Predator Empire
The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3948412 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Isabel Shaw (0000-0002-4289-1740, University of Glasgow, corresponding author), Ian G R Shaw |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 536-559 |
| Publication date | 2013-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Geopolitics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14650045.2012.749241 |
| OpenAlex | W2074994440 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 67 |
| References cited | 28 |
This paper critically assesses the CIA's drone programme and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly “dronified” US national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponised drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilise an amorphous conflict against vaguely defined al-Qa'ida “affiliates”. This process is legitimised through the White House's presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic conflict managed by a “disposition matrix”. These official narratives are challenged by the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I term the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that digitises, catalogues, and eliminates threatening “patterns of life” across a widening battlespace. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the distant environments of the affiliate into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland
Bureaucracy · Computer security · Drone · Empire · Geopolitics · Homeland · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Global Security and Public Health · Law · Political Theology and Sovereignty
Life-Saving Weapons
Depersonalisation of killing
Why Drones Have Not Revolutionized War
Violence
Geopolitics/Critical Geopolitics
The Banality of Empire
The Dronification of State Violence
Drone warfare and the limits of sacrifice
China’s ‘Liquid’ Warfighting Shift and Its Implications for Possible Future Conflict
Frappes de drones sous Obama
Le dispositif du drone
Conceptual and theoretical debates in modern geopolitics and their implications for Chinese geopolitics
US military logistics outsourcing and the everywhere of war
Worlding war as a primary institution of international society
The U.S. drone programme, imperial air power and Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas
Global Assemblages of Security Governance and Contemporary International Intervention
Toward a critical geopolitics of tea culture across China and Taiwan
Confucian values and Chinese geopolitical discourse on terrorism
Drone views
Conceptualizing the European military-civilian-industrial complex
International society’s challenge of targeted killing by drones
Predators and Peace
Relational geographies of cyberterrorism and cyberwar
The evolution of targeted killing practices
Embodying algorithmic war
Unmanned moral forces
Distant Intimacy
The sky is the limit
Social geographies II
The proliferation of peripheries
Now boarding
The Social Life of Robots
Introduction
Documenting and Preventing Place Annihilation
Drone strikes, ephemeral sovereignty, and changing conceptions of territory
Assemblage of the vertical
The Notion of the “Subaltern” and the Drone Victim Subjectivities in Pakistani Anglophone Fiction
The Timbuktu syndrome
Making Terrorist Targets
The Urbanization of drone warfare
Drone methodologies
Public Drone Perception
Discourse, medical metaphor and the East Asian medicine approach to conflict resolution
Drones y el orden legal internacional. Tecnología, estrategia y largas cadenas de acción
Distinction and the Ethics of Violence
Death comes knocking on the roof”
Secrecy and absence in the residue of covert drone strikes
Beyond the Predator paradigm
Norm transformation and the institutionalization of targeted killing in the US
Interventions on military mobilities
Cyberwar
A microdynamics approach to geographies of violence
From minefields to minespace
Drone warfare and the making of bodies out of place
From 'liberal war' to 'liberal militarism
Visualizations of the small military drone
From cyborg feminism to drone feminism
A bear's biography
Lively robots
The Emergence of iBorder
Sky watching
More-than-human warfare
Liquid or Solid Warfare? Autocratic States, Non-State Armed Groups and the Socio-Spatial Dimension of Warfare in Yemen
Scorched Atmospheres
Remote Warfare and the Retooling of American Primacy
The explication of the social
Here Be Dragons
Society Must Be Defended’
Topological twists
An Anti-geopolitical Eye
Global Liberal Governance
Population and Affective Perception
Vertical Geopolitics
The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in Fata, Pakistan
Neoliberal Geopolitics
Stalingrad in the Hindu Kush? Afpak, Crucibles and Chains of Terror
War and peace
A subaltern critical geopolitics of the war on terror
A crisis in aerial sovereignty? Considering the implications of recent military violations of national airspace
Giorgio agamben and the spatialities of the camp
The Other Spaces of War
Performing security
Reconsidering the concept of discourse for the field of critical geopolitics
Aeromobilities
Bio-Political Geographies
A 'new Foucault' with lively implications - or 'the crawfish advances sideways
Biopolitics of security in the 21st century
Biometric borders
Goatsucker
Border security, 9/11 and the enclosure of civilisation
The everywhere war
Detention, deportation, devolution and immigrant incapacitation in the US, post 9/11
One Island, One Team, One Mission
Liberal Lawfare and Biopolitics
Governing Terror
| Unique citing works | 67 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 5,58 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2026 (13) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 64 |