Abstract
This article addresses the interaction between policies of targeted killing and wider social forces, particularly technology, through three recently published books. I suggest that while Ian Shaw’s Predator Empire does well to draw attention to the enclosing tendency of contemporary nonhuman environments and means of technological control – particularly drones, Kyle Grayson’s Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing provides a necessary contextualisation of these technological transformations by emphasising the cultural-political underpinnings of policies of targeted killing and of the assemblage of technologies into such policies. These perspectives are replicated in Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land, which describes the political and strategic manipulation of space to implement Israeli nonterritorial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. I conclude by suggesting that these three works provide renewed avenues to reflect on the normative and conceptual impacts of lethal drones and other novel warfighting technologies, as well as on the relation between state violence and normalcy.
Introduction
In recent years, the lethal drone has provided a focal point in International Relations scholarship for reevaluating practices, norms, and strategic doctrines in warfare. Between histories of targeted killing, 1 works relating the use of lethal drones to wider practices in warfighting, 2 and theorisations of contemporary warfare centring on a shift to the containment of risk and the rise of global policing, 3 there is wide consensus that the impact of remote-controlled aircraft reaches far beyond narrow strategic considerations or strict questions of ethics of use of force. 4 Accordingly, it is the wider reshaping of society engineered by (drone-led) targeted killing campaigns that is the focus of the three books under review here. Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land, 5 Ian Shaw’s Predator Empire and Kyle Grayson’s Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing all share, among other factors, a macroscopic perspective on the effects of state violence on political life and on structures of power and domination. While Weizman provides a rich account of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, Shaw and Grayson provide wider-spectrum discussions of the interplay between liberalism, capitalism, and the institutionalisation of targeted violence. In all three cases – sometimes more explicitly (in Shaw and Grayson), warfare is discussed as being produced and sustained by – and impacting on – wider forces in society and biopolitical endeavours to police, regulate, and constrain behaviour and life processes.
Nevertheless, despite this general agreement on targeted killing’s reshaping of political society, all three books also provide distinct outlooks on the relations between technology, modes of violence, and political life. While Shaw emphasises the role of non-human mediators in constituting the world, Grayson highlights the embeddedness of technology and violence in cultural and political constructions. Weizman, meanwhile, highlights how technological means of surveillance can be used to transform spatial conceptions, systematise the inflicting of violence and produce a ‘system’ 6 of control.
In this article, I discuss these three works’ account of the role of technology in producing and mediating political violence. 7 I point first to a fundamental debate between Ian Shaw and Kyle Grayson on the role of technology and the ‘non-human’ in the constitution of assemblages of targeted killing, suggesting that Shaw fails to acknowledge the cultural-political underpinnings of technologies of violence. I then examine Weizman’s presentation of Israeli occupation in light of Predator Empire and Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing, suggesting that Weizman’s account of the system of Israeli surveillance and control – while highlighting features present in both Grayson and Shaw’s accounts – suggests a greater human agency in directing technological violence than Shaw accounts for. I close by situating this debate within wider trends in the study of drone warfare and targeted killing.
Predator Empire, Culture, and State Violence
Predator Empire is predicated on the foundation that non-human structures and elements influence the conduct of International Relations to – at least – the same extent as human elements. Shaw’s account devotes significant attention to the non-human environments which are constructed by technology and which condition human relations, as ‘Our anthropology, our very human existence, is shaped by the artificial environments, big and small, we carve out from the planet’. 8 Shaw – drawing from Peter Sloterdijk’s conception of spheres – contends that technology perpetuates and accentuates constant historical trends towards ‘enclosure’, that is, the constraining of human life for the perpetuation of unequal social relations. 9 What is new in contemporary globalised society, however, is that the mediation of human relations is now predominantly non-human, effectuated through technological means. New technologies of state power – in particular the armed drone – push tendencies to enclosure and nonhuman mediation to their paroxysm: ‘The desire to enclose the world in a single immunitary configuration may be as old as empire, but the drone is a technology that can begin to realize this ambition’. 10 The world is now a world in which humans are ‘contained by artificial domes and […] artificial drones’. 11
In Shaw’s materialist structural account – inspired in part by Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, 12 technology acts as ‘an existential force’ 13 transforming environments inhabited by humans. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in common conceptions of security, where ‘The health of communities is secondary to the feeding of the war machine. In other words, security is seen as a nonhuman rather than human condition’. 14 As suggested by the title, the American MQ-1 ‘Predator’ drone plays a central role in Shaw’s account: it is the technology which enables the definitive enclosure of humanity through its unparalleled capabilities for surveillance and targeted killing: ‘The wager this book takes is that the military drone is not simply a weapon but a geopolitical actor that seeks to enclose the world by producing overlapping, electromagnetic, civilizatory domes’. 15
However, Shaw repeatedly conflates his concept of the Predator Empire, American campaigns of drone-led targeted killing, and the drone as a technological artefact. Shaw regularly makes little difference between the technology – the remote-piloted aircraft – and his conception of the imperialistic condition of human enclosure predicated on surveillance and policing – the Predator Empire – in which the drone aircraft is embedded, but of which it forms merely a part. In other words, Shaw uses drones simultaneously as technological catalysts (or ‘agents’), as metaphors (through their use in targeted killing) for the increasingly dominating biopolitical power of the state over life and death, and as examples of the unwavering and pervasive reach of surveillance and policing. ‘Drone’, as such, is a slippery category, which Shaw deliberately treats as a fuzzy and indeterminate concept.
Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing, against Shaw’s approach focused on the agential role of technology, engages in a critique of liberalism inspired by Foucault, which puts cultural factors at the foreground. Grayson, against approaches such as Giorgio Agamben’s, Derek Gregory’s, or Andrew Neal’s, 16 argues that the resort to targeted killing is not an aberration enabled by a state of exception – however permanent – but rather an outcome made possible – but not necessary – by liberalism itself. 17 Therefore, he investigates the cultural, political, and social assemblages which make targeted killing a viable option compatible with liberal politics; at the heart of his work lies the contention that ‘The logic that contributes to the possibility of targeted killing is therefore reflective of longer standing changes to the ways in which mechanisms for governing have been viewed by those who govern’. 18
As such, Grayson examines aspects of cultural frameworks which enable targeted killing. Culture, in his view, is a paradoxical force, both transforming and traditionalistic, which plays a central role in defining human relations. Most importantly, Grayson argues, culture contributes to defining the problematisations to which perceived solutions, such as targeted killing campaigns, respond. 19 If, as Grayson (and Shaw) argues, security threats are not given but constructed, then the cultural construction of these threats can explain the selection of certain forms of violence as solutions, and provide a way to deconstruct the ‘assemblages’ upon which this violence is founded.
These ‘assemblages’, namely ensembles of related components through which properties emerge which are not present in any individual part, 20 provide a sharp point of contrast between Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing and Predator Empire. Grayson discusses at length the assemblage of both human and non-human cultural-political elements, while Shaw agrees that a technological force ‘always already necessitates a larger sociotechnical assemblage’. 21 Where they differ, however, is on the constructing or constructed role of technology within these assemblages. For Shaw, a technology such as the armed drone, as a non-human agent, actively shapes the environment and ‘must be seen, therefore, as a geopolitical actor’. 22 Technology is primary, and cultural practices such as targeted killing arise as a result of technological shifts. 23 Just as ‘Empires would be impossible without the infrastructures that anchor their power relations to the landscape’, 24 ‘Aerial technologies now hack the human lifeworld from the skies in order to capture, digitize, and police it’. 25 The Predator Empire and the violence sustaining it arise primarily as a result of technological changes, most prominently the appearance of the drone.
Grayson, meanwhile, takes issue with Shaw’s materialist account, criticising ‘technological rationalism’ 26 which presents violence as produced by technological assemblages and ‘a set of shifts that emerge from adopting it’. 27 Grayson’s account rather ‘emphasise[s] relations amongst component parts, the incorporation of disparate elements including the non-human, power relations, plasticity, and the importance of discourse’. It is, as such, centred on ‘the importance of cultural mediation to liberal forms of rule’, rather than technological mediations. 28 Specific assemblages of violence are not determined by non-human environments and technological agents, but made more probable by cultural constructions which underpin the practice of violence. Against Shaw, Grayson notes that the desire to transfer warmaking capabilities to machines – among them drones – is itself predicated upon cultural foundations derived from economic organisation and market optimisation. 29
In designing his highly idealised conception of the Predator Empire, Shaw tends to overstate the impact of technology on society, downplaying the cultural factors which shape technology. Shaw evacuates the human from the Predator Empire so much that he ignores the cultural – and therefore human – forces which shape the development of technology. In contrast, Alison Williams provides a powerful counterpoint in her analysis of the loitering capacity of drones – which, for Shaw, is a key part of their role in enabling the Predator Empire. Drawing on interviews with drone pilots, she considers ‘the military aircraft as an assemblage that bends human and machine elements to produce one combat entity’. 30 This is not a case, in other words, of a machine replacing the human, but of combining human and technological characteristics; later, Williams argues that the privileging of vision is caused by the ‘tension’ of human and machine, in which human limitations restrict machine capabilities. The human element, in summary, persistently disrupts the fantasy of technological supremacy, contra Shaw’s vision of technological determinism. 31
Targeted Killing in the Hollow Land
Unlike Predator Empire and Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing, Hollow Land possesses a clear empirical focus, namely the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. That being said, the relevance of Weizman’s work is as much theoretical and methodological as it is historical and empirical. In this following section, I introduce Eyal Weizman’s methodological approach, before comparing his account of the violence of Israeli occupation to the approaches of Shaw and Grayson.
At first glance, Weizman espouses a similarly biopolitical approach to that of Shaw and Grayson. In the new preface from 2017, he thus describes the siege of Gaza as ‘a giant and unparalleled exercise in population control’, 32 emphasising the extent to which strategic and political objectives depend on the regulation of life patterns. Weizman, however, pursues his investigation of the biopolitics of Israeli occupation through what he terms ‘forensic architecture’, 33 that is, the use of architectural concepts to find evidence of embedded power relations. Power, for Weizman, is encoded in the physical construction of the environment; accordingly, the Israeli system of control manifests itself in its reshaping of buildings, cities, networks, and landscapes. 34 While Shaw describes ‘the architecture for a forever drone war’ 35 through domes and enclosures, Weizman approaches political geography through layers and networks.
Against cartographic geographies which have ‘until recently almost exclusively [been] associated with the mechanisms of colonial power’, 36 he advocates complex, volumetric 37 geographies which demonstrate how political domination can sacrifice surface occupation in favour of control of the underground layer, as well as of the enveloping airspace. Network thinking, meanwhile, reflects the fact that ‘Temporary lines of engagement marked by makeshift boundaries are not limited to the edges of political space but exist throughout its depths’, 38 a fact made evident by chapter 2 on Ariel Sharon’s conception of defence in depth and of settlements as a form of control. Forensic architecture, therefore, functions in two ways: it reflects the embedding of power relations in built structures and infrastructure, and it emphasises how the political is constructed in and through the ‘medium’ of space. 39 In other words, whoever controls the physical environment controls society and life. 40
Israel’s Predator Empire
Hollow Land reflects several key elements of Shaw’s Predator Empire, not least the notion of encirclement and enclosure through a network of bases which sacrifice physical presence in favour of technological surveillance. Weizman’s key contention is that, essentially, the Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 represented not an abdication of control but a replacement of physical presence by technological domination. Just as Shaw argues that ‘The dronification of state violence embodies a form of nonterritorial occupation’, 41 so Weizman argues that Israel has sought to segment Palestinian society through a network of settlements supplemented by aerial domination. 42 Weizman thus describes, for instance, how Ariel Sharon decided to cut boulevards through Palestinian refugee camps (‘design undertaken by destruction’) in order to combat Palestinian insurgency, notably by allowing the Israel Defense Forces [Official name in English] to isolate and purge sections of camps. 43 For Shaw, the Predator Empire ‘see[s] drone warfare as part of a wider project to surveil and enclose the human species’ without physical architectures. 44 In Weizman’s account, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza does just that.
Weizman and Shaw both highlight the ‘aerial dimension of state power’ 45 through which the world is rendered as a ‘grid of targets’ for potential elimination. 46 Equally important, however, is the network of physical bases which allow for the abdication of control of the surface. In Hollow Land, this network is provided by legal and tacitly tolerated Israeli settlements which are connected by roads, disrupting Arab territory and making communication difficult, if not impossible. In Predator Empire, similarly, Shaw notes how American imperialism has forfeited large bases in favour of scattered ‘lily pads’ from which drones can be launched to reach any point of the earth. 47 In many ways, therefore, Israel’s control of the Occupied Territories acts as a ‘laboratory’ for the occupation of the world. 48
That being said, Weizman’s depiction of Israeli occupation puts into focus a key figure which is absent from Shaw’s account: the architect. The Israeli system of control, architectural in nature, was actively built by architects, namely – given Israeli militarisation 49 – by a number of ‘architect/general[s]’ such as Sharon: ‘For Sharon the architect/general, politics was war as much as war was politics and both were exercised in space making’. 50 Technology, in other words, for Weizman, does not direct the transformation of geopolitics, but rather is marshalled in the service of pre-existing political, military, and geopolitical aims. Weizman sees continuity between pre-2005 and post-2005 Israeli domination: the bomber, helicopter, and drone may have replaced the bulldozer, but the objective – the control of population – and the means to achieve it – the destruction of homes and the cordoning off of no-go areas – remain sensibly the same. 51 The switch to drone-dominant policing transformed occupation, but did not change its nature: ‘The geography of occupation thus completed a ninety-degree turn: the imaginary “orient” – the exotic object of colonization – was no longer beyond the horizon, but now under the vertical tyranny of a western airborne civilization that remotely managed its most sophisticated and advanced technological platforms, sensors and munitions in the spaces above’. 52 In other words, occupation may no longer have a human face and may be mediated through non-human means, but it is very much masterminded, designed and controlled by humans.
The Cultural Politics of Israeli Targeted Killing
Hollow Land demonstrates the extent to which targeted killing by Israel is embedded in a project wider than its stated aims, namely the policing of excluded modes of life. Far beyond its stated military aim, it is engineered to maintain Israeli control by disrupting and governing quotidian life in the Occupied Territories in order to thoroughly eliminate risk. 53 Grayson, citing Katharyn Mitchell, notes how, following the Cold War, the dominant conception of security was transformed from containment to the administration and management of danger. 54 Among others, he discusses the destruction of homes as a violation of sacred spaces which has far-reaching disorienting consequences, including psychological, social, and economic disruption. 55 This reflects Weizman’s account of the Israeli occupation, which (he argues) very much seeks to eliminate danger by reformatting life through the reshaping of its social environment, notably through the deliberate destruction of homes.
Overall, Weizman’s assertion that Israel and Palestine constitute ‘the world’s largest laboratory for airborne assassinations’ 56 lends credence to Cultural Politics of Targeted Killings’ privileging of cultural factors in the development of targeted killing doctrines. As Weizman argues, the implementation of targeted killing by Israel as a method of airborne occupation relies not only on the availability of technological means, but also on popular support and on the development of legal arguments justifying it. 57 Furthermore, once targeted killings have become a possible solution, they rely on a self-perpetuating logic, according to which they become the solution to all sorts of problems. 58 In other words, the large-scale implementation of targeted killing campaigns relies on a cultural decision in their favour, and a reconfiguration of the cultural underpinnings of security.
Conclusion
Kyle Grayson, Ian Shaw, and Eyal Weizman’s books address the crucial question of the interaction between war, political violence, and wider social practices, accounting for ways in which life patterns become both sources and objects of violence. Warmaking does not occur in a vacuum, but is shaped and shapes the way life and politics are conducted. The three books under review continue trends in critical International Relations, discussing both how political violence emerges out of cultural processes (Grayson) and how war transforms social relations (Shaw), with Weizman’s Hollow Land providing an applied illustration of both. The call to contextualise warfare and technologies of violence (particularly lethal drones) in wider political life provides a potentially fruitful avenue for future research, evading narrow questions of strict legality and decontextualised strategic discussions of the effectiveness of political violence and counter-insurgency.
The disagreement here between Grayson and Shaw can be linked to a wider debate in the study of drone warfare, namely how a new technological weapon – the lethal drone – impacts existing norms and conceptions of war. 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.
Finally, these three books question the meaning of normality and abnormality in the exercise of state violence. Grayson argues against conceptions of targeted killing as aberrations or exceptions to normalcy, while Shaw argues for continuity in the analysis of war and policing, domestically and abroad, suggesting the need for genuinely planetary geopolitics of violence. Weizman, meanwhile, highlights a situation in which regulation by violence has become the exceptionally normal situation – territories existing in a state of twilight which excludes any stable order. The paradox of this state of occupation is perhaps best summarised by Peter Stirk: ‘Military occupation pushes sovereignty to the point at which its existence and meaning are precarious. All that is left is a hollow shell whose significance lies in a negative fact: the occupier is not sovereign’. 64 While Weizman, emphasising the spatial underpinnings of this violent governance, writes of a ‘hollow land’ rather than a ‘hollow shell,’ the significance here should be clear: it is increasingly impossible to distinguish state violence from peace, and to assume an orderly domestic society unaffected by exterior violence.
