on the ground). Do we not see here a colonial logic
of “us” in the sky, versus “them” on the ground (Amoore 2009; Gregory 2010)?¶ The drone is
capable of performing (Bialasiewicz et al 2007) this logic, through a digital worldview of targets
that dismisses ambiguity and reinforces the same old¶ god-trick of a view of somewhere from
nowhere (Kaplan 2006b). This is not to say¶ that the sky is a space of pure deterritorialization
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Since¶ the mid-twentieth century the atmosphere has become
increasingly nationalized,¶ particularly after the Cold War (Kaplan 2006b; Williams 2010). The
“Revolution in¶ Military Affairs” (RMA) was a set of tactics put forward by the USmilitary for
securing¶ the future of warfare (Kaplan 2009).
Drones link to colonialism. They only operate in FATA which is a region that has
been historically exempted from constitutional protection due to British abuse.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12. Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
FATA is divided into seven tribal agencies spanning 27 244 km2 and, according to the¶ last
census in 1998, is home to 3.1million people. FATA, especially the agencies of¶ North and
SouthWaziristan, has been subjected to drone bombardment since 2004,¶ with the intensity of
attacks only increasing under the Obama administration. The interlinked legal and military
history of this region is rarely given adequate attention,¶ with “analysis” usually relying on a
characterization of the inhabitants, the Pakhtuns,¶ as “rugged” and “intractable” (Nawaz 2009).
At least since the British engagement¶ with the region, roughly a century and a half ago, the
legal and constitutional status of the region in relation to state power has been co-determined
with its geopolitical¶ role.¶ The tribal regions that today comprise Afghanistan, FATA, and the region formerly¶ known as the North
West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan have, as far back¶ as the fourteenth century, been constructed as “special cases” that could not be¶
The current
legal and geopolitical¶ position of FATA can only be understood from its colonial past as a
“frontier” region for the British Raj, understood at the time as a “wide tract of border
country,¶ hinterlands, or a buffer state” (Spain 1977:27). Buffer states can be interpreted as¶
classic territorial exceptions—states by virtue of not being other states. A buffer state¶ was supposed to
governed according to normal rules (Figure 2). British engagement with the region¶ began in 1849, after the annexation of Punjab.
ensure that two giants did not rub shoulders. Afghanistan’s birth as¶ a buffer state between the expanding powers of Russia and Britain was ushered in
by¶ the Durand Line Agreement of 1893 and the Pamir Boundary Agreement of 1895.¶ The former was an agreement between an Afghan King and the
British recognizing¶ what Pakistan today claims is the international boundary with Afghanistan. The¶ latter was an agreement between the British and
the Russians that demarcated¶ Afghanistan’s northern border. The British followed a “three-fold frontier” strategy, which applied their state¶ power
and law in gradients over the frontier (Embree 1977). The first frontier¶ was on the outskirts of the geographic edges of directly administered
territory—¶ in the case of the northwest frontier, in the environs of Peshawar and the settled¶ areas. Afghanistan, an ostensibly sovereign state, was
It is the¶ second frontier, where the British ruled the Pakhtun tribes indirectly,
where we locate the colonial legacy of FATA. The Pakhtuns were theoretically to retain a¶
the third frontier.
measure of autonomy over their own affairs, but control was exercised through¶ subsidies
provided to selected tribal leaders from the British. The British state thus¶ extended its control,
but not its rule. This peculiar political space, forged in the¶ furnace of the geopolitical “Great
Game” between Britain and Russia, required¶ a correspondingly peculiar legal order—the
Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) of¶ 1901.¶ The FCR were crafted by Lord Curzon to create
some semblance of codified¶ law to govern the tribal area. The act gives the federal
government the right to¶ appoint a “Political Agent” (PA) for each of the agencies in FATA. The
PA is invested¶ with considerable magisterial, administrative, revenue, executive and
development¶ powers in the agencies. They have the authority to decide any matter, civil or¶
criminal, or refer it to a jirga, or assembly of tribal men (which the PA, of course,¶ convenes).
There is no judicial review or accountability of any decision made by¶ the PA. Other powers
given to the PA under the FCR under specific circumstances¶ are: preemptory imprisonment,
expulsion of individuals and groups, destruction¶ of buildings, imprisonment of children,
collective punishment, strict regulation of¶ housing, economic blockades, and even execution
(Amnesty International 2010;¶ Mahmud 2010; Spain 1977; Tanguay-Renad 2002). Upon
independence in 1947,¶ Pakistan adopted the FCR, and continued the policy of excepting FATA
from the¶ normal rule of law. The FCR and the constitutional status of FATA have not gone¶ unchallenged, and two cases in
particular cemented the geographical exception of¶ FATA. In ChaudriManzoor Elahi vs Federation of Pakistan (1975), the Supreme Court¶ ruled that
FATA as an area was beyond the jurisdiction of any superior court—and¶ therefore there was no one for the people of FATA to appeal to for their rights
as¶ citizens of Pakistan. And in Government of NWFP vs Muhammad Irshad (1995), it¶ was ruled that the President’s word is indeed law in tribal
areas.1 However, dissenting¶ opinions were registered in both rulings and “the issue has yet to be fully settled and¶ the constitutional position of FATA
inhabitants remains ambiguous and unfavorable”¶ (Tanguay-Renad 2002:554).¶ Article 247 of the Constitution of Pakistan (1973) spells out the
exception clearly. The most telling clauses are listed below:¶ 247.3) No Act of Parliament shall apply to any Federally Administered Tribal Area or to¶
any part thereof, unless the President so directs.¶ 247.5) Notwithstanding anything contained in the Constitution, the President may,¶ with respect to
any matter, make regulations for the peace and good Government of a¶ Federally Administered Tribal Area or any part thereof.¶ 247.6) Neither the
Supreme Court nor a High Court shall exercise any jurisdiction under¶ the Constitution in relation to a Tribal Area, unless Parliament by law otherwise
provides. It is 247.3 that produces FATA as a space of political-geographic exception by¶ declaring it out of bounds from any act declared by Parliament.
In lethal parallel,¶ 247.6 produces FATA as a legal-geographic exception by declaring the area out¶ of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. And the
“cherry on top” is 247.5, which¶ makes FATA subject to the judgment of one person, the President. As we saw above,¶ the
President
exercises authority in the region through the legal architecture of the¶ FCR and political
agents.¶ Relatively recent constitutional and political developments in Pakistan, in the¶ wake of the tumultuous Lawyer’s Movement of 2007,
offered some hope that a¶ progressive government would bring significant constitutional changes with respect¶ to the status of FATA (Khan 2009). The
legal fraternity of Pakistan took to the streets¶ in the name of the supremacy of law and the constitution, and eventually toppled¶ the military regime
of General Pervez Musharraf, America’s staunchest international¶ ally in the war on terror. In the heady days of early 2008, after the populist Pakistan¶
People’s Party (PPP) swept dramatically to power, the Prime Minister promised¶ that the “obsolete” FCR would be abolished and FATA brought into a
normalized¶ federal relationship with the rest of the country. During the following year, cosmetic¶ changes to the FCR were ushered in by the
President (Ali 2009).¶ The much-vaunted historical eighteenth amendment to the Pakistani¶ Constitution, the culminating politico-legislative act of the
new democratic¶ government, was passed by Parliament in April 2010. It was conspicuously silent¶ about any change in FATA’s constitutional position
(National Assembly of Pakistan¶ 2010). Although the amendment makes concessions of power from the center¶ to the provinces, there is no mention
of any amendment to Article 247. As¶ Amnesty International despairingly notes “[d]espite numerous recent promises by¶ Pakistan’s government to
reform the FCR and improve the legal situation of the¶ people of FATA . . . governed by this law, as of May 2010, the FCR continued¶ to
relegatemillions of people in northwest Pakistan to second-class legal status”¶ (2010:26).¶ Perhaps,
upon reflection, the
Pakistani government came to the same conclusion¶ as British political strategist Dr Coatman
did almost 80 years ago—this place, and¶ these people, must be excepted from state and
society for the purposes of war:¶ There are many good reasons why we should not [extend constitutional reforms], and¶ the first
reason is the one Imentioned to you at the beginning of my address—namely, the¶ position of the North-West Frontier and its importance from the
point of view of defence¶ and foreign relations. And on the Frontier even the ordinary process of government, the¶ police and the building of roads,
cannot be looked upon in quite the same way as in¶ other parts of India, because, after all, the North-West Frontier Province is the terrain in¶ which
(Coatman 1931:342). The
history of FATA reveals a region that has served military and state power. This¶ was the case a
century ago when the FCR were first drafted and the British Empire¶ spanned the globe, and it is
the case now, with the FCR still alive and drones raining¶ terror down on the people of FATA. The
fact that drone warfare has not extended¶ beyond FATA and into Baluchistan, another
borderland Province of Pakistan also¶ rumored to harbor terrorist networks, speaks volumes of
the role of legal geography in war. Indeed, threats made by Obama during his campaign to
expand the drone¶ war beyond the excepted area of FATA and into Baluchistan have not
our armies might have to operate in case of war. We cannot play fast and loose¶ with that territory
materialized. This is because the legal-historical geography of the terrain acts in concert with
the object itself to produce drone warfare in FATA: it is not simply a matter of drones
operating over an undifferentiated enemy landscape. Rather, uneven geo-legalities of war,
state, and exception make drone warfare a reality in certain spaces and not others.
Racism
Savagery, an arcane yet persistent racist bias, become re-propagated through
the prejudices of the drone cyborg features and functions.
Allinson 12. (Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.
com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
In the following section I take up a particular, unusually well-documented instances of a strike
that killed Afghan civilians to substantiate my argument about the necropolitics of the imperial
cyborgs. This is only one instance, of course, but it evokes a series of response and slippages
also visible in the considered pronouncements of US military personnel of varying ranks. For
example, when describes drones as ‘our answer to the suicide bomber’ the implication is not
too difficult to draw out: the opponents of the US, being fanatical and uncivilized, do not fear
death and therefore must be met with the ultimate product of technical civilization, a killer
robot without the capacity to fear death. A similar slippage is at work when a US military
journalist predicts the development of autonomous robotic networks that will ‘help save lives
by taking humans out of harms’s way’. Of course, a combat drone that does not put humans in
harm’s way would be useless. The premise of this statement is that those who take up arms
against the US have forfeited their humanity, becoming ‘savage life… just another form of
animal life’.
ATR, the algorithm that allows the drone to set its target, is already imbued
with the racialized and generalized way in which we identify our “enemies.”
Allinson 12. (Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.
com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
The process of racial distinction relies upon an apparatus of knowledge that identifies those
whom it is acceptable to put to death. This apparatus of knowledge, the colonial algorithim of
the drone-cyborg, in particular defines Afghan ‘MAMs’ (Military Age Males) as those whom it
is ‘acceptable to put to death’, and assimilates every decision to kill to the identification of
members of such a category. As the NYU/ Stanford report ‘Living under the Drones’ relates ‘the
US government counts all adult males killed by strikes as “militants,” absent exonerating
evidence’.
Biopolitics
THE IMPERIAL CYBORG - Necropolitics is the insertion of the right to kill within
the right to life. In so doing, the drone cyborg becomes fundamentally racialized
as it targets a group to be killed for the sake of letting itself live.
Allinson 12. (Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.
com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
Here we return to the operations of necropolitics, constitutive of that self-same imperialmilitary apparatus. Mbembe writes of necropolitics as the ‘synthesis of massacre and
bureaucracy’, perfected in the colony and returned to Europe in the Second World War . The
idea of necropolitics, and the particular place of the colony in its operation occupies a point of
tension within the intellectual inheritance of Foucault: stretching across the distinction drawn
between the disciplinary power of the sovereign, captured in the striking vignette that opens
Discipline and Punish, as ‘principally that of life and death over his subjects…the power to put
them to death’ and biopower as ‘the new discursive regulation of populations through
surveillance and control of their health, sexuality, reproduction and so on’ assuming ‘the right
to life over a whole population’. Judith Butler identifies this tension in her dissection of the
role of detention and torture in the War on Terror: writing of how ‘governmentality becomes
the field in which resurgent sovereignty can rear its anachronistic head’ through the state of
extra-legality justified by invoking the exceptional threat of terrorism . Drawing on Agamben,
she argues that ‘one way of managing a population is to constitute them as the less than
human without entitlement to rights, as the humanly unrecognizable’ and that this is ‘different
from producing a subject who is compliant with the law’ .¶ The view of disciplinary power and
biopower as a chronological sequence in Foucault’s work has been challenged by Stephen
Morton and Stephen Bygrave who write that ‘[d]isciplinary power and bipower emerged
successively but operated simultaneously’ . More important for our purposes here is the notion
of necropolitics as the embedded operation of the sovereign right to kill within the familiar
technologies of biopower . Necropolitics is thus fundamentally an apparatus of ‘racial’
distinction, which constitutes the very populations between which the distinctions are made.
Thus Mbembe writes, interpreting Foucault, ‘[i]n the economy of biopower, the function of
racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions
of the state’ forming ‘“the condition for the acceptability of putting to death”’. ¶ We return
here to drones and their wars. For the drone is not merely a new technology in the every-day
sense of a mechanical and electrical assemblage: it is a technology of racial distinction. What
else is the drone operator’s screen or any potential Automated Target Recognition (ATR)
system but a means ‘to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is
not’ ? Circling and swooping above entire territories, the drone defines who is an ‘object in
the battlespace’ and who is not, delineating those areas and populations characterized by the
‘acceptability of putting to death’. The current debate on drones and their potential autonomy
misses this point not by underestimating the autonomy of drones but overestimating that of
their operators: there is already a Target Recognition system at work in the technology of
racial distinction that embraces both the mechanical drones and their fleshy operators. It is in
this sense that I speak of ‘imperial cyborgs’. How is this technology visible in the practice of
drone strikes?
UAV’s are used for biopolitical control over populations under the guise of
humanitarianism
Wilcox 9
(Lauren, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, “Body Counts: The Politics of
Embodiment in Precision Warfare”)
Precision warfare is the mode in which technologically advanced states wage war. It is a form
of warfare characterized by the use of precision guided munitions (PGMs, or ‘smart bombs’)
and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones. While the term ‘precision’ warfare refers to a
mode of violence of violence, precision wars are waged as a form of global liberal governance
(Dillon and Reid 2001). Global liberal governance can be understood as an expression of
biopower, in which governance is the task of managing populations through the production of
bodies that must be killed so that others might live (see Foucault 2003). Precision bombing is a
vision of mastery over the contingency of war, of nature, and of man. One can kill, but not be
killed. Violence never touches the planners or executers of the precision bombs, only the
targets or bystanders. ¶ The use of precision guided munitions has been defining characteristic
of the post-Cold War military in the United States. The precision guided bomb and the UAV are
probably the most celebrated result of the so-called revolution in military affairs, or RMA. The
goal of precision warfare is absolute discrimination between combatants and civilians, a feat
that depends upon absolute knowledge of the difference. Precision is about faith in
technological solutions to the problem of discrimination. Precision weapons are intended to
destroy targets with two specific advantages. First, it is cost effective, despite the high price of
the technology, because targets can be destroyed in one sortie, and sometimes even multiple
targets, whereas in the past, dozens if not hundreds of sorties were required. Second, targets
can be hit without as much risk to the civilian population. Thus, military planners will attempt to
destroy targets within cities or residential areas, targets that may have been off limits in the
past. PGMs have increased as a percentage of total bombs dropped from 7 percent in the first
Gulf War to around 60 percent in the initial incursion into Afghanistan in 2001-2002. Even more
recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or ‘drones’) have been used not only for
surveillance, but have been armed with missiles to fire on targets. Currently, the US and Israel
are the only two countries to use drones as weapons. The UAVs have been used to kill by the US
Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the CIA in Pakistan (Shane 2009). The drone strikes in
Pakistan since 2006 are estimated to have killed about 20 top al-Qaeda leaders, 250-400 lower
level militants, and 250-320 militants (Bergen and Tiedeman 2009).¶ In discourse of precision
warfare, the deaths of civilians occupy a substantial, if not crucial, role. The sparing of civilian
lives is given as a key rationale (second only to protecting the lives of servicemen and women)
for the development and use of precision munitions. In this way, precision warfare is a key
component of the entry of biopolitical rationality into the sphere of war. Foucault considers
biopower to be the power “to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm
of explicit calculation and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life,”
(Foucault 1978, 143). Precision bombing, as part of the liberal way of war, may be said to
operate as part of the network of biopower through surveillance and precision targeting on
behalf of war ostensibly fought for humanitarian reasons. Along with discipline, biopower
constitutes one of the “two poles around which the organization of power over life was
deployed” (the other being discipline) (Foucault 1978, 139). Biopower concerns the supervision
and intervention regarding the biological processes of birth, mortality, health, and life
expectancy. Liberal, high-tech wars embody biopolitical warfare, through which the logic and
practice of precision bombing are emblematic. The very nature of precision bombing is of
calculated risk, of circular error probabilities, that the bomb will hit its target. Throughout the
twentieth century, different technologies have allowed the CEP to decrease. Death is rendered
calculable—that is, the destruction of the target. Death for civilians is also understood in this
framework of risk and probability.
Targeted killing is biopolitical
Grayson 12 (Kyle, Senior Lec. At Newcastle University in Critical Geopolitics and International
Politics, “Six Theses on Targeted Killing,” Political Studies Association, Vol 32,
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01434.x/abstract>)¶
Targeted killing is a nodal point through which relations of domination, submission¶ and
resistance constituted by forms of juridical power, disciplinary power, biopo-¶ litical power and
control circulate (Deleuze, 1992; Foucault, 1977, 2003 and 2007).¶ Individuals who are targeted
have been determined to be located beyond the forms¶ of ‘legitimate’ political activity that
constitute contemporary politics. They are¶ identified by a profile of danger that is calculated
through perceptions of race,¶ religion and nationality which are fused to notions of political
affiliation, capabilities¶ and intent (Dillon and Reid, 2009). Extermination evokes the spectacle
of sovereign¶ punishment, the ordering conformity of the disciplinary norm, the biopolitical¶
eschatology of ‘killing to make life live’ and the desire – expressed through mecha-¶ nisms of
control – to immediately locate, position and track persons of interest¶ across a governmental
environment that is being conceived on a planetary scale¶ (Deleuze, 1992; Dillon and Reid,
2009; Foucault, 1977 and 2003). These logics¶ resonate, combine and reformulate throughout
the myriad projects of global¶ counter-insurgency. Yet, the resiliency of existing networks of
opposition, ongoing¶ micro-resistances to Western governance, and the adoption of a strategic
doctrine of¶ insurgency that privileges the unpredictability of ‘the swarm’ over the pursuit of¶
omniscient command and control mean that targeted killing also encapsulates the¶ very
failure of these forms of governmental power to deliver what they individually¶ promise:
imperial aggrandisement, docile bodies, governable populations and/or¶ security through the
tempering of flows of people, ideas and capabilities said to pose¶ risks.1 Targeted killing does
not deter. Targeted killing does not disrupt. Despite a¶ marked increase in the number of
targeted killings performed since 2008, insur-¶ gencies that have been subject to the practice
have neither disintegrated nor¶ stopped their resistance. Despite its counterproductiveness, it
is frustration and¶ anxiety over the failure of the global counter-insurgency campaign to
successfully¶ impose the preferred global order on ‘ungoverned areas’ that continues to give
the¶ practice policy traction (Lamb, 2007).¶
UAV’s create a global panopticon of disciplinary control
Wilcox 9
(Lauren, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, “Body Counts: The Politics of
Embodiment in Precision Warfare”)
Foucault’s critique of power/knowledge is also particularly relevant in terms of precision
bombing. That bodies are made intelligible through knowledgeable discourses focuses our
attention on the ways in which the knowledge that is used in bombing is produced. The
aspiration for total sight, total destructive capability for the entire globe is not limited to the
specifics of precision weapons systems, but is a defining component to the so-called Revolution
in Military Affairs. The RMA is a discourse in which information is central to warfare, as “the new
metaphysic of power” in warfare (Dillon and Reid 2001, 59). The creation, control, and transfer
of information are crucial components of the liberal war machine. Proponents of the RMA
proclaim knowledge as the foundation of American military supremacy. (Nye and Owens 1996).
“Total Information Awareness,” is the goal of the Information Awareness Office, a DARPA
program formerly symbolized by an all-seeing eye casting its laser-like gaze over the entire
planet. The motto is, fittingly, ‘scientia est potentia,’ or ‘knowledge is power’. Ostensibly defunded in 2003, its key projects have been funded under other programs. This is but one
example of the goal of a global ‘panopticon’ in order to ensure military superiority. This
omniscient power is productive of a division of the world between those with the superhuman visual capabilities and the objects of that knowledge, produced as potential terrorists
under the disciplining gaze. ¶ Precision warfare is also characterized by risk-aversion in both the
means of fighting and reasons for war. While precision warfare involves constant calculation of
risks to both soldiers and civilians, it should be noted that ‘risk’ as prevalent concern is not a
concept that is essential and unavoidable. Kessler and Werner note, “risk is not a ‘thing’
independent of human practices or social relations. It is not a property of an objectively given
reality, nor is it a psychological law. Rather, risk names the boundary of both what is known
and unknown and the particular war in which the ‘unknown’ is made known,” (Kessler and
Werner 2008). Risks are a product of specific discourses of threat and danger on one hand, and
technologies of control on the other.
Drones extends the global reach of the panopticon
Wilcox 9
(Lauren, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, “Body Counts: The Politics of
Embodiment in Precision Warfare”)
The use of drones continues the extension of the space of the battlefield as well as the time of
war indefinitely. By surpassing the limits of the ‘normal biopolitical body’ through the
inculcation of cyborg subjectivities invested with sovereign power over life and death,
precision warfare is a means of constituting the global reach of the panopticon: “the oldest
dream of the oldest sovereign” (Foucault 2007, 66). Sovereign power over the individualized
bodies of terrorists is exercised simultaneously with the biopolitical rationality of risk
management that characterizes the ‘accidental’ deaths of civilians who are killed as a result of
the high-tech targeting of terrorists.
Biopolitics – Surveillance I/L
Drones are biopolitical surveillance – they are produced by a technostrateic
discourse.
Wall, Tyler, Eastern Kentucky University. “Surveillance and Violence From Afar: The Politics of
Drones and Liminal Security Scapes.” Theoretical Criminology. 2011.
The corporeal politics of space, place, and identity are powerfully inflected by techno- logical
systems of remote surveillance and violence. This is especially evident with drones, or
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which the US and other governments have been deploying
with greater frequency across a diverse range of territories (CNN, 2010; Lewis, 2010). Drones
have garnered recent media attention as remote-controlled, kill-at- a-distance technologies,
which allow soldier ‘pilots’ stationed potentially thousands of miles away to collect military
intelligence, identify targets, and fire missiles at suspected enemies. In addition to being used
in warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and northern Pakistan, UAV systems are being used for
managing emergencies caused by natural disasters (Dean, 2007), spying on foreign drug cartels
(Padgett, 2009), finding criminal activity in urban and rural areas (Lewis, 2010; Public
Intelligence, 2010), and conducting border control operations (Walters and Weber, 2010). While
drones appear to affirm the primacy of visual modalities of surveillance, their underlying
rationalities are more nuanced and problematic. As complex technological systems, drones are
both predicated upon and productive of an actuarial form of surveillance. They are employed
to amass data about risk probabilities and then manage populations or eliminate network
nodes considered to exceed acceptable risk thresholds. In part, drones are forms of
surveillance in keeping with the precepts of categorical suspicion and social sorting that define
other contemporary surveillance systems (Gandy, 1993; Murakami Wood et al., 2006; Lyon,
2007; Monahan, 2010). Drones may perform pre- dominately in the discursive register of
automated precision and positive identification of known threats, but in practice, these
surveillance systems and their agents actively interpret ambiguous information that
continuously defies exact matches or clear responses. In the process, UAV systems may force
homogenization upon difference, thereby reducing variation to functional categories that
correspond to the needs and biases of the operators, not the targets, of surveillance. All
surveillance and dataveillance systems are prone to errors that have harsh ramifications for the
subjects whose flawed ‘data doubles’ haunt them (Haggerty and Ericson, 2006). Drone-based
surveillance systems are no exception, as witnessed by verified cases of ‘collateral damage’
caused by drone strikes (Bergen and Tiedemann, 2010). Drones also illustrate some key
dynamics in the relationship between surveillance and militarization. These devices are woven
up in myths of technological superiority, objectivity, and control that help support their
adoption. By means of their supposed accuracy and precision, drone systems may encourage
the hostile targeting of threats in military settings while further inuring people to invisible
monitoring in domestic spheres. However, drones reveal important dissonances in
militarization processes. The narrative of rationalization is interrupted in telling ways—by
technological and human errors that kill innocent people, by emotional affect experienced by
drone operators who may feel closer to their targets than they would like, by innovative uses
of camouflage and monitoring of drone feeds by so-called enemies, and by media broadcasts
of these and other instabilities in drone systems. Thus, although general trends can be
discerned in the application of drones across territories, UAVs—like all systems of surveillance
and violence—are neither monolithic nor static; they are always multiple, contingent, and
negotiated. As such, analysis of drone systems requires us to acknowledge the violent or
dehumanizing potentials of such technologies, and be sensitive to the active mediation of such
logics by people and organizations in local contexts.
Through technostrategic means drones can implement a god like form of
surveillance that can be used to control large populations of people
Grayson 12 (Kyle, Senior Lec. At Newcastle University in Critical Geopolitics and International
Politics, “Six Theses on Targeted Killing,” Political Studies Association, Vol 32,
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01434.x/abstract>)
While the centrality of vision to practices of power has been identified by the likes¶ of Michel
Foucault (1977 and 1990) and Edward Said (1978), it is Allen Feldman¶ (1997, p. 30) who
suggests that ‘compulsory visibility is the rationality of state¶ counterinsurgency’. Targeted
killing is therefore predicated on ‘forms of visual¶ surveillance that authorise this form of
bodily intervention’ (Feldman, 1997, p. 27).¶ Targets must be visually identified, confirmed,
tracked and positioned relative to other people and material objects in the complex spaces of
everyday socio-¶ economic activity. Claims to the precise and discriminatory nature of the
practice¶ rest on a consensus about the veracity of the surveillance produced through forms¶ of
technologically enhanced vision which, in turn, are reliant on the operationali-¶ sation of a
specific scopic regime. According to Feldman (1997, p. 30), a scopic¶ regime refers to the means
and techniques:¶ ‘that prescribe modes of seeing and object visibility and that proscribe or
render¶ untenable other modes and objects of perception. A scopic regime is an ensemble¶ of
practices and discourses that establish truth claims, typicality, and credibility of¶ visual acts and
objects and politically correct modes of seeing’.¶ The scopic regime that operationalises targeted
killing is one that is shaped by¶ epistemological and aesthetic realism. The pursuit undertaken by
these practices of¶ seeing is verisimilitude. The scopic regime operates under the assumption
that¶ vision – through technological enhancement – can become an infallible sense¶ which
captures the physical world that exists independently of any subjective¶ perceptions that we
may have of it. The disembodied, ahistorical and objective¶ observation that helps to define this
vision is symbolic of what Donna Haraway¶ (1988, p. 581) refers to as the ‘god trick of seeing
everything from nowhere’. Those¶ that are identified, tracked, targeted and killed are
positioned as both ‘indubitable¶ recordings of what ... [was] simply there and as heroic feats
of technoscientific¶ production’ (Haraway, 1988, p. 582). The scopic regime thus encapsulates a
par-¶ ticularly masculine way of seeing that has developed through Western traditions in¶ the
sciences and humanities (Berger, 1972; Haraway, 1988; O’Tuathail, 1996).¶ Targeted killing
constructs a cyborg assemblage of seeing that surveys, targets¶ and exterminates. Remotely
piloted air systems (RPASs) with advanced camera¶ technology combine with a human
operator – and other forms of surveillance/¶ intelligence to which the operator has been made
privy – to produce an image of¶ the field of operation within which a targeted killing will take
place.2 The RPAS¶ then shifts these processes of visual recognition into a mode of physical
extermi-¶ nation, for as Feldman (1997, p. 38) notes, ‘[the RPAS becomes] a prosthetic that¶
extends ideology and visions of history into the depth of the human body, leaving¶ the dead
and depicted in its wake’.¶ But the argument that those who commit targeted killing possess a
detached and¶ disembodied vision which enables clinical precision when circumstances justify
its¶ deployment belies that such a vision is also an affective sensibility. To paraphrase¶ John
Berger’s (1972) observation on the history of female portraiture in Western¶ art, the body of the
targeted, in the roles as an object of surveillance and as a¶ physical conduit for the inscription of
military power, serves to flatter the one who¶ can view. This mode of ‘seeing without being
seen’ is constitutive of an asymmetri-¶ cal power relation that produces pleasure for the
viewer and can empower acts of¶ violence (Feldman, 1997, p. 40). Similarly, the
demonstration of ‘scopic power’¶ attempts to create anxiety for potential targets (and wider
populations) about being¶ monitored so that preferred norms are internalised and behaviour
is shaped into¶ forms more amenable to the goals of the counter-insurgency project
(Feldman,¶ 1997, p. 41). Therefore, while realism as a mode of seeing can be deployed as a¶
means of supporting ‘truth claims about the rationality and efficacy of political violence’, it also
produces a form of pleasure that can be addictive for the one with¶ the privilege of viewing
(Feldman, 1997, p. 41).¶\
Drone aerial surveillance is a violent epistomology
Addey et al 11 (Peter Addey, Mark Whitehead, Alison Williams et al.
"Introduction: Air-target
Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality." Theory, Culture & Society 28.7-8 2011).
We know that the symbolic crosshairs of the vertically perceived target has never encompassed
all there is to say or critique about the aerial view. However, underneath the imagery is an
increasingly extensive and yet para- doxically compressed matrix of practices that bring to bear
on the target the weight of, inter alia, statistical, operational and juridical forces in the context
of militaristic practices. Focusing, for instance, on the example of the US Air Force, Derek
Gregory has located an augmented ‘kill-chain’ (find, fix, track, target, engage, assess, in the
usual military jargon) of aerial targeting that effectively demonstrates this diversity and
expresses the technological shortening of distances and relationships, to reduce the chain
from target to kill: ‘from hours to minutes and ultimately from min- utes to seconds’ (Guetlein,
2005: 2). Gregory’s analysis uncovers the pro- cesses through which the apparatus of aerial
targeting builds and assembles an object, which has been identified within some environment or
milieu. For Gregory, what is performed through these processes demon- strates, as he argues
elsewhere, a ‘concatenation of aerial views produced through a process of calculation that
was also a process of abstraction’ (Gregory, 2011a). Within this system the air-target is in fact
made, per- formed and brought into being through long and complex procedures of
identification and calculation ^ which have evolved since early forms of ‘colonial policing’ (Legg,
2007; Omissi, 1990; Satia, 2008) ^ well before any strategies of action can be brought against it
(Adey, 2010a). These views, these ‘aerial perspectives’ for Caren Kaplan (2006; Kaplan and
Kelley, 2006), have gone hand in hand with ‘the rise of an imperial world view’ and are thus
‘intrinsic to the discursive representations of contemporary nation-states’. To these ends it is
clear that while pre-dating high altitude sur- veillance by many centuries, the aerial
viewpoints adopted and provided by the cartographers of state and empire established the
systems of legibility that were central to the formation of modern forms of territorial power
(see Saint-Amour, 2005; Scott, 1998). To put things another way, the aerial view- point appears
to be inescapably entangled in the very genesis of modern sys- tems of control, and the coeval
development of the target. When considering the longue dure¤ e of aerial power, however, it
is important to position related practices within their own particular historical and societal
contexts. The intensely calculative and intelligence-rich pro- cesses of the allied bombing ‘chain’
of reports, detailed maps and plans, models, mosaics and prints that would be circulated
throughout the intelli- gence network allowing ‘targets’ to be decided upon during the Second
World War, for example, were famously comparable with the Luftwaffe’s much less detailed and
‘contemporary’ knowledge. While the power of the aerial perspective pre-dates high altitude
surveillance, the air-target has always been connected to flight. Within the very origins of aerial
photogra- phy, and parallel histories of the deciphering of societal change from the air, the
target and the distanced eye of the aeroplane and the balloon have been complicit (see Kaplan,
forthcoming), as, for example, when aerial archaeology was born through the photographic
reconnaissance of hidden and camouflaged military installations on the Eastern Front (Cosgrove
and Fox, 2010). Aerial warfare would come to require a new form of the target- ing of the
enemy, which engaged particular forms of visualization and exam- ination, sequences of
interpretation and analysis, and deliberative processes of selection and decision-making with
regard to a suitable target. These evolving sorts of practices culminated in the Central Allied
Interpretation Unit’s work at Mendenham, Buckinghamshire, during the Second World War.
Drawing on the work of Crary (1992), it is thus possible to see the practices of air-targeting as
not merely a product of developments within the technologies of vision, but also
developments within the epistemologies of geographical knowledge production (see
Whitehead, 2009), and, as Gregory and Bishop show in this issue, those within wider scopic
regimes of visuality, wider forms of sensory reception ( Jay, 1994) and other domi- nant ways
of seeing, from landscape painting to modernist aesthetics and scientific exploration. These
violent epistemologies saw the early modern practices of territorial legibility and
consolidation replaced by an aerial epis- temology devoted to locating sites that could be used
to disrupt the territo- rial functioning of a community. A crucial component of these violent
epistemologies would be the cultivation, training and discipline of an aerial eye that was able
to interpret and target geographical phenomena in new ways and under new conditions of
aerial mobility (see here Foucault, 1991 [1975]), yet subtracted from the violence of war (Adey,
2010a; Saint- Amour, 2005). The dialectics of subjection and objectification, and proxim- ity and
distance, which enable the production of new subjects of aerial surveillance and targeting,
provide a crucial focus for this special section (Crary, 1992: 16).
Gender
Technostrategic discourse excludes feminist views
Cohn 93 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, “Wars,
Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” Gendering War Talk, Princeton
University Press,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/War,%20Wimps,%20and%20Women%20%20Cohn.pdf, pg. 3)
The story is not simply about on individual, his feelings and actions; it is about the role of gender
discourse. The impact of gender discourse in that room (and countless others like it) is that
some things get left out. Certain ideas, concerns, interests, information, feelings, and meaning
are marked in national security discourse as feminine, and are devalued. They are therefore,
first, very difficult to speak, as exemplified by the physicist who felt like a woman. And second,
they are very difficult to hear, to take in and work with seriously, even if they are said. For the
others in the room, the way in which the physicist’s comments were marked as female and
devalued served to delegimitate them. It is almost as though they had become an accidental
excrescence in the middle of the room. Embarrassed politeness demanded they by ignored.¶ I
must stress that this is not simply the product of the idiosyncratic personal composition of that
particular room. In other professional settings, I have experienced the feeling that something
terribly important is being left out and must be spoke; and yet, it has felt almost physically
impossible to utter the words, almost as though they could not be pushed out into the smooth,
cool, opaque air of the room.¶ What is that cannot be spoken? First, any words that express an
emotional awareness of the desperate human reality behind the sanitized abstractions of
death and destruction—as in the physicists sudden vision of thirty million rotting corpses.
Similarly, weapons; effects may be spoken of only in the most clinical and abstract terms,
leaving no room to imagine a seven year old boy with this flesh melting away from his bones
or a toddler with her skin hanging down in strips. Voicing concern about the number of
casualties in the enemy armed forces, imagine the suffering of the killed and wounded young
men, is out of bounds. (Within the military itself, it permissible, even desirable to attempt to
minimize immediate civilian casualties if it is possible to do s without compromising military
objectives, but as we learned in the Persian Gulf War, this is only an extremely limited
enterprise; the planning and precision of military targeting does not admit of consideration of
the cost in human lives of such actions as destroying power systems, or water and sewer
systems, or highways and food distribution systems.) Psychological effects—on the soldiers
fighting the war or on the citizens injured, or fearing for their own safety, or living through
tremendous deprivation, or helplessly watching their babies die from diarrhea due to the lack
of clean water—all of these are not to be talked about.¶ But it not only particular subjects that
out of bounds. It is also tone of voice that counts. A speaking style that is identified as cool,
dispassionate, and distanced is required. One that vibrates with the intensity of emotion
almost always disqualifies the speaker, who is heard to sound like a “hysterical housewife.” ¶
What gets left out, then is the emotional, the concrete, the particular, the human bodies and
their vulnerability, human lives and their subjectivity—all of which are marked as feminine in
the binary dichotomies of gender discourse. In other words, gender discourse informs and
shapes nuclear and national security discourse, and in so doing creates silences and absences.
It keeps things out of the room, unsaid, and keeps them ignored if the manage to get in. As
such, it degrades our ability to think well and fully about nuclear weapons and national
security, and shapes and limits the possible outcomes of our deliberations.
Hegemony
Drones maintain American hegemonic control
Wall, Tyler, Eastern Kentucky University. “Surveillance and Violence From Afar: The Politics of
Drones and Liminal Security Scapes.” Theoretical Criminology. 2011.
West (Shaw, 2005). Central to common representations of virtuous warfare, and especially
aerial warfare, is the idea that the USA is technologically superior to other countries in its war
capabilities, particularly because of its reliance on ‘smart bombs’ and ‘precision-guided
missiles’ that distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate targets (Der Derian, 2001). This,
in turn, brings about an expectation that militaries should go to great lengths to use their
violence in discriminatory ways that target combatants while avoiding civilians (Beier, 2003).
Militaries in technologically advanced countries such as the US embrace this rhetoric to assert
that they have the capacity to conduct war in more legal and moral ways than less
technologically advanced countries (Beier, 2003). Of course, claims to technological
sophistication are always relative ones that can invite hubris on the part of those parties
presuming superiority. This was revealed when it was discovered in 2009 that Iraqi insurgents
had accessed unencrypted video footage from US Predator drones (Gorman et al., 2009). This
example, while embarrassing for US military officials, illustrates a paradox in the construction
of the enemy other. Insurgents were apparently presumed too backward and unsophisticated
to tap unen- crypted signals broadcasted by the USA. By intercepting these signals with
apparent ease using ‘$26 off-the-shelf software’ (Gorman et al., 2009) and storing the feeds on
laptop computers, the enemy effectively elevated its own symbolic legitimacy as civilized peoples, in large part because in the West technological achievement and ability are often
equated with civilization (Adas, 1989). The enemy moreover demonstrated its agency and its
refusal to become a legible and docile object for western control. People who are aware of
adversarial monitoring from the skies also engage in tactics to evade the drone stare.
Specifically, subjects of drone surveillance have tried to be stealthier and camouflage
themselves better than they have in the past. In the North 248 Theoretical Criminology 15(3)
Waziristan region of Pakistan where drone surveillance and violence has been heavily
concentrated, the standard ways in which militants have traditionally traveled, slept, and
communicated has been significantly altered by the aerial gaze of UAVs, according to some local
sources (Perlez and Shah, 2010). Combatants have allegedly abandoned ‘sat- ellite phones and
large gatherings in favor of communicating by courier and moving stealthily in small groups’
while also establishing hide-outs in mountainside tunnels and relying more on civilian-looking
transportation as opposed to ‘all-terrain vehicles’ (Perlez and Shah, 2010). In addition, if past
ruses of camouflage and spatial deception employed by undocumented immigrants along US
border regions are good indicators, undocumented migrants seeking entrance to the USA will
find new ways of subverting and disappearing from the gaze of UAVs (Corchado, 2003). Still,
discourses of technological accuracy and hegemonic control persist. According to one drone
operator: unlike all the other weapons systems out there, I can control collateral damage to a
much greater degree in this and I can minimize it and negate it because if I see a high-value
individual—one of those jackpot guys—that I want to prosecute an attack on I’m not limited
by gas. I’m not limited by the physiological constraints of the air crew. I’ll swap another air
crew out. I’ll bring another plane out and have them run in there ... and I will stay with that
individual until the time is right by my making. (Rattansi, 2010) But the discourse of
discriminatory precision bombing is primarily a fantasy because civilians are still the most
common victims of aerial warfare (Tanaka and Young, 2009). In addition, ‘accuracy’ is a social
construction, even in the context of advanced missile delivery systems (MacKenzie, 1993).
Although the extent to which US drone missile attacks have killed foreign civilians is highly
contested, it is widely recognized that Hellfire missiles have killed people who were not
‘legitimate targets’ (Bergen and Tiedemann, 2010). Official Pakistani sources claim that
approximately 700 civilians were killed in 2009 alone, and in a study of US drone attacks in
Pakistan from 2004 to early 2010, the New America Foundation found that around 32 percent
of drone-induced deaths during this time were civilians (Bergen and Tiedemann, 2010)
Technostrategy I/L
Technostategic Discourse leads to Distancing
Blumenthal 2013 (Max Blumenthal, former Senior Writer of The Daily Beast, “Shocking
'Extermination' Fantasies By the People Running America's Empire on Full Display at Aspen
Summit” July 25, 2013, < http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/shocking-exterminationfantasies-people-running-americas-empire-full-display>)
Following the gales of cheering that resounded from the room, Mattis, the gruff 40-year Marine
veteran who once volunteered his opinion [3] that “it’s fun to shoot some people,” outlined
the challenge ahead. The “war on terror” that began on 9/11 has no discernable end, he said,
likening it to the “the constant skirmishing between [the US cavalry] and the Indians” during
the genocidal Indian Wars of the 19th century.¶ “The skirmishing will go on likely for a
generation,” Mattis declared. Mattis’ remarks, made beside a cable news personality who acted
more like a sidekick than a journalist, set the tone for the entire 2013 Aspen Security Forum this
July. A project of the Aspen Institute, the Security Forum brought together the key figures
behind America’s vast national security state, from military chieftains like Mattis to embattled
National Security Agency Chief General Keith Alexander to top FBI and CIA officials, along with
the bookish functionaries attempting to establish legal groundwork for expanding the war on
terror.¶ Partisan lines and ideological disagreements faded away inside the darkened
conference hall, as a parade of American securitocrats from administrations both past and
present appeared on stage to defend endless global warfare and total information awareness
while uniting in a single voice of condemnation against a single whistleblower bunkered inside
the waiting room of Moscow International Airport: Edward Snowden.¶ With perhaps one
notable exception, none of the high-flying reporters junketed to Aspen to act as interlocutors
seemed terribly interested in interrogating the logic of the war on terror. The spectacle was a
perfect window into the world of access journalism, with media professionals brown-nosing
national security elites committed to secrecy and surveillance, avoiding overly adversarial
questions but making sure to ask the requisite question about how much Snowden has caused
terrorists to change their behavior.¶ Jeff Harris, the communications director for the Aspen
Institute, did not respond to questions I submitted about whether the journalists who
participated in the Security Forum accepted fees. (It is likely that all relied on Aspen to at least
cover lodging and travel costs). CNN sponsored the forum through a special new website called
CNN Security Clearance, promoting the event through Twitter and specially commissioned opeds [4] from participating national security figures like former CIA director John McLaughlin.¶
Another forum sponsor was Academi, the private mercenary corporation formerly known as
Blackwater. In fact, Academi is Blackwater’s third incarnation (it was first renamed “Xe”) since
revelations of widespread human rights abuses and possible war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan
threw the mercenary firm into full damage control mode. The Aspen Institute did not respond to
my questions about whether accepting sponsorship from such an unsavory entity fit within its
ethical guidelines.
Technostrategic discourse masculinizes the speaker and encourages them to
deny the reality of warfighting
Cohn 93 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, “Wars,
Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” Gendering War Talk, Princeton
University Press,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/War,%20Wimps,%20and%20Women%20%20Cohn.pdf, pg. 3)
Let us know return to the physicist who felt like a woman: what happened when he “blurted
out” his sudden awareness of the “only thirty million” dead people? First, he was
transgressing a code of professional conduct. In the civilian defense intellectuals world, when
you are in professional settings you do not discuss the bloody reality behind the calculations.
It is not required that you be completely unaware of them in your outside life, or that you have
no feelings about them, but it is required that you not bring them to the foreground in the
context of professional activities. There is a general awareness that you could not do your work
if you did; in addition, most defense intellectuals believe that emotion and description of
human reality distorts the process required to think well about nuclear weapons and warfare.
¶ So the physicist violated a behavioral norm, in and of itself a difficult thing to do because it
threatens your relationships to and your standing with your colleagues. ¶ But even worse than
that, he demonstrated some of the characteristics on the “female” side of the dichotomies—in
his “blurting” he was impulsive, uncontrolled, emotional, concrete, and attentive to human
bodies, at the very least. Thus, he marked himself not only as unprofessional but as feminine,
this, in turn, was doubly threatening. It was not only a threat to his own sense of self as
masculine, his gender identity, it also identified him with a devalued status—of a woman—or
put him in the devalued or subordinate position in the discourse. ¶ Thus both his statement, “I
felt like a woman,” and his subsequent silence in that and other settings are completely
understandable. To have the strength of character and courage to transgress the strictures of
both professional and gender codes and to associate yourself with a lower status is very difficult.
FATA
Drone Strikes in the FATA Continue to Cause Civilian Casualties That Only Serve
to Exemplify the Price of Western Hegemony and Imperialism
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
Obama’s ostensible reversal of Bush’s legally dubious policies of ‘enhanced interrogation’ and
Guantánamo detention is offset by an intensification of an equally dubious drone program (Ofek
2010). Following President George W. Bush, Obama has dramatically increased the deployment
of drones, both officially and through clandestine CIA operations. In 2009 there were over 50
of these controversial strikes in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA),
compared with 45 during the entire administration of Bush (Bergen and Tiedemann 2010). The
CIA’s use of drones in ¶ Pakistani territory (operated from Langley, Virginia) to assassinate AlQaeda militants is wildly unpopular, with only 9% of Pakistanis supporting it (Al Jazeera 2009).
And this is hardly surprising. Despite the official rhetoric of clinical kills and surgical strikes,
civilian casualties are heavy, and the suffering is far messier than the digital imagery from the
sky presents. Death counts are always disputed, but the New America Foundation website
(updated regularly) states that since 2004 there have been 205 drone attacks in ¶ Pakistan
responsible for between 1,294 and 1,989 deaths, of which between 983 and ¶ 1,453 were
described as ‘militants’ by the press [http://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/drones]. In 2010,
91 percent of these strikes were in North Waziristan. Despite this ramped up activity in the
region, ‘the U.S. drone strikes don’t seem to have had any great effect on the Taliban’s ability
to mount operations in Pakistan…’ (Berger and Tiedemann 2010:5). ¶ Given that Pakistan is an
ally of the U.S.-led ‘war on terror’, the mounting toll of civilian deaths continues to strain a
rather contradictory relationship with Washington. The Pakistani government both privately
supports and publically condemns the drone attacks. It is this split between Pakistan-asfrontline state and Pakistan-as-sovereign nation that scars the embattled region of FATA; a
region that has long held geopolitical significance. In this sense, we can situate the drone
program in the well-worn circuit of ¶ Western hegemony and empire (Agnew 2003; Watson
2010), fed by the brutal dialectic of capitalism and imperialism (Harvey 2005, Roberts et al
2003). Indeed, little has changed in the geo-legal logics operating in tribal areas along the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border from the British Empire to the postcolonial state of Pakistan. What
are similar in each case are the processes that render this territory as exceptional (Agamben
1998, 2005). Similar to the extant work of geographers that have dealt with sovereignty and
spaces of exception (Elden 2009; Gregory 2004, 2006, 2007, 2010; Ramadan 2009; Reid-¶ Henry
2007), we argue for the significance of the law in rendering people and places vulnerable to
violent intervention. However, the story of FATA is different because of the political work that
the drone itself carries out in relation to the law.
The USFG has taken advantage of the state of exception of FATA where they
paradoxically operate legally and illegally through their use of drones. Because
of the ambiguous nature of FATA, the USFG can carry out extreme abuse of
human rights.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12. Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
There are two interrelated approaches to capture the spatial complexities of FATA,¶ Pakistan.
First, the region falls under Agamben’s (1998, 2005) definition of a “state of exception”—where
the juridical protections of law are suspended and the sovereign¶ is able to subject the territory
to unmitigated violence and torture (eg Gregory¶ 2004, 2006, 2007, 2010; Ramadan 2009). Such
a reading is one that illustrates the¶ processes through which the Pakistani government turns
a “blind eye” to the CIA’s¶ bombing campaign, leaving hundreds of civilians dead in its legal
shadow. Second,¶ after Elden (2009), we can consider the state of Pakistan itself as being
rendered¶ contingent. That is, given the failings of the Pakistani government to control its¶
territory in the face of real and perceived terrorist networks, its own sovereignty¶ is no longer
guaranteed—and in the interest of maintaining territorial integrity—¶ international
intervention is pursued.¶ Agamben’s (1998) state of exception is a lawless space, precisely
because the¶ sovereign has mandated that it be so, and by “withdrawing” the sovereign is
able¶ to enact an excess of law. The logic of sovereignty for Agamben is thus a logic¶ founded
on the very collision between an excess of law and a lack of law. This¶ process is always
already spatial, both domestically and internationally. Speaking to¶ the former, Braun and
McCarthy (2005:808) write:¶ If Guantanamo Bay revealed a democracy that was fully able and
willing to use its power¶ to cast noncitizens outside political life—a fact troubling to many but
certainly not all¶ Americans—Katrina revealed that the potential for abandoned being is
present and often¶ realized in the spaces of the nation itself, in its cities, streets, sewers,
markets, housing,¶ and hospitals.¶ Spaces of exception also exist around the globe, in black sites
and war prisons that¶ span an invisible geography. As Gregory (2007:226) surmises:¶ The very
language of “extraordinary rendition,” “ghost prisoners,” and “black sites”¶ implies something
out of the ordinary, spectral, a twilight zone: a serial space of the¶ exception. But this
performative spacing works through the law to annul the law; it is not¶ a “state” of exception
that can be counterposed to a rule-governed world of “normal”¶ politics and power. It is, at
bottom, a process of juridical othering that involves three¶ overlapping mechanisms: the
creation of special rules that withdraw legal protections . . . ;¶ the calculated outsourcing of
war crimes to regimes known to practice torture; and the¶ exploitation of extra-territorial sites
where prisoners are detained and tortured at the¶ pleasure of sovereign power.¶ If Gregory’s
Agamben-fuelled critique points to a networked geography of¶ exceptional sites, a legal-lethal
space where “politico-juridical instruments [are used]¶ to exempt categories of people from the
responsibilities or the protections of the¶ law” (Gregory 2010:177), then Elden’s analytic
encompasses entire states. Arguing¶ against deterritorialized political visions, his analytic pivots
on the status of territory:¶ “Yet while we should certainly rethink and examine, and be open to
an analysis¶ of the new, we must not forget that the war has thus far been fought with a very¶
conventional sense of territory in mind—territory that has been targeted, bombed,¶ and
invaded” (Elden 2009:xx). By giving a detailed and empirically rich account¶ of the UN’s
progressive move towards intervention, Elden writes: “a state that¶ fails to exercise one of the
standard definitions of sovereignty—effective political¶ control of the ‘monopoly of legitimate
physical violence’ within its territory—finds¶ that its sovereignty more generally is held to be
‘contingent’” (2009:162). FATA is” emblematic of this process, with the failure of the Pakistani
government to control¶ its own territory rendering the FATA region vulnerable to outside
intervention, in¶ this case, the attacks of the US drone army.¶ A word of caution is necessary
here. We are not saying that Pakistan deserves to¶ be violently invaded because it fails to enact
control of FATA. Nor are we saying¶ that FATA’s “exceptional” status justifies “exceptional”
violence. We have narrated¶ the geo-legal history of FATA by invoking Agamben’s “state of
exception” not¶ to exonerate imperial belligerence and “blame the victim”, but rather to
disrupt¶ chauvinistic portrayals of invaded peripheries as passive and listless when confronted¶
with the active military might of the metropole. The Pakistani state, following¶ its imperial
predecessors, has actively created FATA as an exceptional region: an¶ aberration that exists
outside of the state’s constitutional laws. This process of judicial¶ abandonment, an old
colonial performance, has created a volatile landscape that in¶ turn produces conditions
conducive for international intervention. But the necessary¶ twist here is that the intervention
is itself exceptional in the form of the Predator¶ drone, an object with a fetishized
metaphysical status. Taken together, drone and¶ FCR act in concert to produce the space for
war in FATA, Pakistan—a topology of¶ technology and law.¶ The legal space that drones operate
in is thus located in the deadly residue of drone¶ and document. The ongoing silence of the CIA
with respect to its drone operations in¶ Pakistan is raising international and national criticism.
Recent Congressional hearings¶ in the USA have debated this, with much of the discussion
centered on what¶ counts as a legitimate “target” for assassination and “self-defense”. Indeed,
the CIA’s¶ drone strikes are controversial precisely because they exist in a shadowy vacuum
of¶ accountability. As the UN Special Rapporteur (on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary¶ executions) Phillip Alston puts it, “Transparency is required by both
[international¶ humanitarian law] and human rights law. A lack of disclosure gives States a virtual¶ and impermissible license to kill” (Alston 2010). This led a prominent law
professor¶ to suggest that drone pilots could be liable for war crimes (Hodge 2010). Currently,¶ US drone attacks are justified following 9/11, an event that led Congress to grant
the¶ President the ability to use all necessary force against persons he determines planned,¶ authorized, committed, or aided the attacks of 9/11 (“The authorization for use of¶
military force against terrorists”, Public Law 107–40). In addition to domestic law,¶ the USA relies on international law in the guise of Article 51 of the UN Charter:¶ A targeted
killing conducted by one State in the territory of a second State does not¶ violate the second State’s sovereignty if either (a) the second State consents, or (b) the¶ first,
targeting, State has a right under international law to use force in self-defence under¶ Article 51 of the UN Charter, because (i) the second State is responsible for an armed¶
attack against the first State, or (ii) the second State is unwilling or unable to stop armed¶ attacks against the first State launched from its territory. International law permits
Both the CIA and
Pakistani government remain tight-lipped on the drone program,¶ allowing it to persist in
deadly silence and continually undo FATA’s sovereignty.¶ This is opposed to Alston’s (2010:27) recommendation that “If a State
the¶ use of lethal force in self-defence in response to an “armed attack” as long as that force¶ is necessary and proportionate (Alston 2010:12).¶
commits a targeted killing in the territory of another State, the second State should publicly¶ indicate whether it gave consent, and on what basis”. US State Department Legal¶
Advisor Harold Koh has defended the drone program, arguing the attacks against¶ suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban targets are bundled into the nation’s legitimate¶ right to selfdefense: “Koh also asserted that in targeting suspected militants via¶ drone strikes the United States was adhering to basic international humanitarian¶ law rules regarding
The status¶ of
“civilian” is therefore worryingly undermined by the drone. As one professor and¶ legal scholar
at George Washington University, puts it:¶ . . . instead of apologizing each time the wrong
individual is targeted or collateral damage¶ is caused,we should stress that the issue would be
largely resolved in short order if the abusive¶ civilians would stop their abusive practices and
fight—if they must—according to established¶ rules of war. They cannot have it both ways . . .
(Etzioni 2010:67: emphasis in original).¶ There is therefore much at stake in drone warfare,
including the status of those¶ civilians under the constant watch of the Predator; human beings
that are so often¶ translated into statistical and targeted calculations. In this sense, our
argument is¶ that the US-led attacks in FATA result from the interactions between the drone
itself¶ and the legal history of Pakistan’s northwest, enshrined in FCR of 1901. Both of¶ these
objects act in concert to produce an exceptional and contingent space. In this¶ sense, territory
is itself a shifting outcome of wider political processes. Never does it¶ sit there, and never
does it sit still.
distinction and proportionality. These rules, meant to protect¶ civilians from harm, do not protect civilians absolutely” (Mariner 2010).
Impacts
Civilian Casualties
Virtual War’s Separation Leads to the False Appearance of No Civilian Casualties
Booth ‘13 Sebastian Booth “Does distance or Remoteness Affect How Human Beings Use and
Respond to Violence?” e-International Relations 2/19/13 http://www.eir.info/2013/02/19/does-distance-or-remoteness -affect-how-human-beings-use-and-respondto-violence/
I will use Johan Galtung’s typology of violence – this encompasses ‘direct’ violence, ‘structural
violence’ and ‘cultural violence’ – but all can be reduced down to a common denominator,
that is, the unwanted and unnecessary impairment of human life to a standard below that of
which is required to meet their needs. This could include anything from simple economic
exploitation to injury and, ultimately, death (Galtung, 1996:197). Recent NATO conflicts have
become more technologically asymmetrical. As a result of this, Michael Ignatieff has presented
the theory of “virtual war”: a reduced-risk war are that uses technology to remove the
aggressor from the situation (2001:162). A perfect example is Operation “Unified Protector”,
the NATO intervention in Libya, which consisted of over 26,500 sorties, including 9,700
airstrikes, destroying over 5,900 military targets (NATO, 2011). Yet the only official casualty on
the NATO side was a British airman who was killed in a car accident in Italy whilst on
deployment. This seems to sum up Ignatieff ’s contention with modern warfare; “technological
mastery removed death from our experience of war. But war without death – to our side – is
war that ceases to be fully real to us” (2001:4). However, it seems that ‘virtual war’ may
perhaps be the only means by which interventions can be conducted: a 2011 YouGov poll
revealed that only 17% agreed to possibly sending armed troops to Libya even after the
conflict had ‘ended’ (YouGov, 2011). Furthermore, UN Resolution 1973, which legally
sanctioned the intervention, explicitly prohibited the deployment of NATO troops to Libyan soil.
Although the nature of this intervention reduced the risk to NATO forces, they did not act with
any degree of impunity – the Libyan military was specifically targeted and there was a relatively
low amount of civilian deaths. In this situation, spatial¶ distance reduces the risk to those
intervening; with such technology at NATO’s disposal, it seems intangible not to employ such
means. Bradley Strawser agrees, claiming that militaries are morally obliged to use Predator
drones for the sole purpose of protecting their lives but only in the context of a justified conflict
(2010:362). But what of civilian deaths – does this distance make them more likely?¶ Virtual
war has created the belief that war can be “clean” (Ignatieff, 2001:164). President Obama’s
justification for using drones in the regions of Waziristan are based on such beliefs – in his
Google+ ‘hangout’ he announced that “they [drone attacks] have been very precise, precision
strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates” (BBC News, 31/01/2012). Interwoven into this
language is the thought that warfare can be carried out with no consequences to civilians; a
Human Rights Watch Report, Unacknowledged Deaths; Civilian Casualties in NATO’s Air
Campaign in Libya, condemns the 72 civilian deaths that occurred as a result of NATO airstrikes.
Furthermore, the Brookings Institute , despite conceding that drones are the US’s only option
in North-western Pakistan, have revealed that such attacks have resulted in 10 civilians death
for every targeted insurgent (Byman, 2009). Although these civilian deaths cannot be
condoned, they seem to be consistent with civilian casualties in other conflicts: 79% of all
casualties in the Iraq War (2003-2011) were civilians, and when viewing the methods of
violence, we see that it is gunfire that caused the majority of civilian deaths (fig1
iraqbodycount.org, 2012). Thus it appears that distance does not necessarily lead to violence
with impunity.¶ Furthermore, distinctions between civilian and combatant have become
increasingly tedious in the current ‘War¶ on Terror’. In September 2012, a suicide attack at Kabul
International Airport was conducted by a 22 year old woman, and it is very possible that in other
circumstances she would be regarded as a civilian. Indeed, Francois Debrix, building on
Kristeva’s theory of abjection, claims that in the War on Terror there is no distinguishable
enemy – the binary distinction of the ‘Other’ has been blurred by the tabloid press, creating
an environment in which anybody could be implicated for terrorist activities (Debrix,2007:88).
Inherent in these condemnations is the thought that this remote-controlled warfare seems to
emotionally detach the aggressor from the situation and increase the likelihood of civilian
deaths. How can we unravel this paradox, which combines the belief that these methods are
more precise with the outspoken abhorrence towards civilian casualties? Carol Cohn (1985)
informs us that the language surrounding contemporary warfare (for example words such as
“precision” and “collateral damage”) serves to distort the realities of warfare. This , along
with the reduced risk to drone pilots, distances the general public from the reality of war and
creates a false narrative claiming that no civilians are killed. This is to the detriment of the
armed forces – the controversy surrounding civilian deaths serves to reduce public support f or
the War on Terror.
Drones are responsible for killings all over the world, many of which are called
“accidents”
Webb, Wirbel, and Sulzman 2010 (Dave Webb, Convener of the GN board, Loring Wirbel,
Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, Bill Sulzman, Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, From
Space, No One Can Watch You Die. Peace Review, 22(1), p.32)
Currently, drones are being used or developed in over forty countries (including Belarus,
Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Georgia) for a variety of activities. Some analysts have suggested that
Georgian drones, obtained from Israel, outperformed Russia (who also buys Israeli drones) in
aerial intelligence during the conflict in August 2008. Hundreds of people in Afghanistan have
been killed by drone attacks, and Israel has been accused of killing twenty-nine Palestinian
civilians with drones during the January conflict. In addition, in their rush to deploy, the U.S. Air
Force has acknowledged numerous accidents and crashes that have resulted in serious injuries
and deaths. In September, a report in The Register gave details of how a U.S. Reaper ‘‘rebelled
against its human controllers above Afghanistan’’ and had to be shot down by a manned U.S.
fighter jet ‘‘before it unilaterally invaded a neighbouring country.’’ Today, U.S. forces are
flying heavily armed drones over Pakistan every hour of the day. Predator attacks have been
responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, including scores of women and children. In
June, a drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral in South Waziristan in Pakistan.
The US manages and kills people under the guise of accidents to rid themselves
of all responsibility while still maintaining hegemonic control of populations.
Wilcox 9
(Lauren, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, “Body Counts: The Politics of
Embodiment in Precision Warfare”)
By privileging the question of just how ‘precise’ precision weapons are, both proponent and
critics of precision warfare operate in the discourse of risk in which death and destruction are
probabilistic rather than absolute. The deaths of civilians and ‘our’ soldiers are carefully
managed. Patricia Owens argues that the ‘accidents’ in precision bombing that kill scores of
civilians are not really ‘accidents’ per se, but are rather part of a discourse associated with
technological progress legitimizes such civilian deaths under the guise of ‘accidents’ (Owens
2003). ‘Accidents’ furthermore help sustain the hegemonic status quo in which US and NATO
campaigns are framed as ‘humanitarian’. The portrayal of civilian casualties as ‘accidents’ by
officials and in the popular press along with constant claims of military planners of the
precautions taken to avoid civilian casualties serve to shield politicians and the military from
responsibility for these civilian deaths. ‘Accidental’ deaths are seen as inevitable even with
the most precise weapons are used. The word ‘even’ here is instructive. Accidental massacres
are attributed to human, not technological error. For example, the attack on Al-Firdos bunker
in which three hundred civilians were killed is described as one of the most precise of the war:
an intelligence failure as to the facility’s use was the only thing preventing this mission from
being a complete success (Rip and Jasik 2002, 321). The bombing of the Chinese embassy in
Sarajevo has been attributed to the use of outdated maps or to improper targeting information.
The infamous bombing of a wedding party in Afghanistan has been attributed to errors made
by the ground spotters.
The epistemological blurring of the line between a militant and civilians has
caused massive civilian deaths. Drones kill 10 civilians for every militant
Wilcox 9
(Lauren, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, “Body Counts: The Politics of
Embodiment in Precision Warfare”)
While the ‘terrorists’ are targeted for death, a large number of the people actually killed in
precision warfare are civilians. The ‘spectacle’ of punishment in bombing is the destruction of
buildings and non-human targets; the death of people, whether soldiers or civilians with some
important exceptions, is hidden from view. Where the just war tradition sees death in war as
glorious sacrifice on behalf of the nation, death is a mistake, an accident, in precision warfare
(Elshtain 1995 [1987]). Apart from the much discussed ‘CNN effect,’ in which Western countries
are seen to be reluctant cause civilian casualties or endure casualties of their own military forces
due the supposed lack of political support for such missions, the avoidance or hiding of death
can be seen as part of a broader process of liberal warfare. Challenging this vision of the
perfectability of war, Beier argues “there is an indeterminacy inherent in the use of precisionguided munitions (PGMs), even when the weapons themselves perform as intended,” (Beier
2006, 267). While the military stresses the procedures used to distinguish civilians from the
intended targets, drones reportedly kill ten civilians for every militant death (Byman 2009). 87
civilians were killed in 42 drone attacks in Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip between
December 2008 and January 2009 (Human Rights Watch 2009). ¶ The legitimacy of precision
bombing is based on up the just war and international humanitarian law principles of
discrimination and double effect. Civilians are not to be the target of military attacks, but their
unintended deaths are acceptable insofar as their deaths are not deemed disproportionate to
war aims. The deaths of civilians in places were precision bombs are being dropped are
produced as an accident, a calculated if unfortunate risk, and whose deaths must be down
played and hidden from view. The practices of precision warfare suggest a different
understanding of the subject of violence than concept of civilian is meant to imply. While
enforcement of the principle of civilian immunity has historically been more honored in the
breach than the observance, the principles of precision warfare indicate an understanding who
should be killed, who can be killed, and who must be protected that is at odds with the
civilian/combatant distinction. ¶ Those to whom violence is done to ‘accidentally’ are constituted
as ‘bodies that don’t matter’. Civilian deaths are considered tragic, but acceptable.
Distancing – Responsibility
The US’s insistence to use drones in no fly zones ignores the consequences of
war and makes violence acceptable
Addey et al 11 (Peter Addey, Mark Whitehead, Alison Williams et al. "Introduction: Air-target
Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality." Theory, Culture & Society 28.7-8 2011).
Perhaps as a consequence of what many refer to as Network Centric Warfare, aerial targeting is
focused on the construction of the target which is in itself a sign for part of a system. What
else does an aerial target imply other than its ‘marking’? As opposed to a ‘location’, a target for
all kinds of purposes ^ as Kaplan has outlined in relation to targeting’s politi- cal-economies ^
refers to not only the identification of something or some- body but the ability to ‘clearly’ mark
or recognize something in space and time which has been increasingly understood as systemic
and relational, or, as Stephen Graham (2010) shows, infrastructural. Coward’s (2006) examination of the built environment as the subject of conflict, for instance, identi- fies the marking of
meaningful buildings and landscapes as suitable objects of aerial violence. Drawing upon an
assumption of relational net- worked spatialities, which presume the experience of the built
environment as shared and coexistent, as Coward (2006: 430) writes, the consequence of aerial
violence is the destruction of parts of the environment ‘not for what they individually represent
(military target, cultural heritage, conceptual metaphor)’ but for the conditions such
environments provide for the perfor- mance of ways of life and life itself. The targeting of these
nodes or integral points on a relational network or ‘battlespace’ has become a primary
method in the doctrine of contemporary air power.¶ Finally, while shaped by international
law, the making of the air-target is almost always fuzzy. The practice of targeting civilians was
challenged during the bombing of cities during the Second World War, just as the link between
the precision and accuracy of smart bombs and collateral damage took centre-stage during the
First Gulf War and the NATO bomb- ings of Kosovo. Today’s complexities of autonomous
drones and robots, and the recurring use of extraterritorial no-fly zones in Libya (as seen in
Iraq), further stretch the limits of the target’s juridical and geographical shape. NATO’s aerial
targeting of Libyan military assets, and, increasingly, ‘com- mand and control nodes’, is
permissible under the remit for protection of human civilians and self-defence, even if those
potential civilian casualties are not ‘directly’ targeted but are threatened as collateral risks by
the UN resolution’s remit for wider protection of ‘population areas’. Blurring both ‘direct’
action with indirect consequences, and actual action with the threat- ening hostility of ‘intent’
^ NATO attacks may be conducted on the basis of perceived ‘intent’ ^ for Michael N. Schmitt
the provision also effectively decouples ‘the...nexus between airstrikes and no-fly-zones’ (2011:
56). Indeed, whether the rebel and NATO operations would be treated in the same way by the
authorizing UN resolution ^ especially as Libyan forces loyal to Gaddafi used civilians as ‘human
shields’ ^ was brought into focus during the early stages of the bombing. As Maja Zehfuss has
shown recently, and Saint-Amour explores in a very different context in this spe- cial section, the
issues we need to consider are around precision and the lin- guistically exaggerated rhetoric of
accuracy and transparency. The Circular Error Probable (CEP) is the military parlance for a
circular area at which a percentage of weaponry (usually 50 percent) will fall. Thus, a 10-metre
CEP means ‘every other time it is fired in a test the weapon will land within a 10-meter radius of
the designated target. In the other 50 percent of cases, it will land somewhere else’ (Zehfuss,
2010). International law makes the spatially articulated killing of civilians through these sorts
of geometries and error-probables entirely permissible, and we should there- fore note the
double standards of the UN’s provision to protect ‘population areas’ in the same way. Civilian
casualties may be ‘incidental rather than accidental’, writes Zehfuss, ‘and this is, under certain
conditions, perfectly legal’.¶ What’s more, the networked and stretching chains of targeting
deci- sions, and the blurring of autonomy over these decisions, makes understand- ing the
legality of aerial targets even more complicated, as Gregory (2011b) shows in his article.
Because software is driving these complex and inte- grated systems, identifying the agency
and action, and therefore tracing or understanding responsibility for each air-target, is almost
impossible. This is particularly key when drones have no pilot present (at least corporeally)
and therefore rules of self-defence come into question. And with the stretched and decentralized network of kill-chains, UAVs and precision weapons, concentrating the focus and
strike of the target into ever decreas- ing circles of intensity, the so-called ‘reach-back’ of the
drone’s targeting pro- cess, from the Area of Operations to air force bases thousands of miles
away, makes deliberation over who is a combatant increasingly imprecise. The pilots who fly
far away from the battlefield may well be becoming a legitimate target for reciprocal violence
and forgivable collateral damage based on their own terms of engagement. As Roach (2008: 14)
argues:¶ The UAV pilots who engage the enemy every day in Iraq and Afghanistan do not go
back to their cots in tents or trailers like their manned counterparts do. They instead go home
to their spouses and families every night. They are only at war during duty hours. Yet, they are
legal combatants¶ engaging enemy targets.
Distancing – Accountability
A moral review of drone technology is not possible in the status quo. The U.S.
also plans to take over orbital space for increased drone use.
Webb, Wirbel, and Sulzman 2010 (Dave Webb, Convener of the GN board, Loring Wirbel,
Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, Bill Sulzman, Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, From
Space, No One Can Watch You Die. Peace Review, 22(1), p.38)
A moral review of space policies is very difficult because the critic can never have access to the
‘‘secret information’’ that is required for any evaluation. Hiding the truth from the enemy also
means hiding it from the public. Real public discourse cannot happen either, because the body
politic cannot be trusted with all the facts. Despite this, there appear recently to be some
grounds for optimism: no actual weapon in space has yet been fielded by any nation;
President Obama has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his aspirations for a nuclear
weapons– free world and other world leaders are pledging to work harder to banish nuclear
weapons; and the U.S. president has called for a review of the October 2006 National Space
Policy that proposes the virtual U.S. ‘‘ownership’’ of orbital space. Like so many nationalsecurity realms where President Obama has taken tentative half-steps, the struggle for peace
in space is far from over. The U.S. military remains, by far, the largest user of orbital space. Its
satellites for intelligence, communications, and navigation remain the key enabling components
that allow the United States and its allies to conduct war. The president’s new sea-based
missile-defense plans allow a more provocative stance in challenging nations like Russia and
China, who might try to foil U.S. global management plans. Activists throughout the world need
to examine closely all claims for ‘‘sanitizing’’ warfare. Citizens should not be swayed into
thinking that a war allowing more invisible means of killing others is somehow one that can be
accepted better than bloody battles on the ground. Space is the ultimate commons, and no
one has the right to dominate the planet through unilateral control.
Distancing – Violence
Killing at a distance renders war ‘virtual’ for one side of the conflict, which
allows an individual to kill in a very casual manner, while there is no risk to the
drone controller’s life.
Holmqvist, 2013. (Caroline, Holmqvist. Centre for International Studies, London School of
Economics, UK Swedish National Defense College, Sweden. Undoing War: War Ontologies and
the Materiality of Drone Warfare. May 1, 2013. http://mil.sagepub.com/content/early
/2013/04/30/0305829813483350. P. 5-6)
An intuitive response to news about the increased reliance on technologies that allow for
‘killing at distance’ is that it renders war ‘virtual’ for one side of the conflict. This view follows
from discussions of air power in war more generally, as we saw in the wake of NATO’s
bombardment of Kosovo in 1999.22 The drone operator, sitting in the safety and comfort of
his control room in Nevada, no longer experiences war, goes the argument, and killing as a
result becomes casual.23 Shielded from physical harm, the drone operator is no longer part of
the fight in an existential sense; there is no risk to his life.¶ No doubt, drone warfare is
infinitely more real for the populations amongst whom attacks take place, who risk being
killed, losing loved ones or having their homes destroyed. Yet, while such arguments have
understandable appeal, close study of drone operators’ activity yields a more complicated
picture. Derek Gregory’s study of drone operators’ experience focuses on the ‘scopic regime’
that enables drone warfare in the first place and closely examines the different types of vision
and imaging that drone operators are exposed to, from wide area airborne surveillance to the
macro-field of micro-vision.24 These visibilities are conditional and conditioning because they
are not merely technical feats but ‘techno-cultural accomplishments’.25 Rather than any
straight- forward abstracting of war into a video game, the abstracting that takes place is
convoluted and paradoxical. Contrary to common perception, drone warfare is ‘real’ also for
those staring at a screen and, as such, the reference to video games is often simplistic. It is the
immersive quality of video games, their power to draw players into their virtual worlds, that
make them potent – this is precisely why they are used in pre-deployment training.26 The
video streams from the UAV are shown to have the same immersive quality on the drone
operator – they produce the same ‘reality-effect’.
Drone usage distances the horrors from reality—the language used by
operators proves
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The US military deploys two types of drones in the conduct of its war in Afghanistan: Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (UAV), used for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes; and Unmanned Aerial
Combat Vehicles (UACV), equipped with missiles that can destroy designated targets. In this
essay, I focus exclusively on UACV drones. Before I proceed, however, I want to offer a brief
overview of these technologies.¶ The use of u nmanned a erial v ehicles can be traced back to
World War I. It was during the period of the Vietnam War, however, that they began to be
deployed in an intensive manner for purposes of surveillance and reconnaissance. The
contemporary development of unmanned aerial vehicles was enabled under Section 845 of
Public Law 103-160, Section 845; this law 'gave DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency] broad authority to carry out prototype projects that are directly relevant to weapons or
weapon systems'.'" The arming of u nmanned a erial v ehicles with missiles designed to
liquidate designated targets only occurred in the context of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks
on the United States. On 3 November 2002, a Predator drone equipped with two Hellfire
missiles destroyed a car allegedly carrying a senior al-Qaeda leader in the Marib desert of
Yemen. This attack enunciated a new paradigm in the conduct of robotic aerial warfare, as it
effectively marked the possibility of killing at a distance without ever putting the human
subject controlling the plane at risk.¶ Predator drones are unmanned planes equipped with
sensors, cameras and radar that can identify targets through smoke, fog, haze and clouds. They
are also equipped with laser-guidance technology and two Hellfire missiles; the laser designator
in the nose of the plane locks on to a target and guides the trajectory of the missile once it is
launched.'" Predator drones are usually launched from a military base close to the theatre of
war but they can actually be controlled from a Ground Control Station thousands of miles away.
Many of the Predator drones deployed in the war in Afghanistan are controlled from air force
bases such as Creech or Nellis, located over 7000 miles away in Nevada. Predator drones are
controlled by a pilot and two sensor operators from their Ground Control Station. The pilot
navigates the plane while the two sensor operators control the plane's cameras and sensors,
firing the drone's missiles when it locks on to a target. Schematically, the drone's
communication system resembles a triangulated structure. The pilot and sensor operators
transmit their control signals from their Ground Control Station up to a satellite in space that, in
turn, amplifies and transmits these signals down to the drone and vice versa. The violent
dimensions of this robotic killing technology are underscored by the Predator drone crew's
mission statement, as succinctly articulated by Colonel Eric Mathewson, Predator drone
squadron commander: 'Most mission statements are long, complicated and italicized. Mine
was three words: "Kill [Expletive] Heads."" ' Predator drone crews have emblazoned this
mission statement - 'KFH' - on their unit letterhead.
Advances in drone technology continues to distance the operators from deaths
caused by drones, with future technology aimed at artificial intelligence
operating drones
Webb, Wirbel, and Sulzman 2010 (Dave Webb, Convener of the GN board, Loring Wirbel,
Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, Bill Sulzman, Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, From
Space, No One Can Watch You Die. Peace Review, 22(1), p.36-37)
U.S. drones, such as the Predator and Reaper, are now being armed with cluster bombs and
missiles. Last July, the U.S. Air Force unveiled a UAV System Flight Plan outlining possible
drone development until 2047. The plan is for large drones to replace bombers (even nuclear
bombers) and fighter planes, for smaller surveillance and/or attack drones to be deployed in
swarms, and to use artificial intelligence computer technology to decide when, who, and how
to attack. In 2008, BAE Systems carried out a trial with swarms of drone planes that could
communicate with each other and select their own targets. Pilots once used joysticks to control
UAVs, emulating a video game. Now they use Google Earth on touch screens to point to a
location they want to bomb. Within a year, those applications will be available for special
iPhones and Blackberries made for U.S. troops. All of these methods of delivering death use
space technology, and many also take advantage of the Pentagon’s new cyber-warrior tools,
which have culminated in the establishment of a dedicated Cyber Command to control
computer networks at home and abroad. Noel Sharkey believes that drones could soon be
deciding when and who to kill, leading to a rapid rise in civilian casualties. He thinks that the
increased deployment of automated military technology is already creating a culture of
armchair warfare, and there should be international discussion and arms control on these
weapons. Perhaps the greatest concern is that, because most systems identify people by using
heat sensors, they cannot tell the difference between civilians and combatants. Automated
fighters may also remove a sense of responsibility from their controllers. As Sharkey puts it,
‘‘The further you are away, the easier it is to kill.’’ In Britain, only RAF pilots with combat
experience are allowed to control drones, but in the United States, soldiers who have never
seen combat are being given short training courses to identify those who have quick reactions.
The military is, in fact, recruiting young people who are good at computer games. The Israeli
Harpy robotic aircraft is already close to removing human control from the loop. It flies around
searching for enemy radar signals and if it identifies one from its database, it homes in on the
source. Sharkey points out that the role of the human controller is increasingly being phased
out by a move toward just one person monitoring a large number of drone craft, with little
power to intervene. He is concerned about ‘‘the next thing that’s coming, that really scares
me, is totally autonomous robots. It could happen now. The technology is there.’’ Other
possible uses of drones are also under discussion, including the delivery of chemical or biological
weapons. Concerns that UAVs could have been used for this purpose against Coalition forces
during the Iraq war were expressed publicly by the Bush administration. Laurence Newcome
has discussed the distinct possibility of the use of UAVs to transport chemical and biological
agents into an urban environment. Other, perhaps more obvious, uses for small robot planes
are for frontier patrol on the one hand, and drug and arms smuggling on the other.
Violence Qua Representation Supports the Numbing Effect of Distance
Booth ‘13
Sebastian Booth “Does distance or Remoteness Affect How Human Beings Use and Respond to
Violence?” e-International Relations 2/19/13 http://www.e-ir.info/2013/02/19/does-distanceor-remoteness -affect-how-human-beings-use-and-respond-to-violence/
Violent video games are an example of how distance effects how we use and respond to
violence. If we remember Ignatieff, he asserts that “technological mastery removed death
from our experience of war” (2001:4). If we take the popular video game Call of Duty: Modern
Warfare 3 (MW3), has this not done just that? One can now sit in the comfort and protection of
their own home and engage in full scale war, with all the trimmings, and the result will be
enjoyment and a pronounced lack of death. The reason that the player can dispatch a vast
multitude of unnamed enemies is because he believes that they are not really human (they
are just bits of memory on a disc). Interestingly, 72% of Xbox owners approved of the CIA drone
attacks in Northwestern Pakistan (Infowars.com, 2012), raising the question of whether this
distance does indeed make us more accustomed to violence. However, the latest psychological
study on violent video games has shown that “even engaging in harmless and gratuitous
violence appears to be sufficient to make us feel we have lost elements of our own humanity”
(Bastian, Jetten & Radke, 2012:490). Furthermore, a US Air Force study into post-traumatic
stress disorder amongst drone pilots revealed that the pilots recorded exceptionally high
levels of stress partly due to the f act that they are exposed to “hours of live video feed and
images of destruction to ensure combatants have been effectively destroyed or neutralized”
(Chappelle, Salinas & McDonald, 2012: 19-3). This may go some way to assessing the contention
with UAV’s – if people who play these video games question their own humanity when using
violence, then it is very likely that such emotions come into play when operating the drones.
Thus it is very difficult, in light of this study, to argue that UAV pilots are more likely to act with
impunity then those physically confronted with the enemy.¶ Moreover, Call of Duty has been
produced for pleasure and for profit. Ergo, there must be an aspect of enjoyment in watching/
committing violence. Is it distance that enables us to enjoy violent video games? Edmund
Burke did famously say that “terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does
not press too close” (Bleiker, 2009:74). Theories of the ‘sublime’ explain where pleasure in
violence comes from and, indeed, distance is an important precondition. We can define the
sublime as a violent event that happens on such a large scale (e.g. 9/11) that it seems beyond
the limits of comprehension; it inspires a plethora of feelings, from anger and hatred to relief
and even pleasure (Bleiker, 2009:70). Violence of such magnitude, and the shock and awe it
delivers, serve to reinforce the togetherness of the community that is affected (Debrix,
2007:130). It is this community-building, as well as the relief of not being killed, that the
pleasure of violence comes from. Sitting at home, watching the evening news reports of the
faraway peoples of Waziristan protesting against CIA-controlled UAV’s, the average person
may feel like this is not their battle.
The cyborg is coopted by the masculine—turning warfare domination into
entertainment
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
Articulated in this blurring of lines of accountability is a complex network of prostheticised and
tele-techno mediated relations and relays that can no longer be clearly demarcated along lines
of categorical divisibility: such is precisely the logic of the prosthetic. As the military now
attempts to grapple with this prostheticised landscape of war, it inevitably turns to
technocratic solutions to questions of accountability concerning lethal drone strikes that kill
the wrong targets: 'It depends on the situation,' rationalises a DARPA-funded roboticist. 'But if it
happens too frequently, then it is just a product recall issue.'n The language of 'product recall'
and consequent 'product replacement' clearly enunciates the biopolitical instrumentalisation
of the life and death of the targeted other. The violent asymmetry of this new technocratic
warfare is graphically marked in this caesura between replaceable robots and irreplaceable
human life, and the manner in which this othered sub-life fails to enter the equation. This
biopolitical asymmetry is nowhere more painfully materialised than in the killing by a drone of
Daraz Khan and two of his friends in southern Afghanistan. Daraz Khan and his friends were
collecting scrap metal on a hillside when they were liquidated by a drone missile, after they
were mistakenly taken to be planting mines in the area. The anomic violence of drone killings,
which suspends and violates judicial procedures and laws of war, is perfectly encapsulated in
this Pentagon response: 'We're convinced that it was an appropriate target ... [although] we
do not yet know exactly who it was.'" As one commentator has noted, framing this type of
killing in human rights terms, 'it should have attempted, at a minimum, to detain and capture,
offer surrender, before striking. And once having detained, it should then charge and try
suspects on criminal grounds.'" In his analysis of the necropolitical dimensions of empire, Achille
Mbembe poses two critical questions that cut to the heart of these imperial¶ asymmetries of
power:¶ What difference is there between killing with a missile helicopter or a¶ tank and killing
with one's body? Does the distinction between the¶ arms used to inflict death prevent the
establishment of a system of¶ general exchange between the manner of killing and the manner
of¶ 0 dying?"¶ In his essay, Mbembe does not discuss the use of drones in war; however, his
latter question can effectively be transposed to the imperial use of this technology: precisely
what the necropolitical use of drones precludes is 'a general system of exchange' between the
prosthetic tele-techno ensemble of the US imperial state and its anonymous and unsuspecting
victims, who have neither a right of reply nor recourse to judicial procedure. Juxtaposed against
this extrajudicial killing of anonymous, and thus unknown, human targets is the desperate
apostrophe made by Daraz's niece: 'Why did you do this? Why did Americans kill Daraz? We
have nothing, nothing, and you have taken from us our Daraz.'m Two things stand out in this
interrogative and despairing apostrophe: the counter-discursive appellation of the innocent
victim, Daraz, who had been reduced to an anonymous target and dispatched to a violent death,
and the marking of the violently asymmetrical material relations that characterise the
North/South axis. The repetition of 'nothing, nothing' underscores the asymmetry ofthis axis.¶
Enframed by cameras and monitors, the victims of these strikes become themselves mere
drones to these unseen attacks, scurrying insects that are dismembered and incinerated by the
airborne fire that is unleashed by the Predator and Reaper drones. Drone sensor operators
jokingly term the human targets running for cover when Hellfire missiles explode as
'squirters'." In tropological terms, there is a complex process of prosopopeia operative in the
figuration of drone technologies. On the one hand, as cyborg, the drone is brought to 'life'
through the ruse of an animating logic that invests it with animal qualities of predatory agency.
For example, following its successful strike on a target, the Predator drone is described in the
literature in this manner: 'The eyes of its Lynx side aperture have seen, and the talons of the
AGM-1 14 Hellfire missile on the starboard talon have struck.'" On the other hand, the tropic
transposition of the technology's entomological nomenclature to the actual victims of the
technology, and the consequent process of tactical de-humanisation and animalisation of its
human targets, is underscored by one drone commentator who likens the drone attacks to
'going into a beehive, one bee at a time', with the resultant problem that 'the hive will always
produce more bees'.' The CIA, in fact, terms a successful drone hit as 'bugsplat'." The term
'bugsplat' caricatures its victims by inserting them within the field of a cartoonish pop culture
where, as disposable figures, their deaths are scripted as mere comic mishap. 'Bugsplat' reduces
the human victims of drones to nothing more than liquefied entomological waste generated
via a technology driven by a more highly evolved species - qua the human as opposed to the
insect. Operative here is that foundational biopolitical caesura that philosophically separates
certain privileged humans from animals and that, simultaneously, enables the coding of certain
other humans as animals that can be killed, as non- human animals are, with impunity. As I
argue elsewhere, the disavowed figure of a virulent speciesism haunts Foucault's
conceptualisation of the biopolitical uses of race in order to create hierarchies of life hierarchies¶ that determine who can live and who can be left to die.'¶ The speciest recoding of
human targets in terms of insects that can¶ effectively be liquidated without compunction or
ethical scruples is further evidenced by the manner in which this dehumanising military
language has been reproduced by civilians watching drone strikes on YouTube. One YouTube
blogger posted the following comment regarding a 'Kill TV' drone execution in Afghanistan:
'You're not watching murder, you're watching pest extermination.'" Drone attack videos
have, in fact, become YouTube hits. Effectively recoding the agents and actors of this cyborg
war into the very phallogocentric terms that Haraway opposed in her radical
conceptualisation of the cyborg, the YouTube viewers of drone killings talk about 'drone porn'
giving them 'raging hard ons'." Citing the work of Claudia Springer, Rosi Braidotti has
underscored that:¶ the social imaginary around cyborgs, or technologies, is masculine,
militarized and eroticized. It supports images of hyper-masculine killing machines, with wired
circuitry both replacing and reinforcing muscular power."
Drone operators experience emotional and psychological difficulties due to the
voyeuristic manipulation and destruction of the distant Other.
Wall, Tyler, Eastern Kentucky University. “Surveillance and Violence From Afar: The Politics of
Drones and Liminal Security Scapes.” Theoretical Criminology. 2011.
Clearly, the privilege of having a cosmic view distances drone operators from retalia- tory
violence. With the drone pilot potentially thousands of miles away, drones actualize a ‘risktransfer war’ (Shaw, 2005), wherein the goal is to reduce or eliminate the deaths of ‘our own’
while still producing significant casualties for the enemy. In this sense, drone operators engage
in a semi-voyeuristic manipulation or destruction of distant others: Digital footage from the
robot planes is now routinely sent everywhere the military’s network extends, which means
soldiers far removed from the front lines finally get to see a little action in real time. ‘It’s like a
video game’, says one analyst who served at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Camp As
Sayliyah in Qatar. ‘It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s fucking cool’. (Shachtman, 2005) Wall
and Monahan 249 But some military drone operators, who have also flown combat missions in
‘manned aircraft’ such as F-16 fighter jets, say that the technological mediation of UAV systems
is more visceral and phenomenologically complex than a video game experience, in large part
because of the advanced camera systems of the drones. With UAVs, one par- ticular pilot
claimed to feel: more connected with the ground fight than I ever did when I was flying over
the top at 20,000 feet, the reason being that I am much [more] involved in coordination and
contact with those ground forces that are taking fire than I ever was in a F-16 ... it comes
together to create a much more tangible, much more real event ... then [sic] I experienced
when I was dropping bombs from F-16s. Similarly, another former F-16 pilot comments that
when flying an F-16, ‘you come in at 500–600 miles per hour, drop a 500-pound bomb and then
fly away, you don’t see what happens’, but when remotely piloting Predator drones ‘you watch
it all the way to impact, and I mean it’s very vivid, it’s right there and personal. So it does stay in
people’s minds for a long time’ (Lindlaw, 2008). Yet another drone pilot said, ‘When you’re on
the radio with a guy on the ground, and he is out of breath and you can hear the weapons fire in
the background, you are every bit as engaged as if you were actually there’ (Drew, 2009).
Although we should be skeptical of this claim of ‘realistic’ experiences created through
interactions with drone systems, there have been some reports that drone opera- tors have
expressed emotional and psychological difficulties due to this mediated inti- macy and
physical distanciation. As one drone pilot explains, ‘It is quite different, going from potentially
shooting a missile, then going to your kid’s soccer game’ (Lindlaw, 2008). Even after the missiles
have been fired and flesh ripped apart, the drone stare is often ordered to linger in the air to
record and observe the destruction produced by the UAV system. As another drone operator
states: You do stick around and see the aftermath of what you did, and that does personalize
the fight ... You have a pretty good optical picture of the individuals on the ground. The images
can be pretty graphic, pretty vivid, and those are the things we try to offset [through psychiatric
treatment and psychological and spiritual counseling]. Previous analyses of the psychological
effects of killing suggest that killing is easier to do from a distance and becomes progressively
more difficult the closer one is to one’s victim (Grossman, 2009). In the case of UAVs,
however, the pilots may be on the other side of the globe yet nonetheless feel proximate to
those with whom they engage. This may create the possibility for a re-personalization of
distant, technologically mediated attacks, wherein pilots register some experiences of trauma
and responsibility. This phe- nomenon could vitiate some of the dehumanizing tendencies of
remote warfare or, at the very least, render the experiences visceral for those viewing the
monitors, whether they are pilots or the public. The technological politics of drone systems
hinge upon the productive capabilities of these devices, which extend beyond their use for
missile strikes. By means of the drone assemblage of aircraft, cameras, missiles,
communication technology, and distant pilots, people ‘down below’, whether migrants,
insurgents, or citizens, are abstracted from their local social, political, and geographical contexts.
The targets of drone surveillance are thereby translated into objectified representations of
risk and value, but, as Jacques Derrida (1981) would remind us, there is always a remainder
that exceeds neat binary equations of semiotic meaning. The remainders here include forms
of collateral damage, whether innocent people wrongfully targeted or inadvertently killed, or
civil liberties and human rights sidelined or oppressed through the ongoing militarization of
borders and domestic spaces. Other remainders are psychological effects experienced by
drone pilots; by allies, neutral parties, supposed enemies on the ground; and by distant
witnesses to drone warfare, which may include anyone in the world with access to the relevant
media streams. Finally, there is the important and nagging remainder of the agency of the
Other, who refuses to be petrified and immobilized by the drone stare, who exploits the
techno- logical hubris and vulnerabilities of the West, and who devises new tactics of
camouflage and mobility to evade the reach of surveillance and violence from above..
Distancing – Public
The surveillance and combat capabilities of drone use desensitizes the public to
warfare because it distances those involved in the conflict from the damage
they produce.
Wall, Tyler, Eastern Kentucky University. “Surveillance and Violence From Afar: The Politics of
Drones and Liminal Security Scapes.” Theoretical Criminology. 2011.
Drone systems necessarily objectify, and most likely dehumanize, people targeted by them.
The ongoing informatization of warfare leads to increased mediation of combat experiences
(Robins and Levidow, 1995; Haggerty, 2006; Monahan and Wall, 2007) and this is definitely the
case for many UAV ‘pilots’ who ‘sit at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside
dimly lit trailers’ (Drew, 2009) and ‘kill enemy fighters with a few computer keystrokes. Then,
after their shifts are over, they get to drive home and sleep in their own beds’ (Lindlaw, 2008).
Taken together, the techno-scientific mediation of modern-day weapons systems and the
symbolic mediation of television and computer screens allow drone pilots and the general
public to view war ‘from a distance’ while making way for organized state violence to be seen
as virtuous (Der Derian, 2001)—that is, clean, precise, and noble. In this context of
computerized ‘postmodern warfare’ (Gray, 1997), it seems reasonable to assert, as Kevin Robins
and Les Levidow (1995: 120) did in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991: Killing is done ‘at a
distance’, through technological mediation, without the shock of direct confrontation. The
victims become psychologically invisible. The soldier appears to achieve a moral dissociation;
the targeted ‘things’ on the screen do not seem to implicate him in a moral relationship. The
technological mediation vital to what we call ‘the drone stare’ is most often framed by
advocates of UAV systems as an unproblematic ability to see the truth of a particular situation
(see Rattansi, 2010) or to achieve a totalizing view of the ‘object’ under cosmic control. In the
words of Robins and Levidow (1995: 121): ‘Enemy threats—real or imag- inary, human or
machine—became precise grid locations, abstracted from their human context.’ To the extent
that this description is accurate, it would appear to hold true for the use of drones in combat
as well as non-combat settings. Journalist Noah Shachtman (2005), who observed drone
operators monitoring the US–Mexico border, betrays through his description the dehumanizing
tendency of drone- mediated perceptions: ‘Everyone looks like germs, like ants, from the
Hunter’s 15,000- foot point of view. Especially when the ant hill breaks apart, and everybody
scatters in a dozen different directions.’ But this particular articulation makes no distinction
between ‘illegal immigrants’, political refugees, or Mexican-American citizens. In this sense, the
drone system radically homogenizes these identities into a single cluster of racialized
information that is used for remote-controlled processes of control and harm. Bodies below
become things to track, monitor, apprehend, and kill, while the pilot and other allies on the
network remain differentiated and proximate, at least culturally if not physically.In the case of
the use of military drones for ‘precision’ killing, the practical action of firing a Hellfire missile is
translated and transformed by the informational system into a computerized checklist of
‘things to do’. As one journalist writes concerning US Air Force drones, ‘Now, pilots say, it takes
up to 17 steps—including entering data into a pull-down window—to fire a missile’ (Drew,
2009). In this respect, as Kevin Haggerty (2006) has pointed out, the speed and mobility of
informatized warfare is perforce slowed by attendant complex systems of control, which is a
generalizable finding that presents (Wall and Monahan 247) an important caution against
overdetermined conclusions about inevitable increases in the velocity of war technologies. But
this step-by-step process of entering ‘data’ into a computer system nonetheless propagates a
dehumanizing abstraction when living human beings are rendered into mere spatial or tactical
coordinates. As Avital Ronell (1992: 75) puts it: ‘the cyborg soldier, located in command and
control systems, exercises on the fields of denial’. Killing transpires not only at a distance but
through the routine, banal computerized procedure of typing and clicking. UAV systems,
according to one military drone operator, are ‘pretty simple’ to operate but, the challenge is
taking all the information available and fusing it into something that’s usable and then practicing
and exercising the constraint or the lethal power to either preserve life or to prosecute an
attack. And that is where the challenge really is, honing that warrior spirit— knowing when to
say when. (Rattansi, 2010) But as we have discussed, this ‘knowing when to say when’ is not a
‘decision’ that is made in a vacuum but is rather a sovereign act shaped by social and political
norms, which are encoded in both the institutional practices and technological systems of drone
warfare.
Biopolitics
The biopolitical implications of the status quo create the ideological priming
needed for a holocaust
Smith 11 (Robert, “Endgame Nearing an End: The Production of Bare Life under the U.S.
Deportation Regime”, pg. 9, BW)
Agamben writes that the sovereign nomos is the principle that joins law and violence to
establish the territorial of order. The sovereign occupies the point indistinction between
violence and law. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre wrote that sovereignty
demarcates a space established and constituted by violence. This violence cannot be
separated from a principle of unification that subordinates all social practices. Through its
monopolization of vio¬lence the state claims to create a space where society is perfected for
all, though in fact it is the interests of a minority class that are enforced. The Westphalian
state system, held as a defining element of modernity, established the principle of territorial
sovereignty in international law. Galina Cornelisse defines the concept of “territoriality” as the
founding of political authority on demarcated territory (Cornelisse 2010). Though the idea of
universal human rights emerged after 1945, these rights became inextricably tied to national
citizenship and hence state sovereignty. It is this sovereignty that finds itself under attack by
globalization, the free movement of labor across borders. Under globalization, the State must
fight irrelevancy by reconstituting itself through the production of bare life. This is why,
according to Schinkel, deportation and detention are not shortcomings of the state under
globalization but its fulfillment (Schinkel 2009). According to Foucault, another decisive event
of modernity was the inclusion of bare life in the political realm as a subject. The focus on this
bare life as an object of the calculations of state power is the practice known as biopolitics,
which finds its ultimate expression in the “camp.” Agamben understands this causal chain as
crucial to addressing modern democratic state’s contradictions. The most horrific events of the
20th century, especially Nazism and the death camps, can be traced to this stumbling block of
Western democracy: that it seeks to bring about people’s happiness in the realm of bare life,
which tragically brings democracy into collusion with totalitarianism. The camp is thus the
“nomos of the political space in which we live,” leading Agamben to the disturbing conclusion
that the state of exception has become the rule, and in truth we are all homo sacer. The
absolute biopolitical space of the “camp”, which establishes the “political space” of modernity
(Schinkel 2010: 8), is topologically different from the prison because the prison is securely
embedded in the juridical realm, while the camp is the space of the exception which makes
the juridical realm possible. As the localization of the state of exception where sovereign power
confronts bios, bare life, without mediation, the camp is a “realm of experimentation, exercise
and symbolic reproduction of the violence of sovereign power” that also sends an ambiguous,
threatening message to the outside world (Minca 2005). We shall see below how these concepts
are tangibly realized in the deportation regime of the United States.
Biopower renders life calculable, and allows for the government to have total
control over all aspects of life, devaluing it.
Inda, 2002 (Johnathan Xavier, Department of Chicano Studies at University of California
“Biopower, Reproduction, and the Migrant Woman’s Body”, 100-101)
“For a long time ,” Foucault notes, “one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was
the right to decide life and death” (History: 135). For instance, If an external enemy sought to
overthrow him, the sovereign could justly wage war, requiring his subjects to fight in defense of
the state. So, without directly proffering their death, the sovereign was sanctioned to risk their
life. In this case, he exercised “an indirect power over them of life and death” (135). However,
if someone hazarded to rebel against him and violate his laws, the sovereign could exert a direct
power over the transgressor’s life, such that, as penalty, the latter could be put to death. The
right to life and death, then, was somewhat dissymmetrical, falling on the side of death: “The
sovereign exercised his right to life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from
killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring..
The right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take
life or let live” (136). As such, this type of power, Foucault observes, was wielded mainly as a
mechanism of deduction, making it “essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and
ultimately life itself” (136). That is, power was fundamentally a right of appropriation—the
appropriation of a portion of the wealth, labor, services, and blood of the sovereign’s subjects--one that culminated in the right to seize hold of life in order to subdue it. The power of
appropriation or of deduction, Foucault suggests, is no longer the principal form of power in the
West. Since the classical age, the mechanisms of power here have undergone a radical
transformation. Power now works “to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize
the forces under it”; it is “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering
them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them”
(History: 136). Thus, in contrast to a power organized around the sovereign, modern “power
would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was
death, but with living beings, and the mastery if would be able to exercise over them would be
applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more that the threat of death,
that gave power its access even to the body” (142-143). In short, political power has assigned
itself the duty of managing life. It is now over life that power establishes its hold and on which
it seeks to have a positive influence. This power over life, which Foucault calls biopower, is most
apparent in the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem in the
eighteenth century. This “population” is not simply a collection of individual citizens. We are not
dealing , as Foucault notes, with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a composite body
“with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy,
fertility, state of health, frequency of illness, patterns of diet and habitation” (History: 25). The
“population,” in other words, has its own form of order, its own energy, traits, and dispositions.
The management of this “population,” principally of its health, Foucault suggests, has become
the primary commitement as well as the main source of legitimacy of modern forms of
government: it’s the body of society which becomes the new principle [of political
organizations] in the nineteenth century. It is this social body which needs to be protected, in a
quasi-medical sense. In place of the rituals that served to restore the corporeal integrity of the
monarch, remedies and therapeutic devices are employed such as the segregation of the sick,
the monitoring of contagions, the exclusion of delinquents. (“Body/Power”: 55) The concern of
government, then, is to produce a healthy and productive citizenry. Its commitment is to the
protection and enhancement of the health of particular bodies in order to foster the health of
the composite body of the population. This means, according to Foucault, that “biological
existence” has now come to be “reflected in political existence” (history: 142). As such,
biopower ultimately designates “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of
explicit calculations” (143), its main overall concern being the life of the population, that is, of
the species body—the body that functions as the foothold of biological processes pertaining to
birth, death, health, and longevity. Simply put, the species body and the individual as a simple
living being have become what are at stake in a state’s political tactics, marking the
politicization of life, turning politics into biopolitics and the state into a biopolitical state.
The end point of biopolitics is a state in which legal order is indistinguishable
from bare life
Dean, 04 – professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle (Mitchell, “Four Theses on the
Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5, December 2004,
http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf)//HK
Fourth thesis: Bio-politics captures life stripped naked (or the zoē that was the exception of
sovereign power) and makes it a matter of political life (bios). Today, we seek the good life
though the extension of the powers over bare life to the point at which they become
indistinguishable. In this formulation, the emergence of a government over life in the
eighteenth century does mark a rupture in forms of rule, which the search for an ʻoriginary
structureʼ of sovereignty cannot capture. For Foucault, the nature of this rupture is the
displacement, articulation or re-inscription of sovereignty within a peculiarly modern form of
politics, bio-politics. However, this capture of the government of the state by bio-powers is
already present in the structure of sovereignty. It would be a mistake, in this sense, to view
Agambenʼs quest for the structure of sovereignty, with its multiple thresholds, as ahistorical,
that is, as insensitive to temporal thresholds. His thesis offers a kind of history of modernity.
Here, the demonic character of modern states lies in the possibility that the thresholds that
maintained bare life as a state of exception are breaking down. Zoē is entering into a sphere of
indistinction with bios in modern politics. For Agamben the paradigm of modern politics—the
new Nomos—is not the liberal governing of freedom, but the concentration camp. The camp
is the material form of the stabilization of the state of exception, the excluded inclusion, both
inside and outside modern political and legal ordering. Because the camp is established by law
as a space of exception, it is subject to no order itself, only direct police command. It is thus a
space of ordered disorder in which bare life enters into a zone of indistinction with legal
order. While such views may appear to lead to a kind of radical condemnation of many
instances of bio-politics, such as the attempt to develop humane processing procedures for
asylum seekers, the idea of mapping zones of indistinction would seem to locate arenas of
analysis and spheres of contestation rather than a site of dogmatic rejection. We have become
used to a style of criticism in which liberal notions of the individual citizen have been revealed
to be constituted through a series of exclusions (of women, the disabled, prisoners, the insane,
the poor, the indigene, the refugee, etc). Note that Contretemps 5, December 2004 28 biopower today holds the promise of extraordinary solutions to disability, criminality and insanity.
The inclusion of women through their state of exclusion, also, would appear to raise interesting
questions concerning sovereign violence given womenʼs historic biological relationship to the
reproduction and care of human life. This relationship, itself excepted under the universality of
law, is thus produced as bare life; and women are required to take responsibility for sovereign
decisions. If we are to take Agamben seriously, this desire for inclusion may have the effect not
simply of widening the sphere of the rule of law but also of hastening the point at which the
sovereign exception enters into a zone of indistinction with the rule. Our societies would then
have become truly demonic, not because of the re-inscription of sovereignty within bio-politics,
but because bare life which constituted the sovereign exception begins to enter a zone of
indistinction with our moral and political life and with the fundamental presuppositions of
political community. In the achievement of inclusion in the name of universal human rights, all
human life is stripped naked and becomes sacred. Perhaps in a very real sense we are all homo
sacer. Perhaps what we have been in danger of missing is the way in which the sovereign
violence that constitutes the exception of bare life—that which can be killed without
committing homicide—is today entering into the very core of modern politics, ethics, and
systems of justice.
Violence Generic
Drones become an extension of the operators—allows asymmetrical violence
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
Law as prosthetic works to problematise instrumentalist conceptualisations of law that are
predicated on a dichotomy between human agents and technology. Law as prosthetic is
predicated on the understanding that law as technology is always already embodied, and that
the dichotomy between human subject and technology/techn is, in effect, untenable. In
contradistinction to a conceptualisation of the body as a purely natural datum (with technology
as its polar opposite), I proceed to conceptualise the body as an entity that can only achieve its
cultural intelligibility as 'body' precisely because it is always already inscribed by a series of
discursive and technological mediations. As I have discussed elsewhere, I understand the body
as indissociably tied to technology, and not as something that stands in contradistinction to it.'
Drawing on the work of Derrida, I refuse the body/technology or natural/synthetic binary. In his
theorisation of the relation between body and technology, Derrida articulates the inextricable
tie between the natural (physis) and the synthetic (technd).6 He emphasises that this relation 'is
not an opposition; from the very first there is instrumentalization [dds I'origine il y a de
I'instrumentalisation]... a prosthetic strategy of repetition inhabits the very moment of life. Not
only, then, is technics not in opposition to life, it also haunts it from the very beginning.' From
the very beginning, then, the body is always already intextuated and instrumentalised by a
series of technologies. At the most elementary level, this process of technical inscription,
through the technology of language, is essential in rendering the body culturally intelligible. At
yet another level, the body is inscribed from the very beginning (at birth) by a series of laws that
proceed to determine its legal identity, its gender, its maternity and paternity, and so on. Law,
in other words, is never something that comes after the body; rather, law is always already
inscribed on the body, precisely as technk from the very first. This process of prosthetic
inscription operates to constitute the very conditions of possibility for the conceptual marking
of the body as 'human': 'The prosthesis,' notes Bernard Stiegler, 'is not a mere extension of the
human body; it is the constitution of this body qua "human.'¶ In arguing, then, for an
understanding of law as always already a technics of embodiment, I want to proceed to
conceptualise the pilots and sensor operators who control the drones from their far-away
locations in Nevada (Nellis) or Virginia (Langley) as embodied prostheses of the laws of war
grafted on to their respective technologies - both in ready-to-hand Heideggerian terms
(joysticks and push-buttons) and in tele-techno mediated forms via satellite uplinks to and from
the airborne drones. In this schema, the drones must be seen prosthetically as the 'phantom
members' of the pilots and sensor operators. Operating here is a relation of indissociable
articulation between seemingly separate parts - the human agent and the technological
equipment - that is simultaneously predicated on technically augmenting the power and reach
of the human agent through the figure of prostheticity. Stiegler writes: 'Prostheticity ... is a
putting outside-the-self that is also a putting-out-of-range-of-oneself." As I discuss below, the
putting out of range of oneself through the prosthetics of drones is precisely what enables the
violent asymmetry that inscribes the conduct of drone warfare, with the drone operators
safely ensconced in their ergonomic cubicles in the United States while they rain down bombs
on their suspect targets. In his work on the logic of the prosthesis, David Wills terms this
process of articulation the 'contrivance of this transferential interface', 'prosthesis'." The
transferential interface operative between humans and technology - a technics of law and its
agents and targets - enables a prosthetic system of relationality that defies categorical
separation of different entities and figures. This seemingly indivisible process of prostheticised
grafting is something that is brought into clear focus by the observation of US Air Force Colonel
Matt Martin, who remarks that, even as he is located in the Ground Control Station of Nellis Air
Force Base, Nevada, he views himself as having become completely coextensive with the
drone he is piloting, regardless of the fact that the drone is actually flying thousands of miles
away in Afghanistan: 'I was already starting to refer to the Predator and myself as "I", even
though the airplane was thousands of miles away."
Targetting = Indiscriminate
AGELESS SKIN - The categories and differences in being collapse when you are
the object target of the drone cyborg. In this Feb. 2010 Afghanistan drone strike
recounted below, the very possibility of your assimilation to the threat makes
you liable for death.
Allinson 12. (Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.
com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
About three-quarters of an hour into the Uruzgan incident, the Screeners at Hurlburt Field
identified children amongst the passengers in the vehicles: at 5:38, 5:40 and 5:47 . There
follows a revealing exchange about the category to which these figures belong: whether they
were ‘children’ or adolescents’. When asked by the ground troops about the presence of
children at 7:38, ‘the Predator crew discusses with the Screeners and the Screeners change
their assessment to "adolescents". Although there was no agreed to definition of
"adolescents", the Predator pilot reports to the JTAC [ground commander] "We're thinking
early teens...adolescents"’ .¶ This categorization of childhood, it becomes evident, is both fatal
and opaque. The crews do not agree on what constitutes an adolescent and the nature of
adolescent personhood: in any case the age range identified as ‘adolescent’ (nine to fourteen
or seven to thirteen years old) appears much younger than the normal English usage of
someone who has begun puberty but not reached full adulthood. A similar concern seems to
exercise the US major interviewing the surviving victim of the attack, asking her twice whether
children ‘under ten’ were present .¶ When asked ’[i]s adolescent a different call out then [sic]
child or children?’ a Screener replies:¶ ‘I think it varies from Screener to Screener. One
Screener may be more comfortable with calling out adolescent. It's very difficult to tell. I
personally believe an adolescent is a child, an adolescent being a non-hostile person’ [Reference
redacted]. He stated he believed an adolescent to be 9-14 years old [Reference redacted].
[Name redacted] the primary Screener at the time, said she believed an adolescent to be 7-13
years old, and "in a war situation they're considered dangerous" [Reference redacted] ¶ This
indistinct distinction takes on a fatal aspect at 8:37, shortly before the missiles are launched,
when the Screeners change their assessment of ‘child’ to ‘adolescent’ and therefore
‘dangerous’. The Screeners issued a call ¶ stating that the ‘*2 children were to be
adolescent”...This * indicates a corrected assessment [Reference redacted]. Ultimately, the
distinction between children, adolescents and MAMs disappeared. The Predator crew
immediately before the strike was ordered, only identified militarily capable war-fighting age
males being on the convoy. ¶ When the Predator crew suggest firing on the vehicles on the
basis of a supposed weapon sighting, the ground commander¶ responds ‘we notice that but
you know how it is with ROEs [Rules of Engagement] so we have to be careful with those,
ROEs. In contrast the Predator crew acted almost juvenile in their desire to engage the targets.
When the Screeners first identified children, the Predator sensor responds "bullsh*t, where?"
The Predator pilot follows with 'at least one child...Really? assisting the MAM,uh, that means
he's guilty / yeah review that (expletive deleted) ...why didn't he say possible child, why are
they so quick to call (expletive deleted) kids but not to call (expletive deleted) a rifle."...The
Predator sensor says on internal comms, ‘I really doubt that children call, man I really
(expletive deleted) hate that’ ¶ The tangible sense of these extracts is not that the of the
Predator operating team committing an atrocity out of rage or fear, that would be
ameliorated by the machine rationality of an autonomous drone, but rather out of the
operation of an existing knowledge of distinction in putting to death of which any potentially
autonomous drone would still be part. The entire incident lasts a long time, over three hours,
and involves a series of back and forth deliberations based on the shared assumption that a
Militarily Aged Male in Afghanistan is a member of dangerous population, liable for putting to
death. Thus the revealing protest of the Predator pilot 'at least one child...Really? assisting the
MAM, uh, that means he's guilty’. Further, when seeking to clarify the age of the children, the
teams asks not ‘are they children’ or ‘are they a threat’ but rather ‘[i]s adolescent a different
call out then [sic] child or children?’ That is, the concern is not with what these actual humans
are doing, their age or the threat their actions pose but where they fit in the established
categories of the US military. If ‘adolescent’ forms a different such category to ‘child’ then
persons found to belong to that category belong once again to the population that is liable for
putting to death. The subsequent elision of children into ‘adolescents’, followed by the deadly
missile launch illustrates precisely that drawing of a ‘biological caesura’ of which Mbembe
writes¶ ‘A beautiful target’¶ The assimilation of the children to the status of ‘Military Aged
Male’ reflects a further step in the necropolitical logic: the assumption that all members of the
MAM population pose a lethal threat, to be met with equally lethal violence. The MAM
belongs to ‘a population understood as, by definition, illegitimate, if not dubiously human' .
The drone pilots of the Uruzgan incident enact this understanding in their pursuit of a
definition of the human forms visible on their screens as MAMs and therefore as carrying
weapons: weapons that pose no threat to the drone crew (nor to the ground troops twelve
kilometers away) but whose hypothetical presence renders permissible the putting to death
of the passengers in the vehicle.
Technostrategic Discourse – Violence
Abstracting rhetoric and reliance on axioms removes the reality of nuclear
weapons—presenting them as a neat, reasonable, and proportionate response
to potential aggression
Duncanson and Eschle 8 (Claire Duncanson, PhD Lecturer in IR at University of Edinburgh;
Catherine Eschle, PhD Senior Lecturer University of Strathclyde “Gender and the Nuclear Weapons State:
A Feminist Critique of the UK Government’s White Paper on Trident” New Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 4,
December 2008)
Such bland descriptors as “stockpiles” and “deterrent system” bring us to the¶ second strand
of the feminist critique of the way in which states talk about nuclear¶ weapons technology: the
tendency to use highly “abstract, euphemistic and¶ acronym-ridden language.”31 This point
was developed by Cohn in her work on¶ US defence intellectuals, in which she identified the
deployment of terms such as¶ “collateral damage,” “damage limitation weapon” and “clean
bombs” as part of¶ a discourse she labelled “technostrategic.”32 Such a discourse leaves out
“the¶ emotional, the concrete, the particular, human bodies and their vulnerability,¶ human
lives and their subjectivity—all of which are marked [as] feminine.”33 For¶ a member of the
defence community to speak of such things would mean they risk¶ being discredited and
disempowered in the male-dominated world in which they¶ operate. Conversely, ignoring such
things helps defence intellectuals insulate¶ themselves from the realities and consequences of
their work.¶ We suggest this dynamic can also be seen in the way the UK government talks¶
about nuclear weapons in the White Paper. There are no more than a couple of fleeting
references to the weapons’ uniquely “terrifying power”34—and those only¶ to underscore their
deterrent capacity against “a future aggressor” and certainly not¶ as a way of opening up
discussion about their impact on bodies and communities.¶ Further, although the government is
keen to assert that it only wishes to have¶ nuclear weapons as a deterrent, it also acknowledges
that the concept of deterrence¶ only makes sense if the threat of using the weapons is credible.
This means it has to¶ entertain the possibility of actually using them, albeit in a highly abstracted
way in¶ which the consequences of so doing are not discussed. Thus buried in the heart of¶ the
White Paper lies a statement implying the abandonment of the long-held¶ second-strike
doctrine and asserting the right to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively:¶ “we will not rule in or
out the first use of nuclear weapons.”35¶ This has enormous implications in terms of the
supposedly defensive posture of¶ the UK as well as potential human cost, but the employment
of euphemisms such¶ as “use of our nuclear deterrent” and “use of our nuclear capabilities”36
serves to¶ obscure what is really being talked about here. Later the White Paper notes that¶
“Any state that we can hold responsible for assisting a nuclear attack on our vital¶ interests can
expect that this would lead to a proportionate response.”37Again, the¶ notion of a
“proportionate response” sounds appropriately reasonable and vague,¶ and the realities of
retaliation and nuclear war are neatly avoided. Similar moves are¶ made during the more
technical discussion of possible weapons systems. Look,¶ for example, at the following
statement: “We need to make a judgement on the¶ minimum destructive capability necessary to
provide an effective deterrent¶ posture ... we believe that our existing capability to deploy up to
48 warheads on¶ the submarine is sufficient.”38 This sounds very restrained until we remember
that¶ 48 warheads comprise a total explosive power of around 19 megatons (more than¶ 1,400
times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, which killed 140,000 people).¶ Interestingly, Cohn
argues that it is not, ultimately, technostrategic language¶ that is mobilised to justify nuclear
weapons and decisions about their deployment¶ and use. Rather, defence intellectuals and
others rely for this task on “much more¶ primitive ambiguous and contradictory axioms”—by
insisting, for example, on¶ the importance of “enhancing our deterrence” and “protecting our
vital¶ interests.”39 As Cohn points out,40 such axioms (assertions of fact or principle¶ that are
taken as self-evident, not requiring evidence or explanation), fail to¶ provide grounds for
discrimination between different defence systems; moreover¶ they remove the need for
explicit justification of the need for nuclear weapons in¶ the first place. A reliance on axioms is
particularly evident in the White Paper.41¶ They include the following: “For 50 years our
independent nuclear deterrent has¶ provided the ultimate assurance of our national security”;
“We believe that an independent British nuclear deterrent is an essential part of our insurance
against¶ the uncertainties and risks of the future”;42 and most strikingly,¶ The fundamental
principles relevant to nuclear deterrence have not changed since¶ the end of the Cold War, and
are unlikely to change in future ... Nuclear weapons¶ remain a necessary element of the
capability we need to deter threats from others¶ possessing nuclear weapons.43¶ As Cohn points
out, such axioms operate in “a realm where gender is just below¶ the surface.”44 What she
means by this is that the axioms gain their credence and¶ “emotional valences” because they
mobilise underlying assumptions about the state¶ and about security which are suffused with
gendered, and specifically masculine¶ imagery.45This is the third strand of the feminist critique
of the way in which states¶ talk about nuclear technology. Cohn’s assertion gains strong support
from other¶ feminist work, particularly that in the discipline of International Relations (IR),¶
which has developed an extensive critique of the gendered underpinnings of¶ dominant
conceptions of both the state and security. Such work focuses its critique¶ particularly on
Realism, a school of thought that sees the world as an anarchic¶ system of self-interested states
struggling to defend themselves through military¶ power. Since World War Two, Realism has
been the dominant approach in IR as well¶ as amongst statesmen, policy-makers and defence
intellectuals, and the UK is no¶ exception. As we will show below, the Realist world view is a
masculinised one, in¶ which “manly” states strive for self-reliance and security.
Targetted killing is used to remove the political meaning of its targets ¶
Grayson 12 (Kyle, Senior Lec. At Newcastle University in Critical Geopolitics and International
Politics, “Six Theses on Targeted Killing,” Political Studies Association, Vol 32,
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01434.x/abstract>)¶
Violence is always a form of communicative action. Its tactility and symbolism send¶ messages
to victims, perpetrators and those who bear witness. Forms of mass¶ violence – and even
massacre – that derive from the strategic logics of old and new¶ forms of warfare often seek
to eliminate completely the target of hostility, to leave¶ no witnesses, to preclude the
possibility for mourning, remembrance and renewal¶ of ways of life seen to be objectionable or
threatening. Erasure is the end game. In¶ contrast, the logic of targeted killing requires
survivors. Its future-oriented effec-¶ tiveness rests on the preservation of those who can bear
witness (even in absentia),¶ mourn, remember and, most importantly, learn to abide by the
desires of the¶ targeting party.¶ Targeted killing also communicates a value judgement that has
been placed on the¶ life of the victim. While historically the identification of an assassination
event – as¶ opposed to a battlefield death or murder – served to elevate the status of one who¶
has been assassinated (Ford, 1985), the identification of a targeted killing produces¶ a different
political effect. Those who deploy the practice have exerted much effort¶ to distance targeted
killing from assassination’s prior negative associations with¶ perfidy, treachery and dishonour.
Targeted killing is, in part, an attempt to transpose¶ the dishonourable connotations associated
with assassins on to the one who is¶ assassinated. Targeted killing thus becomes a means of depoliticising the potential¶ political and symbolic meanings (e.g., martyrdom, honour, public
significance,¶ heroism, bravery, resistance) that could be cultivated from the death of an indi-¶
vidual. This is done through the decontextualisation of the killing from the broader¶ conflict
by focusing attention upon the claimed characteristics of the specific person¶ targeted. This
individual is found to be deserving of such a death not just because¶ of their potential
capabilities, but also due to their perceived intentions being¶ considered uncivil (Tuastad, 2003).
Being targeted is therefore an indicator that one¶ has been primarily determined to be an
illegitimate political subject rather than an¶ important one.¶
Technostrategic discourse maps the world along accepted lines of conflict while
silencing the historical dimensions of those conflicts.
Shapiro 1990 [Michael J. Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i
at Manoa, “Strategic Discourse/Discursive Strategy: The Representation of "Security Policy" in
the Video Age”, International Studies Quarterly Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sep. 1990) pp. 327-340]
There are thus two senses in which the geopolitical discourse is strategic. First, it is ¶ strategic
at an explicit or recognized level in that it maps the world into warring or at ¶ least conflicting
camps and strategic alliances. Second, it is strategic in the sense that ¶ it participates in an
economy of power and authority by holding sway over other ¶ possible representations of the
world. By aggregating the world into national units ¶ and blocks, for example, it licenses
particular forms of political recognition at the ¶ expense of other possible forms. As I have
noted elsewhere, to refer to any area in ¶ the geostrategic mode of representation such as Latin
America "is not just to refer to ¶ a place on the globe, it is to help reproduce an institutionalized
form of domination, ¶ one in which the minority, hispanic part of the populations of the region
control the ¶ original indigenous groups" (Shapiro, 1989:92). The institutionalization of the
state- ¶ centric discourse incorporates a form of silence. What is not registered in the mod- ¶
ern geopolitical discourse is the historical process of struggle in which areas and ¶ peoples
have been pacified, named, homogenized, and fixed in modern interna- ¶ tional space.
Technostrategic Discourse – Thought
Technostrategic discourse destroys the capacity for thought by reifying
technical reason and an attendant, monological interpretation of the world.
Der Derian 1990 [James der Derian is a Watson Institute research professor of international
studies and professor of political science at Brown University. “The (S)pace of International
Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3
(Sep. 1990), 295-310]
The three new forces in international relations that I will examine are simulation, ¶
surveillance, and speed. The problematic they have generated can be simply put: the ¶ closer
technology and scientific discourse bring us to the "other"-that is, the more ¶ that the model is
congruent with the reality, the image resembles the object, the ¶ medium becomes the
message-the less we see of ourselves in the other. Back to the ¶ big American car: reflection
loses out to reification. ¶ This can be simply expressed but not fully explained. Why is this so? A
full answer ¶ would surely lead to an ontological bog, so instead this article offers a partial
explanation-and a provocation that might prompt others to lead the way on the onto- ¶
theological question that I have begged. I imagine that many of our leaders and ¶ scholars, like
earlier estranged tribes who sought in heaven what they could not find ¶ on earth, have given up
on peace on earth and now seek peace of mind through the ¶ worship of new techno-deities.
They look up to the surveillance satellite, deep into ¶ the entrails of electronic micro-circuitry,
and from behind Stealth protection to find ¶ the omniscient machines and incontrovertible
signs that can help us see and, if state ¶ reason necessitates, evade or destroy the other. And
should one pause too long to ¶ reflect skeptically on this reification of technical reason, one is
consigned to the ranks ¶ of the dissident other, as infidels who refuse to believe that there
can be a single ¶ power or sovereign truth that can dispel or control the insecurities,
indeterminacies, ¶ and ambiguities that make up international relations.
Social Justice
Social justice is impossible in the world where technocratic discourse dominates
all science. Only by the transformative use of art and film through the feminist
perspective can masculine ideology be deconstructed
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and GeoInformatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
The wars following 9/11 have taken an enormous human toll, sometimes with the assistance
of GT such as GPS and remote sensing. The failures that Hurricane Katrina revealed, which
many had hoped to be able to avoid through the help of GT, are also disconcerting. As feminist
GT practitioners, we need to think carefully about the kinds of geospatial practices that are truly
relevant to the contemporary world. We should engage in the development of GT practices
that help to create a less violent and more just world. I have argued in this article that
embodied practices and passionate politics of GT that are attentive to bodies, emotions, and
subjectivities will help us move beyond software and data to focus on real people and real
lives. Drawing on recent developments in feminist thinking, I suggest that attention to the
importance of affect and possibilities of performing ( practicing) GT as resistance would lead
to distinctively feminist contribution to research and practice on GT.¶ Feminist geography
affords a rare discursive space for making emotions, feelings, values, and ethics an integral
part of our work (Whatmore 2002; Ekinsmyth et al. 2004; Sharp, Browne, and Thien 2004;
Trauger 2004; Bondi, Davidson and Smith 2005; Kobayashi 2005). Mobilizing emotions in our
work not only rep- resents an important element of the feminist project that seeks to recenter
bodies in geospatial practices, it also entails experimentations with more expressive and
evocative forms of visual practices for conveying provocative feminist messages. As video
artist Pipilotti Rist points out, ‘‘Messages that are conveyed emotionally and sensually can break
up more prejudices and habitual behavior patterns than . . . intellectual treatise’’ (cited in
Riemschneider and Grosenick 2001, 142). Feelings and emotions have long been silenced in
research and social life. Bringing them back to bear upon our GT practices would have
considerable potential for yielding insights about new ways of using GT.¶ In order to effect
broader social change, how- ever, it is important to scale our care or concern from the
personal/local level up to larger con- texts. Although most of the projects I describe in this
article were undertaken as personal endeavors, our personal politics of resistance needs to be
scaled up to the level of collectively practiced feminist politics. Collaborative projects undertaken by GT researchers, feminist/art activists, and community groups throughout the world
offer important inspiration for how this may be accomplished (e.g., McLafferty 2002, 2005a;
kanarinka 2006). As feminist GT practitioners, we should develop innovative means to protest
against the use of GT for violence and to engage in political activism that turn violence and
fear into hope. Only when emotions, feelings, values, and ethics as well as a commitment to
social justice become integral elements of our geospatial practices will moral geospatial
practices become possible. Only then can GT help create a less violent and more just world.
Nuclear War
Technostategic discourse turns nuclear warfighting into a sexy game.
Cohn 87 (Carol Cohn, “Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” Bulletin of Atomic
Science June 1987 Vol. 43 http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07aa.shtml)
I spent the next year immersed in the world of defense intellectuals--men (and indeed, they are
virtually all men) who, in Thomas Powers's words, "use the concept of deterrence to explain
why it is safe to have weapons of a kind and number it is not safe to use." Moving in and out of
government, working sometimes in universities and think tanks, they create the theory that
underlies U. S. nuclear strategic practice.¶ My reason for wanting to spend a year among these
men was simple, even if the resulting experiences were not. The current nuclear situation is so
dangerous and irrational that one is tempted to explain it by positing either insanity or evil in
our decision makers. That explanation is, of course, inadequate. My goal was to gain a better
understanding of how sane men of goodwill could think and act in ways that lead to what
appear to be extremely irrational and immoral results.¶ I attended lectures, listened to
arguments, conversed with defense analysts, interviewed graduate students throughout their
training, obsessed by the question, "How can they think this way?" But as I learned the
language, as I became more and more engaged with their information and their arguments, I
found that my own thinking was changing, and I had to confront a new question: How can I
think this way? Thus, my own experience becomes part of the data that I analyze in attempting
to understand not only how "they" can think that way, but how any of us can.¶ This article is the
beginning of an analysis of the nature of nuclear strategic thinking, with emphasis on the role of
a specialized language that I call "technostrategic." I have come to believe that this language
both reflects and shapes the American nuclear weaponry and that all who are concerned
about nuclear weaponry and nuclear war must give careful attention to language--with whom
it allows us to communicate and what it allows us to think as well as say.¶ I HAD PREVIOUSLY
encountered in my reading the extraordinary language used to discuss nuclear war, but
somehow it was very different to hear it spoken. What hits first is the elaborate use of
abstraction and euphemism, which allows infinite talk about nuclear holocaust without ever
forcing the speaker or enabling the listener to touch the reality behind the words.¶ Anyone
who has seen pictures of Hiroshima burn victims may find it perverse to hear a class of nuclear
devices matter-of-factly referred to as "clean bombs." These are weapons which are largely
fusion rather than fission and which therefore release a higher quantity of energy not as
radiation but as blast. Clean bombs may provide the perfect metaphor for the language of
defense analysts and arms controllers. This language has enormous destructive power, but
without the emotional fallout that would result if it were clear one was talking about plans for
mass murder, mangled bodies, human suffering. Defense analysts talk about "counter value
attacks" rather than about incinerating cities. Human death, in nuclear parlance, is most often
referred to as "collateral damage." While Reagan's renaming the MX missile "the
Peacekeeper" was the object of considerable scorn in the community of defense analysts, the
same analysts refer to the missile as a "damage limitation weapon."¶ These phrases, only a few
of the hundreds that could be chosen, exemplify the astounding chasm between image and
reality that characterizes technostrategic language. They also hint at the terrifying way the
existence of nuclear devices has distorted our perceptions and redefined the world. "Clean
bombs" as a phrase tells us that radiation is the only "dirty" part of killing people.¶ It is hard not
to feel that one function of this sanitized abstraction is to deny the uncontrolled messiness of
the situations one contemplates creating. So that we not only have clean bombs but also
"surgically clean strikes": "counterforce" attacks that can purportedly" take out"--that is,
accurately destroy--an opponent's weapons or command centers, without causing significant
injury to anything else. The image is unspeakably ludicrous when the surgical tool is not a
delicately controlled scalpel but a nuclear warhead.¶ FEMINISTS HAVE OFTEN suggested that an
important aspect of the arms race is phallic worship; that "missile envy," to borrow Helen
Caldicott's phrase, is a significant motivation force in the nuclear buildup. I have always found
this an uncomfortable reductionist explanation and hoped that observing at the nuclear center
would yield a more complex analysis. Still, I was curious about the extent to which I might find a
sexual subtext in the defense professionals' discourse. I was not prepared for what I found.¶ I
think I had naively imagined that I would need to speak around and eavesdrop on what men
said in unguarded moments, using all my cunning to unearth sexual imagery. I had believed that
these men would have cleaned up their acts, or that at least at some point in a long talk about
"penetration aids," someone would suddenly look up, slightly embarrassed to be caught in such
blatant confirmation of feminist analyses.¶ I was wrong. There was no evidence that such
critiques had ever reached the ears, much less the minds of these men. American military
dependence on nuclear weapons was explained as "irresistible, because you get more bang
for the buck." Another lecturer solemnly and scientifically announced, "To disarm is to get rid of
all your stuff." A professor's explanation of why the MX missile is to be placed in the silos of the
newest Minuteman missiles, instead of replacing the older, less accurate missiles, was "because
they're in the nicest hole--you're not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a
crummy hole." Other lectures were filled with discussion of vertical erector launchers, and the
comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks--or what one military adviser to the
national Security Council has called "releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one
orgasmic whump."¶ But if the imagery is transparent, its significance may be less so. I do not
want to assert that it somehow reveals what defense intellectuals are really talking about, or
their motivations; individuals motives cannot necessarily be read directly from imagery, which
originates in a broader cultural context. The history of the atomic bomb project itself is rife
with overt images of competitive male sexuality, as is the discourse of the early nuclear
physicists, strategists, and members of the Strategic Air Command. Both the military itself and
the arms manufacturers are constantly exploiting the phallic imagery and promise of sexual
domination that their weapons so conveniently suggest. Consider the following, from the June
1985 issue of Air Force Magazine: Emblazoned in bold letters across the top of a two-page
advertisement for the AV-8B Harrier II--"Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick." The copy below
boasts "an exceptional thrust-to-weight ratio," and "vectored thrust capabilities that makes
the....unique rapid response possible."¶ Another vivid source of phallic imagery is to be found in
descriptions of nuclear blasts themselves. Here, for example, is one by journalist William
Laurence, who was brought by the Army Air Corps to witness the Nagasaki bombing.¶ Then, just
when it appeared as though the thing had settled down into a state of ¶ permanence, there
came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased ¶ the size if the pillar to a total of
45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more ¶ alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a
white fury of creamy foam, sizzling ¶ upward and then descending earthward, a thousand
geysers rolled into one. It ¶ kept struggling in an element fury, like a creature in the act of
breaking the bonds ¶ that held it down.¶ Given the degree to which it suffuses their world, the
fact that defense intellectuals use a lot of sexual imagery is not especially surprising. Nor does
it, by itself, constitute grounds for imputing motivation. The interesting issue is not so much the
imagery's possible psycho-dynamic origins as how it functions--its role in making the work
world of defense intellectuals feel tenable. Several stories illustrate the complexity.¶ At one
point a group of us took a field trip to the New London Navy base where nuclear submarines are
home ported, and to the General Dynamics Electric Boat yards where a new Trident submarine
was being constructed. The high point of the trip was a tour of a nuclear-powered submarine. A
few at a time, we descended into the long, dark, sleek tube in which men and a nuclear reactor
are encased underwater for a month at a time. We squeezed through hatches, along neon-lit
passages so narrow that we had to turn and press our backs to the walls for anyone to get by.
We passed the cramped racks where men sleep, and the red and white signs warning of
radioactive materials. When we finally reached the part of the sub where the missiles are
housed, the officer accompanying us turned with a grin and asked if we wanted to stick our
hand through a hole to "pat the missile." Pat the missile?¶ The image reappeared the next week,
when a lecturer scornfully declared that the only real reason for deploying cruise and Pershing II
missiles in Western Europe was "so that our allies can pat them." Some months later, another
group of us went to be briefed at NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command).
On the way back, the Air National Guard plane we were on went to refuel at Offut Air Force
Base, the Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska. When word leaked out
that our landing would be delayed because the new B-1 bomber was in the area, the plane
became charged with a tangible excitement that built as we flew in our holding pattern, people
craning their necks to try to catch a glimpse of the B-1 in the skies, and climaxed as we touched
down on the runway and hurtled past it. Later, when I returned to the center I encountered a
man who, unable to go on the trip, said to me enviously, "I hear you got to pat a B-1."¶ What is
all this patting? Patting is an assertion of the intimacy, sexual possession, affectionate
domination. The thrill and pleasure of "patting the missile" is the proximity of all that phallic
power, the possibility of vicariously appropriating it as one's own. But patting is not only an
act of sexual intimacy. It is also what one does to babies, small children, the pet dog. The
creatures one pats are small, cute, harmless--not terrifying destructive . Pat it, and its lethality
disappears. ¶ Much of the sexual imagery I heard was rife with the sort of ambiguity suggested
by "patting the missiles." The imagery can be constructed as a deadly serious display of the
connections between masculine sexuality and the arms race. But at the same time, it can also be
heard as a way of minimizing the seriousness of militarist endeavors, of denying their deadly
consequences. A former Pentagon target analyst, in telling me why he thought plans for
"limited nuclear war" were ridiculous, said, "Look, you gotta understand that it's a pissing
contest--you gotta expect them to use everything they've got." This image says, most
obviously, that this is about competition for manhood, and thus there is tremendous danger.
But at the same time it says that the whole thing is not very serious--it is just what little boys or
drunk men do.¶ SANITIZED ABSTRACTION and sexual imagery, even if disturbing, seemed to fit
easily into the masculine world of nuclear war planning. What did not fit was another set of
words that evoked images that can only be called domestic.¶ Nuclear missiles are based in
"silos." On Trident submarines, which carries 24 multiple-warhead nuclear missiles, crew
members call the part of the sub where the missiles are lined up in their silos ready for
launching "the Christmas tree farm." In the friendly, romantic world of nuclear weaponry,
enemies "exchange" warheads; weapons systems can "marry up." "Coupling" is sometimes
used to refer to the wiring between mechanisms or warning and response, or to the psychopolitical links between strategic and theater weapons. The patterns in which a MIRVed missile's
nuclear explosives are not dropped; a "bus" "delivers" them. These devices are called "reentry
vehicles," or "RVs" for short, a term not only totally removed from the reality of a bomb but also
resonant with the image of the recreational vehicles of the ideal family vacation.¶ These
domestic images are more than simply one more way to remove oneself from the grisly reality
behind the words; ordinary abstraction is adequate to that task. Calling the pattern in which
bombs fall a "footprint" almost seems a willful distorting process, a playful, perverse refusal of
accountability-- because to be accountable to reality is to be unable to do this work .¶ The
images evoked by these words may also be a way to tame the uncontrollable forces of nuclear
destruction. Take fire-breathing dragons under the bed, the one who threatens to incinerate
your family, your town, your planet, and turn it into a pet you can pat. Or domestic imagery may
simply serve to make everyone more comfortable with what they're doing. "PAL" (permissive
action links) is the carefully constructed, friendly acronym for the electronic system designed to
prevent the unauthorized firing of nuclear warheads. The president's annual nuclear weapons
stockpile memorandum, which outlines both short and long-range plans for production of new
nuclear weapons, is benignly referred to as "the shopping list." The "cookie cutter" is a phrase
used to describe a particular model of nuclear attack.¶ The imagery that domesticates, that
humanizes insentient weapons, may also serve, paradoxically, to make it all right to ignore
sentient human beings. Perhaps it is possible to spend one's time dreaming up scenarios for the
use of massively destructive technology, and to exclude human beings from that technological
world, because that world itself now includes the domestic, the human, the warm and playful-the Christmas trees, the RVs, the things one pats affectionately. It is a world that is in some
sense complete in itself; it even includes death and loss. The problem is that all things that get
"killed" happen to be weapons, not humans. If one of your warheads "kills" another of your
warheads, it is "fratricide." There is much concern about "vulnerability" and "survivability,"
but it is about the vulnerability and survival of weapons systems, rather than people.¶ Another
set of images suggests men's desire to appropriate from women the power of giving life. At Los
Alamos, the atomic bomb was referred to as "Oppenheimer's baby"; at Lawrence Livermore, the
hydrogen bomb was "Teller's contribution" and he claimed he was not the bomb's father but its
mother. In this context, the extraordinary names given to the bombs that reduced Hiroshima
and Nagasaki to ash and rubble -"Little Boy" and "Fat Man"- may perhaps become intelligible.
These ultimate destroyers were the male progeny of the atomic scientists.¶ The entire history of
the bomb project, in fact, seems permeated with imagery that confounds humanity's
overwhelming technological power to destroy nature with the power to create; imagery that
converts men's destruction into their rebirth. Laurence wrote of the Trinity test of the first
atomic bomb: "One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World." In a
1985 interview, General Bruce K. Holloway, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air
Command from 1968 to 1972, described a nuclear war as involving "a big bang, like the start of
the universe."¶ Finally, the last thing one might expect to find in a subculture of hard-nosed
realism and hyper-rationality is the repeated invocation of religious imagery. And yet, the first
atomic bomb test was called Trinity. Seeing it, Robert Oppenheimer thought of Krishna's words
to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, destroyer of worlds." Defense intellectuals,
when challenged on a particular assumption, will often duck out with a casual, "Now you're
talking about matters of theology." Perhaps most astonishing of all, the creators of strategic
doctrine actually refer to their community as "the nuclear priesthood." It is hard to decide
what is most extraordinary about this: the arrogance of the claim, the tacit admission that they
really are creators of dogma; or the extraordinary implicit statement about who, or rather what,
has became God.¶ ALTHOUGH I WAS startled by the combination of dry abstraction and odd
imagery that characterized the language of defense intellectuals, my attention was quickly
focused on decoding and learning to speak it. The first task was training the tongue in the
articulation of acronyms.¶ Several years of reading the literature of nuclear weaponry and
strategy had not prepared me for the degree to which acronyms littered all conversations, nor
for the way in which they are used. Formerly, I had thought of them mainly as utilitarian; they
allow you to write or speak faster. They act as a form of abstraction, removing you from the
reality behind the words. They restrict communication to the initiated, leaving the rest both
uncomprehending and voiceless in the debate.¶ But being at the center revealed some
additional, unexpected dimensions. First, in speaking and hearing, a lot of these terms are very
sexy. A small supersonic rocket "designed to penetrate any Soviet air defense" is called a SRAM
(for short-range attack missile). Submarine-launched cruise missiles are "glick'ems." Airlaunched cruise missiles are magical "alchems."¶ Other acronyms serve in different ways. The
plane in which the president will supposedly be flying around above a nuclear holocaust,
receiving intelligence and issuing commands for where to bomb next, is referred to as
"Kneecap" (for NEACP--National Emergency Airborne Command Post). Few believe that the
president would really have the time to get into it, or that the communications systems would
be working if he were in it--hence the edge of derision. But the very ability to make fun of a
concept makes it possible to work with it rather than reject it outright.¶ In other words, what I
learned at the program is that talking about nuclear weapons is fun. The words are quick,
clean, light, they trip off the tongue. You can reel off dozens of them in seconds, forgetting
about how one might interfere with the next, not to mention with the lives beneath them.
Nearly everyone I observed--lecturers, students, hawks, doves, men, and women--took
pleasure in using the words; some of us spoke with a self-consciously ironic edge, but the
pleasure was there nonetheless. Part of the appeal was the thrill of being able to manipulate an
arcane language, the power of entering the secret kingdom. But perhaps more important,
learning the language gives a sense of control, a feeling of mastery over technology that is
finally not controllable but powerful beyond human comprehension. The longer I stayed, the
more conversations I participated in, the less I was frightened of nuclear war.¶ How can
learning to speak a language have such a powerful effect? One answer, discussed earlier, is that
the language is abstract and sanitized, never giving access to the images of war. But there is
more to it than that. The learning process itself removed me from the reality of nuclear war.
My energy was focused on the challenge of decoding acronyms, learning new terms, developing
competence in the language--not on the weapons and the wars behind the words. By the time I
was through, I had learned far more than an alternate, if abstract, set of words. The content of
what I could talk about was monumentally different.¶ Consider the following descriptions, in
each of which the subject is the aftermath of a nuclear attack:¶ Everything was black, had
vanished into the black dust, was destroyed. Only the ¶ flames that were beginning to lick their
way up had any color. From the dust that ¶ was like a fog, figures began to loom up, black,
hairless, faceless. They screamed ¶ with voices that were no longer human. Their screams
drowned out the groans rising ¶ everywhere from the rubble, groans that seemed to rise from
the very earth itself.¶ [You have to have ways to maintain communications in a] nuclear
environment, a ¶ situation bound to include EMP blackout, brute force damage to systems, a ¶
heavy jamming environment, and so on.¶ There is no way to describe the phenomena
represented in the first with the language of the second. The passages differ not only in the
vividness of their words, but in their content: the first describes the effects of a nuclear blast on
human beings; the second describes the impact of a nuclear blast on technical systems designed
to secure the "command and control" of nuclear weapons. Both of these differences stem from
the difference of perspective: the speaker in the first is a victim of nuclear weapons, the speaker
in the second is a user. The speaker in the first is using words to try to name and contain the
horror of human suffering all around her; the speaker in the second is using words to insure the
possibility of launching the next nuclear attack.¶ Technostrategic language articulates only the
perspective of users of nuclear weapons, not the victims. Speaking in expert language not only
offers distance, a feeling of control, and an alternative focus for one's energies; it also offers
escape from thinking of oneself as victims of nuclear war. No matter what one deeply knows or
believes about the likelihood of nuclear war and no matter what sort of terror or despair the
knowledge of a nuclear war's reality might inspire, the speakers of technostrategic language
are allowed, even forced, to escape that awareness, to escape viewing nuclear war from the
position of the victim, by virtue of their linguistic stance.¶ I suspect that much of the reduced
anxiety about nuclear war commonly experienced by both new speakers of the language and
longtime experts comes from characteristics of the language itself: the distance afforded by its
abstraction, the sense of control afforded by mastering it, and the fact that its content and
concerns are those of the users rather than the victims. In learning the language, one goes from
being the passive, powerless victim to being the competent wily, powerful purveyor of nuclear
threats and nuclear explosive power. The enormous destructive effects of nuclear weapons
systems become extensions of the self, rather than threats to it.¶
PTSD
Drone controllers suffer as high, and possibly higher, rates of PTSD as soldiers
engaged in battle as a result of high-resolution images of killing. Including the
details of causalities and body parts that would never be seen by soldiers in
theatre.
Holmqvist, 2013. (Caroline, Holmqvist. Centre for International Studies, London School of
Economics, UK Swedish National Defense College, Sweden. Undoing War: War Ontologies and
the Materiality of Drone Warfare. May 1, 2013. http://mil.sagepub.com/content/early
/2013/04/30/0305829813483350. P. 5-6)
Virtual war, it seems, is less virtual than would appear at first glance. This conclusion is
strengthened by the growing realization that drone operators suffer as high, and possibly
higher, rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as soldiers engaged in battle as a result
of exposure to high-resolution images of killing, including the details of casualties and body
parts that would never be possible to capture with the human eye.27 In other words, drone
operators see more than soldiers in theatre. This is not to imply any trivializing parallels
between operating drones from afar and physical engagement in battle, however. The view of
the ‘hunter-killer’ is, in Gregory’s words, still privileged as the drone operator empathizes with
his fellow comrades on the ground in Afghanistan and feels compelled to ‘protect’ and ‘help’
them by instructing to shoot. Ultimately, the ‘drone stare’ still furthers the subjugation of
those marked as Other.29 What is of interest to us in examining the interaction of the virtual,
material and human here, however, is that this occurs not through the experience (on the part
of the drone operator) of distance, remoteness or detachment, but rather through the ‘sense
of proximity’ to ground troops inculcated by the video feeds from the aerial plat- forms.30 The
relationship between the fleshy body of the drone operator and the steely body of the drone
and its ever-more sophisticated optical systems needs to be conceptualized in a way that
allows for such paradoxes to be made intelligible. Moreover, there is clearly a need to think of
the study of the experience of war in new ways: if drone operators are not as shielded from
the realities of war as is generally assumed, what might they be bringing into the wider
communities of which they are part? To what extent are their experiences theirs alone, and to
what extent do we see them seeping out in a wider social corpus? In Merleau-Ponty’s terms,
can we see the body (of the drone operator) ‘literally incarnating’ material capacities for
agency, and thereby affecting the political disposition of a wider community?31 It is well
established that soldiers returning from service run a higher risk of committing domestic
violence, and the US military has an established program for combating domestic violence.32
The high rate of PTSD amongst drone operators points to the need for follow-up studies of
how these individuals behave in their home communities. By extension, this suggests that
those interested in the experience of war need to include consideration also of the experience
of – in this case – Nevada communities amidst which drone operators live. What such studies
might yield we can only guess; yet it seems reasonable to suspect that the complex
assemblage of virtual and material experiences that drone warfare produces might have its
very own repercussions for processes and dynamics of societal militarization and other
manifestations of members’ violent experiences set in motion by, but far exceeding, war
itself. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, the human body is not separate from things, matter or
representation; rather, ‘the flesh (of the world or my own) is ... a texture that returns to itself
and conforms to itself’. Human bodies are ‘beings-in-the-world’,34 and the material ‘reality’ of
robotic warfare, like the flesh of human bodies, is irredeemably generative.
Drones are responsible for many civilian deaths and cause psychological trauma
for drone operators
Webb, Wirbel, and Sulzman 2010 (Dave Webb, Convener of the GN board, Loring Wirbel,
Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, Bill Sulzman, Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado, From
Space, No One Can Watch You Die. Peace Review, 22(1), p.35-36)
Vidsel Test Range and Esrange Space Center are part of the North European Aerospace
Testrange (NEAT) located in northern Sweden. The testing of drones and the Advanced Medium
Range Air to Air Missile or AMRAAM (which could be carried by drones) is a regular occurrence.
NEAT consists of an area of 36,000 sq km of restricted air space and 1,650 sq km of restricted
land area (expandable to 3,000sqkm), and is Europe’s largest overland test range. It is a
cooperation of the Swedish organizations FMV (the Swedish Defence Material Administration,
which operates the Vidsel Test range) and SSC (the Swedish Space Corporation, which operates
the Esrange Space Center). It has been used for over fifty years for testing missiles and aircraft,
and for unmanned vehicle operations and weapon integration. Another European UAV test
range has been established at Kemijarvi by the Finnish company Robonic. It was originally
allocated 1,000– 1,500sqkm of airspace and uses a 1,200-meter-long runway to test commercial
and military drones. There has been widespread condemnation of using drones as weapons.
Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups reported forty- two drone attacks, killing eightyseven civilians during the conflict in December and January. In June 2009, the New York–based
Human Rights Watch issued a thirty-nine-page report detailing six incidents of Israeli drones in
Gaza, causing twenty-nine civilian deaths, including eight children. Their findings were
primarily based on debris from Israeli-made Spike missiles fired from drones—they concluded
that Israeli drone operators ‘‘failed to exercise proper caution’’ in determining whether their
targets were civilians. Last April, David Kilcullen, a former Australian soldier who served in Iraq
as a top advisor to U.S. Commander General David Petraeus, called on the U.S. House Armed
Services Committee to stop drone attacks over Pakistan, saying they are counterproductive.
He argued that they are ‘‘deeply aggravating to the population’’ and lead to increased support
for extremism. Paul Rogers of Bradford University’s Department of Peace Studies agrees that
drone attacks in western Pakistan are adding ‘‘fuel and succour’’ to Al Qaeda’s efforts of
radicalization, and believes that drone deployments would be better termed as ‘‘air-raids.’’
Lord Bingham, until last year the senior law lord in the United Kingdom, has also condemned
the use of drones, comparing them to cluster bombs and landmines. International lawyers
have called drone attacks ‘‘state-sanctioned assassinations’’ as targeted suspects have no
opportunity to defend themselves. Drone operators are far from the target with whom there
is no connection, no way to determine if they are an enemy or innocent civilian. In August
2008, CBS News reported that Predator pilots in Southern California operating drones over
Iraq were suffering similar psychological stresses to those seen on the battlefield, as they can
see the results of their actions on their computer screens via the UAV cameras used for
assessing the damage they have caused. The cameras beam back stark pictures of the death
and destruction that they have been responsible for—something ordinary bombers and
fighter pilots never experience. Without ever being near the war-zone, drone pilots observe
the effects of their actions in detail and then, when their shifts end, they go home to resume
their lives with their families.
Drone operators suffer from PTSD at higher rates than troops on the ground
Holmqvist 12
Holmqvist, C. "Automation and ‘undoing’: (re)thinking materialities and virtualities of war."
Paper presented at Millenium Annual Conference on Materialism and World Politics October
2012.
Rather than any straight-forward abstracting of war into a video game, the abstracting that
takes place on is convoluted and paradoxical. Contrary to common perception, drone warfare
is ‘real’ also for those staring at a screen and, as such, the reference to video games is often
simplistic. Rather, Gregory points to the immersive quality of video games, their power to
draw players into their virtual worlds – and points out that this is precisely why they are used
in pre-deployment training (2011: 198). The video streams from the UAV are shown to have
the same immersive quality on the drone operator – they produce the same ‘reality-effect’.
Virtual war, it seems, is less virtual that it would appear on first glance. Such conclusions are
strengthened by the growing realisation that drone operators suffer as high, and possibly
higher, rates of post-traumatic stress than soldiers engaged in battle as a result of exposure to
high-resolution images of killing, including the details of casualties and body parts to a degree
that would never be possible to capture with the human eye (Shaw and Akhter, 2012: 1493). In
other words, drone operators see more than soldiers in theatre (Gregory, 2011: 198).
WOT Bad
The Endless War Waged by the American Empire in the Name of the War on
Terror has Cost Countless Civilian and Military Lives and an Obscene Amount of
Money, With No End in Sight
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
Contemporary U.S. foreign policy is underwritten by a legacy of intervention. Since the close of
the Second World War, every corner of the globe has felt the consequences of a New American
Century. Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Cuba – these countries have all fallen under the
crosshairs of Presidents ranging from Kennedy to Obama. Although these personalities have
varied (at least superficially), a violent Washington consensus has persisted: that the Republic
is a beacon of liberty that shines across the globe and that it is the duty of these United States
to transform the world wherever chaos spills from shadow. ¶ The numbers involved in
maintaining an empire are daunting. For the fiscal year of ¶ 2010, the budget allocated to the
Department of Defense (DoD) was just under $700 billion – and to add defense-related
expenditure from outside the DoD – would take the number to over a trillion dollars, easily
surpassing the money spent on the nation’s social security, not to mention the combined
budgets of the next 15 countries in the world. Over a quarter of U.S. defense expenditure is
passed directly into the hands of private contractors. The additional cost of war in Afghanistan
and Iraq is staggering. For the former theater of violence, there has been $445.1 billion dollars
allocated since 2001, while Iraq has benefited from $815 billion dollars since 2003
(http://costofwar.com/en/about/counters/). ¶ The U.S. has 300,000 troops and 90,000 sailors
stationed abroad (more than the rest of the world combined). And according to a DoD report
from 2008, these boots on the ground could were marching at 761 sites in 39 countries
(Bacevich, 2010). At the time of writing, there have been over 4,500 U.S. military casualties in
the ‘war on terror’, with over 100,000 more wounded. It is more difficult assess civilian
causalities. In Iraq, the website ‘Iraq Body Count’ (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/) estimates
there have been 108,000 documented deaths, whereas ‘Just Foreign Policy’ ¶
(http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq) puts the number at a much higher 1.4 million. ¶
Whatever the exact figure, the message of these bloody numbers is that thousands upon
thousands of people have lost their lives to a war with no foreseeable end.
A/T: International Law Checks
Drones have made law and technology one in the same—makes drone use
more commonplace and reduces lives to legal debates
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The categories of 'law' and 'technology' would seem to be at once non- interchangeable and
conceptually distinct. In reductive terms, law can be said simply to act instrumentally on its
various technologised agents. In this essay, I problematise this dualistic understanding by
theorising the relation of law and technology as indissociably prosthetic. My theorisation of law
as prosthetic will be situated in the context of the use of unmanned aerial combat vehicles, such
as Predator and Reaper drones, by the United States in its pursuit and extermination of so-called
'insurgents' and 'terror suspects'. Theorising law as prosthetic - that is, as inextricably entwined
with technology from its originary enunciation through the technology of language - enables
the disclosure of complex dynamics of power, disavowal and violence. The US government has
argued that the use of drones in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan has been legitimated by
both domestic and international law. In the words of Harold Hongju Koh, Legal Adviser, US
Department of Justice:¶ [1lt is the considered view of this [Obama] Administration - and it has
certainly been my experience during my time as Legal Adviser - that US targeting practices,
including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all
applicable law, including the laws of war.¶ The United States agrees that it must conform its
actions to all applicable law. As I have explained, as a matter of international law, the United
States is in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, as well as the Taliban and associated forces, in
response to the horrific 9/11 attacks, and may use force consistent with its inherent right to selfdefence under international law. As a matter of domestic law, Congress authorised the use of all
necessary and appropriate force through the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force
(AUMF). These domestic and international legal authorities continue to this day.'¶ The use of
drones in the United States' waging of its war on terror has dramatically increased under the
Obama administration: 'From 2004 to 2008, Bush authorized 42 drone attacks, according to the
New American Foundation. The number has more than quadrupled under President Obama to 180 at last count.'2 Koh's invocation of 'domestic and legal authorities' operates to provide
the 'legal guidance' that will justify the use of drones as lethal technologies that kill at a
distance. Drone strikes are conducted both by conventional military personnel and the CIA. The
CIA, in the execution of its own drone program, is operating effectively as a paramilitary
organisation. John A Rizzo, who served as the CIA's acting general counsel, helped draft the
protocols for such lethal attacks. Requests for targeted killings are sent to the CIA's Counterterrorism Centre, in northern Virginia:¶ where lawyers - there are roughly 10 of them, says Rizzo
- write a cable asserting that an individual poses a grave threat to the United States. The CIA
cables are legalistic and carefully argued. If the targeted killing is approved, the general counsel
signs off and adds the term 'concurred.' Rizzo has been quoted as boasting 'How many law
professors have signed off on a death warrant'.¶ As Dana Priest and William Arkin have
observed:¶ Rizzo, the lawyers at the CTC [Counterterrorism Centre], and the head of the
National Clandestine Service (formerly the CIA Directorate of Operations) would act as judge
and jury on these terrorism files ... without a hearing, without giving the targeted man a
chance to refute the information or even to admit guilt and¶ surrender.'¶ In the words of one
former senior US intelligence official, interviewed on the condition of anonymity by The
Washington Post, the CIA drone program has turned the agency 'into one hell of a killing
machine" ... Blanching at his choice of words, he quickly offered a revision: " Instead say, 'one
hell of an operational tool'."'
International law surrounding the use of drones is an Orientalist fiction that
homogenizes nations where drone usage is seen as necessary
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication
and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The deployment of drones across different nations against which the United States is not at
war, including Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, has officially been legitimated by a
'domestic policy of anticipatory self- defense'.' Anticipatory self-defence effectively gives the
US administration carte blanche to conduct war wherever it 'anticipates' its suspect targets
might lurk. Predator and Reaper drones have been represented by the administration as ideal
attack weapons 'in dealing with terrorist groups in ungoverned places of the world'.' The
Orientalist trope of the lawless and ungoverned Other has lost none of its force or salience in
the opening decade of the twenty-first century as the customary way of legitimising imperial
incursions in places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.! Indeed, the international law doctrine of
territorial sovereignty is conveniently reduced by the US administration's apologists to a mere
'diplomatic fiction' that cannot be applied equally to all nation-states. Such apologists duly
discount the possibility of drone attacks in, for example:¶ 4¶ London or Paris [as] what is justified
in the ungoverned regions of Somalia or Yemen is a different matter applied to places under the
rule of law such as our friends and allies. The United States is not going to undertake a targeted
killing in London. The diplomatic fiction of the 'sovereign equality' of states makes it difficult to
say, as a matter of international law that, yes, Yemen is different from¶ France, but of course
that istrue.9¶ Postcolonial legal scholars have indeed drawn attention to the historical
foundation of the discipline of international law in the violent moment of the colonial
encounter. In his genealogical tracking of the historical emergence of international law in
Francisco de Vitoria's jurisprudential work on the relations between imperial Spain and its Indian
colonies, Antony Anghie notes that: 'The vocabulary of international law, far from being
neutral, or abstract, is mired in this history of subordinating and extinguishing alien cultures.'
"o¶ The Orientalist logic that enables the discursive practices of imperial intervention is
perhaps nowhere more graphically evidenced than in the US military's neologism 'AfPak' to
describe the 'zone of hostilities' in which it is conducting its current war." AfPak, in keeping
with its Orientalist determinations, homogenises and collapses two different nations,
Afghanistan and Pakistan, into one undifferentiated amalgam. The conceptual flattening and
erasing of difference that operates in this geopolitical neologism functions to legitimate the
conduct of war across the terrain of both sovereign nations - Afghanistan and Pakistan - as
though they were one. The imperial position which argues that target nations can have their
sovereignty violated with impunity - because their territory is undifferentiated, malleable and
always 'open' to the entitlements of empire - is clearly evidenced by current US doctrine:¶ One
legal view (the traditional view and that presumably taken by the Obama administration ...) is
that we are in armed conflict. Wherever the enemy goes, we are entitled to follow and attack
him as a combatant. Geography and location - important for diplomatic reasons and raising
questions about the territorial integrity of states, true - are irrelevant to the question of whether
it is lawful to target under the laws of war; the war goes where the combatant goes.12¶ David
Glazier, Professor of Laws of War, challenges this view: 'it is hard to believe that many of the
strikes conducted [in Pakistan and Yemen] realistically satisfy the imminency requirements
established by international law."' Yet, precisely as the US drone program expands to Somalia
and the 'essentially ungoverned lands of the Gulf of Aden', the House Armed Forces Committee
of the US Congress is proposing a new Defence Bill that 'would establish an expansive standard
for the categories of groups that the United States may single out for military action, potentially
making it easier for the United States to kill large numbers of low-level militants in places like
Somalia."' In keeping with the geopolitical latitudes of imperial power, this 'expansive standard'
appears to be without determinate borders or circumscribed limits: 'In an interview, Senator
Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said he would
support the House version [of the bill] and that he would go further ... "This¶ is a worldwide
conflict without borders."'"¶ Taking my cue from the US doctrine that 'the war goes where the¶
combatant goes', my focus in this article is on examining the relation of law to lethal unmanned
aerial combat technologies that conduct war and killing at a distance. I proceed to examine this
relation in the context of two seemingly opposed figures: the parenthetical and the prosthetic. I
argue that the parenthetical relation of law to technology is premised on atopical hiatus that
disassociates the executioner who manipulates the killing technology of the drone from the
facticity of the resultant execution. In this scenario, law is conceived of in the most radically
instrumental of understandings: it enables and legitimates the execution while simultaneously
suspending the connection between the doer and the deed. The prosthetic relation of law to
technology is, conversely, premised on the indissociable articulation between technology
(understood in both the hardware and software senses) and its seeming opposite: the biological
human subject. Through a series of instrumental mediations, the biological human actor
becomes coextensive with the drone that she or he pilots from the remote ground control
station. I close the article by refocusing on the relation between law and technology, and in the
process I attempt to extrapolate a general theory of law as prosthetic.
The Objectiveness of the World as a Grid of Things to Destroy is Enhanced by
Drone Targeting Technology - The Entire World is one Calculated Picture to be
Controlled
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
The drone is heralded by the U.S. military as the apex of a targeting logic – accurate, efficient,
and deadly. This logic traces a distinct genesis. In 1938 Martin Heidegger wrote of the ‘age of
the world picture’, in a classic essay on the split between subject and object. For him, today’s
world is conceived, grasped, and conquered as a picture – and what it means ‘to be’ is for the
first time defined as the objectiveness of representing. In this modern age of humanism, a
subjective ‘worldview’ arises for the first time – humans appear as Cartesian subjects and the
world as a calculated picture, engineered by science and technology. Ray Chow (2006) extends
this metaphysical analysis to contend that the world has further been produced as a ‘target’. In
the wake of the atomic event of Hiroshima, the entire globe is rendered as a grid of targets to
be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible. Indeed, to see is to destroy. ¶ Vision is thus
crucial to an ocularcentric Western society (Rose 2001), and always-already entangled within
military culture. The ability to gaze from ‘nowhere’ and yet represent ‘everywhere’ is what
Haraway (1988) labels the ‘god-trick’. She argues that the eyes have been perfected by the
logics of military, capitalist, and colonial supremacy; one that is fundamentally located within
a nexus of disembodiment: ‘...the vantage point of the cyclopian, self-satiated eye of the
master subject. The Western eye has fundamentally being a wandering eye. Vision is
apparently without limit, the ‘ordinary primate’ can now see underwater, at night, through
walls, into biological cells, onto distant galaxies: an ‘unregulated gluttony’ that prides itself on
its ‘objectivity’ (1988:586).
The Cosmic View Drones Provide Separates Ontological Understanding of
Killing, While Engraving Itself Into What it Means to Exist in a World of Drones –
Constantly a Potential Target
Shaw 11 (Ian Shaw, Ph.D. in Geology, “THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF DRONE WARFARE”,
Dissertation, http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/145131, submitted for
defense 2011.)
This disembodied visual logic is perfected in the doctrine of airpower, the dominant theme of
U.S. national defense post World War II. Kaplan (2006a) names this a ‘cosmic view’ that both
unifies and separates ‘targets’ from above. The sky is the space in which technology masters
the world. It is clean, disembodied, and a place where nobody dies (that just happens on the
ground). Do we not see here a colonial logic of ‘us’ in the sky, versus ‘them’ on the ground
(Amoore 2009; Gregory 2010)? The drone is capable of performing (Bialasiewicz et al 2007) this
logic, through a vertical indifference to territory and sovereignty. This digital-orbital view of
the world, a dream of targets that dismisses ambiguity, reinforces the same old god-trick of a
view of somewhere from nowhere, and (re)produces the subjects of U.S. Empire (Kaplan
2006b). This is not to say that the sky is a space of pure deterritorialization (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987). Since the mid-twentieth century the atmosphere has become increasingly
nationalized, particularly after the Cold War (Kaplan 2006b, Williams 2010). The ‘Revolution in
Military Affairs’ (RMA) was a set of tactics put forward by the U.S. military for securing the
future of warfare (Kaplan ¶ 2009). They include information communications, space technology,
satellites, drones, nano-robotics, all pivoting around the idea of ‘network-centric warfare’. As
Macdonald (2007) argues, this is precisely the reason that ‘outer space’ needs to be investigated
by critical geography, given that social life tied to the celestial, and space-based subjectivities
are increasingly normalized. ¶ Orbital logics thus spill into the everyday, as does the pervasive
influence of targeting in U.S. culture. From the use of GIS sciences that spatialize, calculate,
and fix Cartesian wanderings—without a necessary appeal to the uniqueness of place or its
crumpled ontologies—to the vicarious gazing and gaming of a far-away war (Shaw 2010; Wark
2007), targeting is now woven into the fabric of mundane life. GIS and GPS programs are no
longer alien technologies used by armies and government agencies, but shared everyday
practices. As such, the drone is not an aberration – but the apex of an expanding targeting
zeitgeist. In this age, ‘to be’ is to be locked within the cool certainty of a crosshair.
Drones weaponize vision and turn those and turns the targetter into an “god”
that prioritizes vision that turns its relationship with its targets into a paradox.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12. Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
Indeed, to see is to destroy. Vision is thus crucial to an ocularcentric Western society (Rose
2001), and always already entangled within military culture. The ability to gaze from
“nowhere” and yet represent “everywhere” is what Haraway (1988) labels the “god-trick”. She
argues¶ that the eyes have been perfected by the logics of military, capitalist, and colonial¶
supremacy; one that is fundamentally located within a nexus of disembodiment: . . . the
vantage point of the cyclopian, self-satiated eye of the master subject. The Western eye has
fundamentally been a wandering eye. Vision is apparently without limit,¶ the ‘ordinary primate’
can now see underwater, at night, through walls, into biological cells, onto distant galaxies: an
“unregulated gluttony” that prides itself on its “objectivity”¶ (1988:586).¶ This disembodied
visual logic is perfected in the doctrine of airpower, the dominant¶ theme of US national
defense post World War II. Kaplan (2006a) names this a “cosmic view” that both unifies and
separates “targets” from above.
PLAYING GOD - The drone cyborg, spawned of a super-technology and a history
of Western hegemony and capitalism, asserts that it has total agency, power
and consciousness, and is thus able to enact upon all others who become
objects.
Allinson 12. (Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.
com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter have already situated drone warfare within ‘the well-worn circuit
of Western hegemony and empire, fed by the brutal dialectic of capitalism and imperialism’.
Writing of the CIA drone campaign in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of
Pakistan, they describe how ‘uneven geo-legalities of war, state, and exception make drone
warfare a reality in certain spaces and not others’. Also referring to Donna Haraway, Shaw
evokes the manner in which drone surveillance-targeting-death enacts the ‘God-trick’⎯
enchanting a partial perspective with the illusion of its totality, and consequently wreaking a
dreadful violence on the human forms that fall beneath its gaze. ¶ This paper picks up on the
alternative reading of drones highlighted by Shaw’s invocation of the Object Oriented
Philosophy of Graham Harman and Quentin Meillaisoux. Drones as objects, argues Shaw, are
not simply dumb existences but ‘are already autonomous, in the sense that they themselves
act upon the world, opening up certain possibilities while simultaneously closing others
down…slicing and dicing bits of reality to produce the world in their own image’. Moreover,
the drone is a fundamentally fetishized object, transforming relations between people
(specifically of some people choosing to kill other people) into relations between objects,
‘isolated from the imperial and military apparatus behind it'. Complementing Shaw’s enquiry,
this paper presents drones not just as objects of potent thing-ness, but also as fusions of
human flesh, cybernetic weapon and ‘imperial and military apparatus’.
Solvency
Affect Solves
Their impacts are inevitable in the world of current geospatial technologies.
Only through a viewpoint of emotions through the alternative can we solve.
Kwan 07 (Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and GeoInformatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
In this article I address the two questions raised by Karen Dias and Jennifer Blecha (2007) for this
themed issue in light of these recent developments in feminist thinking. I argue that an
attention to the importance of affect (feelings and emotions)2 in social life and research and
the performative nature of GT practices offers a ‘‘distinctive critical edge’’ to feminist work on
GT ( Jenkins, Jones, and Dixon 2003, 59), and that GT can be a fruitful analytic project for
feminist geographers. I highlight some recent works by feminist scholars and explore the ways
in which they hint at alternative geospatial practices that are more relevant to the
contemporary world, especially in light of the current epoch of wars, international conflicts,
‘‘natural’’ disasters, and globalization (Chomsky 1988, 2003; Enloe 1989; Gregory 2004; Hannah
2005; Hyndman 2005, 2007; Sparke 2005). I emphasize the need for researchers, developers,
and users (hereafter ‘‘practitioners’’) to contest the dominant meanings and uses of GT, and to
participate in struggles against the oppressive or violent effects of these technologies.
Drawing on feminist con- ceptualization of affect (e.g., Thien 2005), I argue that geospatial
practices need to be embodied and attentive to the effects of emotions, which mediate the
social and political processes through which our subjectivities are reproduced ( J. Harding and
Pribram 2002; Bennett 2004). This not only involves reintroducing long-lost subjectivities of
the researcher, the researched, and those affected by GT back to geospatial practices, but also
involves making emotions, feelings, values, and ethics an integral aspect of geospatial
practices. Only then will moral geospatial practices become possible, and only then can we
hope that the use and application of GT will lead to a less violent and more just world.
By incorporating emotion and feelings into geospatial technology the
affirmative is able to deconstruct current techno strategic thought that
dehumanizes people and reduces them to dots on a map.
Kwan 07 (Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and GeoInformatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
As I argued earlier, feminist GT practitioners can draw on the emotional power of moving
images and techniques in narrative cinema to create GIS movies that tell emotionally provocative stories or that highlight social injustice (Deleuze 1986, 1998; Aitken 1991; Aitken and
Craine 2006). Cinema, in Gilles Deleuze’s (1998, 15) view, tells ‘‘stories with blocks of
movements/duration.’’ As Stuart Aitken (1991, 105) argues, the frame-sequence in a motion
picture ‘‘portrays the dynamic interaction be- tween people and their social and physical en-
vironments,’’ and the foundations of successful narrative cinema lie in a unique portrayal of this
dynamic interaction.¶ In a recent project, I explored ways of using moving images generated by
GIS for articulat- ing emotional geographies and contesting the objectifying vision of GIS-based
3D geovisual- ization. Drawing on the methods in visual eth- nography, visual sociology, and film
studies (e.g., Banks 2001; Pink 2001; Rose 2001; Buck- land 2003), I created a 3D GIS movie that
is more an artistic and expressive visual narrative than an objective recording generated with
the aid of scientific visualization. As Sarah Pink (2001) suggests, video materials should not be
treated merely as visual facts but rather as representations in which the collaborations and
strategies of self-representation of those involved are part of their making. For visual
ethnographers, video is not simply a data-col- lecting tool but a technology that participates in
the negotiation of social relationships and a medium through which ethnographic know- ledge
is produced. Participatory video has been used by feminist geographers in action research that
seeks to encourage communities to ‘‘ana- lyze their social world and to explore the construction of meaning’’ (Kindon 2003, 143). The collaborative use of video, as Kindon (2003, 143)
suggests, has ‘‘considerable transformative potential in terms of the action it may generate.’’¶
Based on these notions of participatory video and narrative cinema, I developed ‘‘collaborative 3D GIS videography,’’ a method of creating videos using moving images rendered by a 3D
GIS for articulating the personal experience and story of a particular research participant. I
pro- duced a video based on the oral history of a Muslim woman in Columbus, Ohio (who was
a key informant of the study), about her feelings when traveling and undertaking activities outside her home shortly after 11 September 2001 (hereafter ‘‘9/11’’). The purpose of the study
was to understand the impact of post-9/11 anti- Muslim hate crimes on the perception of
safety and use of public space of the Muslim women in Columbus, Ohio, study. Several
months after 9/ 11, I traveled with her for one day as she drove her minivan to undertake her
normal out-of- home activities. As we passed through various routes, she recalled her feelings
and fear when she saw particular buildings or stores (and her oral narrative was recorded).
Using the textual transcripts of such audio recordings, the field notes I took on that day, and
the activity diary and map sketches she completed during an in-depth interview, I portrayed
her body’s space-time trajectory and her emotions as she moved around the study area with a
3D GIS.
Feminist GT Solves
Feminist geospatial technology can deconstruct masculine technocratic
ideology through incorporating the body to an otherwise reductionist and
dehumanizing science.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and GeoInformatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Like travel photography, Parks (2001, 213) suggests, ‘‘the GPS receiver, rather than capturing
an objective record, instead generates a visual display that may activate memories of
subjective perspective, of a particularly situated point of view.’’ GPS not only registers
location coordinates but also records the highlights, landmarks, and special events of one’s
journey— those personal experiences that are not coded within conventional maps. In this
sense, Parks argues, the GPS map combines the objective and omniscient discourse of
cartography with the subjective, grounded experience of the user. Visual representation of the
moving body by GPS introduces the possibility of subject(ive) mapping. Although represented
as a series of lines and dots, the body’s movement transforms the map from an omniscient
view of territory into an individualized expression. By plotting the personal, GPS inscribes
embodied practices into the discourse of mapping and allows the user to call into question the
objective status of the map by inflecting it with personal move- ment. The producer of the GPS
map is none other than the body that traveled, walked, or moved along a certain trajectory
carrying a GPS receiver. The practice of plotting the personal, then, figures the user as subject,
produced through a series of movements and encounters. Drawing on Paul Virilio (1997) and
Gilles Del- euze (1986), Parks calls this subject ‘‘the trajective self,’’ referring to a space in
between the subjective and objective that accounts for the ongoing condition of bodily
movement. Further, as Parks (2001, 214) suggests, ‘‘GPS mapping involves the act of selfpositioning by recording and displaying movements from here to there. The goal of the
personal plot is not to reproduce panoramic vistas, but rather to dis- play one’s changing
position and archive one’s routes.’’ The GPS maps therefore represent the possibility of a
mediated experience, as they often necessitate storytelling and narration be- cause what they
reveal is seen and experienced from very specific and personal points of view. When used as a
technology of self-reflection, GPS invites the user to see herself as a subject- in-motion, as an
author and a reader, reflexively
GT Art solves
Geospatial technology art contests the masculine detachment, rationality and
objectifying nature of drones.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and GeoInformatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
As Parks’s and my own work have shown, GT can be appropriated as media for self-expression
and articulation of emotional geographies. These experimentations contest the detach- ment,
rationality, and objectifying vision en- tailed in conventional GT practices. Map artists and art
activists have long created art maps that contest the authority and content of official maps—
witness the maps produced by the Sur- realists and the Situationists (Krygier 2006; Varanka
2006; Wood 2006). Art maps are often created by extensively reworking preexisting maps,
‘‘redrawing, digitally altering, painting over, and reorienting the original images’’ (Wood 2006,
10). They point toward worlds other than those mapped in official maps and seek to ‘‘produce
new configurations of space, subjectivity and power’’ (kanarinka 2006). Each art map is
therefore not only a ‘‘work of art’’ but also a ‘‘political action’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
12). Similarly, GTcan be appropriated as a digital art medium and used to create artworks that
protest against social injustice and violence. GT art practices can be undertaken or performed as a form of resistance (Deleuze 1998; Kaufman 1998; Klebesadel 2003).
Based on these notions of art practices as pol- itics of resistance, I have explored GIS as an artistic medium for generating digital artwork using GIS software and data. As GIS was not
developed and designed for artistic work, my GIS art project intends to challenge the
understanding of GT as scientific apparatus for producing ob- jective knowledge or as an
instrument of dom- ination. I seek to destabilize the fixed meanings of GT that have precluded
their use in novel and creative ways. Through my GIS art I also articu- late my discontent with
the use of GT in wars and international conflicts that result in large num- bers of civilian
casualties (Gregory 2004; Hynd- man 2005, 2007). I also protest against the use of these
technologies in any applications that vio- late personal rights and privacy, as in geodemographic and surveillance applications. I have explored the aesthetic potential of GIS by
experimenting with various artistic styles and techniques (Figures 1 and 2).3 The digital spaces
of GIS have been appropriated as my spaces of resistance, which elude state sanction on the
more readily recognizable spaces of political protest (Pile 1997; Wainwright forthcoming). My
GIS art project was undertaken out of my sadness in light of the human casualties resulted from
the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 as well as the ensuing wars and
violent conflicts in the Middle East. In the project, GIS was used to create digital images that are
aesthetically pleasing, but none of the visual elements in these images corresponds to any
particular object in the world. For instance, the image shown in Figure 1 was created with three
layers of real vector GIS data. The color schemes of these data and their overlay proper- ties
were first tweaked in a GIS. The map file was then imported to an image processing program
and processed with several artistic filters that transformed it into a drastically different image.
Geospatial Technology art allows for a politics of resistance at the individual
level which is key to solve. Social change is only possible after recognizing the
importance of the human body without reducing humans to mere statistics.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and GeoInformatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Through this abstract and nonrepresentation- al GIS art practice, GIS is momentarily dissociated from any precepts of science, objectivity, transcendent vision, exploitation, surveillance,
or control. I thus participated in the cultural politics of contending the meanings of GT (al- beit
at a personal level), as cultural politics ‘‘are contestations over meanings, over borders and
boundaries, over the ways we make sense of our worlds, and the ways we live our lives’’
(Mitchell 2000, 159). Through this geospatial aesthetics grounded on my concern about the
role of GT in global violence, I insist that GT should be used primarily for creating a more just
and peaceful world, as when the technologies are used in re- search on environmental justice
or for empowering marginalized social groups (e.g., Mennis 2002; McLafferty 2005a). In the
project, GIS was used as a medium of passionate politics for countering the dominant
practices. It is in this sense that my GIS art project can be understood as part of a broader
counterhegemonic struggle over GT, as a form of questioning, and a form of protest and
resistance. and to effect broader social change, politics of resistance at the individual level
needs to be scaled up and connected to collectively practiced politics. The recent trend of
increasing collaboration between researchers, artists, and community groups in projects that
seek to understand people’s feelings and concerns may be indicative of how this connection
can be made (e.g., Rose 1997). For instance, the Greenwich Emotion Map Project engaged art
activists and local residents to reflect on the social change taking place on the Greenwich Peninsula (Nold 2005). It was a mapping project that aimed at understanding how local residents
feel about the area based on their personal exploration and journeys. In the project, biomapping
devices worn by participants recorded their emotional response (their body’s level of
stimulation) to and interaction with their immediate environment, and a GPS tracked the routes
they took. On returning to the studio, the information and photos taken along the way were uploaded and interpreted by participants to create a personal visual narrative. The resulting emotion maps encouraged participants’ personal reflection on the complex relationship between
them, their local environment, and their fellow citizens. The project allowed local residents of
the Greenwich Peninsula to visualize where they feel stressed and excited, to articulate their
concerns, and to engage with wider community issues (Nold 2005).
Ethnography solves
Ethnography critically interrogates patriarchy in technostrategic discourse
Cohn 2005 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights
“Motives and methods: using multi-sited ethnography to study US national security discourses”,
Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, 2006)
I embarked on my research on gender and security in the mid-1980s, during the height of the
Cold War and the so-called “nuclear arms race” between the USA and the Soviet Union. The
manufacture and stockpil- ing of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, the quest for more
“useable nukes” and more “survivable” weapons delivery systems – all of it seemed so wildly
irrational to me that I was consumed by the questions: “How can they do this? How can they
even think this way?Ӧ Initially, those questions were more expressions of moral anguish and
political despair than anything I might have ever thought of as “a good research question.”
However, the intensity of my concern led me to take an opportunity to learn about nuclear
weapons from some of the men who made their living thinking about nuclear weaponry and
strategy. And that experience, my first close encounter with the discursive universe of national
security elites, ultimately led me into an extensive, multi-sited study of the role of gender in
shaping US national security paradigms, policies, and practices (Cohn, forthcoming). This
chapter is a reflection on the methodological choices I made in the course of that study.¶ Here
is an understatement: in the course of my research, many things shifted.¶ My questions
changed. As I became acculturated into a community of civilian nuclear defense intellectuals,
my question changed from “How can they think that way about nuclear weapons” to “How
can any of us?”
Ethnography creates lenses of understanding outside technostrategic discourse
Cohn 2005 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights
“Motives and methods: using multi-sited ethnography to study US national security discourses”,
Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, 2006)
Thus, the scope of my inquiry changed as well, as I moved from studying nuclear technostrategic discourse to national security discourse more broadly.¶ As I engaged in conversation
with people in different parts of the national security community, both civilian and military, and
as I listened to what they said, my question changed again, from “What is the nature of this
discourse?” to “In what ways does gender affect national security paradigms, policies, and
practices?”¶ My subject has been a moving target.¶ To complicate matters further: national
security discourse is a com- plex cultural phenomenon which is produced and deployed in a
wide variety of sites (see, for example, P. J. Katzenstein 1996; Weldes et al. 1999; Evangelista
1999). To study it, I needed a transdisciplinary ap- proach and a composite methodology that
combines cultural analysis and qualitative, ethnographic methods. My approach draws upon
field- work with national security elites and military personnel, as well as upon textual analysis
of Department of Defense official reports, military docu- ments, transcripts of Congressional
hearings, news media accounts (in- cluding print media, radio, and television), and popular film,
to explore the ways in which national security policies and practices are deeply shaped,
limited, and distorted by gender.¶ Naming it¶ In casting about to describe my method, I find
myself at an interdiscip- linary juncture and quandary. My eclectic background includes a
procliv- ity both for philosophical and cultural studies analyses and for the ethnographic
methods of anthropology and sociology; I am never as happy as when I am in there, able to hang
out, ask questions, observe, and interview. So, I find myself working in both worlds. Ultimately,
my study includes cultural studies interpretation, based in my longstand- ing engagement in
national security issues, where every interpretation both builds on and potentially contradicts
every other one. It is also based in the grounded methods of qualitative sociology and
ethnographic anthropology. “Blurred genres,” indeed (Geertz 1973).¶ In bringing the two
together, I heard voices in my head. First, the objection that any empirical social scientist would
have to a cultural studies analysis: “You don’t really justify why you chose these things to¶
analyze and not others. Since there is an infinite world out there, what’s your sampling
technique?”¶ The cultural studies voice responds: “There isn’t really an answer. All you can say
is, these ones were available to me. My method derives its strength from the juxtaposition and
layering of many different windows. Someone else who chose ten different windows might
have come up with a very different analysis. I know that. But I think there is a lot of power in the
fact that there are ten windows open, and among them, I have found these continuities.Ӧ The
feminist qualitative researcher chimes in: “Any investigation, and especially one of a field so
vast as the production and deployment of national security discourse, is of necessity partial, in
a variety of important ways.Ӧ One of the most useful ways I found to get the voices to stop
talking past each other, and to articulate some aspects of the nature and logic of my approach,
comes from anthropologist George Marcus.1 In his description of multi-sited ethnography,
Marcus (1995: 102) figures the mapping of a mobile and multiply situated object of study as
occurring on a “fractured, discontinuous plane of movement and discovery among sites”2 –
and that seems to me to be the perfect description of the “chains, paths, threads, conjunctions,
[and] juxtapositions of locations” that structure my work. In addition, in Marcus’s
characterizations of the different modes and techniques through which multi-sited
ethnographies define their objects of study, one seemed custom-built to describe the activity
that propel- led me along my study’s fractured, discontinuous path – “Follow the Metaphor”
(1995: 108). I have been following gender as metaphor and meaning system through the multisited terrain of national security.¶ Over a decade and a half, my initial interest in ways of
thinking about the discourse of nuclear defense intellectuals expanded to an interest in ways
of thinking about national security more broadly, at different loca- tions in American society.
These included the mass media, Congres- sional hearings, nuclear weapons laboratories,
military bases, and elite military professional education institutions. It is probably a good thing
that I undertook my study of gender and national security in stages, adding on pieces as they
became salient, rather than starting with the direct question of how to study the thinking that
shapes national security practices, paradigms, and policies – for obviously, the question has no
simple or single answer. National security discourse and policies are created by the workings of
many complex social organizations, including universities and think-tanks, legislative and
executive branches of gov- ernment, the military, corporations that contract with the military,
tech- nological research and development labs, and the mass media. And the discourses used
to articulate purposes and policies are not uniform throughout these different locations.¶ My
selection of sites to investigate was both “pre-planned” and “op- portunistic,” very much shaped
by both the nation’s history and my own. When I first went to spend two weeks in a summer
program run by nuclear defense intellectuals, I did not expect to become so involved in the
process of thinking about their thinking. But I was almost instantly intrigued and morbidly
fascinated by their world, so, given the oppor- tunity to stay for a year, I jumped at it. Once
caught up in the elaborate linguistic and conceptual systems of nuclear strategic analysis, I
began to dig deeper into its premises, and started to see their ramifications far outside the
specialized world of nuclear strategy (see Gusterson 1996). As the Cold War ended and nuclear
weapons began to recede from the front-and-center position in public consciousness (although
not from US arsenals or strategic doctrines), a series of other national security events and
institutions came into the news, including the Gulf War and the military sex-and-gender
controversies. As each heated up, it seemed to me an ideal site to explore the discourses
through which national security is constructed and represented. In writing up my research, I
sought to “bring these sites into the same frame of study” and “to make connections through
translations and tracings among distinctive discourses from site to site” (Marcus 1995: 100–
101).¶ Doing it¶ In addition to the choice of sites, another inevitable source of partiality comes
from the practices I used to investigate my chosen sites. As Marcus describes multi-sited
ethnography, “not all sites are treated by a uniform set of fieldwork practices of the same
intensity. Multi-sited ethnographies inevitably are the product of knowledge bases of varying
intensities and qualities” (Marcus 1995: 100). Inevitably, I could not do in-depth research at
each of the kinds of sites where national security discourse is produced and deployed, and there
are gaps in my know- ledge, as the research had no obvious, inherent situational boundaries.
Ethnography solves distancing
Cohn 2005 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights
“Motives and methods: using multi-sited ethnography to study US national security discourses”,
Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, 2006)
My study of national security discourse is the product of combining my political concerns with
my intellectual interests in how people think, and the role of language in not only constructing
and reflecting meaning, but also in shaping systems of thought. Although what impelled me
into this research was a political critique, in the actual doing of the work I have had to try to
put that aside. This is not because I hold a positivist notion of objectivity, but for several
reasons. First, because my goal is to learn, to find out what’s out there, without imposing
preconceptions about what people are like, what the issues are, or what form of analysis or
theoretical framework is most appropriate to engage. I was not trying to prove a point or test
a hypothesis, but to see what was there and think about it. I am not as hopelessly na ı̈ ve as
that may sound. Inevitably, everything about who I am – how I am embodied, what my life
and intellectual history have been, and so on – shapes what I do and do not notice as
significant, and how I interpret it. Other people, with diverse past experiences, political
commitments, and favored analytic frame- works would no doubt look at and hear the same
things that I heard, and inevitably notice different things and come to different conclusions.
But within and despite an awareness of those limits, my thinking about research is in part
reflected in the way that Barbara McClintock spoke about her work in corn genetics. She
emphasized the importance of try- ing imaginatively to get down there in the kernel of corn, to
“listen to the material and let the experiment tell you what to do” (Keller 1985: 162). I think
that the material can sometimes even point you towards the tools you need to understand it;
not because there is only one, true, accurate understanding to which any one of us has
privileged access, but precisely because “nature [and social life] is characterized by an a priori
complex- ity that vastly exceeds the capacities of the human imagination.” Each of us will
bring different insights to understanding and interpreting that complexity, if we “listen to the
material.” More than twenty years ago, my sister-in-law came to this country from Japan.
Shortly afterwards, when I asked her how New York compared to what she expected, she shook
her head, and explained, “Before I came here, I made my mind a blank sheet of paper.”
Postmodern epistemologies tell us to forget about that possibility. But we can still try to take
as many as possible of the sheets that are written all over, and put them aside for a while.
Ethnography solves Technoscientiic Discourse
Cohn 2005 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights
“Motives and methods: using multi-sited ethnography to study US national security discourses”,
Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, 2006)
Although, in the midst of the incident I have just described, I kept putting them aside, I have,
throughout my research, tried to pay atten- tion to feelings. That includes both those of the
people I have observed and talked with, and my own. In participant observation and
interviews, I’ve listened for differences in emotional tone and intensity that accom- pany
different utterances, and the focus on both the apparent presence and apparent absence of
emotion has been part of what guides my attention to issues that merit further analytic
curiosity. I’ve also found that paying attention to my own feelings has at times been key to my
understandings. In my first experience of participant observation among nuclear defense
intellectuals, I took the feelings I had while being encul- turated, learning techno-strategic
discourse, and asked what they could reveal about the discourse and the process of
professionalization. I was fascinated to find, after my reflections were published in the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, that several defense intellectuals told me variations on the same
theme – “Yeah, I had those feelings, too, but didn’t think they were something to think
about.” It is precisely because techno- strategic discourse rests on the radical separation of
thought from feel- ing, on the assumed necessity of excluding emotions from rational thought
(or rather, excluding anything recognized as emotions), that acknowledging the integration of
thought and feeling is so important to me here. Noticing, and thinking about, feelings has
consistently pushed my thinking further – and not only in learning about techno-strategic
discourse. The fact that I have liked, and in a variety of ways respected, so many people whose
choices and actions I not only “disagree” with but am sometimes enraged by and despairing
about, has consistently led me to realize the limits of my understandings, and that I had to go
further.¶ My method derives its strength from the juxtaposition and layering of what I found in
different sites, in different contexts, with different constituencies. I chose what I think of as
several different windows through which to look at national security discourses. I know that
someone else would have chosen other windows, and, even looking through the same
windows, would have been likely to come up with a different analysis. I know that had I
listened at a different think-tank, interviewed at a different base, watched C-SPAN on
different days, or read different newspapers, I would have heard different things, and might
conceivably have come up with a different analysis myself. None- theless, it is significant that
over fifteen years, as I looked through a variety of windows, and listened to multiple local
discourses and con- textual permutations of national security discourses, I heard things in
common, threads that could be pulled through; whether talking to generals or enlisted men,
liberal strategists or a Secretary of Defense, certain continuities could be found. I am very
aware of the disjunctures as well as the resonances across the domains I have been privileged
to enter, and understand that the discontinuities are also tremendously important, and that,
for the sake of my argument, I have probably leaned on the continuities more than on the
discontinuities. However, I believe that the continuities across sites are telling, and significant.
To study them, I used a variety of methods, and participated in different locations in varied
ways. The persuasiveness of my study derives from and must rest upon the very multiplicity of
spaces within which I trace metaphoric gendered themes and their variations in the
production of national security paradigms, policies, and practices.
Deconstruction solves
Deconstruction technostrategic discourse solves for the abstraction of the lived
experience of nuclear conflict and opens space for new ways of nuclear
warplanning.
Cohn 87 (Carol Cohn, “Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” Bulletin of Atomic
Science June 1987 Vol. 43 http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07aa.shtml)
IT DID NOT TAKE LONG to learn the language of nuclear war and much of the specialized
information it contained. My focus quickly changed from mastering technical information and
doctrinal arcana, to an attempt to understand more about how the dogma I was learning was
rationalized. Since underlying rationales are rarely discussed in the everyday business of defense
planning, I had to start asking more questions. At first, although I was tempted to use my newly
acquired proficiency in technostrategic jargon, I vowed to speak English. What I found,
however, was that no matter how well informed my questions were, no matter how complex
an understanding they were based upon, if I was speaking English rather than expert jargon,
the men responded to me as though I were ignorant or simple-minded, or both. A strong
distaste for being patronized and a pragmatic streak made my experiment in English short-lived.
I adopted the vocabulary, speaking of "escalation dominance," "preemptive strikes," and one of
my favorites, "sub-holocaust engagements." This opened my way into long, elaborate
discussions that taught me a lot about technostrategic reasoning and how to manipulate it.¶ But
the better I became at this discourse, the more difficult it became to express my own ideas
and values. While the language included things I had never been able to speak about before, it
radically excluded others. To pick a bald example: the word "peace" is not a part of this
discourse. As close as one can come is. "strategic stability," a term that refers to a balance of
numbers and types of weapons systems--not the political, social, economic, and psychological
conditions that "peace" implies. Moreover, to speak the word is to immediately brand oneself
as a soft-headed activist instead of a professional to be taken seriously.¶ If I was unable to
speak my concerns in the language, more disturbing still was that I also began to find it harder
even to keep them in my own head. No matter how firm my commitment to staying aware of
the bloody reality behind the words, over and over, I found that I could not keep human lives as
my reference point. I found that I could go for days speaking about nuclear weapons, without
once thinking about the people who would be incinerated by them.¶ It is tempting to attribute
this problem to the words themselves--the abstractness, the euphemisms, the sanitized,
friendly, sexy acronyms--then one would only need to change the words; get the military
planners to say "mass murder" instead of "collateral damage," and their thinking would change.
The problem, however, is not simply that defense intellectuals use abstract terminology that
removes them from the reality of which they speak. There is no reality behind the words. Or,
rather, the "reality" they speak of is itself a world of abstractions. Deterrence theory, and
much of strategic doctrine, was invented to hold together abstractly, its validity judged by
internal logic. These abstract systems were developed as a way to make it possible to, in
Herman Kahn's phrase, "think about the unthinkable"--not as a way to describe or codify
relations on the ground.¶ So the problem with the idea of "limited nuclear war," for example, is
not only that it is a travesty to refer to the death and suffering caused by any use of nuclear
weapons as "limited," or that "limited nuclear war" is an abstraction that obfuscates the human
reality beneath any use of nuclear weapons, it is also that limited nuclear was itself an abstract
conceptual system, designed, embodied, and achieved by computer modeling. In this abstract
world, hypothetical, calm, rational actors have sufficient information to know exactly what
size nuclear weapon the opponent has used against which targets, and adequate command
and control to make sure that their response is precisely equifreedomted to the attack. No
field commander would use the tactical nuclear weapons at his disposal at the height of a losing
battle. Our rational actors would have absolute freedom from emotional response to being
attacked, from political pressures from the populace they would act solely on the basis of
perfectly informed mathematical calculus of megatonnage. To refer to limited nuclear war is to
enter a system that is de facto abstract and grotesquely removed from reality. The abstractness
of the entire conception system makes descriptive language utterly beside the point.¶ This
realization helped make sense of my difficulty in staying connected to concrete lives as well as
some of the bizarre and surreal quality of what people said. But there was still a piece missing.
How is it possible, for example, to make sense of the following:¶ The strategies stability of
regime A is based on the fact that both sides are ¶ deprived of any incentive ever to strike first.
Since it takes roughly two ¶ warheads to destroy one enemy silo, an attacker must expend two
of his missiles ¶ to destroy one of the enemy's. A first strike disarms the attacker and the
aggressor ¶ ends up worse off then the aggressed.¶ The homeland of "the aggressed" has just
been devastated from the explosions of, say, a thousand nuclear bombs, each likely to be at
least 10 to 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the aggressor,
whose homeland is still untouched, "ends up worse off"?¶ I was only able to make sense of this
kind of thinking when I finally asked myself: Who--or what--is the subject? In technostrategic
discourse, the reference point is not human beings but the weapons themselves. The
aggressor ends up worse off than the aggressed because he has fewer weapons left; any other
factors, such as what happened when the weapons landed, are irrelevant to the calculus of gain
and loss.¶ The fact that the subject of strategic paradigms are weapons has several important
implications. First, and perhaps most critically, there is no real way to talk about human death
or human societies when you are using a language designed to talk about weapons. Human
death simply is collateral damage--collateral to the real subject, which is the weapons
themselves.¶ Understanding this also helps explain what was at first so surprising to me: most
people who do this work are on the whole nice, even good, men, many with liberal inclinations.
While they often identify their motivations as being concerns about humans, in their work they
enter a language and paradigm that precludes people thus, the nature and outcome of their
work can entirely contradict their genuine motives for doing it.¶ In addition, if weapons are the
reference point, it becomes in some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human
concerns. Questions that break through the numbing language of strategic analysis and raise
issues in human terms can be easily dismissed. No one will claim that they are unimportant.
But they are inexpert, unprofessional, irrelevant to the business at hand. The discourse among
the experts remains hermetically sealed. One can talk about the weapons that are supposed to
protect particular people and their way of life without actually asking if they are able to go for it,
or if they are the best way to do it, or whether they may even damage the entities they are
supposedly protecting. These are separate questions.¶ This discourse has become virtually the
only response to the question of how to achieve security that is recognized as legitimate. If the
discussion of weapons was one competing voice in the discussion, or one that was integrated
with others, the fact that the referents of strategic paradigms are only weapons might be of less
note. But when we realize that the only language and expertise offered to those interested in
pursuing peace refers to nothing but weapons, its limits become staggering. And its
entrapping qualities--the way it becomes so hard, once you adopt the language, to stay
connected to human concerns--become more comprehensible¶ WITHIN A FEW WEEKS, what
had once been remarkable became unnoticeable. As I learned to speak, my perspective
changed. I no longer stood outside the impenetrable wall of technostrategic language and once
inside, I could no longer see it. I had not only learned to speak a language; I had started to think
in it. Its questions became my questions, its concepts shaped my responses to new ideas. Like
the White Queen, I began to believe six impossible things before breakfast--not because I
consciously believed, for instance, that a "surgically clean conterforce strike" was really possible,
but because some elaborate piece of doctrinal reasoning I used was already predicated on the
possibility of those strikes as well as on a host of other impossible things.¶ My grasp on what I
knew as reality seemed to slip. I might get very excited, for example, about a new strategic
justification for a no-first-use policy and spend time discussing the ways in which its implications
for the U.S. force structure in Western Europe were superior to the older version. After a day or
two I would suddenly step back, aghast that I was involved with the military justifications for not
using nuclear weapons--as though the moral ones were not enough. What I was actually talking
about--the mass incineration of a nuclear attack--was no longer in my head.¶ Or I might hear
some proposals that seemed to me infinitely superior to the usual arms control fare. First I
would work out how and why these proposals were better and then ways to encounter the
arguments against them. Then it might dawn on me that even though these two proposals
sounded different, they still shared a host of assumptions that I was not willing to make. I would
first feel as though I had achieved a new insight. And then all of a sudden, I would realize that
these were things I actually knew before I ever entered this community and had since forgotten.
I began to feel that I had fallen down the rabbit hole.¶ THE LANGUAGE ISSUES do not disappear.
The seductions of learning and using it remain great, and as the pleasures deepen, so do the
dangers. The activity of trying to out-reason nuclear strategists in their own games gets you
thinking inside their rules, tacitly accepting the unspoken assumptions of their paradigms.¶ Yet
the issues of language have now become somewhat less central to me, and my new questions,
while still not precisely the questions of an insider, are questions I could not have had without
being inside. Many of them are more practical: Which individuals and institutions are actually
responsible for the endless "modernization" and proliferation of nuclear weaponry, and what do
they gain from it? What role does technostrategic rationality play in their thinking? What would
a reasonable, genuinely defensive policy look like? Others are more philosophical, having to do
with the nature of the "realism" claimed for the defense intellectuals' mode of thinking and the
grounds upon which it can be shown to be spurious. What would an alternative rationality look
like?¶ My own move away from a focus on the language is quite typical. Other recent entrants
into this world have commented that the cold-blooded, abstract discussions are most striking
at first, within a short time you get past them and come to see the language itself is not the
problem.¶ I think it would be a mistake, however, to dismiss these early impressions. While I
believe that the language is not the whole problem, it is a significant component, and clue.
What it reveals is a whole series of culturally grounded and culturally acceptable mechanisms
that make it possible to work in institutions that foster the proliferation of nuclear weapons,
to plan mass incineration of millions of human beings for a living. Language that is abstract,
sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use; paradigms whose referent
is weapons; imagery that domesticates and deflates the forces of mass destruction; imagery
that reverses sentient and non sentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and
creation--all of these are part of what makes it possible to be radically removed from the reality
of what one is talking about, and from the realities one is creating through the discourse.¶ Close
attention to the language itself also reveals a tantalizing basis on which to challenge the
legitimacy of the defense intellectuals' dominance of the discourse on nuclear issues. When
defense intellectuals are criticized for the cold-blooded inhumanity of the scenarios they
paint, their response is to claim the high ground of rationality. They portray those who are
radically opposed to the nuclear status quo as irrational, unrealistic, too emotional--"idealistic
activists." But if the smooth, shiny surface of their discourse--its abstraction and technical
jargon--appears at first to support these claims, a look below the surface does not. Instead we
find strong current of homoerotic excitement, heterosexual domination, the drive toward
competence and mastery, the pleasures of membership in an elite and privileged group, of the
ultimate importance and meaning of membership in the priesthood. How is it possible to point
to the pursuers of these values, these experiences, as paragons of cool-headed objectivity?¶
While listening to the language reveals the mechanisms of distancing and denial and the
emotional currents embodied in this emphatically male discourse, attention to the experience
of learning the language reveals something about how thinking can become more abstract,
more focused on parts disembedded from their context, more attentive to the survival of
weapons than the survival of human beings.¶ Because this professional language sets the terms
for public debate, many who oppose current nuclear policies choose to learn it. Even if they do
not believe that the technical information is very important, some believe it is necessary to
master the language simply because it is too difficult to attain public legitimacy without it. But
learning the language is a transformative process . You are not simply adding new information;
new vocabulary, but entering a mode of thinking not only about nuclear weapons but also
about military and political power, and about the relationship between human ends and
technological means.¶ The language and the mode of thinking are not neutral containers of
information; they were developed by a specific group of men, trained largely in abstract
theoretical mathematics and economics, specifically to make it possible to think rationally about
the use of nuclear weapons. That the language is not well suited to do anything but makes it
possible to think about nuclear weapons should not be surprising.¶ Those who find U.S. nuclear
policy desperately misguided face a serious quandary. If we refuse to learn the language, we
condemn ourselves to being jesters on the sidelines. If we learn and use it, we not only
severely limit what we can say but also invite the transformation, the militarization, of our
own thinking.¶ I have no solution to this dilemma, but I would like to offer a couple of thoughts
in an effort to push it a little further--or perhaps even to reformulate its terms. It is adopting the
strategy of learning the language. When we outsiders assume that learning and speaking the
language will give us a voice recognized as legitimate and will give us greater political influence,
we assume that the language itself actually articulates the criteria and reasoning strategies upon
which nuclear weapons development and deployment decisions are made. this is largely an
illusion. I suggest that technostrategic discourse functions more as a gloss, as an ideological
patina that hides the actual reasons these decisions are made. Rather than informing and
shaping decisions, it far more often legitimizes political outcomes that have occurred for
utterly different reasons. If this is true, it raises serious questions about the extent of the
political returns we might get from using it, and whether they can ever balance out the potential
problems and inherent costs.¶ I believe that those who seek a more just and peaceful world
have a dual task before them--a deconstructive project and a reconstructive project that are
intimately linked. Deconstruction requires close attention to, and the dismantling of,
technostrategic discourse. The dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized
rationality speaks so loudly in our culture that it will remain difficult for any other voices to be
heard until that voice loses some of its power to define what we hear and how we name the
world.¶ The reconstructive task is to create compelling alternative visions of possible futures,
to recognize and develop alternative conceptions of rationality, to create rich and imaginative
alternative voices--diverse voices whose conversations with each other will invent those
futures.
Cyborg Solves
THE EVERYTHING CARD (L, !, ALT) - The dominant debate on drones is occupied
by claims that either its autonomy allows for more rational and precise fighting
or miscalculation, inevitable without human evaluation. This minimizes the
debate by assuming a clear distinction between drone and human, and creates
a technostrategic discourse based on the distancing between persecutors and
violence, all on the backdrop of colonial and asymmetrical war-waging. Rather,
we should embrace the cyborg: the drone and its operator become integrated
as each projects its own apparatus of consciousness and understanding onto
the other, and thus allows for a dual deconstructive/reconstructive approach.
Allinson 12. (Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.
com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
With some exceptions, the rise of drones has largely been discussed across two interconnected
axes. The first of these concerns whether US assassination missions in Pakistan (and by
extension Somalia and Yemen) using drones are permitted under international law. Some of
the substance in this debate touches upon the argument made here but since most of the
controversy concerns the legality of attacks carried out with drones, rather than the nature of
drones themselves, I will not engage with it directly here. Connected to this legal controversy
over a specific US tactic, there is an ongoing debate over whether drones in themselves can be
ethically used in war, and the implications they hold for the future of war.¶ ¶ The positions in
this debate can be sketched out, in very broad lines, into pro and anti-drone arguments. On the
pro-drone side, scholars such as Ronald Arkin, Bradley Strawser and Armin Krishnan argue that
the central point is not the use of drones as such, but the regulation of such use in accordance
with the basic principles of the laws of war: just cause, proportionality and discrimination
between combatants and non-combatants. Against this broadly positive assessment of drone
use, critics such as Noel Sharkey argue that the risk of empowering robots with lethal force is
too great, either in particular decisions to kill or in the lowering of barriers to declaring war in
general. Both sides are concerned not just with the uses of drone in the present, but the
framework of their use as these robots become more autonomous⎯ autonomy meaning the
‘capability of a machine (usually a robot) for unsupervised operation’ and hence the ‘smaller
the need for human supervision and intervention, the greater the autonomy’. The debate is
therefore directed toward the horizon of the development an autonomous killer robot: not
necessarily one that resembles the androids of the Terminator franchise but nonetheless a
machine endowed with the capability to decide when to take human life.¶ ¶ The argument in
favour of using killer drones, even those with a high degree of autonomy, draws on an analogy
between these systems and less sophisticated weapons. In this view, lethal drones will also be
used under the supervision of a human at some point and therefore simply represent a
heightened version of the phenomenon of prosthesis given by firearms, missiles and the like.
Even if an autonomous weapons system were to ‘pull the trigger’ it would still do so under
human supervision. Nor are drones the first autonomous killing system: anti-tank mines, for
example, respond to a stimulus (weight) that triggers their lethal response without any human
supervision. If the war in which such weapons are used is a just one, then there is no reason
for drone use a priori to be unjust and given the assumption of this argument that war is an
inevitable part of human life, it is better to make humane war-drones than to oppose them.¶ ¶
Against these arguments, those holding to the anti-drone position argue that the development
of autonomous killer drones represents a change above their simple use as weapons, although
that use already has proved inhumane and unjust. A drone tasked with killing an enemy it
selects, even on the basis of some pre-programmed criteria, violates the chain of moral
accountability necessary for there to be any enforcement of justice in war. If an autonomous
robot were to kill someone who should not have been killed, it could not be considered a
morally responsible agent ⎯and even if it could be, how meaningful would it be to punish a
machine? On the converse, it would surely be unjust, the argument follows, to punish a
programmer or operator for a malfunction that was not a moral choice of their own. ¶ ¶
Further, claim scholars such as Sharkey drones lower the barrier both to the individual acts of
killing that make up war, and to starting wars. This is because of the ease with which the droneusing side can kill its enemies, without guilt, agony, the sight of blood or the loss of young
lives: in other words drones make war too easy. Sharkey envisions autonomous drones
leading to ‘automated killing as the final step in the industrial revolution of war – a clean
factory of slaughter with no physical blood on our hands and none of our own side killed’
Sharkey hits on an important point here, upon which I expand below, that drones are unlikely
to be used in warfare between major industrial powers. Rather, as drones become more
autonomous they are likely to be employed in the contexts in which they are currently used:
asymmetric and largely aerial warfare, exacerbating the tendency to view the civilian
casualties of such strikes as mere figures on a screen . Moreover, Sharkey claims, there is
simply no way to program a drone to discriminate between civilians and combatants .¶ ¶
Ronald Arkin challenges the notion that drones cannot be programmed to act
humanely⎯indeed that such systems could be programmed to act more humanely that human
‘warfighters’. It would also be possible to establish a system of accountability, or ‘responsibility
adviser’ for autonomous killing systems. According to Arkin, principles of proportionate and
discriminate use of violence could be literally hard-wired into drones, improving the capability
for wars to be fought humanely even if perfection in this regard is impossible to reach. Of
course, this would require some kind of algorithim by which the drone would decide whom to
kill. Krishnan describes how DARPA, the US Defence Research Agency has developed an
Automated Target Recognition System, which ‘would allow a robot or robotic weapon to
independently identify an object as a target and to make a decision whether or not to engage
this target…based on a computer analysis of the signatures and movements of an object in the
battlespace’ although ‘in the long run it would always be very difficult for any ATR system to
divide humans , which it could some day certainly distinguish reliably from other objects, into
combatants and civilians ’. Arkin argues that because drones would not have the human
instinct for self-preservation, they could more easily approach potential targets and ascertain
whether they were combatants or not with less likelihood of using lethal force. Indeed, prodrone scholars such as Bradley Strawser claim not only that drones are just, but that one is
morally obliged to use them because they are more accurate than humans and do not risk
their pilot’s life, leading to an overall gain. ¶ ¶ Against these claims, anti-drone voices focus on
the potential for lethal mistakes. Indeed in 2007 a semi-autonomous cannon malfunctioned at
a military display in South Africa, killing nine soldiers. Events such as this may be behind the
reluctance to have the weaponized versions of US ground robots (systems such as TALONS and
SWORDS) fire shots in anger. Yet, here anti-drone and pro-drone ethicists converge, both
concerning themselves with the idea of the accidental, the unforeseen and the precautionary.
Ronald Arkin and Armin Krishnan argue that there may indeed be lethal drone mistakes in
war, but these are likely to be fewer than those of human soldiers and more predictable.
Atrocities in war, Ronald Arkin argues result from human failings not shared by drones: fear of
one’s own death, rage at the loss of a comrade, ‘revenge’, ‘power dominance’, ‘punishment’,
‘asymmetrical necessity’, ‘genocidal thinking’ and ‘dualistic thinking⎯separating the good from
the bad’.¶ ¶ The convergence in arguments from both sides of the debate here reveals an
interesting lacuna: they are concerned with what goes wrong either with drones (going
haywire, killing people indiscriminately because of a programming error) or with human
soldiers (submitting to their emotional drives and committing atrocities ). Yet might not the
atrociousness of drones arise from their ‘correct’ and quotidian use⎯especially in the context
of the quasi-colonial battlefield in which drones are most likely to be used? The debate on
drone autonomy assumes that the current , human operators of drones are perfectly
separable from the drone and the hierarchical structure of violence that produced it. The
claim that drones would be less likely to, for example, kill civilians, because they lack
emotions assumes that human soldiers commit atrocities because of their emotions. On the
contrary, might it not be the case that atrocities in colonial warfare reflect precisely from
those apparatuses that ‘distinguish those who are to be protected from those who are to be
feared or destroyed’?¶ It is this lacuna that this paper seeks to address. Rather than see human
drone operators (who serve as the standard by which the potential behaviour of autonomous
drones is judged) as perfectly autonomous rationalities, contained within discrete bodies, this
paper adopts Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg: a ‘cybernetic organism, a hybrid of
machine and organism, a creature of reality as well as a creature of fiction’ reflecting the
fusion of mechanical and organic bodies as ‘deep materializations of very complex sociotechnical relations’ . These relations violate the boundary between potentially autonomous
drone and rational human operator: ‘for even the most reliable Western individuated bodies…
neither stop nor start at the skin’ .
The drone cyborg is the synthesis of organism—operator—and technology—
UAV—in the name of necropolitics, the ability to wage the life and death based
on the division of good and bad populations.
Allinson 12. (Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.
com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
Where I take up Haraway’s discussion is at her starting point of the cyborg as ‘the illegitimate
offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism’. Rather than the predominant view on both
sides of the drone debate of current human pilots simply as rational and autonomous
individuals separable from their machines, I make use of Haraway’s insight that drone
complexes are ‘deep materializations of very complex socio-technical relations’ . What is the
assemblage of socio-technical relations to which the drone cyborgs belong? It is, I argue,
constituted by the operation of ‘necropolitics’: ‘the distribution of human species into groups,
the subdivision of the population into subgroups and the establishment of a biological caesura
between the ones and the others’ and at one side of this ‘caesura’ lie those subject to the
sovereign right of death. Or to use some of the algorithmic language of the debate surveyed
above, necropolitics means ‘separating the good from the bad’ and establishing who is ‘an
object in the battlespace’.¶ The concept of ‘necropolitics’ occupies that space between the
image of the sovereign as arbiter of life and death, and reducer of beings to death-in-life, and
the governance of life, of bodies and of the ‘the species body, the body imbued with the
mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes…with all the conditions that
can cause these to vary’ . Necro-politics exercises the sovereign right of death, and the
distinguishing of populations who are to be subject to it, through the logics of surveillance and
management characteristic of ‘governmentality’. One need think only of any instance of drone
warfare⎯the apparatuses and dispositions of data implicated in killing-by-drone, the
dispositions and structures of information, the rendering of space as a Cartesian grid in which
watching-killing is carried out⎯to grasp how appropriate the idea is to our topic. In this
combination of governance and death, necropolitics is both creator and artifact of those areas
beyond the ‘caesura’ spoken of above: in the colony, ‘in which war and disorder, internal and
external figures of the political, stand side by side or alternate with each other’ .
Gender
Links
Generics – IR
Tickner Cards
International politics excludes women and brands them as weak and ineffectual
leaders
Tickner 92 (J. Ann, American University, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Global Security”, Gender in International Relations,
http://www.ces.uc.pt/ficheiros2/files/Short.pdf, pg. 3)
As Eleanor Roosevelt and countless others have observed, international politics is a man's
world. It is a¶ world inhabited by diplomats, soldiers, and international civil servants most of
whom are men. Apart¶ from the occasional head of state, there is little evidence to suggest that
women have played much of a¶ role in shaping foreign policy in any country in the twentieth
century. In the United States in 1987,¶ women constituted less than 5 percent of the senior
Foreign Service ranks, and in the same year, less than¶ 4 percent of the executive positions in
the Department of Defense were held by women. 1¶ Although it is¶ true that women are
underrepresented in all top-level government positions in the United States and¶ elsewhere,
they encounter additional difficulties in positions having to do with international politics. The¶
following stories can help us to understand why.¶ Before the superpower summit in Geneva in
1985, Donald Regan, then White House chief of staff, told a¶ Washington Post reporter that
women would not understand the issues at stake at that meeting. As¶ reported in the Boston
Globe of October 10, 1985, Regan claimed that women are "not... going to¶ understand [missile]
throw-weights or what is happening in Afghanistan or what is happening in human¶ rights. ...
Some women will, but most women... would rather read the human interest stuff of what¶
happened." Protesting Regan's remarks, feminists cited women's prominent roles in the various
peace¶ movements of the twentieth century as evidence of their competency in international
affairs. 2¶ When Bella Abzug entered the House of Representatives in 1972, she claimed that
ending the war in¶ Vietnam was the most important item on the congressional agenda and the
one on which she most¶ wanted to work as the representative of the many women and men in
her district who opposed the war.¶ With this goal in mind, Abzug requested a seat on the House
Armed Services Committee, a committee¶ on which, in 1972, no woman had served in the past
twenty-two years. Abzug's request was denied by¶ members of the House leadership, one of
whom suggested that the Agriculture Committee would be¶ more appropriate. In her account of
this incident, Abzug notes that, of the twelve women in the House of¶ Representatives in 1972,
five were assigned to the Education and Labor Committee, evidence that¶ suggests that women
in politics are channeled into certain arenas of public policy that are perceived as¶ "women's
issues." 3¶ M124ore recently, a picture of Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder crying on her
husband's shoulder, which¶ appeared on the front page of several major American
newspapers after she withdrew from the¶ presidential primary campaign in September 1987,
stimulated subsequent discussion about her suitability¶ as a presidential candidate. The
discussion revealed that, even though Schroeder is one of the very few¶ women who has served
on the House Armed Services Committee, many people in the United States had¶ strong
misgivings over the thought of an emotional woman with her finger on the nuclear button. 4¶
Each of these stories reinforces the belief, widely held in the United States and throughout the
world by¶ both men and women, that military and foreign policy are arenas of policy-making
least appropriate for¶ women. Strength, power, autonomy, independence, and rationality, all
typically associated with men and¶ masculinity, are characteristics we most value in those to
whom we entrust the conduct of our foreign¶ policy and the defense of our national interest.
Those women in the peace movements, whom feminist¶ critics of Donald Regan cited as
evidence for women's involvement in international affairs, are frequently¶ branded as naive,
weak, and even unpatriotic. When we think about the definition of a patriot, we¶ generally
think of a man, often a soldier who defends his homeland, most especially his women and¶
children, from dangerous outsiders. (We sometimes even think of a missile or a football team.)
The¶ Schroeder story suggests that even women who have experience in foreign policy issues
are perceived as¶ being too emotional and too weak for the tough life-and-death decisions
required for the nation's defense.¶ Weakness is always considered a danger when issues of
national security are at stake: the president's dual¶ role as commander in chief reinforces our
belief that qualities we associate with "manliness" are of¶ utmost importance in the selection
of our presidents.
IR is a masculinized sphere where the values of women are considered
irrelevant
Tickner 92 (J. Ann, American University, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Global Security”, Gender in International Relations,
http://www.ces.uc.pt/ficheiros2/files/Short.pdf, pg. 7)
The few women who do make it into the foreign policy establishment often suffer from this
negative¶ perception: Jeane Kirkpatrick is one such example. Attracted by her authoritative and
forceful public¶ style and strong anticommunist rhetoric, Ronald Reagan appointed Kirkpatrick
as ambassador to the¶ United Nations in 1981. Yet in spite of the visibility she achieved due to
her strong stance against¶ anti-American voices at the United Nations, Kirkpatrick complained of
not being taken seriously by her¶ peers both in the United Nations and in the U.S. foreign
policy establishment. Although other American¶ ambassadors to the United Nations have also
complained that they lack influence over U.S. foreign¶ policy-making, Kirkpatrick specifically
attributed this lack of respect to her sex: describing herself to one¶ reporter as a "mouse in a
man's world," Kirkpatrick claimed that her views were seldom listened to and¶ that she failed to
have any effect whatsoever on the course of American foreign policy. 5¶ The experiences of
Abzug, Schroeder, and Kirkpatrick-- women with very different political perspectives¶ (two liberal
Democrats and one conservative Republican)-- are examples of the difficulties that women¶ face
when they try to enter the elite world of foreign policy decision-making. In this book, however, I
do¶ not intend to focus on strategies to increase the number of women in high foreign policy
positions. I¶ believe that these gender-related difficulties are symptomatic of a much deeper
issue that I do wish to¶ address: the extent to which international politics is such a thoroughly
masculinized sphere of activity¶ that women's voices are considered inauthentic. Therefore my
attempt is to step back from the¶ experiences of the few women who have tried to operate in
the world of international politics, sometimes¶ even successfully, and to examine how this world
is constructed. By analyzing some of the writings of¶ those who have tried to describe, explain,
and prescribe for the behavior of states in the international¶ system, we can begin to understand
some of the deeper reasons for women's pervasive exclusion from¶ foreign policy-making-- for it
is in the way that we are taught to think about international politics that the¶ attitudes I have
described are shaped.¶ With its focus on the "high" politics of war and Realpolitik, the
traditional Western academic discipline¶ of international relations privileges issues that grow
out of men's experiences; we are socialized into¶ believing that war and power politics are
spheres of activity with which men have a special affinity and¶ that their voices in describing
and prescribing for this world are therefore likely to be more authentic.¶ The roles traditionally
ascribed to women-- in reproduction, in households, and even in the economy--¶ are generally
considered irrelevant to the traditional construction of the field. Ignoring women's¶
experiences contributes not only to their exclusion but also to a process of self-selection that
results in an¶ overwhelmingly male population both in the foreign policy world and in the
academic field of¶ international relations. This selection process begins with the way we are
taught to think about world¶ politics; if women's experiences were to be included, a radical
redefinition of the field would have to take¶ place.¶ The purpose of this book is to begin to think
about how the discipline of international relations might¶ look if gender were included as a
category of analysis and if women's experiences were part of the¶ subject matter out of which its
theories are constructed. Until gender hierarchies are eliminated,¶ hierarchies that privilege
male characteristics and men's knowledge and experiences, and sustain the kind¶ of attitudes
toward women in foreign policy that I have described, I do not believe that the¶
marginalization of women in matters related to international politics is likely to change.
IR theory is patriarchal and leads to perpetual violence
Tickner 92 (J. Ann, American University, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Global Security”, Gender in International Relations,
http://www.ces.uc.pt/ficheiros2/files/Short.pdf, pg. 8)
Masculinity and politics have a long and close association. Characteristics associated with
"manliness,"¶ ¶ such as toughness, courage, power, independence, and even physical strength,
have, throughout history,¶ ¶ been those most valued in the conduct of politics, particularly
international politics. Frequently,¶ ¶ manliness has also been associated with violence and the
use of force, a type of behavior that, when¶ ¶ conducted in the international arena, has been
valorized and applauded in the name of defending one's¶ ¶ country.¶ ¶ This celebration of male
power, particularly the glorification of the male warrior, produces more of a¶ ¶ gender dichotomy
than exists in reality for, as R. W. Connell points out, this stereotypical image of¶ ¶ masculinity
does not fit most men. Connell suggests that what he calls "hegemonic masculinity," a type¶ ¶ of
culturally dominant masculinity that he distinguishes from other subordinated masculinities, is
a¶ ¶ socially constructed cultural ideal that, while it does not correspond to the actual
personality of the¶ ¶ majority of men, sustains patriarchal authority and legitimizes a patriarchal
political and social order. 6¶ Hegemonic masculinity is sustained through its opposition to
various subordinated and devalued¶ ¶ masculinities, such as homosexuality, and, more
important, through its relation to various devalued¶ ¶ femininities. Socially constructed gender
differences are based on socially sanctioned, unequal¶ ¶ relationships between men and women
that reinforce compliance with men's stated superiority. Nowhere¶ ¶ in the public realm are
these stereotypical gender images more apparent than in the realm of international¶ ¶ politics,
where the characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity are projected onto the
behavior¶ ¶ of states whose success as international actors is measured in terms of their power
capabilities and¶ ¶ capacity for self-help and autonomy. Connell's definition of hegemonic
masculinity depends on its opposition to and unequal relationship with¶ various subordinated
femininities. Many contemporary feminists draw on similarly socially constructed,¶ or
engendered, relationships in their definition of gender difference. Historically, differences
between¶ men and women have usually been ascribed to biology. But when feminists use the
term gender today,¶ they are not generally referring to biological differences between males and
females, but to a set of¶ culturally shaped and defined characteristics associated with
masculinity and femininity. These¶ characteristics can and do vary across time and place. In this
¶
view, biology may constrain behavior, but it¶ should not be used "deterministically" or
"naturally" to justify practices, institutions, or choices that¶ could be other than they are. While
what it means to be a man or a woman varies across cultures and¶ history, in most cultures
gender differences signify relationships of inequality and the domination of¶ women by men.¶
IR theory promotes oppression towards women and thus we must challenge
and break down hierarchal assumptions to have gender equality
Tickner 92 (J. Ann, American University, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Global Security”, Gender in International Relations,
http://www.ces.uc.pt/ficheiros2/files/Short.pdf, pg. 9)
Joan Scott similarly characterizes gender as "a constitutive element of social relationships based
on¶ perceived differences between the sexes, and... a primary way of signifying relationships of
power." 7¶ Indeed one could characterize most contemporary feminist scholarship in terms of
the dual beliefs that¶ gender difference has played an important and essential role in the
structuring of social inequalities in¶ much of human history and that the resulting differences in
self-identifications, human understandings,¶ social status, and power relationships are
unjustified.¶ Scott claims that the way in which our understanding of gender signifies
relationships of power is¶ through a set of normative concepts that set forth interpretations of
the meanings of symbols. In Western¶ culture, these concepts take the form of fixed binary
oppositions that categorically assert the meaning of¶ masculine and feminine and hence
legitimize a set of unequal social relationships. 8¶ Scott and many other¶ contemporary
feminists assert that, through our use of language, we come to perceive the world through¶
these binary oppositions. Our Western understanding of gender is based on a set of culturally
determined¶ binary distinctions, such as public versus private, objective versus subjective, self
versus other, reason¶ versus emotion, autonomy versus relatedness, and culture versus nature;
the first of each pair of¶ characteristics is typically associated with masculinity, the second with
femininity. 9¶ Scott claims that the¶ hierarchical construction of these distinctions can take on a
fixed and permanent quality that perpetuates¶ women's oppression: therefore they must be
challenged. To do so we must analyze the way these binary¶ oppositions operate in different
contexts and, rather than accepting them as fixed, seek to displace their¶ hierarchical
construction. 10 When many of these differences between women and men are no longer¶
assumed to be natural or fixed, we can examine how relations of gender inequality are
constructed and¶ sustained in various arenas of public and private life. In committing itself to
gender as a category of¶ analysis, contemporary feminism also commits itself to gender
equality as a social goal.
Realism is an illusion which excludes feminist studies
Tickner 92 (J. Ann, American University, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Global Security”, Gender in International Relations,
http://www.ces.uc.pt/ficheiros2/files/Short.pdf, pg. 11-12)
The promise of constructing a grand theory of international relations proved illusory.
Knowledge¶ construction in the discipline has generally been driven by real world events, and
realism appeared best¶ to describe the political behavior of the great powers during periods of
high political tension. In the early¶ 1970s, realism was severely challenged at a time when the
declining intensity of the Cold War and a¶ dramatic rise in oil prices catapulted issues other than
war and peace and Soviet-American relations to¶ the top of the foreign policy agenda. The
perceived challenge to national security, mounted by the action¶ of the OPEC cartel, prompted
some scholars to suggest that international relations must pay more¶ attention to issues
associated with economic interdependence and to activities of nonstate actors. This¶
"interdependence" school also challenged realism's exclusive focus on political conflict and
power¶ politics in the international system by calling attention to relations between states,
such as the United¶ States and Canada or Western Europe, where war was not expected.
Interdependence scholars claimed¶ that the traditional approach was particularly unsuitable
for explaining economic conflicts between¶ advanced capitalist states. 19¶ A more fundamental
challenge to realism came from scholars influenced by the Marxist tradition.¶ Motivated by a
different agenda, one that emphasizes issues of equality and justice rather than issues of¶ order
and control, scholars using a variety of more radical approaches attempted to move the field
away¶ from its excessively Western focus toward a consideration of those marginalized areas of
the world¶ system that had been subject to Western colonization. When it became evident, in
the 1970s, that¶ promises of prosperity and the elimination of poverty in these newly
independent states were not being¶ fulfilled, these scholars turned their attention to the world
economy, the workings of which, they¶ believed, served to perpetuate the unevenness of
development between and within states. Many of them¶ claimed that a structural condition
known as dependency locked these states on the peripheries of the¶ world system into a
detrimental relationship with the centers of political and economic power, denying¶ them the
possibility of autonomous development. 20 Marxists emphasized class divisions that exist in,¶
and derive from, the world market and that cut across state boundaries. Peace researchers
began to use¶ the term structural violence to denote a condition whereby those on the margins
of the international¶ system were condemned to a shorter life expectancy through the uneven
allocation of the resources of¶ global capitalism. 21¶ The introduction of competing theories and
approaches and the injection of these new issues and actors¶ into the subject matter of
international relations were accompanied by a shift to a more normative¶ approach to the
field. For example, the world order perspective asked how humanity could significantly¶ reduce
the likelihood of international violence and create minimally acceptable conditions of
worldwide¶ economic well-being, social justice, ecological stability, and democratic participation
in decision-making¶ processes. 22 World order scholars questioned whether the state was an
adequate instrument for solving¶ the multiplicity of problems on the international agenda.
Militarized states can be a threat to the security¶ of their own populations; economic inequality,
poverty, and constraints on resources were seen as the¶ results of the workings of global
capitalism and thus beyond the control of individual states. State¶ boundaries cannot be
protected against environmental pollution, an issue that can be addressed only by¶ international
collective action. World order scholars rejected realist claims of objectivity and positivist ¶
conceptions in the international relations discipline; adopting a specifically normative stance,
they have¶ postulated possible alternate futures that could offer the promise of equality and
justice and investigated¶ how these alternative futures could be achieved. 23¶ In realism's
subject matter, as well as in its quest for a scientific methodology, we can detect an¶ orientation
that corresponds to some of the masculine-linked characteristics I described above, such as¶
the emphasis on power and autonomy and claims to objectivity and rationality. But among
realism's¶ critics, virtually no attention has been given to gender as a category of analysis.
Scholars concerned with¶ structural violence have paid little attention to how women are
affected by global politics or the workings¶ of the world economy, nor to the fact that
hierarchical gender relations are interrelated with other forms¶ of domination that they do
address. 24 In developing a perspective on international relations that does¶ address the effects
of these gender hierarchies, I shall therefore be drawing on feminist theories from¶ other
disciplines to see how they can contribute to our understanding of gender in international
relations.
Military Technologies
New technologies uphold traditional gender narratives
Manjikian 13 (Mary, Faculty Member, Regent University, Robertson School of Government,
International Feminist Journal of Politics, “THE GENDERING OF LETHAL AUTONOMOUS
WARFARE TECHNOLOGY”, Volume 15 2013, January, 30th,
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfjp20#.Ufmji23ciRM)
In addition, new technologies are also subverting and changing traditional gender hierarchies
and gender roles¶ within¶ the military¶ as evidenced by the character of the so-called techno
geek, the one who pilots a desk or a computer rather than an aircraft. Wired Magazine’s¶
Danger Room blog describes the new generation of so-¶ called “geek warriors noting that the
men who command systems like¶ Israel’s Iron Dome mobile anti¶ -rocket interception system
are not stereotypically male leaders. However, American Air Force Major General Stephen J.
Miller refers to the officers who head the Eighth¶ Air Force’s new cyber command as “cyber
warriors,” making the argument that the soldier who utilizes internet-based command,
communications and control technology now “commands” the domain called¶ the internet,
just as other types of soldiers command the air, the sea and the land or terrain. He is also
described as “defending American cyberspace.” Thus, having technical proficiency rather than
typical skills like aggression and war fighting is constructed as being a different type of male
activity rather than being a feminine or gender-neutral activity. Profiles in sources like “Wired”
reinforce the connection between technical prowess and masculinity through featuring¶
pictures of the new ‘geek warriors’ in military gear, posing next to the weapons which they¶
pilot remotely. (Information is also provided which notes their kill ratios.) Thus, it appears that
technologies which enhance war fighting through equipping warriors with new skills and tools
like better eyesight, the ability to carry greater loads, or to move faster or for longer distances
are incorporated into existing gender narratives, rather than leading to the creation of new
narratives.¶ The ability to alter one’s capabilities using technology do¶ es not render one less
masculine or more feminine. It simply makes one different. However, in the scenarios described
above¶ –¶ the invention of technological advances in the equipment which one carries, uses or
wears as a soldier, the¶ soldier’s presence is¶ still required on the battlefield. He may do a
different job, but he is not replaced or absented from his job. However, Masters in particular
argues that military planners have inscribed all technology as masculine, since technology is
seen as providing decision makers with knowledge (which is viewed as something rational and
objective and therefore male). Indeed, descriptions of the ways in which¶ engineers seek to
“teach” robots ethics bring to mind questions derived from Carol Gilligan’s work. The¶ ethical
decision is conflated with the utilitarian calculus, and within the equation there is no room for
such soft, female qualities as consideration of the relationships which the robot has with
others. Thus, a robot can be seen as male, female, queer or un-gendered, depending on the
narrative which one chooses to follow. However, the question still arises what such theorizing
can tell us about the larger question¶ –¶ how does turning the task of warfare over to a
subordinate (or an equal) change the nature of warfare itself, including its gender implications?
Military technologies embody masculine gender
Manjikian 13 (Mary, Faculty Member, Regent University, Robertson School of Government,
International Feminist Journal of Politics, “THE GENDERING OF LETHAL AUTONOMOUS
WARFARE TECHNOLOGY”, Volume 15 2013, January, 30th,
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfjp20#.Ufmji23ciRM)
Next, one can argue that the designers of military technologies imbue these weapons with
both an ideology and a gender. Thus, for example, advertising by military contractors on
websites and magazines might feature a male soldier using a technology, and the weapon
might be painted in typically masculine colors. This is the argument that Carol Cohn (1987)
makes in explaining why nuclear weapons are regarded as male. She points to the language
used by the weapons designers, as well as the design decisions which went into the construct of
the weapons¶ –¶ decisions about the shape, color and naming of the weapons. After spending a
year in residence at a nuclear design facility, she notes the use of the¶ highly sexual and phallic
language used by the weapon’s designers to describe the various classes of ¶ nuclear
weapons. The notion that the technology itself somehow contains the instructions for what it
should mean and how it should be used is referred to as technological determinism. Arguments
which ascribe agency to military weapons in this way can be found within pacifist communities
which, for example, make the argument that new military technologies, once invented, will
inevitably be used. Those who argue that arms races¶ –¶ both in the development of nuclear
technologies and in the development of unmanned technologies¶ –¶ are inevitable, similarly
make a claim towards technological determinism. Furthermore, the argument that warfare is
always and everywhere gendered, and that therefore all weapons implicated in warfare are
similarly gendered, can be seen as a type of technological determinism. First, the social
constructivist view suggests that the drone does not have either a particular ideology or a
particular gender. Here one can make the argument that gender is performative, and robots
(like firearms and other weapons) have been conceptualized of as being masculine or
feminine depending on their function. Here, a digital assistant like Siri which keeps track of
your appointments on your IPhone is gendered as female, since she is after all a secretary. A
piece of equipment which invades a building and sweeps for landmines, however, is male¶ –¶
since invaders are typically male. (Here one can pause to consider that iRobot makes two types
of equipment which actually share a great deal of hardware and software. Both the Pack Bot
anti-IED robot and the Roomba vacuum cleaner robot depend on GPS programs to map the area
in which they work, for example. However, presumably the vacuum is coded as female as
cleaning is seen as a female activity (this Roomba is green), while the IED finding device is coded
as male and painted black.
Technostrategic Discourse
The technostrategic language is a process by which the reality of nuclear war
becomes disguised as a sexy game.
Cohn 87 (Carol Cohn, “Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” Bulletin of Atomic
Science June 1987 Vol. 43 http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07aa.shtml)
I spent the next year immersed in the world of defense intellectuals--men (and indeed, they are virtually all men) who, in Thomas
Powers's words, "use the concept of deterrence to explain why it is safe to have weapons of a kind and number it is not safe to use."
Moving in and out of government, working sometimes in universities and
think tanks, they create the theory
that underlies U. S. nuclear strategic practice.¶ My reason for wanting to spend a year among these men was
simple, even if the resulting experiences were not. The current nuclear situation is so dangerous and
irrational that one is tempted to explain it by positing either insanity or evil in our decision
makers. That explanation is, of course, inadequate. My goal was to gain a better understanding of how sane men of goodwill
could think and act in ways that lead to what appear to be extremely irrational and immoral results.¶ I attended lectures, listened to
arguments, conversed with defense analysts, interviewed graduate students throughout their training, obsessed by the question,
"How can they think this way?" But as I learned the language, as I became more and more engaged with their information and
their arguments, I found that my own thinking was changing, and I had to confront a new question: How can I think this way? Thus,
my own experience becomes part of the data that I analyze in attempting to understand not only how "they" can think that way, but
how any of us can.¶ This article is the beginning of an analysis of the nature of nuclear strategic thinking, with emphasis on the role
of a
specialized language that I call "technostrategic." I have come to believe that this language both reflects
and shapes the American nuclear weaponry and that all who are concerned about nuclear
weaponry and nuclear war must give careful attention to language--with whom it allows us to
communicate and what it allows us to think as well as say.¶ I HAD PREVIOUSLY encountered in my reading the extraordinary
language used to discuss nuclear war, but somehow it was very different to hear it spoken. What hits first is the
elaborate use of abstraction and euphemism, which allows infinite talk about nuclear holocaust
without ever forcing the speaker or enabling the listener to touch the reality behind the
words.¶ Anyone who has seen pictures of Hiroshima burn victims may find it perverse to hear a class of nuclear devices matter-offactly referred to as "clean bombs." These are weapons which are largely fusion rather than fission and which therefore release a
higher quantity of energy not as radiation but as blast. Clean bombs may provide the perfect metaphor for the language of defense
analysts and arms controllers. This
language has enormous destructive power, but without the
emotional fallout that would result if it were clear one was talking about plans for mass
murder, mangled bodies, human suffering. Defense analysts talk about "counter value attacks" rather than about
incinerating cities. Human death, in nuclear parlance, is most often referred to as "collateral
damage."
While Reagan's renaming the MX missile "the Peacekeeper" was the object of considerable scorn in the community
of defense analysts, the same analysts refer to the missile as a "damage limitation weapon."¶ These phrases, only a few of the
hundreds that could be chosen, exemplify the astounding chasm between image and reality that characterizes technostrategic
language. They also hint at the terrifying way the existence of nuclear devices has distorted our perceptions and redefined the
world. "Clean bombs" as a phrase tells us that radiation is the only "dirty" part of killing people.¶ It
is hard not to feel that
one function of this sanitized abstraction is to deny the uncontrolled messiness of the
situations one contemplates creating. So that we not only have clean bombs but also "surgically clean strikes":
"counterforce" attacks that can purportedly" take out"--that is, accurately destroy--an opponent's weapons or command centers,
without causing significant injury to anything else. The image is unspeakably ludicrous when the surgical tool is not a delicately
controlled scalpel but a nuclear warhead.¶ FEMINISTS HAVE OFTEN suggested that an
important aspect of the arms
race is phallic worship; that "missile envy," to borrow Helen Caldicott's phrase, is a significant motivation force in the
nuclear buildup. I have always found this an uncomfortable reductionist explanation and hoped that observing at the nuclear center
would yield a more complex analysis. Still, I was curious about the extent to which I might find a sexual subtext in the defense
professionals' discourse. I was not prepared for what I found.¶ I think I had naively imagined that I would need to speak around and
eavesdrop on what men said in unguarded moments, using all my cunning to unearth sexual imagery. I had believed that these men
would have cleaned up their acts, or that at least at some point in a long talk about "penetration aids," someone would suddenly
look up, slightly embarrassed to be caught in such blatant confirmation of feminist analyses.¶ I was wrong. There was no evidence
that such critiques had ever reached the ears, much less the minds of these men. American
military dependence on
nuclear weapons was explained as "irresistible, because you get more bang for the buck."
Another lecturer solemnly and scientifically announced, "To disarm is to get rid of all your stuff." A professor's explanation of why
the MX missile is to be placed in the silos of the newest Minuteman missiles, instead of replacing the older, less accurate missiles,
was "because they're in the nicest hole--you're not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a crummy hole." Other
lectures were filled with discussion of vertical erector launchers, and the comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm
attacks--or what one military adviser to the national Security Council has called "releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in
one orgasmic whump."¶ But if the imagery is transparent, its significance may be less so. I do not want to assert that it somehow
reveals what defense intellectuals are really talking about, or their motivations; individuals motives cannot necessarily be read
directly from imagery, which originates in a broader cultural context. The
history of the atomic bomb project itself
is rife with overt images of competitive male sexuality, as is the discourse of the early nuclear physicists,
strategists, and members of the Strategic Air Command. Both the military itself and the arms manufacturers are
constantly exploiting the phallic imagery and promise of sexual domination that their weapons so
conveniently suggest. Consider the following, from the June 1985 issue of Air Force Magazine: Emblazoned in bold letters across the
top of a two-page advertisement for the AV-8B Harrier II--"Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick." The copy below boasts "an
exceptional thrust-to-weight ratio," and "vectored thrust capabilities that makes the....unique rapid response possible."¶ Another
vivid source of phallic imagery is to be found in descriptions of nuclear blasts themselves. Here, for example, is one by journalist
William Laurence, who was brought by the Army Air Corps to witness the Nagasaki bombing.¶ Then, just when it appeared as though
the thing had settled down into a state of ¶ permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased ¶ the
size if the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more ¶ alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white
fury of creamy foam, sizzling ¶ upward and then descending earthward, a thousand geysers rolled into one. It ¶ kept struggling in an
element fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds ¶ that held it down.¶ Given
the degree to which it
suffuses their world, the fact that defense intellectuals use a lot of sexual imagery is not
especially surprising. Nor does it, by itself, constitute grounds for imputing motivation. The interesting issue is not so much
the imagery's possible psycho-dynamic origins as how it functions--its role in making the work world of defense
intellectuals feel tenable. Several stories illustrate the complexity.¶ At one point a group of us took a field trip to the New
London Navy base where nuclear submarines are home ported, and to the General Dynamics Electric Boat yards where a new
Trident submarine was being constructed. The high point of the trip was a tour of a nuclear-powered submarine. A few at a time, we
descended into the long, dark, sleek tube in which men and a nuclear reactor are encased underwater for a month at a time. We
squeezed through hatches, along neon-lit passages so narrow that we had to turn and press our backs to the walls for anyone to get
by. We passed the cramped racks where men sleep, and the red and white signs warning of radioactive materials. When we finally
reached the part of the sub where the missiles are housed, the officer accompanying us turned with a grin and asked if we wanted
to stick our hand through a hole to "pat the missile." Pat the missile?¶ The image reappeared the next week, when a lecturer
scornfully declared that the only real reason for deploying cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe was "so that our allies
can pat them." Some months later, another group of us went to be briefed at NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense
Command). On the way back, the Air National Guard plane we were on went to refuel at Offut Air Force Base, the Strategic Air
Command headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska. When word leaked out that our landing would be delayed because the new B-1
bomber was in the area, the plane became charged with a tangible excitement that built as we flew in our holding pattern, people
craning their necks to try to catch a glimpse of the B-1 in the skies, and climaxed as we touched down on the runway and hurtled
past it. Later, when I returned to the center I encountered a man who, unable to go on the trip, said to me enviously, "I hear you got
to pat a B-1."¶ What is all this patting? Patting is an assertion of the intimacy, sexual possession, affectionate domination.
The
thrill and pleasure of "patting the missile" is the proximity of all that phallic power, the
possibility of vicariously appropriating it as one's own. But patting is not only an act of sexual
intimacy. It is also what one does to babies, small children, the pet dog. The creatures one pats are small,
cute, harmless--not terrifying destructive . Pat it, and its lethality disappears. ¶ Much of the sexual imagery I
heard was rife with the sort of ambiguity suggested by "patting the missiles." The imagery can be constructed as a deadly serious
display of the connections between masculine sexuality and the arms race. But at the same time, it can also be heard as a way of
minimizing the seriousness of militarist endeavors, of denying their deadly consequences. A
former Pentagon target
analyst, in telling me why he thought plans for "limited nuclear war" were ridiculous, said, "Look, you gotta
understand that it's a pissing contest--you gotta expect them to use everything they've got." This
image says, most obviously, that this is about competition for manhood, and thus there is tremendous danger. But at
the same time it says that the whole thing is not very serious--it is just what little boys or drunk men do.¶
SANITIZED ABSTRACTION and sexual imagery, even if disturbing, seemed to fit easily into the masculine world of nuclear war
planning. What did not fit was another set of words that evoked images that can only be called domestic.¶ Nuclear missiles are
based in "silos." On Trident submarines, which carries 24 multiple-warhead nuclear missiles, crew members call the part of the sub
where the missiles are lined up in their silos ready for launching "the Christmas tree farm." In
the friendly, romantic
world of nuclear weaponry, enemies "exchange" warheads; weapons systems can "marry up."
"Coupling" is sometimes used to refer to the wiring between mechanisms or warning and response, or to the psycho-political links
between strategic and theater weapons. The patterns in which a MIRVed missile's nuclear explosives are not dropped; a "bus"
"delivers" them. These devices are called "reentry vehicles," or "RVs" for short, a term not only totally removed from the reality of a
bomb but also resonant with the image of the recreational vehicles of the ideal family vacation.¶ These domestic
images are
more than simply one more way to remove oneself from the grisly reality behind the words ;
ordinary abstraction is adequate to that task. Calling the pattern in which bombs fall a "footprint" almost seems a willful distorting
process, a playful, perverse refusal of accountability-- because
to be accountable to reality is to be unable to
do this work .¶ The images evoked by these words may also be a way to tame the
uncontrollable forces of nuclear destruction. Take fire-breathing dragons under the bed, the one who threatens to
incinerate your family, your town, your planet, and turn it into a pet you can pat. Or domestic imagery may simply serve to make
everyone more comfortable with what they're doing. "PAL" (permissive action links) is the carefully
constructed, friendly acronym for the electronic system designed to prevent the unauthorized firing of nuclear warheads. The
president's annual nuclear weapons stockpile memorandum, which outlines both short and long-range plans for production of new
nuclear weapons, is benignly referred to as "the shopping list." The "cookie cutter" is a phrase used to describe a particular model of
nuclear attack.¶ The imagery
that domesticates, that humanizes insentient weapons, may also serve,
paradoxically, to make it all right to ignore sentient human beings. Perhaps it is possible to spend one's time
dreaming up scenarios for the use of massively destructive technology, and to exclude human beings from that technological world,
because that world itself now includes the domestic, the human, the warm and playful--the Christmas trees, the RVs, the things one
pats affectionately. It is a world that is in some sense complete in itself; it even includes death and loss. The problem is that all things
that get "killed" happen to be weapons, not humans. If one of your warheads "kills" another of your warheads, it is "fratricide."
There is much concern about "vulnerability" and "survivability," but it is about the vulnerability and
survival of weapons systems, rather than people.¶ Another set of images suggests men's desire to appropriate from
women the power of giving life. At Los Alamos, the atomic bomb was referred to as "Oppenheimer's baby"; at Lawrence Livermore,
the hydrogen bomb was "Teller's contribution" and he claimed he was not the bomb's father but its mother. In this context, the
extraordinary names given to the bombs that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ash and rubble -"Little Boy" and "Fat Man"- may
perhaps become intelligible. These ultimate destroyers were the male progeny of the atomic scientists.¶ The
entire history
of the bomb project, in fact, seems permeated with imagery that confounds humanity's
overwhelming technological power to destroy nature with the power to create; imagery that
converts men's destruction into their rebirth. Laurence wrote of the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb: "One felt
as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World." In a 1985 interview, General Bruce K. Holloway, the
commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command from 1968 to 1972, described a nuclear war as involving "a big bang, like the start
of the universe."¶ Finally, the last thing one might expect to find in a subculture of hard-nosed realism and hyper-rationality is the
repeated invocation of religious imagery. And yet, the first atomic bomb test was called Trinity. Seeing it, Robert Oppenheimer
thought of Krishna's words to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, destroyer of worlds." Defense intellectuals, when
challenged on a particular assumption, will often duck out with a casual, "Now you're talking about matters of theology." Perhaps
most astonishing of all, the
creators of strategic doctrine actually refer to their community as "the
nuclear priesthood." It is hard to decide what is most extraordinary about this: the arrogance of the claim, the tacit
admission that they really are creators of dogma; or the extraordinary implicit statement about who, or rather what, has became
God.¶ ALTHOUGH I WAS startled by the combination of dry abstraction and odd imagery that characterized the language of defense
intellectuals, my attention was quickly focused on decoding and learning to speak it. The first task was training the tongue in the
articulation of acronyms.¶ Several years of reading the literature of nuclear weaponry and strategy had not prepared me for the
degree to which acronyms littered all conversations, nor for the way in which they are used. Formerly, I had thought of them mainly
as utilitarian; they allow you to write or speak faster. They act
as a form of abstraction, removing you from the
reality behind the words. They restrict communication to the initiated, leaving the rest both
uncomprehending and voiceless in the debate.¶ But being at the center revealed some additional, unexpected
dimensions. First, in speaking and hearing, a lot of these terms are very sexy. A small supersonic rocket "designed to
penetrate any Soviet air defense" is called a SRAM (for short-range attack missile). Submarine-launched cruise missiles are
"glick'ems." Air-launched cruise missiles are magical "alchems."¶ Other acronyms serve in different ways. The plane in which the
president will supposedly be flying around above a nuclear holocaust, receiving intelligence and issuing commands for where to
bomb next, is referred to as "Kneecap" (for NEACP--National Emergency Airborne Command Post). Few believe that the president
would really have the time to get into it, or that the communications systems would be working if he were in it--hence the edge of
derision. But the very ability
to make fun of a concept makes it possible to work with it rather than
reject it outright.¶ In other words, what I learned at the program is that talking about nuclear weapons is fun.
The words are quick, clean, light, they trip off the tongue. You can reel off dozens of them in
seconds, forgetting about how one might interfere with the next, not to mention with the
lives beneath them. Nearly everyone I observed--lecturers, students, hawks, doves, men, and women--took
pleasure in using the words; some of us spoke with a self-consciously ironic edge, but the pleasure was there
nonetheless. Part of the appeal was the thrill of being able to manipulate an arcane language, the power of entering the secret
kingdom. But perhaps more important, learning
the language gives a sense of control, a feeling of
mastery over technology that is finally not controllable but powerful beyond human
comprehension. The longer I stayed, the more conversations I participated in, the less I was
frightened of nuclear war.¶ How can learning to speak a language have such a powerful effect? One answer, discussed
earlier, is that the language is abstract and sanitized, never giving access to the images of war. But
there is more to it than that. The learning process itself removed me from the reality of nuclear war. My
energy was focused on the challenge of decoding acronyms, learning new terms, developing competence in the language--not on
the weapons and the wars behind the words. By the time I was through, I had learned far more than an alternate, if abstract, set of
words. The content of what I could talk about was monumentally different.¶ Consider the following descriptions, in each of which
the subject is the aftermath of a nuclear attack:¶ Everything was black, had vanished into the black dust, was destroyed. Only the ¶
flames that were beginning to lick their way up had any color. From the dust that ¶ was like a fog, figures began to loom up, black,
hairless, faceless. They screamed ¶ with voices that were no longer human. Their screams drowned out the groans rising ¶
everywhere from the rubble, groans that seemed to rise from the very earth itself.¶ [You have to have ways to maintain
communications in a] nuclear environment, a ¶ situation bound to include EMP blackout, brute force damage to systems, a ¶ heavy
jamming environment, and so on.¶ There is no way to describe the phenomena represented in the first with the language of the
second. The passages differ not only in the vividness of their words, but in their content: the first describes the effects of a nuclear
blast on human beings; the second describes the impact of a nuclear blast on technical systems designed to secure the "command
and control" of nuclear weapons. Both of these differences stem from the difference of perspective: the speaker in the first is a
victim of nuclear weapons, the speaker in the second is a user. The speaker in the first is using words to try to name and contain the
horror of human suffering all around her; the speaker in the second is using words to insure the possibility of launching the next
nuclear attack.¶ Technostrategic
language articulates only the perspective of users of nuclear
weapons, not the victims. Speaking in expert language not only offers distance, a feeling of control, and
an alternative focus for one's energies; it also offers escape from thinking of oneself as victims
of nuclear war. No matter what one deeply knows or believes about the likelihood of nuclear war and no matter what sort of
terror or despair the knowledge of a nuclear war's reality might inspire, the speakers of technostrategic language
are allowed, even forced, to escape that awareness, to escape viewing nuclear war from the position of the victim,
by virtue of their linguistic stance.¶ I suspect that much of the reduced anxiety about nuclear war commonly
experienced by both new speakers of the language and longtime experts comes from characteristics of the language itself: the
distance afforded by its abstraction, the sense of control afforded by mastering it, and the fact that its content and concerns are
those of the users rather than the victims. In
learning the language, one goes from being the passive,
powerless victim to being the competent wily, powerful purveyor of nuclear threats and
nuclear explosive power. The enormous destructive effects of nuclear weapons systems become extensions of the self,
rather than threats to it.¶
The only way to prevent the continuation of the abstraction of technostrategic
jargon is through deconstructing the nuclear language and creating a new
language that facilitates diversification of nuclear discussions
Cohn 87 (Carol Cohn, “Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb,” Bulletin of Atomic
Science June 1987 Vol. 43 http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07aa.shtml)
IT DID NOT TAKE LONG to learn the language of nuclear war and much of the specialized information it contained. My focus quickly
changed from mastering technical information and doctrinal arcana, to an attempt to understand more about how the dogma I was
learning was rationalized. Since underlying rationales are rarely discussed in the everyday business of defense planning, I had to start
asking more questions.
At first, although I was tempted to use my newly acquired proficiency in
technostrategic jargon, I vowed to speak English. What I found, however, was that no matter how well
informed my questions were, no matter how complex an understanding they were based
upon, if I was speaking English rather than expert jargon, the men responded to me as though
I were ignorant or simple-minded, or both. A strong distaste for being patronized and a pragmatic streak made my
experiment in English short-lived. I adopted the vocabulary, speaking of "escalation dominance," "preemptive strikes," and one of
my favorites, "sub-holocaust engagements." This opened my way into long, elaborate discussions that taught me a lot about
technostrategic reasoning and how to manipulate it.¶ But the
better I became at this discourse, the more
difficult it became to express my own ideas and values. While the language included things I
had never been able to speak about before, it radically excluded others. To pick a bald example: the
word "peace" is not a part of this discourse. As close as one can come is. "strategic stability," a
term that refers to a balance of numbers and types of weapons systems--not the political, social,
economic, and psychological conditions that "peace" implies. Moreover, to speak the word is to immediately brand
oneself as a soft-headed activist instead of a professional to be taken seriously.¶ If I was unable to
speak my concerns in the language, more disturbing still was that I also began to find it harder even to keep them in my own head.
No matter how firm my commitment to staying aware of the bloody reality behind the words, over and over, I found that I could not
keep human lives as my reference point. I found that I
could go for days speaking about nuclear weapons,
without once thinking about the people who would be incinerated by them.¶ It is tempting to
attribute this problem to the words themselves--the abstractness, the euphemisms, the sanitized, friendly,
sexy acronyms--then one would only need to change the words; get the military planners to say "mass murder" instead of
"collateral damage," and their thinking would change. The problem, however, is not simply that defense intellectuals use abstract
terminology that removes them from the reality of which they speak. There
is no reality behind the words. Or, rather,
the "reality" they speak of is itself a world of abstractions. Deterrence theory, and much of strategic
doctrine, was invented to hold together abstractly, its validity judged by internal logic. These abstract systems were
developed as a way to make it possible to, in Herman Kahn's phrase, "think about the unthinkable"-not as a way to describe or codify relations on the ground.¶ So the problem with the idea of "limited nuclear war," for example, is
not only that it is a travesty to refer to the death and suffering caused by any use of nuclear weapons as "limited," or that "limited
nuclear war" is an abstraction that obfuscates the human reality beneath any use of nuclear weapons, it is also that limited nuclear
was itself an abstract conceptual system, designed, embodied, and achieved by computer modeling. In
this abstract world,
hypothetical, calm, rational actors have sufficient information to know exactly what size
nuclear weapon the opponent has used against which targets, and adequate command and
control to make sure that their response is precisely equifreedomted to the attack. No field
commander would use the tactical nuclear weapons at his disposal at the height of a losing battle. Our rational actors would
have absolute freedom from emotional response to being attacked, from political pressures from the
populace they would act solely on the basis of perfectly informed mathematical calculus of
megatonnage. To refer to limited nuclear war is to enter a system that is de facto abstract and grotesquely removed from
reality. The abstractness of the entire conception system makes descriptive language utterly
beside the point.¶ This realization helped make sense of my difficulty in staying connected to concrete lives as well as some of
the bizarre and surreal quality of what people said. But there was still a piece missing. How is it possible, for example, to make sense
of the following:¶ The strategies stability of regime A is based on the fact that both sides are ¶ deprived of any incentive ever to
strike first. Since it takes roughly two ¶ warheads to destroy one enemy silo, an attacker must expend two of his missiles ¶ to destroy
one of the enemy's. A first strike disarms the attacker and the aggressor ¶ ends up worse off then the aggressed.¶ The homeland of
"the aggressed" has just been devastated from the explosions of, say, a thousand nuclear bombs, each likely to be at least 10 to 100
times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the aggressor, whose homeland is still untouched, "ends up worse
In
technostrategic discourse, the reference point is not human beings but the weapons
themselves. The aggressor ends up worse off than the aggressed because he has fewer weapons left; any other factors, such as
what happened when the weapons landed, are irrelevant to the calculus of gain and loss.¶ The fact that the subject of strategic
paradigms are weapons has several important implications. First, and perhaps most critically, there is no real
way to talk about human death or human societies when you are using a language designed to
talk about weapons. Human death simply is collateral damage--collateral to the real subject, which is the
off"?¶ I was only able to make sense of this kind of thinking when I finally asked myself: Who--or what--is the subject?
weapons themselves.¶ Understanding this also helps explain what was at first so surprising to me: most people who do this work are
on the whole nice, even good, men, many with liberal inclinations. While they often identify their motivations as being concerns
about humans, in their work they enter a language and paradigm that precludes people thus, the nature and outcome of their work
can entirely contradict their genuine motives for doing it.¶ In addition, if weapons are the reference point, it
becomes in
some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human concerns. Questions that break
through the numbing language of strategic analysis and raise issues in human terms can be easily dismissed. No
one will claim that they are unimportant. But they are inexpert, unprofessional, irrelevant to the business at hand. The discourse
among the experts remains hermetically sealed. One can talk about the weapons that are supposed to protect particular people and
their way of life without actually asking if they are able to go for it, or if they are the best way to do it, or whether they may even
damage the entities they are supposedly protecting. These are separate questions.¶ This
discourse has become
virtually the only response to the question of how to achieve security that is recognized as
legitimate. If the discussion of weapons was one competing voice in the discussion, or one that was integrated with others, the
fact that the referents of strategic paradigms are only weapons might be of less note. But when we realize that the only
language and expertise offered to those interested in pursuing peace refers to nothing but
weapons, its limits become staggering. And its entrapping qualities--the way it becomes so
hard, once you adopt the language, to stay connected to human concerns--become more
comprehensible¶ WITHIN A FEW WEEKS, what had once been remarkable became unnoticeable. As I learned to speak, my
perspective changed. I no longer stood outside the impenetrable wall of technostrategic language and once inside, I could no longer
see it. I had not only learned to speak a language; I had started to think in it. Its questions became my questions, its concepts shaped
my responses to new ideas. Like the White Queen, I began to believe six impossible things before breakfast--not because I
consciously believed, for instance, that a "surgically clean conterforce strike" was really possible, but because some elaborate piece
of doctrinal reasoning I used was already predicated on the possibility of those strikes as well as on a host of other impossible
things.¶ My grasp on what I knew as reality seemed to slip. I might get very excited, for example, about a new strategic justification
for a no-first-use policy and spend time discussing the ways in which its implications for the U.S. force structure in Western Europe
were superior to the older version. After a day or two I would suddenly step back, aghast that I was involved with the military
justifications for not using nuclear weapons--as though the moral ones were not enough. What I was actually talking about--the
mass incineration of a nuclear attack--was no longer in my head.¶ Or I might hear some proposals that seemed to me infinitely
superior to the usual arms control fare. First I would work out how and why these proposals were better and then ways to
encounter the arguments against them. Then it might dawn on me that even though these two proposals sounded different, they
still shared a host of assumptions that I was not willing to make. I would first feel as though I had achieved a new insight. And then
all of a sudden, I would realize that these were things I actually knew before I ever entered this community and had since forgotten. I
began to feel that I had fallen down the rabbit hole.¶ THE
LANGUAGE ISSUES do not disappear. The
seductions of learning and using it remain great, and as the pleasures deepen, so do the
dangers. The activity of trying to out-reason nuclear strategists in their own games gets you
thinking inside their rules, tacitly accepting the unspoken assumptions of their paradigms.¶ Yet
the issues of language have now become somewhat less central to me, and my new questions, while still not precisely the questions
of an insider, are questions I could not have had without being inside. Many of them are more practical: Which individuals and
institutions are actually responsible for the endless "modernization" and proliferation of nuclear weaponry, and what do they gain
from it? What role does technostrategic rationality play in their thinking? What would a reasonable, genuinely defensive policy look
like? Others are more philosophical, having to do with the nature of the "realism" claimed for the defense intellectuals' mode of
thinking and the grounds upon which it can be shown to be spurious. What would an alternative rationality look like?¶ My own
move away from a focus on the language is quite typical. Other
recent entrants into this world have
commented that the cold-blooded, abstract discussions are most striking at first, within a short
time you get past them and come to see the language itself is not the problem.¶ I think it would be a mistake,
however, to dismiss these early impressions. While I believe that the language is not the whole problem, it is a significant
component, and clue. What it reveals is a whole series of culturally grounded and culturally
acceptable mechanisms that make it possible to work in institutions that foster the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, to plan mass incineration of millions of human beings for a
living. Language that is abstract, sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use;
paradigms whose referent is weapons; imagery that domesticates and deflates the forces of mass destruction;
imagery that reverses sentient and non sentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and creation--all of these are
part of what makes it possible to be radically removed from the reality of what one is talking about, and from the realities one is
creating through the discourse.¶ Close attention to the language itself also reveals a tantalizing basis on which to challenge the
legitimacy of the defense intellectuals' dominance of the discourse on nuclear issues. When
defense intellectuals are
criticized for the cold-blooded inhumanity of the scenarios they paint, their response is to
claim the high ground of rationality. They portray those who are radically opposed to the
nuclear status quo as irrational, unrealistic, too emotional--"idealistic activists." But if the smooth, shiny
surface of their discourse--its abstraction and technical jargon--appears at first to support these claims, a look
below the surface does not. Instead we find strong current of homoerotic excitement, heterosexual
domination, the drive toward competence and mastery, the pleasures of membership in an elite and
privileged group, of the ultimate importance and meaning of membership in the priesthood. How is it possible to
point to the pursuers of these values, these experiences, as paragons of cool-headed objectivity?¶ While listening to the
language reveals the mechanisms of distancing and denial and the emotional currents
embodied in this emphatically male discourse, attention to the experience of learning the language
reveals something about how thinking can become more abstract, more focused on parts disembedded from
their context, more attentive to the survival of weapons than the survival of human beings .¶ Because
this professional language sets the terms for public debate, many who oppose current nuclear policies choose to learn it. Even if
they do not believe that the technical information is very important, some believe it is necessary to master the language simply
because it is too difficult to attain public legitimacy without it. But
learning the language is a transformative
process . You are not simply adding new information; new vocabulary, but entering a mode of thinking not only about
nuclear weapons but also about military and political power, and about the relationship between human ends
and technological means.¶ The language and the mode of thinking are not neutral containers of information; they were
developed by a specific group of men, trained largely in abstract theoretical mathematics and economics, specifically to make it
possible to think rationally about the use of nuclear weapons. That the language is not well suited to do anything but makes it
possible to think about nuclear weapons should not be surprising.¶ Those who find U.S. nuclear policy desperately misguided face a
serious quandary. If
we refuse to learn the language, we condemn ourselves to being jesters on the
sidelines. If we learn and use it, we not only severely limit what we can say but also invite the
transformation, the militarization, of our own thinking.¶ I have no solution to this dilemma, but I would like to
offer a couple of thoughts in an effort to push it a little further--or perhaps even to reformulate its terms. It is adopting the strategy
of learning the language. When we outsiders assume that learning and speaking the language will give us a voice recognized as
legitimate and will give us greater political influence, we assume that the language itself actually articulates the criteria and
reasoning strategies upon which nuclear weapons development and deployment decisions are made. this is largely an illusion. I
suggest that technostrategic
discourse functions more as a gloss, as an ideological patina that hides the
actual reasons these decisions are made. Rather than informing and shaping decisions, it far more often
legitimizes political outcomes that have occurred for utterly different reasons. If this is true, it raises
serious questions about the extent of the political returns we might get from using it, and whether they can ever balance out the
potential problems and inherent costs.¶ I believe that those
who seek a more just and peaceful world have a
deconstructive project and a reconstructive project that are intimately
linked. Deconstruction requires close attention to, and the dismantling of, technostrategic
discourse. The dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality speaks so loudly in our culture that it
dual task before them--a
will remain difficult for any other voices to be heard until that voice loses some of its power to define what we hear and how we
name the world.¶ The
reconstructive task is to create compelling alternative visions of possible
futures, to recognize and develop alternative conceptions of rationality, to create rich and
imaginative alternative voices--diverse voices whose conversations with each other will invent those futures.
Technostrategic discourse numbs us to the concrete lived experience of war
Cohn 1987 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender Security and Human rights, Sex and
Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Signs, Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without:
Women, Gender, and Theory (Summer,1987), pp. 687-718
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/director.htm)
Entering the world of defense intellectuals was a bizarre experience-- bizarre because it is a
world where men spend their days calmly and matter- of-factly discussing nuclear weapons,
nuclear strategy, and nuclear war. The discussions are carefully and intricately reasoned,
occurring seemingly without any sense of horror, urgency, or moral outrage-in fact, there
seems to be no graphic reality behind the words, as they speak of "first strikes," "counterforce
exchanges," and "limited nuclear war," or as they debate the comparative values of a
"minimum deterrent posture" versus a "nuclear war-fighting capability." Yet what is striking
about the men themselves is not, as the content of their conversations might suggest, their
cold-bloodedness. Rather, it is that they are a group of men unusually endowed with charm,
humor, intelligence, concern, and decency. Reader, I liked them. At least, I liked many of them.
The attempt to understand how such men could contribute to an endeavor that I see as so
fundamentally destructive became a con- tinuing obsession for me, a lens through which I came
to examine all of my experiences in their world. In this early stage, I was gripped by the
extraordinary language used to discuss nuclear war. What hit me first was the elaborate use of
abstraction and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or enabled
the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust that lay behind the words. Anyone who
has seen pictures of Hiroshima burn victims or tried to imagine the pain of hundreds of glass
shards blasted into flesh may find it perverse beyond imagination to hear a class of nuclear
devices matter-of- factly [are] referred to as "clean bombs." "Clean bombs" are nuclear devices
that are largely fusion rather than fission and that therefore release a higher quantity of energy,
not as radiation, but as blast, as destructive explosive power. 7 "Clean bombs" may provide the
perfect metaphor for the language of defense analysts and arms controllers. This language has
enormous de- structive power, but without emotional fallout, without the emotional fallout
that would result if it were clear one was talking about plans for mass murder, mangled
bodies, and unspeakable human suffering. Defense analysts talk about "countervalue attacks"
rather than about incinerating cities. Human death, in nuclear parlance, is most often referred
to as "collateral damage"; for, as one defense analyst said wryly, "The Air Force doesn't target
people, it targets shoe factories. " Some phrases carry this cleaning-up to the point of inverting
meaning. The MX missile will carry ten warheads, each with the explosure power of 300-475
kilotons of TNT: one missile the bearer of destruction approx- imately 250-400 times that of the
Hiroshima bombing.9 Ronald Reagan has dubbed the MX missile "the Peacekeeper." While this
renaming was the object of considerable scorn in the community of defense analysts, these very
same analysts refer to the MX as a "damage limitation weapon ."10 These phrases, only a few of
the hundreds that could be discussed, exemplify the astounding chasm between image and
reality that characterizes technostrategic language. They also hint at the terrifying way in which
the existence of nuclear devices has distorted our perceptions and redefined the world. "Clean
bombs" tells us that radiation is the only "dirty" part of killing people. To take this one step
further, such phrases can even seem healthful/ curative/corrective . So that we not only have
"clean bombs" but also "surgically clean strikes"("counterforce "attacks that can purportedly
"take out"-i.e., accurately destroy-an opponent's weapons or command cen- ters without
causing significant injury to anything else). The image of excision of the offending weapon is
unspeakably ludicrous when the surgical tool is not a delicately controlled scalpel but a
nuclear warhead . And somehow it seems to be forgotten that even scalpels spill blood .11
Phallic Imagery is Inevitable in Technostrategic Discourse Language
Cohn 1987 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender Security and Human rights, Sex and
Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Signs, Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without:
Women, Gender, and Theory (Summer,1987), pp. 687-718
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/director.htm)
FEMINISTS HAVE OFTEN suggested that an important aspect of the arms race is phallic
worship; that "missile envy," to borrow Helen Caldicott's phrase, is a significant motivation
force in the nuclear buildup. I have always found this an uncomfortable reductionist
explanation and hoped that observing at the nuclear center would yield a more complex
analysis. Still, I was curious about the extent to which I might find a sexual subtext in the
defense professionals' discourse. I was not prepared for what I found.¶ I think I had naively
imagined that I would need to speak around and eavesdrop on what men said in unguarded
moments, using all my cunning to unearth sexual imagery. I had believed that these men would
have cleaned up their acts, or that at least at some point in a long talk about "penetration aids,"
someone would suddenly look up, slightly embarrassed to be caught in such blatant
confirmation of feminist analyses.¶ I was wrong. There was no evidence that such critiques had
ever reached the ears, much less the minds of these men. American military dependence on
nuclear weapons was explained as "irresistible, because you get more bang for the buck."
Another lecturer solemnly and scientifically announced, "To disarm is to get rid of all your
stuff." A professor's explanation of why the MX missile is to be placed in the silos of the newest
Minuteman missiles, instead of replacing the older, less accurate missiles, was "because they're
in the nicest hole--you're not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a crummy
hole." Other lectures were filled with discussion of vertical erector launchers, and the
comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks--or what one military adviser to
the national Security Council has called "releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one
orgasmic whump."¶ But if the imagery is transparent, its significance may be less so. I do not
want to assert that it somehow reveals what defense intellectuals are really talking about, or
their motivations; individuals motives cannot necessarily be read directly from imagery, which
originates in a broader cultural context. The history of the atomic bomb project itself is rife
with overt images of competitive male sexuality, as is the discourse of the early nuclear
physicists, strategists, and members of the Strategic Air Command. Both the military itself and
the arms manufacturers are constantly exploiting the phallic imagery and promise of sexual
domination that their weapons so conveniently suggest. Consider the following, from the June
1985 issue of Air Force Magazine: Emblazoned in bold letters across the top of a two-page
advertisement for the AV-8B Harrier II--"Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick." The copy below
boasts "an exceptional thrust-to-weight ratio," and "vectored thrust capabilities that makes the
unique rapid response possible."
The International Arms Race is a Competition of Missle Size
Cohn 1987 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender Security and Human rights, Sex and
Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Signs, Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without:
Women, Gender, and Theory (Summer,1987), pp. 687-718
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/director.htm)
Another vivid source of phallic imagery is to be found in descriptions of nuclear blasts
themselves. Here, for example, is one by journalist William Laurence, who was brought by the
Army Air Corps to witness the Nagasaki bombing.¶ Then, just when it appeared as though the
thing had settled down into a state of ¶ permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant
mushroom that increased ¶ the size if the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was
even more ¶ alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling ¶
upward and then descending earthward, a thousand geysers rolled into one. It ¶ kept struggling
in an element fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds ¶ that held it down.¶ Given
the degree to which it suffuses their world, the fact that defense intellectuals use a lot of
sexual imagery is not especially surprising. Nor does it, by itself, constitute grounds for
imputing motivation. The interesting issue is not so much the imagery's possible psychodynamic origins as how it functions--its role in making the work world of defense intellectuals
feel tenable. Several stories illustrate the complexity.¶ What is all this patting? Patting is an
assertion of the intimacy, sexual possession, affectionate domination. The thrill and pleasure
of "patting the missile" is the proximity of all that phallic power, the possibility of vicariously
appropriating it as one's own. But patting is not only an act of sexual intimacy. It is also what
one does to babies, small children, the pet dog. The creatures one pats are small, cute,
harmless--not terrifying destructive. Pat it, and its lethality disappears.¶ Much of the sexual
imagery I heard was rife with the sort of ambiguity suggested by "patting the missiles." The
imagery can be constructed as a deadly serious display of the connections between masculine
sexuality and the arms race. But at the same time, it can also be heard as a way of minimizing
the seriousness of militarist endeavors, of denying their deadly consequences. A former
Pentagon target analyst, in telling me why he thought plans for "limited nuclear war" were
ridiculous, said, "Look, you gotta understand that it's a pissing contest--you gotta expect them
to use everything they've got." This image says, most obviously, that this is about competition
for manhood, and thus there is tremendous danger. But at the same time it says that the
whole thing is not very serious--it is just what little boys or drunk men do.
Technostrategic Discourse Language Learning is a Double Edge Sword
Cohn 1987 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender Security and Human rights, Sex and
Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Signs, Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without:
Women, Gender, and Theory (Summer,1987), pp. 687-718
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/director.htm)
Learning to speak the language reveals something about how thinking¶ can become more
abstract, more focused on parts disembedded from their context, more attentive to the
survival of weapons than the survival of human beings. That is, it reveals something about the
process of militarization-and the way in which that process may be undergone by man or
woman, hawk or dove.¶ Most often, the act of learning technostrategic language is conceived
of as an additive process: you add a new set of vocabulary words; you add the reflex ability to
decode and use endless numbers of acronyms; you add some new information that the
specialized language contains; you add the conceptual tools that will allow you to "think
strategically." This additive view appears to be held by defense intellectuals themselves; as one
said to me, "Much of the debate is in technical terms-learn it, and decide whether it's relevant
later." This view also appears to be held by many who think of themselves as antinuclear, be
they scholars and professionals attempting to change the field from within, or public interest
lobbyists and educational organizations, or some feminist antimilitarists .50 Some believe that
our nuclear policies are so riddled with irrationality that there is a lot of room for well-reasoned,
well-informed arguments to make a difference; others, even if they do not believe that the
technical information is very important, see it as necessary to master the language simply
because it is too difficult to attain public legitimacy without it. In either case, the idea is that
you add the expert language and information and proceed from there.¶ However , I have been
arguing throughout this paper that learning the language is a transformative , rather than an
additive process. When you choose to learn it you enter a new mode of thinking-a mode of
thinking not only about nuclear weapons but also, de facto, about military and political power
and about the relationship between human ends and technological means.¶ Thus, those of us
who find U.S. nuclear policy desperately misguided¶ appear to face a serious quandary. If we
refuse to learn the language , we are virtually guaranteed that our voices will remain outside
the "politically¶ relevant " spectrum of opinion . Yet, if we do learn and speak it, we not only
severely limit what we can say but we also invite the transformation , the militarization, of
our own thinking.¶ I have no solutions to this dilemma, but I would like to offer a few thoughts
in an effort to reformulate its terms. First , it is important to recognize an assumption implicit
in adopting the strategy of learning the language. When we assume that learning and
speaking the language will give us a voice recognized as legitimate and will give us greater
political influence , we are assuming that the language itself actually articulates the criteria
and reasoning strategies upon which nuclear weapons development and deployment
decisions are made. I believe that this is largely an illusion. Instead, I want to suggest that
technostrategic discourse functions more as a gloss, as an ideological curtain behind which the
actual reasons for these decisions hide . That rather than informing and shaping decisions, it
far more often functions as a legitimation for political outcomes that have occurred for utterly
different reasons. If this is true, it raises some serious questions about the extent of the
political returns we might get from using technostrategic discourse, and whether they can
ever balance out the potential problems and inherent costs.¶ I do not, however, want to
suggest that none of us should learn the language. I do not believe that this language is well
suited to achieving the goals desired by antimilitarists, yet at the same time, I, for one, have
found the experience of learning the language useful and worthwhile (even if at times
traumatic). The question for those of us who do choose to learn it, I think, is what use are we
going to make of that knowledge?¶
The Deconstruction of Technostrategic Discourse Relies on Learning to Talk the
Talk
Cohn 1987 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender Security and Human rights, Sex and
Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Signs, Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without:
Women, Gender, and Theory (Summer,1987), pp. 687-718
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/director.htm)
One of the most intriguing options opened by learning the language is that it suggests a basis
upon which to challenge the legitimacy of the defense intellectuals' dominance of the
discourse on nuclear issues. When defense intellectuals are criticized for the cold-blooded
inhumanity of the scenarios they plan, their response is to claim the high ground of
rationality; they are the only ones whose response to the existence of nuclear weapons is
objective and realistic. They portray those who are radically opposed to the nuclear status quo
as irrational, unrealistic, too emotional. "Idealistic activists" is the pejorative they set against
their own hard-nosed professionalism.¶ Much of their claim to legitimacy, then, is a claim to
objectivity born of¶ technical expertise and to the disciplined purging of the emotional
valences that might threaten their objectivity. But if the surface of their discourse-- its
abstraction and technical jargon-appears at first to support these claims, a look just below the
surface does not. There we find currents of homoerotic excitement, heterosexual domination,
the drive toward competency and mastery, the pleasures of membership in an elite and
privileged group, the ultimate importance and meaning of membership in the priesthood, and
the thrilling power of becoming Death, shatterer of worlds. How is it possible to hold this up as
a paragon of cool-headed objectivity?¶ I do not wish here to discuss or judge the holding of
"objectivity" as an epistemological goal. I would simply point out that, as defense intellectuals
rest their claims to legitimacy on the untainted ratonality of their discourse, their project fails
according to'' its own criteria. Deconstructing strategic discourse's claims to rationality is, then,
in and of itself, an important way to challenge its hegemony as the sole legitimate language
for public debate about nuclear policy.¶ I believe that feminists, and others who seek a more
just and peaceful world, have a dual task before us-a deconstructive project and a
reconstructive project that are intimately linked.51 Our deconstructive task requires close
attention to, and the dismantling of, technostrategic discourse. The dominant voice of
militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality speaks so loudly in our culture, it will
remain difficult for any other voices to be heard until that voice loses some of its power to
define what we hear and how we name the world-until that voice is delegitimized.¶ Our
reconstructive task is a task of creating compelling alternative visions of possible futures, a
task of recognizing and developing alternative conceptions of rationality, a task of creating
rich and imaginative alternative voices--diverse voices whose conversations with each other
will in-¶ vent those futures.¶
Security
National security discourse is hyper masculine, excluding feminist perspectives
Cohn 93 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, “Wars,
Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” Gendering War Talk, Princeton
University Press,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/War,%20Wimps,%20and%20Women%20%20Cohn.pdf, pg. 6)
I want to return to the RAND war simulation story to make on other observation. First, it
requires a true confession I was stung by being called a wimp. Yes, I thought the remark was
deeply inane, and it infuriated me. But even so, I was also stung. Let me hasten to add, this was
not because my identity is very wrapped up with not being wimpish—it actually is not a term
that normally figures very heavily in my self-image one way or the other. But it was impossible
to be in that room, hear his comment and the snickering laughter with which it was met, and
not to fell stung, and humiliated.¶ Why? There I was, a woman and a feminist, not only
contemptuous of the mentality that measures human beings by their degree of so-called
wimpishness, but also someone for whom the term wimp does not have a deeply resonant
personal meaning. How could it have affected my so much?¶ The answer lies in the role of the
context within which I was experiencing myself—the discursive framework. For in that room I
was not “simply me,” but I was a participant in a discourse, a shared set of words, concepts ,
symbols that constituted not only the linguistic possibilities available to us but also constituted
me in that situation. This is not entirely true, of course. How I experience myself was at least
partly shaped by other experiences and other discursive frameworks—certainly those of
feminist politics and antimilitarist politics; in fact, I would say my reactions were predominantly
shaped by those frameworks. But that is quite different from saying “I am a feminist, and that
individual, psychological self simply moves encapsulated through the world being itself”—and
therefore assuming that I am unaffected. No matter who else I was at that moment, I was
unavoidably a participant in a discourse in which being a wimp has a meaning, and a deeply
pejorative on at that. By calling me a wimp, my accuser on the Blue Team positioned me in that
discourse, and I could not feel but the sting.¶ In other words, I am suggesting that national
security discourse can be seen as having different positions within it—ones that are starkly
gender coded; indeed, the enormous strength of their evocative power comes from gender.
Thus, when you participate in conversation in that community, you do not simply choose what
to say and how to say it; you advertently or inadvertently choose a position in the discourse.
As a woman, I can choose the “masculine” (tough, rational, logical) position. If I do, I am seen
as legitimate, but I limit what I can say. Or, I can say things that place in the “feminine”
position—in which case no on will listen to me.
Rational decision-making impossible when it comes to issues of national
security
Cohn 93 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, “Wars,
Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” Gendering War Talk, Princeton
University Press,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/War,%20Wimps,%20and%20Women%20%20Cohn.pdf, pg. 8-9)
In summary, I have been exploring the way in which defense intellectuals talk to each other—
the comments they make to each other, the particular usages that appear in their informal
conversations or their lectures. In addition, I have occasionally left the professional community
to raw upon public talk about the Gulf War. My analysis does not lead me to conclude that
“national security thinking is masculine”—that is a separate, and different, discussion. Instead, I
have tried to show that national security discourse is gendered, and that it matters. Gender
discourse is interwoven through national security discourse. It sets fixed boundaries, and in so
doing, it skews what is discussed and how it is thought about. It shapes expectations of other
nations’ actions, and in so doing it affects both our interpretations of international events and
conceptions of how the United States should respond.¶ In a world where professionals pride
themselves on their ability to engage in cool, rational, objective calculation while others around
them are letting their thinking be sullied by emotions, the unacknowledged interweaving of
gender discourse in security discourse allows men to not acknowledge that their pristine
rational thought is in fact riddled with emotional response. In an “objective” “universal”
discourse that valorizes the “masculine” and deauthorizes the “feminine,” it is not only the
“feminine” emotions that are noticed and labeled as emotions, and thus in need banning from
the analytic process. “Masculine emotions—such as feelings of aggression, competition,
macho pride and swagger, or the sense of identity resting on carefully defended borders—are
not so easily noticed and identified as emotions, and are instead invisibly folded into “selfevident,” so-called realist paradigms and analyses. It is both the interweaving of gender
discourse in national security thinking and the blindness to its presence and impact that have
deleterious effects. Finally, the impact is to distort, degrade, and deter roundly rational, fully
complex thought within the community of defense intellectuals and national security elites
and, by extension, to cripple democratic deliberation about crucial matters of war and peace.¶
¶
¶
Protector/Protected Binary
The protector/protected and self/other dichotomies are a result of gendering
security discourse which increases patriarchy and instability
Duncanson and Eschle 8 (Claire Duncanson, PhD Lecturer in IR at University of Edinburgh;
Catherine Eschle, PhD Senior Lecturer University of Strathclyde “Gender and the Nuclear Weapons State:
A Feminist Critique of the UK Government’s White Paper on Trident” New Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 4,
December 2008)
Feminists in IR problematize the Realist approach to security on several grounds.¶ Most
obviously, they question why military threats from other states (or, more¶ recently, from
terrorist groups) are considered more important and immediate¶ than the threat to human life
posed by poverty, HIV/AIDS, environmental¶ destruction or domestic abuse, all of which are
claimed to disproportionately¶ affect women. As a corollary, they challenge the Realist reliance
on destructive¶ military technology, insisting that welfare budgets do more to provide genuine¶
security for women than increased defence spending.46 Feminists also seek to undermine the
view that security is something which can be possessed or¶ guaranteed by the state. Instead,
they have urged us to understand security as a¶ process, immanent in our relationships with
others, and always partial, elusive,¶ and contested. Conceived in this way, it must involve
subjects—including¶ women—in the provision of their own security.47¶ Two gendered aspects
of Realist conceptions of security are particularly¶ important for our purposes. First, Realists
correlate security with invulnerability,¶ invincibility and impregnability. This is strongly evident
in the White Paper. It is¶ claimed, for example, that:¶ The rationale for continuous deterrent
patrolling (which the UK has maintained¶ since 1969) ... is that the submarine on patrol is
invulnerable to an attack. For¶ example, we are confident that our SSBNs [Ballistic Missile
Submarines] on¶ deterrent patrol have remained completely undetected by a hostile or
potentially¶ hostile state. This means we have an assured nuclear deterrent available at all¶
times.48¶ As Susannah Radstone has argued, however, invulnerability is an¶ unachievable
fantasy with obviously gendered connotations. It is the female¶ body that is penetrated and
impregnated while the male body remains, or ought¶ to remain, intact and impermeable.49
Moreover, as argued above, nuclear¶ technologies do not operate in a social vacuum. They are
created and operated by¶ humans and, as such, there can be no guarantees of infallibility.
Indeed, the world¶ may be decidedly less secure when submarines armed with nuclear missiles
are¶ continuously on patrol, but the emphasis in the White Paper on protection¶ through
superior technology makes this possibility unthinkable.¶ Second, and perhaps more important,
Realist views of security cast the state¶ and its military wing as “protector” and civilians within
the state as “protected,” a¶ dichotomy which is profoundly gendered. Judith Hicks Stiehm, for
instance,¶ highlights the historical association of the protector role with men and the¶ protected
role with women; further, she claims that the protector role gains¶ meaning and status
precisely through its privileging over those who are feminised¶ as vulnerable.50 As Iris Marion
Young put it more recently:¶ The role of the masculine protector puts those protected,
paradigmatically women¶ and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and
obedience. To the extent¶ that citizens of a democratic state allow their leaders to adopt a
stance of protectors¶ toward them, these citizens come to occupy a subordinate status like
that of women¶ in the patriarchal household. We are to accept a more authoritarian and
paternalistic¶ state power, which gets its support partly from the unity a threat produces and
our¶ gratitude for protection.51¶ Although recent years have seen the increasing integration of
women into the¶ armed forces in many developed states, the resistance to this process and the¶
anomalies to which it gives rise demonstrate for many feminists that this¶ gendering of roles
around protection still runs deep.52 Furthermore, the gendered¶ protector/protected
dichotomy still works in symbolic terms. Thus discourses of¶ state protection remain saturated
with constructions of “masculine autonomy¶ (freedom, control, heroics) and feminine
dependency (passivity, vulnerability,¶ woman as adored but also despised).”53¶ Moreover,
feminists and others have pointed out that security discourse¶ involves an enforced linkage
between the protector and protected in the face of an¶ external threat. For Stiehm this
functions to mask the fact that the biggest danger to¶ the protected may actually not come
from outside the state but from the hypermasculinised protectors themselves.54 More recent
post-structuralist-influenced¶ work has made this relationship between the state and an
external threat in Realist¶ thought, or between state identity and “the Other,” central to their
analyses.¶ Although “the Other” may seem radically different from “us,” for poststructuralists,
it is our understanding of the Other which in part constitutes the¶ self.55 As feminists then
point out, the self –other dichotomy frequently has¶ gendered, as well as sexualised and
racialised, dimensions. That the Other is¶ frequently feminised, serving to underpin a
masculine or hyper-masculine¶ response, can be seen in examples ranging from colonial
conceptions of virgin¶ territories populated by compliant, exotic populations, to the treatment
of¶ prisoners at Abu Ghraib.56Alternatively, “the Other” may be portrayed as having¶ a
deficient, gross masculinity in contrast to the rationality and restraint of¶ “ourselves.”57 Thus
different kinds of masculinities may be mobilised in security¶ discourses, serving to differentiate
a particular state government in the eyes of its¶ population from its enemies and to legitimate
its protector role.¶
Institutions Need Investigation
Institutional political cultures need to be investigated through the feminist lens
Cohn & Enloe 03 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights and a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics
generally, armed conflict and security, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College ;
Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Enloe is currently a Research Professor in the International Development,
Community, and Environment Department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
Department of Government and International Relations, Women's Studies Program, Clark
University, “A Conversation with Cynthia kEnloe: feminists look at masculinity and the men who
wage war”, Signs 28.4 (Summer 2003), pg. 1187, KR.)
CC: You know, in my research at
the UN, I’ve heard the Third Committee of the General Assembly—that’s the
committee that works on social, humanitarian, and cultural issues—referred to in‐house as
the “ladies' committee.”5 On the other hand, the Security Council remains an overwhelmingly
male and masculinized preserve, although there have been some very important contributions from women ambassadors in the last
few years.¶ CE: The “ladies' committee” … good grief! What you’re now uncovering inside the UN makes me all the more convinced that we need
to launch explicitly feminist investigations of institutional political cultures. Let’s have a feminist analysis
of the two International War Crimes Tribunals at the Hague and in Arusha—I wonder if the two are identical? We have Carla del Ponte (Swiss) coming
right after Louise Arbor (Canadian), two women chief prosecutors. That is pretty amazing! If we really took them seriously, not just as “remarkable
women,” what would we reveal about this fledgling new world order—and about what it will take to make the brand new UN International Criminal
Court work for women? Could it be that we’re on the verge of creating, through the international war crimes tribunals, institutions that are less
masculinized than the UN Secretariat, the WTO, the World Bank, or the IMF? How could we tell?¶ CC: That’s a really provocative and important
question. And I think that the feminist questions you’ve proposed for monitoring postwar demilitarization are an extremely useful example of how to
approach it.6 So, once
we get feminist analyses of international institutional political cultures, what
do we have?¶ CE: A lot more realistic notion of how the world operates. That translates into a
far more accurate causal explanation for patriarchy’s global malleability.
Gender perspectives in institutional cultures is just patriarchy under a different
name
Cohn & Enloe 03 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights and a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics
generally, armed conflict and security, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College ;
Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Enloe is currently a Research Professor in the International Development,
Community, and Environment Department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
Department of Government and International Relations, Women's Studies Program, Clark
University, “A Conversation with Cynthia kEnloe: feminists look at masculinity and the men who
wage war”, Signs 28.4 (Summer 2003), pg. 1187, KR.)
CC: In the two institutions in which I’ve most recently done work, the word patriarchy is never
used, but gender is all over the place. In the U.S. military, it is gender integration. At the UN, it
is gender balance and gender mainstreaming. Although many people see gender as a more
neutral, less inflammatory word than patriarchy, in these institutional cultures, gender is
apparently often just as alienating and thought‐stopping a term, evoking/representing
“political correctness.” The other thing that strikes me is that, in these institutions where
attention to gender has been mandated, it remains an extremely opaque word. At the UN, for
example, everyone is supposed to integrate a “gender perspective” in their programs, but
¶
many people simply don’t have a real clue what that means. And the training that might make
it clearer has been in short supply. But all of that is really about the practical effects of using
specific words rather than the actual conceptual or analytic difference between patriarchy and
a term such as gender system.¶ CE: And I have kept using patriarchy because it reminds us that
we’re investigating power.
Terrorists are not as threatening as the average person influenced by masculine
institutions
Cohn & Enloe 03 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights and a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics
generally, armed conflict and security, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College ;
Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Enloe is currently a Research Professor in the International Development,
Community, and Environment Department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
Department of Government and International Relations, Women's Studies Program, Clark
University, “A Conversation with Cynthia kEnloe: feminists look at masculinity and the men who
wage war”, Signs 28.4 (Summer 2003), pg. 1187, KR.)
CE: I don’t think I’m knowledgeable enough yet to think very clearly about the actual men who
took part. I would have to think about where masculinity comes into it, and the way in which
masculinity gets mobilized. “Frontline” on PBS has had some very slow, thoughtful, jigsaw‐
puzzle kinds of biographies of two or three of the men, and I found them very helpful. To be
honest, I—this doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be interested—but I myself am not very
enlivened in my own curiosity about men or women, but especially men, who engage in what
is now defined as terrorism. I think I’m quite determined not to be seduced into thinking that
those men are more interesting than men who look much more conventional, much more
institutionalized, more rational, and seemingly nonviolent. There is a temptation—and this is
simply the strength of narration—to find Timothy McVeigh or Mohammed Atta much more
intellectually engaging than a person who usually goes nameless, for example, who flies—or
designs —a B‐52 bomber. Curiosity about the rank‐and‐file terrorist so often distracts us from
asking where power really lies. I don’t mean that people who engage in murder, singly or
multiply, shouldn’t be thought about a lot. I am more interested, though, in the Koranic boys’
schools. I’ve been trying to read a lot more about why parents are pleased to have their young
sons receive shelter, food, and learning that is valued at these schools. I’m very wary of
demonization. I am interested in alienation; I am interested in socialization; I am interested in
the larger processes at work without treating individuals as abstractions, as lacking in
consciousness.¶ September 11 engaged my emotions, a sense of horror, and a sense of worry
about people I knew in New York. But the terrorists who hijacked those three planes? They
aren’t the main objects of my curiosity, because I think they are more the symptom than the
cause. And I think ultimately they are nowhere near as capable of affecting our ideas, our
lives, the structures and cultures in which we live, as a lot of other people who look not very
narratively interesting. I’m pretty interested in bland people, people whose blandness is part of
what’s interesting about them—the rank‐and‐file men in conventional armies, the women who
work as secretaries in aerospace corporations. Or Kenneth Lay, the CEO of Enron; nobody till
last winter thought he was as interesting as Timothy McVeigh. I’m interested in Kenneth Lay
and the culture he and his colleagues helped create that destroyed everybody’s pensions. So,
yes, I put up a bit of an intellectual firewall between my curiosity and certain popular—and
state‐crafted—diversionary narratives. When reporters phone to talk about, for instance,
women terrorists, I try to lead them to consider other, more politically fruitful puzzles.¶ CC:
Interest in the Koranic schools, the madrassas, fits right in with your interest in institutions—
both in how different kinds of masculinity are constructed within institutions and in how
masculinity is mobilized to meet the institutions’ ends. But the question of what is the
difference between somebody who goes through those madrassas and engages in these violent
acts versus someone who goes through the same school and doesn’t—that is not especially
interesting to you?
Impacts
Everything
Gendered structures of international relations and politics culminate in
environmental destruction, nuclear war, and extinction
Tickner 1992
(J. Ann Tickner, Professor of International Relations at USC. Gender in International Relations:
Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. 1992,
http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/)
In the modern West, women's activities have typically been associated with a devalued world
of reproduction and maintenance, while men's have been tied to what have been considered
the more elevated tasks of creating history and meaning. Yet all these activities are equally important for
human well-being. History and the construction of meaning help us to achieve the kind of security that comes from an
understanding of who we are as individuals and as citizens, while reproduction and maintenance are necessary for our survival. In
the discourse of international politics, however, our national identities as citizens have been tied
to the heroic deeds of warrior-patriots and our various states' successful participation in
international wars. This militarized version of national identity has also depended on a
devaluation of the identities of those outside the boundaries of the state. Additionally, it has
all but eliminated the experiences of women from our collective national memories. A less
militarized version of national identity, which would serve us better in the contemporary
world where advances in technology are making wars as dangerous for winners as for losers,
must be constructed out of the equally valued experiences of both women and men. To foster
a more peaceful world, this identity must also rest on a better understanding and appreciation
of the histories of other cultures and societies. The multidimensional nature of contemporary insecurities also
highlights the importance of placing greater public value on reproduction and maintenance. In a world where nuclear
war could destroy the earth and most of its inhabitants, we can no longer afford to celebrate
the potential death of hundreds of thousands of our enemies; the preservation of life, not its
destruction, must be valued. The elimination of structural violence demands a restructuring of
the global economy so that individuals' basic material needs take priority over the desire for
profit. An endangered natural environment points to the need to think in terms of the
reproduction rather than the exploitation of nature. This ethic of caring for the planet and its
inhabitants has been devalued by linking it to the private realm associated with the activities
of women; yet caring and responsibility are necessary aspects of all dimensions of life, public
and private. They will be valued in the public realm only when men participate equally in the private realm in tasks associated
with maintenance and responsibility for child rearing. If we are to move toward a more secure future, what we value in the public
realm, including the realm of international politics, should not be so rigidly separated from the values we espouse in the home.
Paternalism
This fetishization of the drone creates a paternalistic discourse that assumes a
passive, feminine battlefield and a masculine, active drone. And this discourse
reveals just how human the drone is, despite attempts to remove it from its
social relation.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12. Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
Indeed, much of the military discourse is molded by the iron cast of paternalism: a feminized¶
FATA “rescued” by masculine US forces—without mention of the human pain and¶ suffering.¶
Objects, commodities, and technologies have always mattered to the unfolding¶ stories of our
lives (Kloppenburg 1988; Latour 1993, 2005; Mintz 1985; Robbins¶ 2007; Schivelbusch 1987;
White 1996; Winner 1977), as have their hybrid couplings¶ (Haraway 1991; Whatmore 2006).
The key point is that although the drone is¶ capable of reconfiguring political and legal life, it
does so through a network. As¶ Latour (2005:56) writes: “An ‘actor’ in the hyphenated
expression actor-network is¶ not the source of an action but the moving target of a vast array
of entities swarming¶ around it”. In other words, the autonomy and exceptional status of the
drone is¶ always-already a production. The Obama administration’s touting of the drone as¶
the “magical solution” to the “war on terror” is a fetishization that occludes its¶ unbearable
humanness.¶ Unmasking the fetish that surrounds drone warfare is critical to our project. But as¶
we have learnt from our research into the FCR and Pakistani constitution, we need¶ more than
this to explain its bloody usage in FATA, Pakistan—a region that “invites”¶ a technology able to
utilize historical territorial contradictions.
Degradation
Patriarchy prevents women from having power and expressing their grief
Cohn & Enloe 03 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights and a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics
generally, armed conflict and security, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College ;
Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Enloe is currently a Research Professor in the International Development,
Community, and Environment Department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
Department of Government and International Relations, Women's Studies Program, Clark
University, “A Conversation with Cynthia kEnloe: feminists look at masculinity and the men who
wage war”, Signs 28.4 (Summer 2003), pg. 1187, KR.)
Later I thought that maybe especially people who don’t have much power—certainly many
women who are in staff support positions in universities don’t have much power to shape the
expression of ideas and meanings—maybe they have to search for a way to make a public
expression of grief that won’t be misinterpreted—that somebody else won’t co‐opt,
expropriate, exploit. Women are in that position so often, and so are a lot of men without
power, but women are in that position so often because—and this comes back to patriarchal
cultures—because their ideas about grief are not taken very seriously. Their expressions of
grief are treated as important symbolically, but not their ideas about grief, and certainly not
their ideas about the relationship of grieving to public policy. So in that circumstance, how
does a woman reduce her complex ideas to a pin she wants to wear on her lapel?
Women
Women’s liberation contributes to peace and national security for as long as
the patriarchal structures see it as a benefit to them
Cohn & Enloe 03 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights and a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics
generally, armed conflict and security, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College ;
Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Enloe is currently a Research Professor in the International Development,
Community, and Environment Department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
Department of Government and International Relations, Women's Studies Program, Clark
University, “A Conversation with Cynthia kEnloe: feminists look at masculinity and the men who
wage war”, Signs 28.4 (Summer 2003), pg. 1187, KR.)
CC: My wondering if there could be any positive impact comes from my conversations with NGO
activists about Resolution 1325, the UN Security Council’s landmark resolution on women,
peace, and security, passed in 2000. While the Security Council may have anticipated simply
another thematic debate, women’s NGOs ran with it; they publicized it, printed and
distributed copies of it, and got the word out to women’s activist groups in many different
countries. So now, 1325 has an active constituency who monitor and push for its
implementation. Women’s groups are really using it as a tool. For example, in the resolution,
the council committed to consult with women’s organizations when on field missions. So on the
council mission to Kosovo, the women got to meet with the council members and present
them a letter critiquing the UN mission’s Gender Unit and pass on information they wanted
the council to have—although the meeting did end up occurring at 11 p.m. in a diplomat’s hotel
room! Another example—before Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN’s special representative to
Afghanistan, left New York to start talks about an interim Afghan government, women’s NGOs
provided him with a list of Afghan women’s NGOs they felt he should consult with—and he did.
And 1325 isn’t just having an impact on UN activities; women are also using it to put pressure
on their own governments. I spoke with a woman from the Russian Committees of Soldiers’
Mothers, for example, who told me that when they first got the resolution in the mail, they
looked, thought, “Oh, just another Security Council resolution,” and didn’t bother to read it. But
later, someone looked—and they’ve found it to be a gold mine. “Now,” she says, “when we go
to talk to political or military leaders, we take it with us. And because the Russian leadership
is now very concerned about their international legitimacy, they feel that they have to listen
to us, because that’s what the resolution says.”¶ CE: But that’s not a high‐tech aerial bombing
campaign that’s improving women’s lives.¶ CC: Right. But is there the least possibility now of a
parallel move? Despite the motivations of the Bush government, could this opening of
rhetorical space for talking about women’s lives and “national security” in the same breath be
seized upon by women activists for ends that go far beyond the intentions of Bush’s policy
advisors and speechwriters?¶ CE: It’s really risky for anyone who’s trying to understand cause
and effect to imagine that the military campaign strategists who were desperate for
international legitimacy and thus grasped on to whatever they could—and girls being denied
schooling happened to work very nicely, thank you—had that as their strategic objective.
Maybe sometimes it’s a risk that it’s worth feminists taking. After all, we aren’t served up many
chances to get our foot in the patriarchal door. Still, so many feminist studies of imperialism,
colonization, World’s Fairs, warfare, the global spreadings of Christian missionary work, and
capitalist markets are here to provide us with a blinking yellow cautionary light: that is, when
on occasion women’s liberation is wielded instrumentally by any masculinized elite as a
rationale‐of‐convenience for their actions, we should be on high alert; they’ll put it back on
the shelf just as soon as it no longer serves their longer‐range purpose.
Nuclear War
The association of the masculine with wartime decision making will cause
nuclear war—“realists” have discounted soft power as a legitimate option
Cohn and Ruddick 3 (Carol, Researcher and Teacher at Harvard Medical Signs, and Sara, author, A
Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/cohnruddick.pdf)
Question Three asks whether it is ethical to develop and deploy WMD as deterrents only. That ¶
is, it asks the classic question of whether it is ethical to have weapons and threaten to use then,
¶ even if it is not ethical to use those weapons militarily. As the question is framed, then, ¶
“development” and “deployment” appear not as phenomena subject to ethical scrutiny unto ¶
themselves, but merely as way-stations, as adjuncts subsumed under what is taken to be the
core ¶ ethical issue, which is seen as deterrence.¶ This formulation does not work for us. We
need to pause and recognize that there are really ¶ several questions enfolded in that one. We
must not only ask about the ethical status of ¶ deterrence, but also whether its entailments –
development and deployment – are themselves ¶ ethical.27¶ One of the constitutive positions of
anti-war feminism is that in thinking about weapons and ¶ wars, we must accord full weight to
their daily effects on the lives of women. We then find that ¶ the development and
deployment of nuclear weapons, even when they are not used in warfare, ¶ exacts immense
economic costs that particularly affect women. In the words of a recent Indian ¶ feminist
essay:¶ “The social costs of nuclear weaponisation in a country where the basic needs of ¶
shelter, food and water, electricity, health and education have not been met are ¶ obvious....
[S]ince patriarchal family norms place the task of looking after the ¶ daily needs of the family
mainly upon women, scarcity of resources always hits ¶ women the hardest. Less food for the
family inevitably means an even smaller ¶ share for women and female children just as water
shortages mean an increase in ¶ women’s labour who have to spend more time and energy in
fetching water from ¶ distant places at odd hours of the day.”28¶ While the US is not as poor a
nation as India, Pakistan, or Russia, it has remained, throughout the ¶ nuclear age, a country in
which poverty and hunger are rife, health care still unaffordable to ¶ many, low-cost housing
unavailable, with crumbling public schools and infrastructure, all while ¶ the American nuclear
weapons program has come at the cost of 4.5 trillion dollars.29¶ In addition to being
economically costly, nuclear weapons development has medical and political ¶ costs. In the US
program, many people have been exposed to high levels of radiation, including ¶ uranium
miners; workers at reactors and processing facilities; the quarter of a million military ¶ personnel
who took place in “atomic battlefield” exercises; “downwinders” from test sites; and ¶
Marshallese Islanders.30 Politically, nuclear regimes require a level of secrecy and security ¶
measures that exclude the majority of citizens, and in most countries, all women, from
defense ¶ policy and decision-making.”31¶ From the perspective of women’s lives, we see not
only the costs of the development of nuclear ¶ weapons, but also the spiritual, social and
psychological costs of deployment.¶ One cost, according to some feminists, is that
“Nuclearisation produces social consent for ¶ increasing levels of violence.32 Another cost, for
many, is that nuclear weapons create high levels ¶ of tension, insecurity and fear. As Arundhati
Roy puts it, nuclear weapons “[i]nform our dreams. ¶ They bury themselves like meat hooks
deep in the base of our brains.”33¶ Further, feminists are concerned about the effect of nuclear
policy on moral thought, on ideas ¶ about gender, and how the two intersect. Nuclear
development may legitimize male aggression, and breed the idea that nuclear explosions give
a ‘virility’ to the nation which men as individuals ¶ can somehow also share.¶ [T]he strange
character of nuclear policy-making not only sidelines moral and ¶ ethical questions, but
genders them. This elite gets to be represented as rational, ¶ scientific, modern, and of course
masculine, while ethical questions, questions ¶ about the social and environmental costs are
made to seem emotional, effeminate, ¶ regressive and not modern. This rather dangerous way
of thinking, which suggests ¶ that questions about human life and welfare are somehow
neither modern nor ¶ properly masculine questions, or that men have no capacity and concern
for peace ¶ and morality, can have disastrous consequences for both men and women.34¶ All
in all, we find the daily costs of WMD development and deployment staggeringly high – in ¶ and
of themselves sufficient to prevent deterrence from being an ethical moral option.¶ A so-called
“realist” response to this judgement might well pay lip-service to the “moral ¶ niceties” it
embodies, but then argue that deterrence is worth those costs. Or, perhaps to be more ¶
accurate, it might argue that the results of a nuclear attack would be so catastrophic that the
rest ¶ of these considerations are really an irrelevant distraction; deterring a WMD attack on our
¶ homeland is the precondition on which political freedom and social life depend, and so it must
be ¶ thought about in a class by itself. ¶ We make two rejoinders to this claim. First, we note that
in the culture of nuclear defense ¶ intellectuals, even raising the issue of costs is delegitimized,
in large part through its association ¶ with “the feminine.” It is the kind of thing that
“hysterical housewives” do; something done by ¶ people not tough and hard enough to look
harsh “reality” in the eye, unsentimentally; not strong ¶ enough to separate their feelings from
theorizing mass death; people who don’t have “the stones ¶ for war.” Feminist analysis rejects
the cultural division of meaning which devalues anything ¶ associated with women or femininity.
It sees in that same cultural valuing of the so-called ¶ “masculine” over the so-called
“feminine” an explanation of why it appears so self-evident to ¶ many that what is called
“military necessity” should appropriately be prioritized over all other ¶ human necessities. And
it questions the assumptions that bestow the mantle of “realism” on such ¶ a constrained focus
on weapons and state power. Rather than simply being an “objective” ¶ reflection of political
reality, we understand this thought system as 1) a partial and distorted ¶ picture of reality, and
2) a major contributor to creating the very circumstances it purports to ¶ describe and protect
against. ¶ Second, just as feminists tend to be skeptical about the efficacy of violence, they
might be ¶ equally skeptical about the efficacy of deterrence. Or, to put it another way, if war is
a “lie,” so ¶ is deterrence. This is not, of course, to say that deterrence as a phenomena never
occurs; no ¶ doubt one opponent is sometimes deterred from attacking another by the fear of
retaliation. But ¶ rather deterrence as a theory, a discourse and set of practices underwritten
by that discourse, is a ¶ fiction Deterrence theory is an elaborate, abstract conceptual edifice,
which posits a hypothetical ¶ relation between two different sets of weapons systems – or
rather, between abstractions of two ¶ different sets of weapons systems, for in fact, as both
common sense and military expertise tells ¶ us, human error and technological imperfection
mean that one could not actually expect real ¶ weapons to function in the ways simply assumed
in deterrence theory. Because deterrence ¶ theory sets in play the hypothetical
representations of various weapons systems, rather than¶ assessments of how they would
actually perform or fail to perform in warfare, it can be nearly ¶ infinitely elaborated, in a
never ending regression of intercontinental ballistic missile gaps and ¶ theater warfare gaps
and tactical “mini-nuke” gaps, ad infinitum, thus legitimating both massive ¶ vertical
proliferation and arms racing. ¶ Deterrence theory is also a fiction in that it depends upon
“rational actors,” for whom what ¶ counts as “rational” is the same, independent of culture,
history, or individual difference. It ¶ depends on those “rational actors” perfectly understanding
the meaning of “signals” ¶ communicated by military actions, despite dependence on
technologies that sometimes ¶ malfunction; despite cultural difference and the lack of
communication that is part of being ¶ political enemies; despite the difficulties of ensuring
mutual understanding even when best ¶ friends make direct face-to-face statements to each
other. It depends on those same “rational ¶ actors” engaging in a very specific kind of calculus
that includes one set of variables (e.g., ¶ weapons size, deliverability, survivability, as well as the
“credibility” of their and their ¶ opponent’s threats), and excludes other variables (such as
domestic political pressures, ¶ economics, or individual subjectivity). What is striking from a
feminist perspective is that even ¶ while “realists” may worry that some opponents are so
“insufficiently rational” as to be ¶ undeterrable, this does not lead them to search for a more
reliable form of ensuring security, or¶ an approach that is not so weapons-dependent.¶ Cynthia
Cockburn, in her study of women’s peace projects in conflict zones, describes one of the ¶
women’s activities as helping each other give up “dangerous day dreams.”35 From a feminist ¶
anti-war perspective, having WMD as deterrents is a dangerous dream. The dream of perfect ¶
rationality and control which underwrites deterrence theory is a dangerous dream, since it ¶
legitimates constructing a system that only could be (relatively) safe if that perfect rationa lity
and ¶ control were actually possible. Deterrence theory itself is a dangerous dream because it
justifies ¶ producing and deploying WMD, thereby making their accidental or purposive use
possible (and ¶ far more likely) than if they were not produced at all, nor deployed in such
numbers. “Realists” ¶ are quick to point out the dangers of not having WMD for deterrence
when other states have ¶ them. Feminist perspectives suggest that that danger only appears so
self-evidently greater than ¶ the danger of having WMD if you discount as “soft” serious
attention to the costs of ¶ development and deployment.
War
Gendered technostsrategic discourse makes war inevitable
Cohn 93 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, “Wars,
Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” Gendering War Talk, Princeton
University Press,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/War,%20Wimps,%20and%20Women%20%20Cohn.pdf, pg. 6)
Within the defense community discourse, manliness is equated not only with the ability to win
a way (or to “prevail” as some like to say when talking about nuclear war); it is also equated
with the willingness (which they would call courage) to threaten and use force. During the
Carter administration, for example, a well-known academic security affairs specialist was
quoted as saying that “under Jimmy Carter the United States is spreading its legs for Soviet
Union.” Once this image is evoked, how does rational discourse about the values of U.S. policy
proceed?¶ In 1989 and 1990, as Gorbachev presided over the withdrawal of Soviet forces from
Eastern Europe, I heard some defense analysts sneeringly say things like, “They’re a bunch of
pussies for pulling of Eastern Europe. You would assume that if they were politically and
ideologically consistent, if they were rational, they would be applauding the Soviet actions.
Yet in their informal conversations, it was not their rational analyses that dominated their
response, but in fact for them, the decision for war, the willingness to use force, is cast as a
question of masculinity—not prudence thoughtfulness, efficacy, “rational” cost-benefit
calculation, or morality, but masculinity.¶ In the face of this equation, genuine political
discourse disappears. One more example: After Iraq invaded Kuwait and President Bush
hastily sent U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia, there was a period in which the Bush administration
struggled to find a convincing political justification for U.S military involvement and the
security affairs community debated the political merit of U.S. intervention. Then Bush set the
deadline, January 16, high noon at the OK Corral, and as the day approached conversations
changed. More of these centered on the question compelling articulated by one defense
intellectual as “Does George Bush have the stones for war” This, too, is utterly extraordinary.
This was a time when crucial political actions abounded: Can the sanctions work if given more
time? Just what vital interests does the United States actually have at stake? What would be
the goals of the military intervention? Could they be accomplished by other means? Is the
difference between what sanctions might accomplish and what military violence might
accomplish worth the greater cost in human suffering, human lives, even dollars? What will the
long-term effects on the people of the region be? On the ecology? Given the apparent success
of Gorbachev’s last-minute diplomacy and Hussein’s series of nearly daily small concessionsm
can and should Bush put off the deadline? Does he have the strength to let another leader play
a major role in solving the problem? Does he have the political flexibility to not fight, or is he
hell-bent on war at all costs? And so on, ad infinitum. All of these disappear in the sulfuric acid
test of the size of Mr. Bush’s private parts.
Terrorism Turn
*Beautiful—Violence to fight terrorism is not the answer
Cohn & Enloe 03 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights and a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics
generally, armed conflict and security, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College ;
Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Enloe is currently a Research Professor in the International Development,
Community, and Environment Department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
Department of Government and International Relations, Women's Studies Program, Clark
University, “A Conversation with Cynthia kEnloe: feminists look at masculinity and the men who
wage war”, Signs 28.4 (Summer 2003), pg. 1187, KR.)
CC: So, in those weeks after September 11 and before the bombing started, what did you say
when you were asked for a feminist response to the question “What should ‘we’ do now?”¶ CE:
I didn’t have it all worked out—I found myself saying, well, first of all, let’s really think about
what is the appropriate response, and what, in the long term, is the most useful response.
And especially if we’re Americans, let’s really think comparatively. Can we learn some lessons
from the women of Srebrenica, the Bosnian town where five thousand men were massacred
by Serbian militias? Or, what if the September attack had happened in Brussels, seat of the
European Union? Would we all assume that the Belgian air force should take to the skies,
heading for Southwest Asia? Feminists have taught us to be very, very careful before we
adopt a response to grief, loss, and anger that is a state response, especially a militarized state
response.¶ What did you say during those weeks?¶ CC: My starting place was that we needed to
analyze why military violence seemed like a good response—or why it seemed so impossible
not to strike back. We can’t take it as self‐evident.¶ I’ve been very influenced by working with
Sara Ruddick on a “feminist ethical perspective on weapons of mass destruction” (Cohn and
Ruddick 2002). She has written that the efficacy of violence is overrated, while its costs are
consistently underestimated—although I actually believe that more than she does at this point!
Anyway, I think that response to September 11 is really a prime example. The seemingly “self‐
evident” (to a lot of people) need to strike back is partly based on the assumption that it will
“work,” that it will be the most effective form of response. People assume that military
violence will, in general, work a lot better than a negotiated political solution or a response
based on the enforcement of national or international law or on economic actions.¶ I think
that assumption needs to be examined, challenged. Even if you see the question of whether
to use military force as a strategic, pragmatic question, apart from moral consideration, I am
not at all sure that it is an effective response to terrorists or the causes of terrorism—even
from a purely U.S. perspective. What I am sure of is that the human costs will be enormous,
including the spread of further violence, and that in the long run the political consequences
both for the United States and for many Arab women will be quite damaging.¶ I think one
reason it’s so hard politically to even examine the assumption that “striking back” is the best
option is that ideas about masculinity are so intricately and invisibly interwoven with ideas
about national security. So‐called realist strategic dictums for state behavior sound a lot like
dictums for hegemonic masculinity.¶ CE: You mean, “We have to do something.”¶ CC: And,
“The risks of inaction [read ‘passivity’] are far greater than the risks of action,” and “We have
to show we are strong,” and “We have to show them they can’t push us around,” and “We
aren’t going to take this lying down,” and “We can’t let them think we are wimps.”¶ CE: “It’s
our honor.” Americans in the early twenty‐first century have created what seems to me to be
a deadly combination for themselves (ourselves!)—possessing such disproportionate power
combined with a cultural sense of being vulnerable. It gives me the shivers.¶ CC: But I think the
problem is more than the sense of being vulnerable. It is the refusal to acknowledge the
inevitability of our vulnerability. After all, vulnerability is a fact of human and political life. The
attempt to deny its inevitability is what has led to the development of weapons of mass
destruction “as deterrents,” to massive investments in “national missile defense” and other
baroque weapons technology, while we refuse to make serious investments in dealing with
the worldwide HIV epidemic, or starvation, or poverty around the world. It has led to U.S.
partnerships with oppressive regimes and multiple military attacks on other nations—and
another being talked about by the Bush administration even as we speak! And all of these, of
course, are part of what creates the desperation and anger that are the seeds of terrorism.¶
My fantasy is that if we acknowledged the impossibility of making ourselves invulnerable, of
constructing Reagan’s Plexiglass shield, we would have to have policies that fostered and
strengthened good will and interdependence, that invested in making the planet a livable
place for people in all countries, that aimed at disarmament instead of weapons
“advancement” and proliferation. And my fear is that we won’t acknowledge it, because these
assumptions about strength and weakness, and vulnerability, are simultaneously engaged at
the very personal, identity level but also built right into beliefs about national security and
into national security doctrine—as though they reflected “objective reality” and in no way
stemmed from deeply felt and held identities.¶ So stopping to try to disentangle emotions and
assumptions about violence and its efficacy was the starting place for me. Ultimately, I want to
ask what it will take to change the discourse, to alter the meanings of strength and justice in the
international political arena?
Solvency
Embodied Analysis
A feminist perspective on geopolitics allows micro-scale anaylsis that uncover
humans relationship with technology.
Williams, 2011 (Alison J., Enabling persistent presence? Performing the embodied geopolitics
of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle assemblage, Political Geography, Volume 30, Issue 7,
September, p. 381-390, MR )
This paper has elucidated how the adoption of a feminist perspective on geopolitics provides the
ability to look beyond the macro-scale geopolitics of strategy and policy to uncover the hidden
geographies of individual combatant’s experiences. Whilst this might be seen as troubling, as a continuation of
the privileging of the voices of the powerful, this paper has sought to illustrate that this level of analysis enables us to analyse the
lived experiences of military work in new and useful ways. We
need to appreciate what can be learnt by downscaling our analysis to the individual experiences of UAV aircrews and others who are involved
in the actual practices of war-fighting. This gives us an invaluable insight into how the
technologies of war are intertwining with those militarised bodies to create more-than-human
assemblages. As Croser, 2007 and Croser, 2010 has illustrated, the increasing use of vision and envisioning technologies within
the US military has altered the infantry’s relationship to its battlespace. Her work is illustrative of a growing interconnectivity of
human and machine in the accomplishment of the will to state violence. The
employment of the concept of the
assemblage provides a fruitful way to uncover the complex relationship between humans and
technologies in this, and other cases, and enables us to look at the specific geographies of
these relationships.¶ Beyond the focus of this paper, the use of an embodied geopolitical perspective provides much scope
for further work. And, whilst many feminist geographers may be uneasy at the use of this approach to analyse the experiences of
combatants rather than their victims, this paper has sought to illustrate that there
is much that can be learnt by
refocusing our geopolitical lenses from the macro-scale discourse analysis of foreign policy
statements to the micro-scale of the individual experiences of those affected by these
discourses. Indeed, as Hyndman (2003, 10) so powerfully opines, feminist geopolitics “attempts to map the silences
of the dominant geopolitical position[s] and undo these by invoking multiple scales of enquiry
and knowledge production”. This paper provides an attempt to access a perhaps less obvious, but no less important
space of silence. Indeed, as geopolitical writers we are often guilty of homogenising the combatant without attempting to uncover
the personal experiences that individualise their practices. In this mode, we perhaps need to step forwards, rather than backwards,
towards these people to enable us to encounter them in more detail and uncover their individual stories. Perhaps
through
this we will achieve a more nuanced exegesis of the geopolitical practices of warfare.
Ungender IR Key
Ungender the rhetoric of relations—only through viewing emotions as human
instead of masculine or feminine will we be able to break free of technostategic
thinking’s domination of nuclear discourse
Cohn and Ruddick 3 (Carol, Researcher and Teacher at Harvard Medical Signs, and Sara, author, A
Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/cohnruddick.pdf)
The final question asks us to evaluate current or proposed treaty agreements concerning
nuclear, ¶ biological and chemical weapons. We are offered a place at the negotiating table, a
position few ¶ women, probably fewer feminists, have occupied. ¶ For feminists there are two
questions: How should we respond to the invitation? And, what ¶ should we say about particular
treaties if we accept? The second question is not one to which ¶ anti-war feminists have a
distinctive answer arising from our tradition. It is the first question, ¶ whether to come to the
table and how to act effectively once there, that traditionally and today ¶ preoccupies feminists.¶
Peacemaking, like war, has been dominated by men. Few women have been asked to
participate ¶ in negotiations; when asked, it has usually been late, after the agenda was already
set. But ¶ women are now claiming their place in negotiations.45 They have participated in the
struggles ¶ and have a right to be present; many feel that only they will represent women’s
distinctive ¶ interests.¶ Getting and accepting an invitation is only the first step in being able to
participate effectively. ¶ Often women have to overcome outright hostility and ridicule from
male participants. When they ¶ are treated with courtesy, they may still feel unable to express
their concerns, and ignored or ¶ dismissed when they try. Even when present in large numbers,
women may be unable fully to ¶ engage. In South Africa women were welcomed to the peace
table, occupied half its seats, but ¶ no one had contended with the divisions of work and
responsibility in their lives. When ¶ negotiations lasted well into the night, no one was taking
care of their husbands and children; ¶ women who stayed became tense and preoccupied.46¶
Women’s difficulties participating in peace negotiations may be especially marked when the ¶
topic is weapons, a subject which, as we have said, is particularly liable to lend itself to ¶
abstraction. A report by a woman participant at biological weapons treaty negotiations sounds ¶
familiar themes. What counts as “reason” prevailed, what gets coded as “emotions” were ¶
excluded. Disturbing concerns, for example, with the effects of a vaccine on troops or the
populace, were labeled “emotional.” Speakers engaged in “cool, detached reasoning about the
¶ possible uses of weapons against an adversary....’Useful’ in this context means ability to cause
¶ serious loss of life.” Talking about a vaccine’s negative effects was tantamount to ¶
“complaining,” “whining,” “carrying on.”47¶ In discussion of biological weapons, as in issues of
proliferation, the dichotomous division ¶ between reason and emotion is entwined with a
similar division between [Western] Self and ¶ [unruly] Other, a particular instance of self and
other, Us and Enemy typical of peace and arms ¶ negotiation. “One test of belonging and being
heard in this group was whether one accepted the ¶ nature of the source of the BW problem.
Did one accept the identity of the adversary?” That ¶ identity was often described in racist terms
– e.g., “[they] don’t value human life the way we do” ¶ – and these remarks elicited no
comment.48¶ ‘To belong and speak and be heard’ would mean ignoring the rules and
interrupting the cool ¶ detached voice of reason. Again the gender discourse system is at work,
frustrating these efforts. ¶ An objection which acknowledges emotion, which talks about the fate
of bodies or lives, ¶ becomes an “outburst.” Reason ignores them in order to continue the
discussion of weapons and ¶ their effects. Outbursts are “feminine”; in the silence that follows
an outburst anyone, male or ¶ female, can “feel like a woman.” The effect of gender discourse
depends upon a person’s ¶ complex personal and social identities. But for a feminist, who aims
to speak as herself-who-isa-woman, the accusation of “being a woman” or a wimp has to be
poignantly inhibiting. ¶ For feminists struggling to participate effectively, the final insult may be
the realization that the ¶ negotiations, especially if they are presented as inclusive and
democratic, are more ritualistic ¶ displays than political action. “In reality, major decisions are
made in secret in the capitals, ¶ based on calculations that seek military (and increasingly
commercial) advantages.”49 In the ¶ words of a male political scientist: “arms control is war by
other means.” Real power is always ¶ already somewhere else by the time a woman takes her
place at the table.50¶ Should women then give up the effort to join in negotiations? It seems
that many do. [They] ¶ “get intimidated, and don’t put up with it, so they step aside.”51 But
other women in increasing ¶ numbers are resisting ridicule and discrimination in order to make
their views known. There are ¶ many reasons, personal and social, why some women persevere
where others do not. Cultural ¶ attitudes toward women vary; women are more easily heard
when many women are present, ¶ especially if they are linked in alliances that include all parties
in conflict. ¶ One reason that some women persevere is their belief that they have a distinctive
perspective to ¶ bring to negotiation. Women participants in peace negotiations have said that
they bring to the ¶ table an ability to experience of “the severe human consequences of
conflict” and a commitment ¶ to expose the “underbelly of war.” They stress the importance
of speaking openly about pain ¶ and fear and loss, of building trust among adversaries, of
opening up difficult, divisive issues ¶ rather than cloaking them in rhetoric or postponing them.
They are apt to “see more clearly the ¶ continuum of conflict that stretches from the beating at
home to the rape on the street to the killing on the battlefield.” “They witness vivid links
between violence, poverty and inequality in ¶ daily lives.” They define peace in terms of “basic
universal human needs” but/and advocate ¶ practical solutions to the building of peace, focusing
on ordinary safety, housing, education and ¶ child care.52¶ In sum, these women introduce a
perspective that satisfies the criteria of the “feminine” as it ¶ functions metaphorically in gender
discourse. The women only sometimes compare themselves ¶ to men, occasionally with some
anger, more often speaking quietly of what they, women, are ¶ more likely, often, to believe and
do. But it would be hard to accuse them of acting like a ¶ woman; and, if women are present in
sufficient numbers, they may be less vulnerable to the ¶ silencing power of gendered national
security discourse. ¶ Making treaties is only a small part of making peace. There are virtues in
treaty making even ¶ when individual treaties are seriously flawed. Negotiating requires
structured places in which ¶ opponents can talk; signed treaties require further conversation and
negotiation. Prolonged ¶ negotiations create relations that at the least survive post-treaty
crises, and at best may help ¶ resolve them. But treaties are no substitute for peace-building
processes. They are made in ¶ formal contexts where participants are apt to cling to their ethnonational political identities and ¶ to keep their eye on political boundaries, rewards, and
positions.53 Among treaties, arms control ¶ negotiations, which extrapolate weapons from their
context of injury and pain, may be the least ¶ amenable to the perspectives attributed to, and
claimed by, women.¶ But if there are to be treaties, if weapons of mass destruction are to be
subject to negotiation, ¶ then our tradition would encourage the participation of women. This is
not because we believe ¶ that women offer a perspective “different” from men’s – though that
may be the case in many ¶ cultures at this historical moment. What gets left out of dominant
ways of thinking about ¶ weapons – the emotional, the concrete, the particular, the human
bodies and their vulnerability, ¶ human lives and their subjectivity – is neither masculine nor
feminine but human . Rather, we ¶ would hope that the power of gender discourse to exclude
what is now coded as “feminine” ¶ would be weakened by the presence of numbers of women
for whom “acting and feeling like a ¶ woman” were a matter of course, even sometimes a source
of strength, not an occasion for self doubt and silence.
Feminist Critique Key
Only through a thorough feminist critique can you deconstruct masculine
technocratic thought and allow for new perspectives.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and GeoInformatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Geospatial technologies include a broad range of technologies for collecting, stor- ing,
displaying, or analyzing geographical infor- mation (e.g., geographical information systems
[GIS]; global positioning systems, and remote sensing). Much has been written about the limitations and social implications of geospatial technologies (GT) since the early 1990s (e.g.,
Sheppard 1993; Curry 1994; Pickles 1995). Critiques have focused largely on issues of epistemology, representation, power, ethics, privacy violation, and the noncivilian deployment of
these technologies. With contributions by critical geographers from diverse perspectives, considerable progress has been made in the nascent subfields of critical GIS and critical cartography
to date (e.g., Schuurman 1999; Kyem 2004; Sheppard 2005; Crampton and Krygier 2006; Del Casino and Hanna
¶¶¶¶¶¶
2006; Elwood 2006; Knigge and Cope 2006; Kwan and Knigge 2006; Pavlovskaya 2006; Propen 2006; Sieber 2006;
Ghose forthcoming; Kwan and Aitken forth- coming). In this article I seek to develop feminist per-
spectives on GT along new directions,building on earlier contributions to feminist understanding of GT. First, recent feminist thinking in geography has witnessed heightened attention to
the importance of emotion in social life and knowledge production (e.g., Bondi 1999, 2003, 2005;
Burman and Chantler 2004; Davidson and Bondi 2004; Ekinsmyth et al. 2004; Ettlin- ger 2004; Thien 2004, 2005;
Bondi, Davidson and Smith 2005; Tolia-Kelly 2006). As Kay An- derson and Susan Smith (2001, 7) argue,
the ‘‘human world is constructed and lived through the emotions’’ and yet feelings and
emotions are silenced in both research and social life. Since emotions affect research
processes and findings (Bennett 2004) and are highly political but rarely an important
consideration in public policy (Kwan and Aitken, forthcoming), bringing emotions back to bear
upon GT practices may offer new insights about ways of using GT that contest the dominant
understanding and mean- ings of GT and their relationships with the so- cial and political
world (e.g., using GT as a means of resistance or political protest).
Incorporating feminist articulations creates new discourse in security
Hoogensen and Rottem 04 (Gunhild, and Svein vingeland, Professors at University of
Tromsø, Norway, “Gender Identity and the Subject of Security”, Security Dialogue, 2004 35:
155,June 1st, http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/35/2/155.full.pdf, pp. 155-171)
¶ When women’s articulations of security are recognized and heard, this¶ results in access to
the appropriate resources women need to ensure their¶ security, as well as creating new
foundations for theoretical reorientations of¶ security. Although such gender theorizing and
practice has been taking¶ place for over a decade, offering many fruitful and important
avenues of¶ Gunhild Hoogensen & Svein Vigeland Rottem¶ Gender Identity and the Subject of
Security Downloaded from¶ research in identity and security, it has not been able to break
through to the¶ mainstream security debates. Feminist perspectives have remained on the¶
margins of international relations and security studies, in part because of ‘a¶ view that feminist
theorizing is always, necessarily, and most usefully done¶ by women, for women, about women’
(Carver, 1996: 4). Blanchard (2003:¶ 1289) notes that the realm of security is ‘part of the elite
world of masculine¶ high politics’, and that the discipline of international relations has ‘only¶
recently made a place for feminist analysis, and then only grudgingly’. Ann¶ Tickner states that
international relations creates ‘an inhospitable home from¶ the more expansive local/global
trajectories of feminist inquiry’ (Runyan,¶ 2002: 361). The realization that ‘realist
hypermasculinity is responsible for¶ the emergence and eventual militarization of the state
system with its¶ imagery of protector/protected, inside/outside, and order/anarchy – a situ-¶
ation in which security for the few is bought at the cost of insecurity of the¶ many’ (Zalewski and
Parpart, 1998: 87) appears to be difficult for main-¶ stream scholarship to accept or engage with.
The ‘so what’ response of¶ militaries to gender awareness in security (SAP Canada, 2002: 20)
appears to¶ be shared by mainstream security scholars. The question is, then, as Anne¶ Sisson
Runyan (2002: 361) states:¶ Should feminists seek to be ‘at home’ in IR (that is, have their
perspectives legitimated¶ within the discipline) or should they ‘forget IR’ in order to build more
hospitable¶ local/global homes for the world’s inhabitants, especially those marginalized by the¶
world politics-as usual?¶ Feminist research and action will continue whether or not it is
legitimated¶ by the mainstream and malestream disciplines of international relations and¶
security studies. It is our contention that, given the relevance of this research¶ to security – and
especially societal security through identity – it is time for¶ the mainstream to take notice.¶
What Can Gender Analysis Offer?¶ The normalization of women’s identity and experience speaks
directly to the¶ decisionmaking involved in determining who is secure and who is not.¶ Security
through gender identity demands a reorientation and restructuring¶ of the concept and of
international relations in general, enabling the research¶ to¶ foreground local/global politics;
problematize statist thinking and organization; dis-¶ rupt boundaries between First World and
Third World, public and private, and local¶ and global; reveal interconnections among political,
economic, cultural, social, and eco-¶ logical spheres (Runyan, 2002: 362).¶ Broadly speaking, this
approach is taken by critical security studies in¶ general, not just feminist research. However, as
Blanchard (2003: 1292) notes,¶ 166¶ Security Dialogue¶ vol. 35, no. 2, June 2004¶ even ‘critical
security discourse has generally invoked, but not engaged,¶ feminist scholarship, and even
approaches that imagined societal sectors of¶ security have yet to take gender seriously’.
Feminist security literature¶ addresses the role of women (or lack thereof) in the ‘corridors of
power’¶ (Blanchard, 2003), as well as the gendered structure within IR theory itself.¶ Through
gender, security becomes reconstructed on the basis of women’s¶ experiences of violence,
interrelating violence on the local, national and¶ international levels, and eradicating
structural violence instead of primarily¶ focusing on the direct violence of war (Tickner, 1992;
Sylvester, 1994;¶ Peterson & Runyan, 1999). Seen though these gender-aware lenses, security¶
cannot remain the exclusive ‘widened’ fortress Wæver et al. have tried to¶ create.¶ This
contention is further supported by the development that gender¶ appears to have more
meaning and relevance to security in practice than in¶ the halls of academe (Blanchard, 2003:
1306). Bureaucracy and policy appear¶ to be leading the way in recognizing the important
linkages between gender¶ and security. UN Security Council Resolution 1325 of October 2000
not only¶ focuses on violence experienced by women, but also recognizes the impor-¶ tant role a
gender perspective has with regard to peacebuilding and conflict¶ resolution – in other words,
with regard to ensuring international peace¶ and security. Further work by the UN on this
agenda resulted in the 2002¶ document¶ Women, Peace and Security¶ (United Nations, 2002).
This study¶ acknowledges there is work to be done regarding the integration of women’s¶
security needs and a gender perspective in all aspects of international peace¶ and security.
UN Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan states that ‘women still¶ form a minority of those who
participate in peace and security negotiations,¶ and receive less attention than men in postconflict agreements, disarma-¶ ment and reconstruction’ (United Nations, 2002: ix). Addressing
this means¶ not only ensuring that women are at the table during negotiations, but also¶
ensuring that a gender perspective informs all approaches to international¶ peace and security.¶
Gender awareness and linkages between women and security were the¶ focus of the South Asia
Partnership Canada Forum Report (SAP Canada,¶ 2002). Women from Nepal, Bangladesh,
Pakistan and other South Asian¶ countries expressed their views about what security means to
women in the¶ South Asian region. Among things that were discussed were sexual violence,¶
domestic violence, economic deprivation and political isolation. Linkages¶ were made between
violence on the battlefield and economic insecurity and¶ the increase of domestic violence at
home (SAP Canada, 2002: 7, 8, 14, 17, 18).¶ Some of these articulations of insecurity mirror the
experiences of women in¶ what are considered to be ‘secure’ regions, such as the rates of
domestic¶ violence among US military personnel and their families, and increases in¶ domestic
violence just prior to and just after military deployment (Lutz &¶ Gunhild Hoogensen & Svein
Vigeland Rottem¶ Gender Identity and the Subject of Security¶ Elliston, 2002). Gender
perspectives not only allow for articulations of secu-¶ rity needs by individuals, but illustrate the
ways in which these security¶ needs transcend some of the traditional barriers we have placed
between¶ individuals on the basis of north/south or secure/insecure divisions. As¶ such, it is ‘a
new dimension that women bring in the whole question of¶ developing an alternative discourse
of human security, alternate to the real-¶ ism paradigm of power and security’ (SAP Canada,
2002: 7). And, as Heidi¶ Hudson (2000: 79) states in her examination of human security needs in¶
Africa, ‘nowhere more than in Africa is the security of all people linked to the¶ security of the
women of the continent’.
Coalitions Solve
Women coalitions can change cultures, especially institutional ones
Cohn & Enloe 03 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights and a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics
generally, armed conflict and security, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College ;
Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Enloe is currently a Research Professor in the International Development,
Community, and Environment Department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
Department of Government and International Relations, Women's Studies Program, Clark
University, “A Conversation with Cynthia kEnloe: feminists look at masculinity and the men who
wage war”, Signs 28.4 (Summer 2003), pg. 1187, KR.)
CE: Because I think we’re all in this together. Because I know that 95 percent of everything I
know, I know because somebody else has done the work. I’m totally dependent on other people
feeling confident enough, empowered enough, energized enough, and funded enough that they
can do the work that will help make me smarter. Also, I actually want to have a lively set of
experiences with people. It makes academic life more fun; it makes it more interesting; it’s
worth doing it. I’m not the sort who wants to go to a log cabin in the woods and think my own
shallow thoughts by myself. This means it really matters to me to change institutions, to
change the cultures in our departments, in ways that give people who are coming along, just
like other people did for me, a sense that, together, you can change cultures; you don’t have to
buy into it. I think about institutional cultures a lot. I think they’re changeable, though it’s
surprising what one has to figure out in order to make those transformations stick. This is why
the host of women’s caucuses we’ve all created in so many professional associations, and all
the new feminist journals we’ve launched with their formats and processes self‐consciously
crafted and nurtured, are so significant. Each and every one of them, I think, are feminist
experiments in creating healthier professional institutions—in the process, we’re trying to
transform the very meanings of “professionalism” and “career.”
Women organizing themselves contributes to national security
Cohn & Enloe 03 (Carol Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human
Rights and a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics
generally, armed conflict and security, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College ;
Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Enloe is currently a Research Professor in the International Development,
Community, and Environment Department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts,
Department of Government and International Relations, Women's Studies Program, Clark
University, “A Conversation with Cynthia kEnloe: feminists look at masculinity and the men who
wage war”, Signs 28.4 (Summer 2003), pg. 1187, KR.)
CC: No one could ever accuse me of being an optimist, but let me push this. Now that the position of women has been publicly inserted in national
security discourse, now that it has been rhetorically marked as a supposed concern of male national political elites (no matter what their motivation),
do you think there
is even the slightest chance that that new discursive legitimacy of talking about
“women” and “national security” in the same breath can be used as a wedge for political good?¶ CE:
Here’s my sense—but we’re all going to have to keep watching this. If Afghan women, like Kosovar women, Bosnian
women, and East Timorese women, manage to make serious gains in demasculinizing the
reconstructed Afghan society, it will not be because of tokenist, exploitative discourse
maneuvers by Bush and Blair and others. It will be because, first, Afghan women themselves are
organized. Second, because there has been so much serious, feminist‐savvy, detailed work
going on inside international groups such as Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty, as well as inside UN
agencies—UNDPKO, UNICEF [United Nations Children's Fund], and the UNHCR [Office of the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees]. Most of us in our research and teaching barely know all the things that
you, Cynthia Cockburn and Dubraka Zarkov (2002); Dyan Mazurana and Angela Raven‐Roberts (2002a, 2002b; Mazurana, McKay, Carlson, and Kasper
2002); Sandy Whitworth (2003); Julie Mertus (2000); Suzanne Williams (2002); Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyman (2003); and others are trying to teach
us about how feminists have made dents in the masculinist operations of international and local institutions operating in Afghanistan and other
“postconflict zones.”
Internationalism Solves Terrorism
International cooperation key to stopping terrorism.
Gitlin ’03 Gitlin, Todd. Writer for Mother Jones, an Investigative Activist
Organization("Goodbye, New World Order: Keep the Global Ideal Alive" - MotherJones.Com)
http://www.motherjones.com 7/14/2003
The United States -- however wealthy, however mighty -- can't be safe enough on its own. Bush
may think he can walk away from the international system, but the international system won't
walk away from him -- or us.¶ A triumphalist moment might seem the poorest of times for
thinking constructively about a working international system, one in which power would be
deployed and responsibility shared in behalf of human rights, democracy, and development. Not
necessarily so. The millions who marched against war have much more work to do now. It's a
time to widen and deepen debate about the shape of the world to come: empire, its
discontents, and the alternatives. To think that all would be well in the world if the U. S.
simply retracted its power is so naive as to be hallucinatory.¶ Start with a matter of pressing
self-interest: Stopping terrorism. Al-Qaeda is nothing if not international. It must be policed
and destroyed across borders. There are far more al-Qaeda operatives in Europe than there
ever were in Iraq. If they have moved operations to Chechnya and Georgia, as many believe,
Russian help is obviously indispensable. To prevent new terror attacks, the U. S. must engage in
full-blooded cooperation -- with all the delicate negotiations this entails among police,
intelligence, border and other authorities. Memo to Washington: Put yourself in their place.
Internationalism key to US legitimacy
Internationalism key to US legitimacy.
Gitlin ’03 Gitlin, Todd. Writer for Mother Jones, an Investigative Activist
Organization("Goodbye, New World Order: Keep the Global Ideal Alive" - MotherJones.Com)
http://www.motherjones.com 7/14/2003
The point is that this would be a terrible time to give up on internationalism. The simple fact
that the US proved victorious in Iraq does not alter the following chain of truths: To push the
world toward democratic rights, power must be legitimate; it is only legitimate if it is held to
be legitimate; it is very unlikely to be legitimate if it is unilateral or close to unilateral; and the
wider the base of power, the more likely it is to appear legitimate. Bush may have no doubt
that American armed force in the Middle East is legitimate, and right now Americans may agree,
but that won't do.¶ Common sense alone should tell us not to overreach. Even with the best
intentions in the world -- which hundreds of millions doubt -- the United States is simply not up
to the global mission that the Bush administration embraces. This nation hasn't the staying
power, the economic strength, the knowledge, the wisdom, or the legitimacy to command the
continents. It is sheerest delusion to think otherwise.¶ Meanwhile, it is an irony of the recent
past that as the United States has lost prestige, the United Nations has gained it -- at least
outside our borders. For all its demonstrable flaws, it retains some credibility -- no small thing
in a world growing more anarchic.
Internationalism solves Genocide
Internationalism key to stopping genocide and tyranny. US action and
acceptance is key to this.
Gitlin ’03 Gitlin, Todd. Writer for Mother Jones, an Investigative Activist
Organization("Goodbye, New World Order: Keep the Global Ideal Alive" - MotherJones.Com)
http://www.motherjones.com 7/14/2003
Most of all, internationalism needs more than a nudge here and there -- it needs a jump-start, a
riveting proof that multilateral action can change facts on the ground. Here's one idea: What if
the UN and Europe decided to take on the toughest assignment? There is no more stringent test for
internationalism's future than what seems the world's most intractable trauma: The endless Israel-Palestine war, which has outlasted a thousand
manifestos, plans, meetings about meetings. The new postwar situation might just be promising, the Bush administration just possibly susceptible to
pressure. Practical, peace-seeking Jews and Palestinians ought to get in on the pressure; so should Europeans looking for payback, not least Tony Blair.¶
And we ought to be thinking of a practical role for a UN, or joint UN-NATO constabulary. As Tony Klug of Britain's Council for Jewish-Palestinian
Dialogue has pointed out on openDemocracy.net, the two bloodied, intertwined, myopic peoples need far more than a road map: they need
enforcement. Klug's idea is an international protectorate for the West Bank and Gaza. Some combination of the UN, NATO, and various national forces
would play various parts. The point would be to supplant the Israeli occupation, relieve the immediate suffering, and guarantee secure borders.¶ Such
a scheme would seem to have taken leave of this earth. The U. S. won't permit it....Sharon won't permit it....The Europeans won't pay for it....The
Israelis won't trust the UN, or the Palestinians, who won't trust the Israeli. But what is the alternative? More living nightmares? Occupation and
massacre in perpetuity?¶ Military enforcement on a global scale has been left to ad hoc coalitions -- sometimes with blue helmets, sometimes not. That
won't do. To
put human rights on the ground, avert genocides to come, and -- not incidentally -help protect the United States from the more vengeful of empire's resentful subjects (funny,
their not understanding how good our power is for them), we need a more muscular global
authority -- including a global constabulary. Imagine, say, a flexible force permitted to commit,
say, 10,000 troops if a simple majority, eight members, of the Security Council signed on, but
expandable to 50,000 if the vote were unanimous. Wouldn't Europe have been in a stronger
position to avert Bush's war if such a force had been in readiness to enforce resolutions of the
Security Council? A wise superpower would know it needs to share responsibility -- which
entails sharing the force that makes responsibility real.¶ Of course such a denouement is scarcely
around the corner, nor is there any guarantee that it is destined to come at all. Like the abolition
of slavery, or the unity of Europe, it surely will not come without pain or error, nor will it be the
work of a single generation. But again, what is the alternative? Tyranny and unilateralism;
UN Fails now
UN ineffective now but we can make it better
Gitlin ’03 Gitlin, Todd. Writer for Mother Jones, an Investigative Activist
Organization("Goodbye, New World Order: Keep the Global Ideal Alive" - MotherJones.Com)
http://www.motherjones.com 7/14/2003
Even the U. N.'s sharpest critics concede that it learns from its mistakes. Having failed miserably
to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda, it started talking about the need to keep
constabulary forces at the ready. Having been assigned much of the world's dirty work -peacekeeping, public health, refugee and humanitarian aid -- its institutions accumulate the
lore of experience. Resolution 1441, which the Security Council passed unanimously last year,
might even be interpreted, strange to say, as a step forward in the enforcement of international
law, for if the U. S. had been more adroit and patient diplomatically, the French and others
could have been nudged into signing onto limited force a few months hence. In the end, the
organization failed to prevent war, but its hopes have never been more necessary, its
resurrection more indispensable.¶ If internationalism is toothless, right now, that's not an
argument against internationalist principle; it's an argument for implanting teeth.
UN fails because of the power the members of the security council holds.
Gitlin ’03 Gitlin, Todd. Writer for Mother Jones, an Investigative Activist
Organization("Goodbye, New World Order: Keep the Global Ideal Alive" - MotherJones.Com)
http://www.motherjones.com 7/14/2003
. "You can't on one side, say the UN is screwing it up and we're going to go to war, and on
other side not give the UN the resources," he said recently. "It is not the UN that failed [in
Iraq]. But it is the permanent five [members of the Security Council] in particular. If they don't
want the UN to be effective, it won't be." Pause with this elementary observation a moment.
The reasons for the UN's weakness are several, but not the least is that -- no surprise here -the most powerful nations want it weak. They like the principle of national sovereignty, and
then some, as the recent war amply demonstrates. It will take a long, steady, popular campaign
to override the inhibitions.¶
UN Does okay
UN has done some decent work. History proves.
Gitlin ’03 Gitlin, Todd. Writer for Mother Jones, an Investigative Activist
Organization("Goodbye, New World Order: Keep the Global Ideal Alive" - MotherJones.Com)
http://www.motherjones.com 7/14/2003
Campaigners might start by underscoring some modest successes. For all the impediments
thrown in its way -- and not only by the US -- the UN has done constructive work. It helped
restore decent governments in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bosnia. It helps keep the peace on
the Golan Heights. On a thousand unnoticed fronts, it daily comes to the aid of refugees, the
sick, the malnourished. A top UN official recently told me that Secretary General Kofi Annan
was inches away from a partition-ending deal in long-suffering Cyprus, only to lose
momentum with the distraction of the Bush-Saddam confrontation
Patriarchy = Prerequisite
To change the dominant discourse, we need to break down patriarchal
structures.
Hoogensen and Rottem 04 (Gunhild, and Svein vingeland, Professors at University of
Tromsø, Norway, “Gender Identity and the Subject of Security”, Security Dialogue, 2004 35:
155,June 1st, http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/35/2/155.full.pdf, pp. 155-171)
In addition to reorienting the security referent from the state to the individual, human security
embodies a positive image of security. No longer¶ focused on the negative ‘absence of threat’
approach, human security speaks¶ to ‘enabling, making something possible’ and ‘making each
secure in the¶ other’ (McSweeney, 1999: 14–15). This positive connotation is not new.¶ Jeremy
Bentham, for example, made frequent use of the positive notion of¶ Gunhild Hoogensen & Svein
Vigeland Rottem¶ Gender Identity and the Subject of Security¶ security as social or civil liberties
two centuries ago (Rosen, 1983: 68).¶ Nevertheless, the positive connotations of security have
not really penetrated the dominant discourses. Rather they have often been dismissed ‘as
sentimental, feminine, utopian, and therefore incapable of transfer to the international arena
for rigorous analysis’ (McSweeney, 1999: 15). Part of the difficulty in human security becoming
part of the dominant discourse is the implicit genderization of the concept. If broadening the
definition of security towards positive, ‘enabling’ connotations results in the ‘feminization’ of
the concept, which in turn reduces its appeal to researchers and policymakers, it is clearly
time that we begin to break down the structures that underpin how we understand security
and international relations. The security debate has shown that one of the primary reasons for
examining security through other referents, especially that of the individual, is that¶ state
security does not inevitably transfer to the individual or other referents¶ within the state. It is
because state security has often been inadequate that¶ discussions of reorienting the referent
have arisen in the first place. To state¶ that the individual as the security referent disables the
meaning of security,¶ with the result that we reify state security, brings us only to the original¶
problem. ‘State security is essential but does not necessarily ensure the¶ safety of individuals
and communities. No longer can state security be¶ limited to protecting borders, institutions,
values, and people from external¶ aggressive or adversarial designs’ (Ogata & Cels, 2003: 275).
Security politics¶ is not undemocratic per se. Creating security is a democratic task coming¶ from
those who seek security: people. This does not negate a role for the state¶ as an important tool
for policy and implementation. The material presented¶ in the debate definitively illustrates the
complexity, not the simplicity, of¶ security. As a result, accepting and working with the
complexity of human¶ security is a necessary part of the search for greater global security. In
these same works, however, it is fruitful to note the development of¶ societal security. Wæver’s
1995 contribution acknowledged societal security, which was rooted in identity, but still
emphasized the state-centric, militaristic and elitist dimensions of security (Wæver, 1995).
Consequently, the¶ realist notion of security politics was given significance, emphasizing the¶
structural dimension over the agent, so that Wæver tells us what security¶ is¶ (within the
confines of structure) and not what it can¶ become¶ . Thus, the neo-¶ realist discourse – where
security is about the state and the study of the¶ threat, use and control of military force (Walt,
1991: 212) – is indirectly¶ embraced. Nevertheless, Wæver et al.’s treatment of societal security
has¶ provided an important entry point into non-state securities focused on¶ groups of
people (albeit not individuals). They do not go as far as we do in¶ acknowledging the next step to
human security, but we argue that the link is¶ there: security is to a large extent what actors
make of it (Wendt, 1992: 404). How does this play out in the identity-as-security relationship?
McSweeney¶ (1999: 73) states that ‘identity is not a fact of society; it is a process of negoti-¶
ation among people and interest groups’. As stated above, however, patriarchy ensures that
gender becomes hidden and irrelevant in the identity equation. Patriarchy creates the
Universal Man upon whom we develop our assumptions about security. McSweeney, who has
recognized the impor-¶ tance of gender in identity (McSweeney, 1999: 97–98) is correct in his
claim¶ that identity is negotiated, but he needs to take this a step further. Gender¶ analysis
demonstrates that the negotiation for identity is imbalanced and Identities are imposed by the
structure of patriarchy, while at the¶ same time they are being formed by individuals living
within the structure.¶ According to McSweeney, Wæver takes this structure as a given:¶ If we
reify the notion of societal identity, in the manner of Wæver et al., the answer is¶ that it just
happens; identity ‘emerges’, and with it, the security claim. If sub-societal¶ groups see things
differently from the majority, Wæver et al., offer no criteria by which¶ to judge and resolve the
dispute. For them, society¶ has¶ an identity by definition. People¶ do not choose it; they
recognize it, they¶ belong¶ to it. (McSweeney, 1999: 77)¶ From a gender perspective, both
McSweeney’s and Wæver’s approaches to¶ identity are relevant. For example, a woman’s
identity, or lack thereof, is¶ established outside of her scope of decision making, such that her
identity is¶ imposed from above, by society and/or the state. In today’s post-9/11 world,¶ such
imposed identities have been manifested through ‘contending mascu-¶ linities that vie to reduce
women to symbols of either fundamentalist tradi-¶ tionalism or Western hypermodernity’
(Runyan, 2002: 362). Hansen (2000:¶ 287) notes that societal security as defined by the
Copenhagen School ‘sub-¶ sumes’ the identity of woman within other identities of religion,
race and¶ nationality. In addition or opposition to these impositions of identity, how-¶ ever, a
woman may also negotiate her identity on her own terms. Neither¶ McSweeney nor Wæver
explicitly recognizes the possibility of an ‘imposed’¶ identity that functions simultaneously and in
conjunction with other identity¶ processes.¶ Security claims cannot be heard from identities
that have been enveloped¶ and hidden by the dominant discourse. At the same time, though,
women in¶ many different ways have been contradicting the dominant discourse by¶ finding
ways to express their identities as women in addition to their other¶ identities. Their
experiences exemplify the complexity of life experiences and¶ perspectives that inform their
diverse securities. Wæver’s acknowledgement¶ (through Erik Ringmar’s analysis) that identity
cannot be properly under-¶ stood and known from the perspective of the system but instead
needs to be¶ understood through the state and statesman is, in effect, not dissimilar to our¶
argument here. Identity cannot be understood from the top down (Wæver,¶ 2002: 21). Wæver’s
approach, however, is not open to digging deeper to¶ individual articulations of identity.
Blocks
AT Framework
Technostrategic discourse excludes information from all except the special few
and gives access to the domination of people. Only through the opening of
these channels can political action occur. (The neg is attempting to lock us out
of the discussion blahblahidkhowtoframework)¶
Yee 10(Andy, Policy Analyst for Google, “Crisis of Democracy,” OpenDemocracy,
<http://www.opendemocracy.net/andy-yee/crisis-of-democracy>)
Walter Lippmann, one of America’s most influential journalists in the twentieth century,
presented a penetrating analysis of democracy, popular participation and media in his classic
work Public Opinion (1922). He saw the difficulty facing the governing class as chaos of local
opinions in which any decentralized decisions would soon flounder. So the general population
must be governed by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality. This
elite class is to master information and knowledge that is not common property, in situations
that the public at large does not conceive. In other words, only the select few would be the
omni-competent... ¶ The specialization discourse¶ A fundamental paradox emerges: on the one
hand, increasingly specialized knowledge and information have removed public understanding
of common interests further away from the realities of public life. On the other hand,
unfamiliarity with these languages of specialization and abstraction prompts us to impart
legitimization and authority to multinational corporations and principal architects who have
major influences on public policies. But whether they will behave honestly is an entirely
different matter.¶ ...Specialized discourse, which presents matters in a highly technical manner
inaccessible to all but a few experts, has effects as far as the North Korean nuclear crisis. There
is no doubt that North Korea plays a large part in the crisis with its nuclear brinkmanship. But
Roland Bleiker, international relations scholar and former Swiss diplomat, has suggested that
Pyongyang s action has not taken place in a vacuum. It has been subject to clear and repeated
American nuclear threats for over fifty years. The image of North Korea as an evil and rogue
state is so deeply entrenched, that any crisis can be easily attributed to Pyongyang s problematic
behaviour, even in the face of contradicting evidence. Behind this threat projection is the
specialized discourse on security and national defence. The public has become used to the
techno-strategic language of abstraction used by defence analysts to the point that these
experts are politically legitimized to comment on these issues with moral authority. ¶ With this
insight, we can understand how it is possible that President Obama can ask Congress to approve
a record US$708 billion in defense spending for 2011, at a time when US military power goes
virtually unchallenged. Defense Secretary Robert Gates only has to point to sophisticated new
technologies being developed by enemies overseas, threats posed by militant groups, and
other unexpected scenarios. Of course, the public has no way to access these claims. ¶ From
what we have seen above, the principal architects, or what Pierre Bourdieu, one of the
twentieth century s most influential social scientists, called the invisible hand of the powerful ,
are creating a complex and refined mode of domination in virtually every area of life, ranging
from finance and defence to the environment. The behaviours of the elite class, however, hardly
instil any confidence in the public, as judged by the repeated occurrences of one catastrophe
after another. But surely what we call the crisis of democracy occurs not when we stop trusting
the elites, but when we find ourselves not able to participate in an intelligent discussion in
public matters. The Climate Gate Scandal, for example, raised a whole lot of questions about the
accuracy of the prediction of global warming and public education.¶ Pierre Bourdieu therefore
advocated new forms of struggle, in which researchers have a key part to play. He envisages a
political action with new ends the demolition of dominant beliefs and new means technical
weapons based on research and a command of scientific knowledge, and symbolic weapons,
capable of undermining common beliefs by putting research findings into an accessible form. In
other words, only a programme aimed at the mass cultivation of Lippmann s omni-competent
citizens could counter the abuse of trust by the principal architects of our societies. At a time
when corporate power remains unchallenged as the financial crisis fades away, and our principal
architects are once again bending their attention to global issues like climate change, food
shortage and nuclear weapons, the stakes could not be higher.¶
AT The STATE Good
Technostrategic discourse is actively produced to forward narratives that are as
favorable as possible to the state and manipulated to neutralize incompatible
narratives.
Shapiro 1990 [Michael J. Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i
at Manoa, “Strategic Discourse/Discursive Strategy: The Representation of "Security Policy" in
the Video Age”, International Studies Quarterly Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sep. 1990) pp. 327-340]
Therefore, in order for the overt/covert economy to operate appropriately, cer- ¶ tain
discursive strategies for representing the relationship must be maintained. The ¶ President
and his staff must be regarded as being in control of foreign policy, if not ¶ of all the details of
its implementation. That policy must not be seen as duplicitous; ¶ for example, the use of
force or intimidation externally must be seen as operating in ¶ behalf of "national security,"
and not even partly on the basis of private commercial ¶ interests. To maintain the credibility
of its strategic discourse, the American state ¶ must therefore manage the articulation and
expression of policy. And because of ¶ recent contention in Congressional hearings and
elsewhere surrounding the propri- ¶ eties of the covert dimension of policy, the state must
either contain expressions of ¶ the relationships between overt and covert policy or it must
actively produce repre- ¶ sentations aimed at preempting or responding to modes of
representation that are ¶ hostile or incompatible with the constructions it desires. ¶ In a sense,
then, a major function of official discourse is to strategically affect the ¶ interpretation of
policy structures, ideals, and implementation. And the discursive ¶ economies of this function
involve significant mediating structures. The first is tex- ¶ tual structure. This level of economy
is influenced by both such textual mechanisms ¶ as narrative, rhetoric, and grammar and by
genre, by the forms of articulation- ¶ verbal utterances, video images, or combinations of
these. The second level of econ- ¶ omy has to do with the diffusion and ownership of the
medium through which non- ¶ official voices and images produce commentaries on policy on
which official ¶ discourse must attempt to impose its interpretations. Of course these levels
are ¶ connected inasmuch as the communication strategies of defenders of strategic policy ¶
must respond with textual strategies that are addressed to competing interpreta- ¶ tions. The
expressions of official discourse can therefore involve counter-narrative, ¶ counter-rhetorical,
and alternative grammars aimed at discrediting various models ¶ of agency or responsibility
that non-official sources ascribe to American policy. The ¶ strategy of official discourse must
involve the appropriate media as well as textual ¶ mechanisms. It will respond with narratives
about the course of events when histori- ¶ cal sequences leading up to an action are at issue,
and it must respond with graphics ¶ and videos when what was perceived before an action was
taken is at issue. Given the ¶ increasing availability of at-the-scene video footage carried by
television into millions ¶ of American homes, those in charge of official discourse have become
increasingly ¶ sophisticated in. the use of images and the creation of favorable verbal
scenarios to ¶ accompany them.
AT Realism
The gendered ontology of Realism hides the human impacts of nuclear war and
never considers disarmament as a policy option
Duncanson and Eschle 8 (Claire Duncanson, PhD Lecturer in IR at University of Edinburgh;
Catherine Eschle, PhD Senior Lecturer University of Strathclyde “Gender and the Nuclear Weapons State:
A Feminist Critique of the UK Government’s White Paper on Trident” New Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 4,
December 2008)
The previous section discussed the masculine character of the identity of the¶ “Protector”; in the
next, we go on to address the masculine identity of the state more generally. In the dominant
Realist view, upheld by both mainstream¶ academics and the majority of policy-makers, states
are “unitary actors whose¶ internal characteristics, beyond an assessment of their relative
capabilities, are not¶ seen as necessary for understanding their vulnerabilities or securityenhancing¶ behaviour.”70 This assumption that states act as coherent units draws its strength¶
from their treatment as “notional persons” in early modern jurisprudence.71¶ Relatedly, the
state is understood to be independent, signified by the status of¶ sovereignty, which entails a
claim not only to authority within a territory but to¶ independence from, and legal equality to,
other such authorities. Realists do not¶ distinguish between the legal status of sovereignty and
actual state practice; they¶ assume that states are as independent from one another as they
claim to be.¶ Moreover, like a person, the state must be able to act—and act in particular ways.¶
The fact of international anarchy (or lack of overarching government) is¶ interpreted by realists
as bringing with it a “self-help” system in which states¶ cannot rely on others and must seek to
defend themselves or perish. Finally, as¶ Alan James makes clear, the state for Realists is a
fundamentally rational actor:¶ The state is said to behave rationally because it is pictured as
bending its efforts in a¶ consistent and calculated way towards a clearly-established goal. And
it can be so¶ depicted because it is a single unit. The analogy is with the sober and mature man¶
who gives careful thought to the achievement of his purposes.72¶ As this quote indicates, the
Realist state is a “manly state.”73 We can see here¶ the systematic mobilising of gendered
dichotomies such as active/passive,¶ independent/(inter)dependent, and rational/irrational,
and the assumption that¶ the state fits with the masculine side of the dichotomies. Needless
to say, the¶ model of rationality that James describes has been critiqued by countless feminist¶
philosophers. Proponents of this model are accused of neglecting social context,¶ both in terms
of the domestic labour and relationships that make the processes of¶ rational decision-making
possible, and in terms of the consequences of the¶ rational decisions made. As Jacqui True
points out, “[r]ational thinkers such as¶ men and states do not figure in their cost –benefit
analyses of foreign policies¶ (military build-up, war mobilisation, economic liberalisation or
protection), the¶ social costs that are borne by ‘private’ family-households and communities.”74
In¶ addition, proponents of this model of rationality are criticised for evacuating¶ emotional and
ethical dimensions of thought, historically gendered feminine, as¶ highlighted in our discussion
above about the limitations of technostrategic¶ discourse.¶ If Realism’s epistemology (its
underlying conception of knowledge) is¶ gendered, its ontology (its underlying conception
about the self and agency) is¶ equally so. Feminists would argue that James’s analogy comparing
the state to a man is not accidental but intrinsic to how the state is understood: this is “an¶
exclusionary masculine model of agency derived from a context of unequal¶ gender relations,
where primarily women’s child rearing and care-giving work¶ supports the development of
autonomous male selves.”75 In order to appear¶ unitary, active and independent, then, these
selves must mask their internal¶ fractures, the constraints and tendencies to inertia that they
might face, and their¶ relations of (inter)dependency on internal and external others. Indeed, as
Spike¶ Peterson points out (in a demonstration of the close linkage here with gendered¶
protection discourses),¶ Dependency is demeaning, a status indicative of subordination and
one shunned by¶ the free man ... being protected is an identity to be avoided as much as
possible.¶ This version of protection constructs dependency in narrow, dichotomous terms¶ that
obscure (inter)dependent relations as a pervasive feature of social reality.76¶ These dimensions
of state identity can all be found in the White Paper. For¶ example, the unitary, coherent
character of the UK is constantly emphasised¶ through the use of several rhetorical techniques.
Several of these can be seen in the¶ following sentences from Section 1:¶ 1.1: The United
Kingdom is committed to helping to secure international peace and¶ security. Since 1956, the
UK’s nuclear deterrent has underpinned our ability to do¶ so, even in the most challenging
circumstances ... we have employed our nuclear¶ forces strictly as a means to deter acts of
aggression against our vital interests ...¶ 1.2: Our manifesto at the 2005 General Election made a
commitment to retain the¶ UK’s existing nuclear deterrent.77¶ What can be seen here is, first,
the use of the collective pronoun “we” and its¶ possessive form “our” to equate both with the
UK state and the current¶ government, often in close proximity. This is done throughout the
text, and it¶ serves to legitimise the current regime by masking internal debates, fusing this¶
government with past ones and government with state. Second, the “vital¶ interests” and
actions of the state and the people within it are also fused, masking¶ any disjuncture between
citizens and their government. Third, the unified,¶ coherent and even strong nature of the UK
state is established through an implicit¶ contrast with the “weak and failing states” emphasised
above as a key enemy¶ Other in the White Paper. While there are a couple of slippages in this¶
construction, with two passing references to past governments and an occasional¶
acknowledgement of internal opposition to the government’s plans on Trident,¶ the overriding
impression is of a state that thinks and acts as one.¶ The ways in which this thinking and acting
are presented are key to the¶ masculine character of the construction. Specifically, the capacity
of the British¶ state for rational decision-making and then to act decisively and unhindered is¶
constantly emphasised. As the executive summary states: “We have thus decided¶ to take the
steps necessary to sustain a credible deterrent capability in the 2020s¶ and beyond.”78 To take
the rationality part of this construction first, this is constantly drawn out through an explicit (if
highly selective and edited)¶ discussion of the decision-making process, particularly in Annex B.
It is clear that¶ reasoning is conceived as the correlation of means and ends, thus “a thorough¶
review of the widest possible range of options” was undertaken79 in order to see¶ how the goal
of maintenance of the nuclear deterrence could be achieved. “Our¶ manifesto at the 2005
General Election made a commitment to retain the UK’s¶ existing nuclear deterrent ... We have
now reached the point at which¶ procurement decisions are necessary.”80 The rationality at
work here is¶ decontextualized and strategic, focused only on how best to uphold a pre-set¶
objective (there is no discussion, for example, of the possibility of disarmament as¶ an
alternative goal). Further, this mode of reasoning involves undertaking a cost –¶ benefit
analysis when assessing the best means to obtain that objective. Concretely,¶ this means that
the relative power and vulnerability of various nuclear systems¶ are compared, along with their
price.81 There is, as already mentioned above, no¶ attention to the human cost of using the
bomb, nor to the moral and emotional¶ problems involved in threatening to use it.¶
AT Drones better than others
Drones are inaccurate- causes large areas of damage
Wilcox 9
(Lauren, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, “Body Counts: The Politics of
Embodiment in Precision Warfare”)
Precision warfare involves the management of risk and the management of death.
Throughout the history of precision bombing, the military has focused on ever more ‘precise’
means of dropping bombs. One of the first tools, the Norden Bombsight, was said to be able
drop a “bomb into a pickle barrel,” but its accuracy was measured in percentage of bombs
hitting within a 1,000 meter radius of the given target (McFarland 1995). The CEP, or circular
error probability, is how ‘precision’ is measured in laser or GPS guided munitions. The CEP
measures the average distance from a target that the bomb will hit in terms of fifty percent of
hits within a certain radius. The mean CEP in Gulf War was 100 feet, (Easterbrook 1991) while
the mean CEP of bombed dropped in Iraq was twenty-five feet, meaning that even if the
bombs hit where they intended to, massive amounts of damage nearby the target will like
ensue. Precision bombing is getting more and more precise, and used as a greater and greater
percentage of tonnage dropped. (Rip and Jasik 2002, 214, 224). However, combined with
intelligence errors, targeting errors, and GPS errors, ‘precision’ missiles that can take out
targets cleanly with little risk to the surroundings are largely a myth.
Misc
Monological interp
Technostrategic discourse is a way for dominant powers to fix meaning into a
monological interpretation.
Der Derian 1990 [James der Derian is a Watson Institute research professor of international
studies and professor of political science at Brown University. “The (S)pace of International
Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3
(Sep. 1990), 295-310]
First, poststructuralism is a semio-critical activity, ever searching for and seeking to ¶
dismantle the empirico-rational positions where power fixes meaning. Second, post
structuralism does not hold that reflectivists or rationalists reflect the field of international
relations. Both use and are used by language, by the tropes, rhetoric, narra tives and grammar
that make up an array of ambiguous and indeterminate ¶ signifying practices. It is this
heterological nature of discourse that dominant powers, ¶ in a demonstrative, hegemonic act,
always dream of fixing, reducing, subjecting to a ¶ single, monological meaning. Third, the
rationalists demonstrate this power play ¶ when they construct a transcendental, privileged
space to make truth-claims about ¶ international relations (like those made by game and rational
choice theory from the ¶ supposed high-point of scientific progress). Alternatively-and Keohane
deserves ¶ credit for now making it less of an alternative-the rationalists might simply ignore ¶
the problem of discourse, in the vain hope that it will ignore them. But the poststructuralists are
always aware of-and always irritating others by demonstrating-the ¶ stickiness of the web of
meaning.
Technology / strategy / security stay together
Technology strategy has gone through many stages, most where technology
dictates strategy
Cornish 2010 (Paul Cornish, Professor of Strategic Studies in the Strategy and Security
Institute at the University of Exeter, Technology, strategy and counterterrorism, International
Affairs, 86: 875–888, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/10.1111/j.14682346.2010.00917.x/full, p.878)
It is not simply the material products of the relationship between technology and strategy that
have been of interest, but also the changing dynamics of that relationship as well as its broader
patterns and implications. It is useful to think of the technology–strategy relationship as
having metamorphosed through several stages. Thus, the industrial age is generally
considered to have had a considerable effect on the technology–strategy relationship,
enabling technology to become more influential than ever before. In The social history of the
machine gun John Ellis describes the American Civil War as ‘the first example of an
industrialised conflict, in which technological advances dictated much of the actual conduct of
the war’.9 Michael Howard observes a broader social effect arising from the same
phenomenon: an effect which would change the style of warfare fundamentally, endowing it
with certain characteristics with which the twentieth century was to become all too familiar.
Nineteenth-century industrial mass production of weaponry, argues Howard, with such
innovations as finely machined and interchangeable weapon parts, made ‘mass participation
in warfare both possible and necessary’.10
Technology advances while security strategy attempts to keep up
Cornish 2010 (Paul Cornish, Professor of Strategic Studies in the Strategy and Security
Institute at the University of Exeter, Technology, strategy and counterterrorism, International
Affairs, 86: 875–888, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/10.1111/j.14682346.2010.00917.x/full , p.879)
In the final stage of the metamorphosis, occurring in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, technology might have broken free altogether from its relationship with strategy.
Buzan refers to the ‘relentlessly expanding human knowledge that drives the technological
imperative’.15 If the task of strategy is to ensure the security of states, the challenge, in
Buzan’s words, is ‘to adjust military strategy to meet that end in an environment dominated
by continuous and often quite radical technological and political change’.16 But the pace of
technological change is now such that strategy can barely keep up, with the result that it
becomes ever more difficult to organize and rationalize fast-evolving technology within some
kind of strategic or security policy framework. Technology has also acquired its own
momentum; there is no longer any need for a national strategic stimulus to, or context for,
technological innovation which is now as likely, if not more likely, to be a response to
commercial opportunity or international demand as to national security. The image which
best summarizes the contemporary relationship between technology and strategy, therefore,
should be that of technology racing ahead and national strategy struggling to catch up. And as
the relationship is loosened in this way, it ought not to be assumed that in the race to catch
up with technology— even if only periodically—governments will always be first.
Terrorist tech increasing
As security technology advances, so will the technology used by terrorists
Cornish 2010 (Paul Cornish, Professor of Strategic Studies in the Strategy and Security
Institute at the University of Exeter, Technology, strategy and counterterrorism, International
Affairs, 86: 875–888, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/10.1111/j.14682346.2010.00917.x/full, p. 881)
Intriguingly, in the revised version of CONTEST published in March 2009, the running order of
the ‘four Ps’ was altered to ‘Pursue’, ‘Prevent’, ‘Protect’, ‘Prepare’. This document is altogether
more explicit regarding the role and significance of technology, both in the terrorist threat and
in the counterterrorist response. Technology is described as one of the four ‘strategic factors’
leading to the emergence of contemporary international terrorist networks, offering
advantages to terrorists in terms of communications and tactics.20 The document sets out a
range of planning assumptions to cover the three years to 2012. With terrorists able to exploit
emerging technology in communications, surveillance, reconnaissance and weapon lethality,
one of the assumptions amounted to a stark assessment of the place of technology in
terrorism: ‘Terrorist organisations will have access to more lethal technology. Scientific
training and expertise will have even greater significance for terrorist organisations because
technology will be able to compensate for the vulnerabilities they will have. Terrorists will
continue to aspire to develop or steal and then use [CBRN] weapons.’21
Even if terrorists cannot obtain the same advanced technology that
governments have, commonplace technology is enough for terrorists to achieve
victory
Cornish 2010 (Paul Cornish, Professor of Strategic Studies in the Strategy and Security
Institute at the University of Exeter, Technology, strategy and counterterrorism, International
Affairs, 86: 875–888, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/10.1111/j.14682346.2010.00917.x/full , p.884)
Technological innovation and inventiveness, particularly in the military area, can be
stimulated by ‘profound economic and social changes’.32 Terrorists can also experience
profound social and economic change, and might also be expected to be inventive. This
prompts two obvious qualifications to the technology–strategy paradigm as traditionally
understood: not only might the adversary be capable of innovation (and perhaps even
decisively so), but the adversary in this case is not a state and ought not to be expected to
behave like one. How then does a terrorist behave? Do terrorists see conflict in terms of tactics
and strategy? And how innovative do terrorists need to be? It is at this point that several of the
categories mentioned above begin to consolidate into a larger and rather messier problem for
government strategists: for terrorists, battle-winning, tactical weaponry and equipment might
be little different in their effect from war-winning, strategic technology. Relatively
commonplace technology (whether in general non-military use, such as ammonium nitrate
fertilizer, or a military weapon such as a sniper rifle) can offer the strategic effect which the
terrorist needs: as Amitav Mallik notes, ‘even moderate levels of technological capability in
the wrong hands will have serious security implications’.33 Technology of this sort might not
give terrorists victory, but it might prevent defeat and allow the struggle to continue, which
for terrorists can be a victory of sorts. Perhaps at this level terrorists might best be understood
as taking a more pragmatic approach to technology and its significance for tactics and/or
strategy. Whereas for industrialized economies technology has often been regarded as an end
in itself, giving rise to the notion that battles and even wars can be won through innovation
and invention, for terrorists technology might be a means to an end: technology need not
promise decisiveness at any level, it simply needs to be good enough to allow an attack to be
made, and to be made again.
Security strategy may never be able to keep up with terrorist strategy
Cornish 2010 (Paul Cornish, Professor of Strategic Studies in the Strategy and Security
Institute at the University of Exeter, Technology, strategy and counterterrorism, International
Affairs, 86: 875–888, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/10.1111/j.14682346.2010.00917.x/full , p.884-885)
This is not to say, of course, that terrorists are not capable of innovation and ingenuity, as Bruce
Hoffman’s account of the evolution of IRA bomb-making makes clear.34 Furthermore, when
terrorists do innovate they can present a low– high span of inventiveness which governments
might find hard to match—particu- larly those governments which for decades have assumed
the technology–strategy relationship to be a matter of constant striving for ever more
sophisticated and decisive innovation, as well as something within the scope of their own
control. As Erin Gibbs van Brunschot and Leslie Kennedy observe, technological advances ‘that
are often outside the realm of state control facilitate the extent and reach of terrorist threat.
Individuals, for example, can produce knowledge-based weaponry in the privacy of their own
facilities.’35 On the one hand, terrorists can make use of relatively low-level technology, in
small quantities, to achieve disproportionate effect: suicide attackers and car bombers are
two cases in point. At the other extreme it is widely understood that terrorist groups are able
to exploit cyberspace to great effect and are keen to acquire and use sophisticated CBRN
weapons.36 The asymmetry here is clear enough: not only must a national counterterrorist
strategy be able to respond and innovate across a broader spectrum than terrorists require to
be successful, it must also do so as rapidly as, if not more rapidly than, terrorists. With respect
to technology and innovation, the terrorist/counterterrorist asymmetry might represent a
fundamental misalignment in approach which even the most sophisticated and responsive
national strategy will be unable to correct to its own advantage. To borrow an idea from David
Edgerton, it might be that terrorists have more of a ‘use-based’ approach to technology than
an ‘innovation-based’ approach. ‘In use-centred history,’ writes Edgerton, ‘technologies do not
only appear, they also disappear and reappear, and mix and match across the centuries.’ The
use-based approach can encompass the widest variety of users, including ‘all places that use
technology, not just the small number of places where innovation is concentrated’, and, most
damagingly of all, ‘undermines the assumption that national innovation determines national
success’.37 For terrorists, whether technology is simple or sophisticated, it is essentially just a
commodity; a means to an end. For national governments, on the other hand, technology is
too often the end in itself—as if the most sophisticated innovation conferred some sort of
evolutionary advantage on those societies able to produce and control it. Ellis notes that some
Europeans believed they had superior weapons (such as the machine gun) because they were
‘the superior race’.38
Private sector key to tech
Governments rely on private sectory technology, as well as technology in
general to keep up with counterterrorism strategy
Cornish 2010 (Paul Cornish, Professor of Strategic Studies in the Strategy and Security
Institute at the University of Exeter, Technology, strategy and counterterrorism, International
Affairs, 86: 875–888, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/10.1111/j.14682346.2010.00917.x/full, p.881-882)
As far as the counterterrorist strategy is concerned, the revised CONTEST offers a more
developed discussion of the role of technology. Government will need to be more open with
non-governmental partners in industry and elsewhere—moving from ‘need to know’ to
‘responsibility to share’—and the private sector will have ‘a key role to play’ in the science
and technology aspects of all four CONTEST workstreams.22 The document refers to the
government’s ‘long track record of working with the science and technology industry across
the military, security and intelligence markets’, but calls for ‘new thinking about the ways this
engagement should be managed’.23 Government will seek better ways to work with industry—
represented by a new Security and Resilience Industry Suppliers’ Community (RISC)—and among
other goals will seek ways to ‘harness the benefit of the commercially driven ICT industry to
support Government security and counterterrorism requirements and explore how industry
can best help with the timely detection of suicide bombers’. More ‘new thinking’ was to be
expected from the Office for Security and Counterterrorism (OSCT), established in the Home
Office in March 2007. Reflecting the sense that technology represents both a threat and an
opportunity, the task of the OSCT would be nothing less than to ensure that the govern- ment
‘has the ability to respond effectively, and with pace, to developments in technology and the
terrorist threat’. Among new ideas to be considered was the possibility that government could
make venture capital-style investments in order to encourage innovation for counterterrorism.
Ideas such as this would be expected to give the government ‘greater understanding of the
innovation community, smarter influence over external innovation and better coordination of
investments in innovative ideas and solutions’.24 The first CONTEST annual report, published in
March 2010, reiterates certain of these themes: the OSCT’s new INSTINCT (Innovative Science
and Technology in Counter Terrorism) programme, intended to seek ‘novel technical solutions
to address challenges identified in CONTEST’, is judged to have set ‘new standards for industry
and Government joint work on counter terrorism related issues’; while in the field of CBRN and
explosives detection the document reports an ‘awareness-raising programme’ being devel- oped
for the ‘academic sector’.25 In a second set of papers the UK government addresses more
directly the role of technology in its counterterrorism strategy. In the United Kingdom Security
and Counterterrorism Science and Innovation Strategy, published in 2007, the then Home
Secretary Dr John Reid insisted on the need ‘to develop a dynamic, innovative and integrated
response to a threat which is seamless in nature’. Reid described the relationship between
science and innovation technology and national security in familiar terms (science and
innovation are of ‘critical importance’ in strengthening the UK’s ability ‘to combat the threat
from terrorism’) and noted with confidence that the United Kingdom ‘has an exceptional record
in delivering cutting-edge science and innovation’. In Reid’s view, the distinctive feature of
terrorism is that it is complex and ‘ever-changing’, requiring more coherence and flexibility in
‘delivering and exploiting counterterrorism research’.26 The document later refers to the
need to have ‘the capacity to harness science and innovation in more agile and decisive ways’
in order to ‘deliver science and innovation at a pace that outstrips our adversaries’.27
The line between free-market technology and government technology has the
potential to be blurred.
Cornish 2010 (Paul Cornish, Professor of Strategic Studies in the Strategy and Security
Institute at the University of Exeter, Technology, strategy and counterterrorism, International
Affairs, 86: 875–888, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/10.1111/j.14682346.2010.00917.x/full , p.886)
Elsewhere the CONTEST and science and innovation/technology documents use language
which may indicate an outdated understanding of the technology– strategy relationship. The
preferred pattern for cooperation with bodies outside government is firmly centralist: it is
government which possesses the critical knowledge, and it is government’s task to share
aspects of that knowledge with industry and others with whom it wishes to ‘work closely’.
This is not entirely unreasonable; relations with industry and non-governmental bodies must be
governed to some extent by the highly classified nature of government work. Yet while it is
clear that government must have authoritative knowledge in some areas, it would not be
reasonable for government to assume authority in all areas. There are commercial companies,
such as Microsoft and Google, which might consider themselves equal to any government in
their understanding of the misuse of cyberspace, for example. The centralist approach to the
technology– strategy relationship also presents the image of government as the controlling
force. Where agility, responsiveness and ‘pace’ are required to deal with technologically capable
terrorists, the assumption appears to be that governments are best placed to orchestrate such a
response. Yet liberal democratic societies and their governments have not always
demonstrated the capacity and the will to respond spontaneously and decisively to security
challenges, particularly of a novel kind. Furthermore, some in the commercial sector might
question whether it is indeed government’s role to ‘manage’, ‘exploit’ and ‘harness’ new
technology and exert ‘smarter influence’ over innovative companies and individuals which
operate in the free market.
Tech doesn’t solve terrorism
Advances in technology will never end terrorism, at best it will only make
terrorism more expensive
Cornish 2010 (Paul Cornish, Professor of Strategic Studies in the Strategy and Security
Institute at the University of Exeter, Technology, strategy and counterterrorism, International
Affairs, 86: 875–888, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/10.1111/j.14682346.2010.00917.x/full , p.887-888)
Recent UK experience also suggests that if the technology–strategy relationship is not
managed carefully there may be perverse consequences, either by giving the terrorist more
importance than he deserves, or undermining important aspects of society’s resilience to
terrorism. Although expert in asymmetric conflict, the terrorist cannot hope that some
technology or other will enable him to seize victory from his technologically, militarily and
economically superior adversary. The most the terrorist can hope is to be granted victory,
slowly and incrementally, by his opponent. The terrorist’s ideal adversary is a government
which either uses technology disproportionately in response to the terrorist threat or defines
its struggle against terrorism in narrowly technological terms and in so doing presents its
more or less technologically competent adversary as its strategic equal. From the perspective
of government and society, technology cannot eliminate all risks and threats and guarantee an
impenetrable defence, nor can it guarantee to defeat terrorism. Instead, the most that can be
expected is that technology be used to increase the costs of terrorist activity to the point
where even incremental victory is perceived to be unlikely and the terrorist effort begins to
lose its energy. But if the aim is to induce entropy in the terrorist’s campaign, then society’s
resilience to terrorist threats and attacks is just as important as the proportionate use of
technology.
Reject nuclearization alt?
The alt is to reject nuclearization—key to destroying gendered notions of
warfare that increase instability and prevent the possibility of peace
Cohn and Ruddick 3 (Carol, Researcher and Teacher at Harvard Medical Signs, and Sara, author, A
Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/cohnruddick.pdf)
Our tradition has advocated and will continue to advocate unilateral reduction in nuclear arms.
¶ Our commitment to nuclear disarmament originates in a general understanding of the use and
¶ dangers of weapons. We begin by noting that conflict is endemic to human relationships. ¶
“Peace” means, among other things, engaging in conflicts, i.e. “fighting,” without actually ¶
injuring or damaging others, without trying to do so, at best without being willing to do so. ¶
There will always be something at hand to use as a weapon and threaten the “peace”; it is ¶
impossible to create a weaponless scene of conflict. A child’s block, a kitchen knife, a passenger
¶ airliner can injure or kill. There is no substitute, then, for learning to fight without resorting to
¶ weapons. ¶ But having “real” weapons at hand makes conflict far more dangerous. It makes
injuring more ¶ likely, whether accidental, deliberate, unwitting or willing. It also tends to
expand the scale of ¶ injury; e.g., while two airliners hitting the World Trade Center resulted in
more than 3,000 ¶ deaths, a “small” nuclear warhead dropped on the twin towers would have
instantly killed at least ¶ 100,000, with another 100,000 deaths in the days that followed.
Deliberately relying on weapons ¶ – purchasing them, learning to use them, keeping them
nearby – makes less likely the ¶ development of other strategies of self protection. Once on the
scene, weapons may be used in ¶ anger or ignorance, just because they are nearby. Weapons
injure; insofar as possible they ¶ should cleared out. ¶ Nonetheless, individuals and states
continue to keep weapons at hand. States and citizens draw ¶ lessons from history that show the
dangers of disarmament. We believe that the recourse to ¶ weapons underestimates their
complex costs and dangers. People equate being armed with being ¶ safe, unarmed with being
vulnerable. They overlook the risk of guns at hand, and exaggerate the ¶ protection guns may
give. But we understand that the issue of weapons arises from personal ¶ experience and
collective identities, that it is deeply felt and in no way simple. We would only ¶ insist that
weapons are never a substitute for negotiation and non-violent fighting, and that they ¶ may
well hinder their success.¶ When we turn to weapons of mass destruction we have only three
additional comments. First, ¶ given the political will, nuclear weapons are among the most
easily reduced. The scale of the ¶ effort required to produce them, the scientific and
technological expertise and financial ¶ investment involved, have all militated toward state
ownership and control of nuclear weapons. ¶ Thus, in contrast to weapons such as small arms –
which are unregulated, can travel anywhere, ¶ and often become the property of near-children –
nuclear weapons are relatively controllable, ¶ and so can be selectively destroyed.¶ Secondly,
unilateral disarmament is not an all or nothing matter, in which weapons disappear ¶ almost
overnight. Would that this were possible. In reality, destroying nuclear weapons would ¶ be a
massively complicated feat; slow and gradual at best. It is often said, rightly, that the US ¶ can
never disarm itself completely, can never lose the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. We ¶
are saying that the US would lose nothing by beginning to destroy its remaining weapons. It ¶
would always have weapons, remain a nuclear “power,” even if it wished otherwise. The ¶
example of unilateral disarmament might, on the other hand, lend credibility to the stated
desire ¶ for a more stable world less endangered by nuclear weapons.¶ Finally, Bush’s nuclear
missile defense, Reagan’s impenetrable shield redux, symbolizes the ¶ sense of safety and power
that nuclear weapons of all kinds appear to bestow. We know that ¶ even if such a shield were
technologically feasible, it would be porous, “penetrable”: not only by ¶ nuclear warheads on
missiles, but by nuclear weapons in suitcases, on boats and in piper cubs; by ¶ biological
weapons sent through the mail; by chemical weapons sprayed by crop-dusters; by ¶ passenger
airliners employed as tools of mass destruction. But “giving up” weapons, and giving ¶ up the
promise (no matter how far-fetched) of a means to defend against them, makes one feel ¶
vulnerable – and, thus, by extension, “feminine.” There is nothing shameful – and nothing ¶
masculine or feminine – about the desire to be safe and to provide safety for others. But the
hope ¶ of finding safety in weapons is another “dangerous dream” that nuclear weapons inspire.
Queer Robots?
The subordinate robot takes on a queer gender.
Manjikian 13 (Mary, Faculty Member, Regent University, Robertson School of Government,
International Feminist Journal of Politics, “THE GENDERING OF LETHAL AUTONOMOUS
WARFARE TECHNOLOGY”, Volume 15 2013, January, 30th,
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfjp20#.Ufmji23ciRM)
Can we not simply examine what robots do, and from there determine their gender? This turns
out be somewhat complicated. Here it is important to consider, first, that autonomy is not a
dichotomous variable, but rather one which exists on a spectrum. At present, robots are neither
wholly autonomous nor wholly subordinate to their human operators. Rather, at different
times they display dominance or autonomy, while at other times they display subordination.
(For example, currently you as a human¶ ¶ operator tell your GPS where you want to go¶ –¶
but it decides for you the best way to get there.) Thus, it might be suggested that the robot has
a queer gender¶ –¶ since it moves between roles and its gender changes accordingly. When we
dominate robots, they are female. When they come to dominate us, they are male. And when
the robot is in the subordinate position, it is Othered, while at other times it others us. In
addition, robots may come in both humanoid varieties, and non-humanoid varieties (such as the
nuclear-powered swarming cyborg insect spies currently being developed by DARPA). Perhaps
when we think of robots as humanlike they are not, to us, the other¶ –¶ while at other times,
when we think of them as subhuman subjects, they are indeed others. Here we can argue that
any time someone is asked to fight on behalf of a power which does not offer them
representation, they have been othered. In this way, a soldier outsourcing his military service
to someone else is part of an old tradition (Tilly 1985),occurring as far back as the Middle Ages.
The practice of paying a subordinate to undertake risk through serving as cannon fodder on your
behalf ¶ –¶ and othering him in the process¶ –¶ is not a new development, but a very old one.
Here the only twist is that it is a robot and not another human who¶ takes ne’s place.¶ And
here, as a report by the UK Office of Science and Innovation Horizon Scanning Center suggests
(BBC, 2006) suggests, humans do not presently conceptualize of robots as being citizens and
having rights¶ –¶ even though one who fights on behalf of a nation is traditionally viewed as
having earned citizenship and respect for having engaged in state building and having done his
patriotic duty. (Indeed, for many years the relationship between citizenship and War-fighting
was used to keep women from enjoying the vote.) Thus, it appears that drones might play a
role similar to that played by African-American soldiers during the American Civil War¶ –¶
exposed to all the risks that their fellow countrymen were, but unrecognized as fellow
countrymen and unable to claim the benefits normally associated with war-fighting. The drone
is thus a sort of half-man, who is still subordinate to the men¶ ¶ who still control the military,
while still being gendered as male through the performance of traditionally male activities.
However, drones neither volunteer (as American females did during World War Two) nor are
they conscripted (as males are during wartime.) Of course, here, no analysis would be complete
without taking into consideration the possibility of the singularity, that moment which futurists
predict will occur when artificial intelligence actually becomes smarter than human intelligence,
and the slaves, in essence, rise up in revolt (Bostrom, 2002). In the future, thus, it is possible that
a sort of peasant rebellion could occur, in which the Othered and subordinate robots could take
control, achieving full autonomy and othering us in the process. (What they would then do with
us¶ –¶ either killing us or putting us to work¶ –¶ remains a mystery. However, this might
represent the ultimate unmanning of the armed forces).
Nuclear
Proliferation discourse otherizes
Proliferation discourse genders associates non-western nations as irrational
and therefore “feminine”; whereas ally states are “rational” international
“father figures”
Cohn and Ruddick 3 (Carol, Researcher and Teacher at Harvard Medical Signs, and Sara, author, A
Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/cohnruddick.pdf)
“Proliferation” is not a mere description or mirror of a phenomenon that is “out there,” but
rather ¶ a very specific way of identifying and constructing a problem. “Proliferation, ” as used
in ¶ Western political discourse, does not simply refer to the “multiplication” of weapons of
mass ¶ destruction on the planet. Rather, it constructs some WMD as a problem, and others as ¶
unproblematic. It does so by assuming pre-existing, legitimate possessors of the weapons, ¶
implicitly not only entitled to those weapons, but to “modernize” and develop new
“generations” ¶ of them as well. The “problematic” WMD are only those that “spread” into the
arsenals of other, ¶ formerly non-possessor states. This is presumably the basis for the
“licit/illicit” distinction in the ¶ question; it does not refer to the nature of the weapons
themselves, nor even to the purposes for ¶ which they are intended – only, in the case of
nuclear weapons, to who the possessor is, where ¶ “licitness” is based on the treaty-enshrined
“we got there first.”¶ Thus, use of the term “proliferation” tends to locate the person who uses
it within a possessor ¶ state, and aligns him or her with the political stance favoring the hierarchy
of state power ¶ enshrined in the current distribution of WMD. The framing of Question Four. “...
is it proper to ¶ deny [WMD] possession to others for the same purposes?”, seems similarly
based in a possessor ¶ state perspective, as it is presumably the possessor states who must
decide whether it is proper to ¶ deny possession to others. ¶ As we have already stated, we find
WMD themselves intrinsically morally indefensible, no ¶ matter who possesses them, and we are
concerned about the wide array of costs to any state of ¶ development and deployment. We
therefore reject the discourse’s implicit division of “good” ¶ and “bad,” “safe” and “unsafe”
WMD, (defined as good or bad depending on who possesses ¶ them). Our concern is to
understand how some WMD are rendered invisible (“ours”) and some ¶ visible (“theirs”); some
rendered malignant and others benign.¶ Here, we join others in noting that the language in
which the case against “proliferation” is made ¶ is ethno-racist and contemptuous. Generally, in
Western proliferation discourse as a whole, a ¶ distinction is drawn between “the ‘Self’(seen as
responsible) vs the non-Western Unruly ¶ Other.”36 The US represents itself as a rational
actor, while representing the Unruly Other as ¶ emotional, unpredictable, irrational,
immature, misbehaving. Not only does this draw on and ¶ reconstruct an Orientalist portrayal of
third world actors37; it does so through the medium of ¶ gendered terminology. By drawing the
relations between possessors and non-possessors in ¶ gendered terms – the prudential,
rational, advanced, mature, restrained, technologically- and ¶ bureaucratically-competent
(and thus “masculine”) Self, versus the emotional, irrational, ¶ unpredictable, uncontrolled,
immature, primitive, undisciplined, technologically-incompetent ¶ (and thus “feminine”)
Unruly Other – the discourse naturalizes and legitimates the Self/possessor ¶ states having
weapons which the Other does not. By drawing on and evoking gendered imagery ¶ and
resonances, the discourse naturalizes the idea that “We” / the US / the responsible father ¶ must
protect, must control and limit “her,” the emotional, out-of-control state, for her own good, ¶ as
well as for ours.¶ This Western proliferation discourse has had a function in the wider context
of US national ¶ security politics. With the end of the “Evil Empire” in the late 1980s, until the
attacks of ¶ September 11th, 2001, the US appeared to be without an enemy of grand enough
proportions to ¶ justify maintaining its sprawling military-industrial establishment. This difficulty
was ¶ forestalled by the construction of the category of “rogue states” – states seen as
uncontrollable, ¶ irresponsible, irrational, malevolent, and antagonistic to the West.38 Their
unruliness and ¶ antagonism was represented as intrinsic to their irrational nature; if it were not
in their “nature,” ¶ the US would have needed to ask more seriously if actions on the part of the
West had had any ¶ role in producing that hostility and disorder. ¶ The discourse of WMD
proliferation has been one of the principal means of producing these ¶ states as major threats.
To say this is neither to back away from our position opposing weapons ¶ of mass destruction,
nor to assess the degree to which WMD in the hands of “Other” states ¶ actually do threaten
the US, the “Other” states’ regional opponents, or their own population. But ¶ it is an
assessment of the role of WMD proliferation discourse in naturalizing and legitimating ¶
otherwise-difficult-to-make-appear-rational programs and expenditures such as National
Missile ¶ Defense.39
The concept that nuclear weapons are the ultimate status of power and
prohibition of proliferation genders international relations and reinforces
patriarchy
Cohn and Ruddick 3 (Carol, Researcher and Teacher at Harvard Medical Signs, and Sara, author, A
Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/cohnruddick.pdf)
Within the logic of deterrence theory and proliferation discourse, the phenomenon of WMD ¶
proliferation is understandable in two main ways. States either acquire WMD for purposes of ¶
aggression – i.e., to use WMD or to threaten their use in acts of aggression, intimidation and/or
¶ coercion against other states or populations within their own state. Or states acquire WMD to
¶ enhance their own security by deterring an opponent from attack. Within a strategic calculus,
¶ either is understood as a “rational” motivation for WMD possession, even if not everyone
would ¶ view these reasons as equally morally defensible.¶ Some in the security community have
argued that this “realist consensus” about states’ ¶ motivations for development of WMD “is
dange rously inadequate.” They argue that “nuclear ¶ weapons, like other weapons, are more
than tools of national security; they are political objects ¶ of considerable importance in
domestic debates and internal bureaucratic struggles and can also ¶ serve as international
normative symbols of modernity and identity.”40 We agree, but would add ¶ that the
understanding any of those motivations will be incomplete without gender analysis.¶ We
argue that gendered terms and images are an integral part of the ways national security issues
¶ are thought about and represented – and that it matters. During the Gulf War, for example,
the ¶ mass media speculated whether George Bush had finally “beat the wimp factor.” When in
the ¶ spring of 1998 India exploded five nuclear devices, Hindu nationalist leader Balasaheb ¶
Thackeray explained “we had to prove that we are not eunuchs.” An Indian newspaper cartoon ¶
“depicted Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee propping up his coalition government with a ¶
nuclear bomb. ‘Made with Viagra,’ the caption read.”41¶ Feminists argue that these images are
not trivial, but instead deserve analysis. Metaphors which ¶ equate political and military power
with sexual potency and masculinity serve to both shape and ¶ limit the ways in which
national security is conceptualized.42 Political actors incorporate sexual ¶ metaphors in their
representations of nuclear weapons as a way to mobilize gendered ¶ associations and symbols
in creating assent, excitement, support for, and identification with the ¶ weapons and their
own political regime. Moreover, gendered metaphor is not only an integral ¶ part of
accomplishing domestic power aims. The use of these metaphors also appropriates the ¶ test of
a nuclear weapon into the occasion for reinforcing patriarchal gender relations. ¶ That a nation
wishing to stake a claim to being a world power (or a regional one) should choose ¶ nuclear
weapons as its medium for doing so is often seen as “natural”: the more advanced ¶ military
destructive capacity you have, the more powerful you are. The “fact” that nuclear ¶ weapons
would be the coin of the realm in establishing a hierarchy of state power is ¶ fundamentally
unremarked, unanalyzed, taken for granted by most (nonfeminist) analysts. Some ¶ anti-war
feminists, by contrast, have looked with a historical and post-colonial eye, and seen ¶ nuclear
weapons’ enshrinement of as the emblem of power not as a natural fact, but as a social ¶ one,
produced by the actions of states. They argue that when the United States, with the most ¶
powerful economy and conventional military in the world, acts as though its power and security
¶ are guaranteed only by a large nuclear arsenal, it creates a context in which nuclear weapons ¶
become the ultimate necessity for and symbol of state security. And when the US or any other ¶
nuclear power works hard to ensure that other states don’t obtain nuclear weapons, it is
creating ¶ a context in which nuclear weapons become the ultimate arbiter of political power.
Non-proliferation theory entrenches the idea of the other as an irrational
actor—thus attributing patriarchy’s notion of the “feminine” into the
international field
Cohn and Ruddick 3 (Carol, Researcher and Teacher at Harvard Medical Signs, and Sara, author, A
Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/cohnruddick.pdf)
Finally, after our critique of both the framing and political uses of Western proliferation ¶
discourse, and our questioning of the adequacy of the models through which proliferation as a
phenomenon is understood, there remains the question: “If some nations possess weapons of ¶
mass destruction (either licitly or illicitly) for defensive and deterrent purposes, is it proper to ¶
deny such possession to others for the same purposes?”. ¶ We have spoken of the multiple costs
of developing and deploying nuclear weapons to their ¶ possessors (Q3) and the immense
suffering that weapons of mass destruction would bring. Given ¶ what we have said, we should
not be indifferent to other states' developing nuclear weapons ¶ unless we were indifferent to
them. Additionally, as we argue in Q5, we believe that more ¶ WMD in more places would make
their “accidental” or purposive use by states, as well as their ¶ availability to terrorists, more
likely. So we are opposed to the development and deployment of ¶ any WMD, by any state or
non-state actor.¶ Despite this clear opposition to the spread of WMD, we are uneasy simply
answering “no” to the ¶ question as it is posed. The question assumes that some states already
have WMD, and asks only ¶ whether it is proper to deny WMD to others. Denying WMD to
others implies maintaining the ¶ current international balance of power, in which the West is
privileged, politically and ¶ economically. As feminists, we oppose the extreme inequality
inherent in the current world ¶ order, and are troubled by actions which will further enshrine it.
But at the same time, we cannot ¶ endorse WMD proliferation as a mode of equalization; nor do
we see it as an effective form of ¶ redress.¶ Second, we come to the question not only as
feminists, but as citizens of the most highly armed ¶ possessor state. As such, we must ask: are
citizens of possessor states entitled to judge, threaten, ¶ allow or encourage the decisions of
non-possessor states to develop WMD? On what grounds? ¶ In what discursive territory? As we
have outlined above, we find the existing proliferation ¶ discourse too ethno-racist, too
focused on horizontal rather than vertical proliferation, and too ¶ sanguine about the
justifiability of “our” having what “they” are not fit to have. ¶ Our task then, as anti-war
feminists, is to learn how to participate in a constructive ¶ conversation,44 eschewing the
vocabulary of “proliferation,” learning to listen, perhaps ¶ publicizing the warnings that women –
and men – are issuing about the multiple costs and risks ¶ of WMD in their particular states. As
citizens of the most highly armed possessor state, our ¶ credibility as participants in this
conversation will be contingent upon our committed efforts to ¶ bring about nuclear
disarmament in our own state, and our efforts to redress the worldwide ¶ inequalities that are
underwritten by our military superiority.
Light Weapons Hurt Women
Light weapons disproportionately harm women and destroy humanity of the
“enemy”
Cohn and Ruddick 3 (Carol, Researcher and Teacher at Harvard Medical Signs, and Sara, author, A
Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/cohnruddick.pdf)
The first question asks whether our tradition includes general norms governing the use of ¶
weapons in war. It does not. If, as it appears, the question assumes the inevitability, perhaps ¶
even the acceptability, of war making, we do not. And granted the existence of wars, we are ¶
ambivalent about making ethical distinctions between weapons. We recognize that some ¶
weapons, and uses of weapons, are worse than others. Some weapons can be sparingly used
and ¶ carefully aimed to cause minimal damage; others cannot. Some weapons may be
deliberately ¶ cruel (e.g., dum dum bullets), outlast the occasion that apparently justified them
(e.g, land ¶ mines), harm indiscriminately (e.g., cluster bombs, land mines again, or poison gas in
a crowded ¶ subway), injure massively and painfully (e.g., incendiary bombs). While respecting
these ¶ distinctions, we nonetheless fear that stressing the horror of some weapons
diminishes the ¶ horrors that more “acceptable” weapons wreak. For us the crucial question is
not, “How do we ¶ chose among weapons?”, but rather, “How can we identify and attend to the
specific horrors of ¶ any weapon?”.¶ Moreover, it is striking that the criteria by which some
weapons are declared less horrible than ¶ others do not fare well by feminist anti-war criteria.
We will consider two kinds – small arms ¶ and light weapons, and high tech weapons aimed
precisely from a distance. ¶ “Small arms and light weapons” are weapons light enough to be
packed over a mountain on a ¶ mule. Among them are stinger missiles, AK47s, machine guns,
grenades, assault rifles, small explosives, and hand guns. Far more than weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), these weapons ¶ can allow for distinguishing attackers and combatants
from bystanders. Some, such as hand ¶ guns, can be accurately aimed to incapacitate without
killing a dangerous attacker. Of course the ¶ weapons may be misused. But if they are carefully
aimed by properly trained gunners they can ¶ satisfy conventional moral criteria ofdoing the
least harm commensurate with protection from ¶ violence. ¶ If, however, we start looking at
weapons from the perspectives of women’s lives, small arms and ¶ light weapons become
visible as the cause of enormous, sustained and pervasive suffering of ¶ very specific kinds.
Light weapons are a staple of the arms market, and the principal instrument ¶ of violence in
armed conflicts throughout the world. They are inexpensive, require little or no ¶ training to use,
and are easily available, often unregulated by state, military, civic, or even ¶ parental authority.
They have a long shelf life, travel easily, and therefore can, in the course of ¶ time, be traded,
turned against various enemies, and brought home. ¶ These weapons are so easy to get, they
threaten to turn any conflict – whether between peoples, ¶ neighbors, or family members –
violent. Women can carry them, but they more often remain the ¶ property of men and late
adolescent boys, increasing the imbalance of power between men and ¶ women. ¶ These
weapons can wreak havoc among the relationships women have tended, and destroy ¶ women’s
capacity to obtain food, water and other necessary staples, to farm and to keep their ¶ animals
safe. Thus, it is not surprising that current international feminist attention to war is often ¶
focused on ethno-nationalist armed conflicts that are fought with light weapons. These wars, ¶
brutal in their effects, often in gender-related ways, are undeterred by, indeed unaffected by,
the ¶ existence of weapons of mass destruction. ¶ Ironically, by contrast with small arms and
light weapons, nuclear weapons can in some ways ¶ seem attractive. They are expensive and
difficult to produce, complicated to deploy, require ¶ training if they are to be used, and rarely
make their way onto main street or into homes, except ¶ as waste material. In the lives of
women around the world, it is small arms and light weapons, ¶ more than weapons of mass
destruction, that constitute a clear and daily present danger.20¶ Consider the “virtues” of a
quite different class of weapons, precision-guided munitions ¶ (PGMs). Modern, hi-tech
precision-guided munitions can reputedly be precisely aimed at ¶ carefully selected targets, a
virtue often on verbal and graphic display during the Gulf War –¶ although the degree of
precision of both weapons and target selection are sometimes more ¶ illusory than real. PGMs
are typically launched from great distances, the human “targets” ¶ invisible to the attacker, and
the weapons’ effects transmuted into unreality by video game-like ¶ imagery. Neither the
attackers nor civilians at home need be aware of the destruction they cause. ¶ Moreover,
precision-guided munitions on “electronic battlefields” appear to make warfare safer ¶ for the
warriors who use them.¶ From our perspective, these virtues, too, become suspect. Critics
charge that we – citizens, ¶ military, political leaders – are too easily reassured by images of
PGMs’ precision. In fact, ¶ PGMs are notoriously subject to “mistakes” of judgment, information
and technological control. ¶ While we agree with these critics, we emphasize two other moral
doubts. ¶ With PGMs, not only is the discourse of war abstract, but war-fighting itself becomes ¶
increasingly abstract and unreal to those who kill, mutilate, and destroy. Anti-militarists have ¶
often seen war as a fiction, an Old Lie, that obscures brutality through patriotic rhetoric, ¶
euphemistic language, abstract theories and discourse. To these are now added the abstracted ¶
illusion of precision strikes displayed on video screens. By contrast, we consider it a virtue if the
¶ brutality of war is evident to the combatants, to those who order them to war, and to the
society ¶ they represent.¶ Secondly, we cannot unambivalently applaud the relative safety that
PGMs accord those who use ¶ them. This safety is purchased by an ignorance of injuries,
ultimately an indifference toward ¶ “the targets.” We understand the military obligation and
human desire to save one’s own ¶ fighters. But we cannot praise a weapon for its ability to save
“us,” while endangering the lives ¶ and destroying the resources of “the enemy” we don’t see,
whose humanity we never confront. ¶ Indeed, people who reject war, including feminists,
refuse to construe an enemy as killable. ¶ By calling into question the criteria by which
weapons are judged, we do not in any way ¶ minimize the horror of weapons of mass
destruction. Women/feminists of our tradition have ¶ been protesting the development, testing,
deployment, and possible use of nuclear weapons, in ¶ particular, since Hiroshima..21 But antiwar feminism urges that we appreciate the specificity of ¶ horror and learn to mourn the
damage that each kind of weapon inflicts on both its possessor and ¶ the injured. This would be
both an expression and a development of our tradition.
Can’t talk about Nuke effects – associated with women
Discussion of the effects on humans of nuclear war is delegitimized and
excluded through its association with the feminine
Cohn and Ruddick 3 (Carol, Researcher and Teacher at Harvard Medical Signs, and Sara, author, A
Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/cohnruddick.pdf)
The second question asks us whether it is ever morally permissible to use weapons of mass ¶
destruction. We are tempted to answer with only three words: “of course not.” ¶ Rather than
pondering the question of when, if ever, it is morally justified to use WMD, we ¶ move in two
directions. First, we note that anti-war feminists’ energies have not been focused on ¶ when to
use these weapons, but rather on attempting to explain why, over many years, there has ¶ been
widespread acceptance of the deployment of nuclear weapons and of the stated willingness ¶ to
use them. Second, we move to question the question itself.¶ Anti-war feminist attention to
WMD has largely focused on nuclear weapons – their horrors, the ¶ urgency of abolishing
them, and the question of how anyone could think it sane to develop and ¶ deploy them. In
this chapter, we, too, write primarily about nuclear weapons – as a reflection of ¶ the tradition
on which we report, but also because they are the weapons whose magnitude of destructive
power seems distinctive, and to best warrant the description “weapons of mass ¶ destruction.”
However, as we learned in the course of our research, many elements of the antiwar feminist
critique of nuclear weapons hold for chemical and biological weapons as well.¶ Rather than
seeing acceptance of nuclear weapons as a “realistic” acknowledgment of the ¶
“technologically inevitable,” anti-war feminists have seen the political and intellectual ¶
acceptance of nuclear weapons’ deployment as something to be explained. Some feminists
have ¶ noted the allure of nuclear weapons, particularly the excitement and awe evoked by
actual or ¶ imagined nuclear explosions. Some have seen the appeal of exploding or launching
nuclear ¶ weapons as reflecting and reinforcing masculine desires and identities.22¶ Several
anti-war feminists have focused less on the weapons themselves, and more on the ¶ discourse
through which the weapons (and their use) are theorized and legitimated. They have ¶ written
about both the sexual and domestic metaphors that turn the mind’s eye toward the ¶ pleasant
and familiar, rather than toward images of indescribable devastation. They have ¶ identified in
nuclear discourse techniques of denial and conceptual fragmentation. They have ¶ emphasized
the ways that the abstraction and euphemism of nuclear discourse protect nuclear ¶ planners
and politicians from the grisly realities behind their words. Speaking generally, antiwar feminists
invite women and men to attend to the identities, emotions and discourses that ¶ allow us to
accept the possible use of nuclear weapons.23¶ Perhaps the most general feminist concern is
the willingness of intellectuals to talk-asusual about nuclear weapons (or about any atrocity).
And this brings us back to the issue of the ¶ framing of Question Two. The question as it is posed
seems in some ways similar to the ¶ abstract, distancing thinking that we have criticized – but
in which we also participate. There is ¶ no mention of the horror, let alone a pause to rest with
it. We move, or are moved, quickly to an ¶ abstract moral tone: “any circumstances” “might be
morally permissible....” and then to ¶ comparisons.¶ Abstract language and a penchant for
distinctions are typical of philosophy, intrinsically ¶ unobjectionable, often a pleasure. It is
continuous abstraction while speaking of actual or ¶ imagined horror that disturbs us. Abstract
discussion of warfare is both the tool and the privilege ¶ of those who imagine themselves as the
(potential) users of weapons. The victims, if they can ¶ speak at all, speak quite
differently207207 account of a nuclear blast’s effects by a US defense intellectual:¶ [You have
to have ways to maintain communications in a] nuclear environment, a ¶ situation bound to
include EMP blackout, brute force damage to systems, a heavy ¶ jamming environment, and so
on.24¶ An account by a Hiroshima survivor:207207 ¶ Everything was black, had vanished into the
black dust, was destroyed. ¶ Only the flames that were beginning to lick their way up had any
color. ¶ From the dust that was like a fog, figures began to loom up, black, ¶ hairless, faceless.
They screamed with voices that were no longer human. ¶ Their screams drowned out the groans
rising everywhere from the rubble, ¶ groans that seemed to rise from the very earth itself.25¶ It
should become apparent then, that our concern about abstract language is not only relevant to ¶
the framing of Question Two, but to its content – the justifiability of nuclear weapons’ use – as ¶
well. It is easier to contemplate and “justify” the use of nuclear weapons in the abstract
language ¶ of defense intellectuals than in the descriptive, emotionally resonant language of
the victim; from ¶ the perspective of the user rather than the victim. Anti-war feminists note
that detailed, focal ¶ attention to the human impact of weapons’ use is not only considered
out of bounds in security ¶ professionals’ discourse; it is also delegitimated by its association
with the “feminine,” with ¶ insufficient masculinity, as is evident in this excerpt of an interview
with a physicist:¶ “Several colleagues and I were working on modeling counterforce nuclear
attacks, trying ¶ to get realistic estimates of the number of immediate fatalities that would
result from ¶ different deployments. At one point, we re-modeled a particular attack, using
slightly ¶ different assumptions, and found that instead of there being 36 million immediate ¶
fatalities, there would only be 30 million. And everybody was sitting around nodding, ¶ saying,
‘Oh yeh, that’s great, only 30 million,’ when all of a sudden, I heard what we ¶ were saying. And
I blurted out, ‘Wait, I’ve just heard how we’re talking -- Only 30 ¶ million! Only 30 million
human beings killed instantly?’ Silence fell upon the room. ¶ Nobody said a word. They didn’t
even look at me. It was awful. I felt like a woman .Ӧ After telling this story to one of the
authors, the physicist added that he was careful to never blurt ¶ out anything indicating that he
was thinking about the victims again.26 Fear of feeling like a ¶ woman (or being seen as
unmanly) silently works to maintain the boundaries of a distanced, ¶ abstract discourse, and to
sustain the tone of Question Two – a tone which invites us to think ¶ abstractly, “objectively”
about WMD use, without pausing with human particularities, passions ¶ and suffering.
Prevents Disarm
Gendered discussion of nuclear weapons makes disarmament irresponsible—
the purpose of the paternal state has become protection
Duncanson and Eschle 8 (Claire Duncanson, PhD Lecturer in IR at University of Edinburgh;
Catherine Eschle, PhD Senior Lecturer University of Strathclyde “Gender and the Nuclear Weapons State:
A Feminist Critique of the UK Government’s White Paper on Trident” New Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 4,
December 2008)
The identity of the UK state as Protector comes through strongly in the White¶ Paper. Blair’s
foreword opens with the statement that “The primary responsibility¶ of any government is to
ensure the safety and security of its citizens”58 and this is¶ echoed throughout the document
with numerous references to responsibility and¶ specifically “responsibilities to protect the
current and future citizens of the¶ UK.”59 As well as establishing a gendered binary between
the masculine, strong208 protector and the feminised, vulnerable population, this serves to
delegitimize¶ any opposition to nuclear weapons. Disarmament strategies become
irresponsible¶ and “imprudent,”60 lacking in crucial masculine-associated traits. It is in this
way¶ that challenges to the nuclear-protector role are positioned as emasculating,¶ rendering
the British state not only incapable of protecting its citizens but at risk of¶ losing its
independence and leadership status.¶ In terms of an implied contrast to an external, threatening
“Other,” the White¶ Paper relies heavily on axioms about nuclear weapons “deterring blackmail
and¶ acts of aggression” from opponents,61 thus constructing a deceitful and coercive¶ enemy
which wields its nuclear weapons in a fundamentally different and less¶ responsible way than
the UK. There is considerable uncertainly and ambiguity,¶ however, about who the enemy Other
actually is. Indeed, no specific aggressor can¶ be named, as the White Paper acknowledges:
“Currently no state has both intent¶ to threaten our vital interests and the capability to do so
with nuclear weapons.”62¶
Gendering nuclear weapons rhetoric halts any discussion about disarmament—
identifying nuclear weapons with the phallus makes disarmament castration
Duncanson and Eschle 8 (Claire Duncanson, PhD Lecturer in IR at University of Edinburgh;
Catherine Eschle, PhD Senior Lecturer University of Strathclyde “Gender and the Nuclear Weapons State:
A Feminist Critique of the UK Government’s White Paper on Trident” New Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 4,
December 2008)
We begin by looking at the way the White Paper talks about nuclear weapons¶ technology.
There are three strands to the feminist critique of the way in which¶ states in general talk about
nuclear weapons technology: first, the deployment of¶ sexualised, phallic imagery; second, a
tendency to abstraction; and, third, a¶ reliance on gendered axioms. On the first point, feminists
have long highlighted¶ that the political and military power associated with nuclear weapons is
linked¶ metaphorically with sexual potency and masculinity. This linkage is neither¶ arbitrary
nor trivial: sexual metaphors are a way of mobilising gendered¶ associations in order to create
excitement about, support for and identification¶ with both the weapons and the political
regime possessing them.15 Thus feminist¶ histories of the development of the nuclear arms
race in the decades after World¶ War Two demonstrate the extent to which it was a race to
prove masculine¶ prowess, fuelled by “missile” envy,16 with the nuclear weapons of the Cold
War¶ superpowers “wheeled out like monumental phalluses” on parade.17 Such¶ imagery has
proved seductive to many governments across time and space. Thus¶ when India exploded five
nuclear devices in May 1998, Hindu nationalist leader¶ Balashaheb Thakeray argued that “[w]e
have to prove that we are not eunuchsӦ and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was
portrayed in a newspaper cartoon as¶ propping up his coalition with a nuclear bomb,
captioned “Made with Viagra.”18¶ Indeed, as Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has commented:¶
Reading the papers, it was often hard to tell when people were referring to Viagra¶ (which was
competing for second place on the front pages) and when they were¶ talking about the bomb—
“We have superior strength and potency.”19¶ Similar language has permeated the nuclear
discourse of the military and¶ defence industry. In her ground-breaking study of the discourse of
American¶ defence intellectuals who formulated nuclear weapons policy during the Cold¶ War,
Cohn noted that sexualised metaphors, phallic imagery and the promise of¶ sexual domination
thrived.20 Lectures were dominated by discussion of:¶ vertical erector launchers, thrust-toweight ratios, soft lay downs, deep penetration,¶ and the comparative advantages of protracted
versus spasm attacks—or what one¶ military adviser to the National Security Council has called
“releasing 70 to 80¶ percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump.”21¶ Cohn suggests
that such sexual imagery serves not only to underline the¶ connections between masculine
sexuality and nuclear weapons but also to¶ minimise the seriousness of militarist
endeavours.22 It makes the nuclear arms¶ race seem the stuff of jocular locker-room rivalry,
denying its deadly¶ consequences. Perhaps most importantly, sexualised metaphors are one of
the¶ reasons that talk of nuclear disarmament is so readily dismissed: “If disarmament¶ is
emasculation, how could any real man even consider it?”23¶