Embodying algorithmic war: Gender, race, and the posthuman in drone warfare

Abstract

Through a discussion of drone warfare, and in particular the massacre of 23 people in the Uruzgan province in Afghanistan in 2010, I argue that drone warfare is both embodied and embodying. Drawing from posthuman feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway and N Katherine Hayles, I understand the turn toward data and machine intelligence not as an other-than-human process of decisionmaking that deprives humans of sovereignty, but as a form of embodiment that reworks and undermines essentialist notions of culture and nature, biology and technology. Through the intermediation of algorithmic, visual, and affective modes of embodiment, drone warfare reproduces gendered and racialized bodies that enable a necropolitics of massacre. Finally, the category of gender demonstrates a flaw in the supposed perfectibility of the algorithm in removing issues of identity or prejudice from security practices, as well as the perceptions of drone assemblages as comprising sublime technologies of perfect analysis and vision. Gender as both a mode of embodiment and a category of analysis is not removed by algorithmic war, but rather is put into the service of the violence it enables.

Moving Beyond Semantics on Autonomous Weapons: Meaningful Human Control in Operation

“…Finally, I will explain why it is important for policy‐makers to understand the distributed nature of control that has shaped military operations over the past decades and continues to be standard in contemporary targeting. In doing so, I will join a growing body of scholarship in the field of international relations that focuses on socio‐technical relations and human agency in complex distributed systems (Amoore and Raley, ; Suchman et al, ; Wilcox, ).…”

Robot Wars: US Empire and geopolitics in the robotic age

“…Scholars have researched its historical ( Kindervater, 2016 ; Satia, 2014 ), philosophical ( Chamayou, 2015 ), legal ( Shaw and Akhter, 2012 ), spatial ( Gregory, 2014 ), ethical ( Schwarz, 2016 ), and material dimensions ( Holmqvist, 2013 ; Walters, 2014 ). Drone warfare continues to complicate the relationship between humans and nonhumans ( Wilcox, 2017 ), as well as the status of sovereignty and territory ( Shaw, 2016 ). Yet current drone warfare is just the beginning of a robotic revolution sweeping across the military: future drones will be smaller, autonomous, and capable of interacting in swarms.…”

“…In making this argument, the article contributes to research in international relations, geopolitics, and political geography on the materiality of world politics and state power (e.g. Aradau, 2010 ; Bourne, 2012 ; Cudworth and Hobden, 2013 ; Meehan et al, 2013 ; Schouten, 2013 ; Walters, 2014 ; Wilcox, 2017 ). Of course, the futurology constructed in this article, like all futurologies, is necessarily contingent, fragile, and non-linear.…”

Drones, Swarms and Becoming-Insect: Feminist Utopias and Posthuman Politics

“…I have elsewhere argued that precision warfare in general, and drone warfare more specifically, blurs lines between human and technology in warfare in the form of posthuman bodies (Wilcox, 2015(Wilcox, , 2017. The posthuman, as explored by feminist theorists, such as Donna Haraway (1991Haraway ( , 1997, N. Katherine Hayles (1999Hayles ( , 2005 and Rosi Braidotti (2002Braidotti ( , 2013, is a process of formation and reformation that reworks and undermines essentialist notions of culture and nature, biology, and technology.…”