Scorched Atmospheres: The Violent Geographies of the Vietnam War and the Rise of Drone Warfare

Abstract

This article explores the violent geographies of the Vietnam War. It argues that the conflict is crucial for understanding the security logics and spatialities of U.S. state violence in the war on terror. An overarching theme is that U.S. national security has inherited and intensified the atmospheric forms of power deployed across Southeast Asia, including ecological violence, the electronic battlefield, counterinsurgency (the Phoenix Program), and drone surveillance. All of these attempted to pacify and capture hostile circulations of life and place them within the secured and rationalized interiors of the U.S. war machine. The article thus expands on the concept of atmospheric warfare. This is defined as a biopolitical project of enclosure to surveil, secure, and destroy humans and nonhumans within a multidimensional warscape. Since modern state power is becoming ever more atmospheric-particularly with the rise of drone warfare-dissecting the origins of that violence in the Vietnam War is a vital task.

Conservation Law Enforcement: Policing Protected Areas

“…I observed how an APU uses dogs to contain poachers in an area or force them out of hiding lest they be attacked. Pinning poachers down or fixing them in harsh spaces of conservation is thus a method of using the "direct effects of the geographical, climatic, or hydrographic environment" not to make people live but to make wildlife live by controlling and neutralizing the circulating threat embodied in the poacher (Foucault 2003, 245; also see Shaw 2016). Even without killing, the capture and arrest of a suspected illegal hunter ostensibly achieves the same objective of doing away with the threat, at least temporarily.…”

The Social Life of Robots: The Politics of Algorithms, Governance, and Sovereignty

“…Related to the above concerns, robots are also transforming the spaces, politics, and subjects of security (e.g. Shaw , , ). From biometric borders, automated gun turrets to mobile sea mines, a new class of robotic apparatuses are being developed, each of which embodies (and mobilises) a future geography.…”

“…It is important to note that this work on robots and robotic technologies is partially related to but also parallels the recent wave of attention to and growth of geographic research produced through, by, and of the digital, what Ash et al () have termed a critical “digital turn” in geography. This turn has focused on questions of smart cities (Datta ), digital media and communication (Adams ), the security state (Shaw , , ), and the automation of environmental conservation (Adams ; Arts et al ), writ large. It does less, though, to think through the reimagination of human–non‐human relations, subjectivities, and potentialities that come to be possible in a world already populated by robotic possibilities.…”

Atmospheric politics: protest drones and the ambiguity of airspace

“…For some time now, scholars have been arguing that airspace is not a given and that atmospheres are historical, even geopolitical entities (Adey 2010(Adey , 2014Banner 2008;Graham 2004Graham , 2016Gregory 2011Gregory , 2014Keysar 2018Keysar , 2019Lin 2016Lin , 2017McCormack 2008McCormack , 2018Nieuwenhuis 2016Nieuwenhuis , 2018Parks 2005Parks , 2016Parks , 2018Shaw 2016;Whitehead 2009;Williams 2010Williams , 2011. Modern airspace has been described aptly by Alison Williams as "overlapping, multivolumetric areas"; for example, civil airspace comprises "permanent air lanes" that "link airports," while military airspace is composed most often of very large and even amorphous geometric volumes that can be "activated and deactivated" as needed" (2011, 254).…”