Getting drones wrong

Abstract

Over the last several years there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in drones, their impact on armed conflict, and the ethics of using such unmanned weaponry. While this attention and inquiry is to be welcomed, an examination of this scholarship reveals that much of it frequently gets drones wrong -focusing too much on the questionable 'newness' of the technology, misunderstanding or misapplying the legal principles which govern such conventional weaponry (especially proportionality) and searching for definitive answers from problematic data. This article highlights the trouble with the contemporary debate over drones and sets out a research agenda in a world of murky campaigns and imperfect information.

Review Article: Targeted Killing, Technologies of Violence, and Society

“…Along with Shaw -who argues that the drone is a 'geopolitical actor' enclosing humanity -one may find authors such as Grégoire Chamayou 59 and Hugh Gusterson, 60 who argue for the radical novelty of drone warfare -technology triggering fundamental changes in the practice of violence. Conversely, Stephanie Carvin, 61 Sven Lindqvist 62 and Chris Fuller 63 adopt historical perspectives, explaining how lethal drones were deliberately reconciled with existing norms, be it those concerning long-range artillery (Carvin), naval warfare (Lindqvist), or assassination (Fuller) -a position closer to Grayson's. All three authors here bring perspectives which speak directly to this debate, which remains crucial as scholars grapple with new forms of war involving new technologies.…”

The transformation of targeted killing and international order

“…The first branch on the use of targeted killing includes statistical studies on the frequency of targeting killing (Eisner, 2011 ; see also the descriptive statistics in Jones & Olken, 2009 ; McGovern, 2010 ), work on the history of targeted-killing strategies (F. L. Ford, 1985 ), and studies on how and why agents resort to this type of violence (David, 2003 ; Gazit & Brym, 2011 ; Iqbal & Zorn, 2008 ; Jacobsen & Kaplan, 2007 ; Plaw, 2008 ; Teergarden, 2014 ). In this context, scholars have also inquired into the trends and causes of the proliferation of drones as the preferred instruments of contemporary targeted-killing operations (Gilli & Gilli, 2016 ; Horowitz & Fuhrman, 2015 ; Sayler, 2015 ; see also critically Carvin, 2015 ). Another avenue of research in this first branch concerns the effectiveness of targeted killing.…”

Norm transformation and the institutionalization of targeted killing in the US

“…For two decades, the US has used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) -"drones" -as platforms for small-scale airstrikes on specific individuals, increasingly relying upon this method of counterterrorism and counter-insurgency, with numbers of strikes and casualties now in the thousands. The evolution of targeted killing in the US is already the subject of a number of recent examinations (see, among others, Carvin, 2015;Fuller, 2017;Grayson, 2012Grayson, , 2016Zenko, 2013), and these establish key ways in which changing legal discourse and re-conceptualizations of the geography of counterterrorism were facilitating factors. 1 This concerns the particular definition of assassination under international law (Beres, 1991;Pickard, 2001;Thomas, 2001), questions of imminence and pre-emption (Gordon, 2006;Kasher and Yadlin, 2005), the space in which a formal armed conflict is occurring, and the status of combatants (Blum and Heymann, 2010).…”