Deadly force: Contract,killing,sacrifice

Introduction

In July 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson – the ‘Dallas sniper’ who shot and killed five police officers and injured nine others at a Black Lives Matter protest – was blown up by a SWAT team using a remote-controlled explosive ordnance disposal robot in what was popularly reported to be the first ‘drone strike’ by law enforcement agents against an American citizen on US soil. It appears that Johnson’s death was the bloody conclusion of a two-hour standoff when Dallas police cornered him in a local community college building. After failed negotiations over surrender, Dallas Police Chief David Brown made the decision to send in a bomb disposal remote control vehicle armed with one pound of C-4 explosive and detonate it. For many legal experts, despite its superficial similarity to the military killing of an enemy combatant in warfare, the Dallas police’s killing of Micah Johnson was in fact an entirely legal act under a longstanding principle of American law enforcement: deadly or lethal force. If law enforcement officers have probable cause to believe that a suspect poses ‘a significant threat of serious bodily injury or death to themselves or others’, the US Supreme Court’s 1985 ruling on Tennessee v. Garner declares, they are thereby authorized to use ‘deadly force’ to neutralize that threat (Graham, 2016). In the view of Seth W. Stoughton – a former police officer who is now a professor of law – the actual weapon used to deliver deadly force once it has been authorized (club, knife, gun, drone, etc.) is in fact legally immaterial: ‘The circumstances that justify lethal force justify lethal force in essentially every form’ (Graham, 2016).

To be sure, the Dallas Police Department’s killing of Johnson – a former US Army reservist who had served in Afghanistan – by a bomb disposal robot that was originally used against insurgents in Iraq (Graham, 2016) nonetheless inevitably prompted a new debate about what happens when drones come ‘home’. It is hardly surprising, given the martial optics of the case, that Johnson’s death was widely reported in the US media as a tipping point in the gradual militarization of domestic policing. For Stoughton, who defended the legality of the Johnson killing, the domestic deployment of drones nevertheless calls into question the legal, political and ethical borders of civil society itself. If the military ‘has many missions’, he argues, ‘its core is about dominating and eliminating an enemy’, whereas ‘policing has a different mission: protecting the populace’ (Graham, 2016). In the Johnson case, this classic set of oppositions that underpin the modern state – between the citizen and the enemy, the police and the military, and, ultimately, peace and war – are seemingly rendered inoperative: protection of the populace and elimination of an enemy coincide in the same moment and even the same body.

If Micah Johnson’s killing thus seems to represent a new phase in the history of civil society – where the juridical logic of sovereignty is, as Oliver Davis (2019) compellingly argues elsewhere in this issue, definitively penetrated by the martial logic of war – the following discussion will seek to argue that we might also see the phenomenon of the ‘civil drone strike’ as the outworking of a much older political aporia between sovereignty and violence, civil law and martial law, and peace and war that goes to the root of the modern state itself. ¹ It seeks to capitalize on a growing body of literature that canvases for some kind of legal, political or ethical continuity (rather than a defining break or rupture) between domestic policing and drone warfare (Kahn, 2002, 2013; Walzer, 2007) – and even to locate the drone decisively within the orbit of modern liberal state power itself (Neocleous, 2013; Wall, 2013, 2016). For Neocleous, as we will see later on, what we call the ‘war–police’ distinction is ultimately the product of a ‘general liberal mythology replicated in the whole sociological tradition, namely the simplifying of the complexity of state power into distinct dichotomies: law/administration, constitutional/exceptional, normal/emergency, court/tribunal, legislative/executive, state/civil society, and, of course, military/police’ (Neocleous, 2013: 587). In order to understand what is ‘normal’ within the apparently exceptional phenomenon of the civil drone strike, though, I argue that we need to go even further back into history and explore the early modern juridico-political origins of the liberal state itself.

This article proposes what we might call a political ‘prehistory’ of drone theory that traces its juridico-political evolution from the 17th century to the present day. It takes its specific point of departure from the contemporary French political theorist Grégoire Chamayou’s (2015) influential critique of drone warfare in Drone Theory. As we will see, this work is one of the very few contributions to the (still largely presentist) field of drone theory that deems it necessary to trace the juridico-political foundation of drone warfare all the way back to the early modern period and, in particular, to the social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes. Yet, in spite of the extensive critical discussions of Chamayou’s work in recent years, this genealogical dimension to his drone theory has attracted little or no attention, even though his larger argument hardly makes sense without it. To outline my own specific argument, I construct what we might call a Benjaminian historical constellation between Hobbes’s theory of sovereign punishment in Leviathan and Chamayou’s critique of drone warfare in Drone Theory that will hopefully illuminate the juridico-political origin and fate of drone violence itself. First, I show that Hobbes’s social contract theory – and in particular his famous theory of the mutual relation between protection and obedience – lays the conceptual groundwork for Chamayou’s own drone theory. Second, I contend that Hobbes’s particular theory of sovereign punishment upon domestic citizens preempts Chamayou’s critique of drone warfare against foreign enemies. Finally, and most controversially, I speculate that Hobbes’s theory of punishment is itself founded upon a sacrificial paradigm that uncannily returns in the phenomenon of domestic drone strikes such as the Micah Johnson killing. In summary, I argue that Hobbes might perversely be called something close to the first drone theorist insofar as he is the first modern political thinker to systematically produce and sustain the state of exception between citizen and enemy, punishment and aggression, peace and war, in which the drone operates today at home or abroad. What, then, are the theoretical origins of drone violence? How does Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign punishment of citizens prefigure and enable drone warfare against foreign enemies? To what extent might even citizens themselves be a species of drone whose self-destruction is hardwired into their very identity and can be activated by the sovereign at any point?

1

In Chapter 20 of his Drone Theory, ‘In War as in Peace’, Grégoire Chamayou (2015: 177) argues that drone warfare seems to offer a solution to a fundamental aporia or tension that has afflicted the theory of political sovereignty in warfare since the 17th century. To quickly recall Chamayou’s (in many ways surprisingly orthodox) account of the emergence of social contract theory here, the French political theorist claims that civil society in the early modern period is founded upon what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1996: 491) famously calls ‘the mutual Relation between Protection and Obedience’: I obey my sovereign because he, in turn, protects my life. Yet, Chamayou notes, this peacetime quid pro quo is suddenly and violently turned upside down when the Hobbesian state decides to go to war: I must now protect my sovereign’s life against foreign enemies, even at the risk of my death, because I obey him. For Hobbes (1996: 484), ‘every man is bound by Nature, as much as in him lieth, to protect in Warre, the authority by which he is himself protected in time of peace’. If sovereign power in peacetime is legitimized by the exchange of obedience for protection, in other words, Chamayou claims that this implicit contract seems to break down in warfare, where the sovereign exposes the subject asymmetrically and unilaterally to the possibility of death. Why should subjects continue to obey their sovereign, even to the point of dying in war, in the absence of any mutual guarantee of protection?

To answer this question, Chamayou argues that social contract theory actually contains an implicit sacrificial paradigm that he traces all the way back to Rousseau: I obey my sovereign to the death, not in exchange for his protection of my physical life, but for the preservation of the greater civil ‘life’ of the state. It is not a question of a contradiction between life and death here so much as a dialectic in which risk of death becomes the very condition of life in the state. As Rousseau claims in Chapter 5 of the Social Contract, ‘Of the Right of Life and Death’: ‘Whoever wills the end, also wills the means and these means are inseparable from certain risks and even certain losses’ (Rousseau, 1997: 64, cited in Chamayou, 2015: 179). For Rousseau, I have already promised my life to my sovereign as the very condition of becoming a subject in the first place:

Whoever wants to preserve his life at the expense of others ought also to give it up for them when necessary. Now, the Citizen is no longer judge of the danger the law wills him to risk, and when the Prince has said to him, it is expedient to the State that you die, he ought to die; since it is only on this condition that he has lived in security until then, and his life is no longer only a bounty of nature, but a conditional gift of the State [un don conditionnel de l’État]. (Rousseau, 1997: 64)

In Chamayou’s reading of the social contract, I thus obey my sovereign to the death in warfare because my life already belongs to the sovereign and can be demanded back at any point: ‘Your life is not something that you can withhold from the state, as if it had preceded the latter; your life is, on the contrary, the state’s product, which it has gifted to you on certain conditions’ (Chamayou, 2015: 179).

For Chamayou, this sacrificial economy in which I give up my own life to the life of the state is one possible answer to the aporia of protection versus obedience in warfare thrown up by social contract theory. It is obvious, though, that this kind of archaic solution would be intolerable to our own risk-averse, security-driven modern liberal democracies, where the preservation of the bare physical life of citizens overrides any larger ethical or metaphysical theory of political or civic life. Accordingly, the security state requires a different biopolitical answer to the question of what happens to the social contract in warfare – and so enters the drone. To fulfil the spirit as well as the letter of its contract with its people, Chamayou argues that the modern liberal state requires not an affirmation of war-as-sacrifice but rather a way of waging war without sacrificing the physical life of its subjects – and this is what drone warfare, uniquely, seems to make possible. If the drone did not exist, in other words, it would have been necessary for the modern state to invent it, because it finally cuts the – political, ethical and phenomenological – Gordian knot that (according to Chamayou at least) has always connected killing and dying in combat: I can now fulfil my promise to obey my sovereign in war without ever relinquishing my own equivalent right to protection because a drone will fight in my place. ² In Chamayou’s account, then, drone warfare constitutes what we might call the technological aufhebung of this contradiction between the sovereign’s right both to preserve the life of its subjects and to command them to die: ‘Waging war, but without sacrifices. Freely exercising war-waging sovereignty, but within the internal political conditions of sovereign security and protection. Abolishing the contradiction’ (Chamayou, 2015: 181).

In summary, Chamayou’s genealogy sees drone warfare as the obscene fulfilment of Hobbes’s dream of a perfect symmetry between protection and obedience in warfare: a modern state can now kill foreign enemies without risking the lives of its own citizens. It is possible to suspect, however, that there is still what Neocleous (2013) might call a ‘liberal’ blind spot in this powerful critique of the violence that underwrites the social contract, namely, a certain tendency to equate state violence only with warfare. As we will see, Chamayou more or less accepts social contract theory’s official description of civil society as instituting a state of political ‘peace’ – minimally defined as the absence of war, violence or domination – which does not cease unless and until it goes to war. Yet, revealingly, Rousseau’s account of the sacrificial economy at work in the sovereign right of life and death in the Social Contract (which Chamayou himself cites) does not only or primarily concern war at all, but rather civil punishment. To recall the context of the 18th-century philosopher’s claim here, I submit to death at the hands of my sovereign in the form of capital punishment because, again, ‘my’ life never belonged to me in the first place: ‘The death penalty imposed on criminals can be looked upon from more or less the same point of view’, Rousseau argues; ‘it is in order not to become the victim of an assassin that one consents to die if one becomes an assassin oneself’ (Rousseau 1997: 64). For Rousseau, indeed, the sovereign sees no essential difference whether de jure or de facto between a citizen who breaks his social contract by committing a crime and a foreign enemy who wages war against the state:

Besides, every evil-doer [tout malfaiteur] who attacks social right becomes a rebel and a traitor to the fatherland [la patrie] by his crimes, by violating its laws he ceases to be a member of it, and even enters into war with it. Then the preservation [conservation] of the State is incompatible with his own, one of the two has to perish, and when the guilty man is put to death, it is less as a Citizen than as an enemy [c’est moins comme Citoyen que comme ennemi]. (Rousseau, 1997: 64–65)

If Chamayou tends to presume that it is only in warfare that the political quid pro quo between protection and obedience begins to break down – because subjects must continue to obey their sovereign with no mutual guarantee that their lives will be protected by him – Rousseau’s account of the sovereign power over life and death reminds us that even the apparently ‘peaceful’ sphere of rights and obligations is itself produced and maintained by absolute and extrajudicial sovereign violence before the decision to go to war is ever taken. In the peace of the Commonwealth, every domestic citizen still authorizes their sovereign’s right to kill them as a foreign enemy of the state if and when it proves necessary.

2

In Chapter 21 of Leviathan, ‘Of the Liberty of Subjects’, Thomas Hobbes expounds his own theory of the sovereign right to punish. To recall Hobbes’s central claim here, the sovereign’s absolute power over life and death expresses itself in his right to punish and, if necessary, put to death any of his subjects (Hobbes, 1996: 214). It is important to stress that the political theorist is not just anticipating Rousseau’s claim that the sovereign has the right to wield the public sword against a subject who breaks the civil law by, for example, inflicting capital punishment. As we will see, he is actually making a much more radical claim about the absolute power of life and death that breaks open the mutual relation between protection and obedience on which the social contract rests. For Hobbes, the sovereign ultimately possesses the right to punish or kill anyone – guilty or innocent – in the name of preserving the peace of the Commonwealth: ‘And therefore it may, and doth often happen in Common-wealths, that a Subject may be put to death by the command of the Soveraign Power; and yet neither doe the other wrong’ (Hobbes, 1996: 148). If Hobbes does argue that the sovereign remains bound by both divine and natural law to pursue what is ‘good’ for the Commonwealth, and affirms that the subject possesses certain rights and liberties – the right to a public trial in a court of law, the right to a punishment commensurate to their crime and, of course, the famous right to physically resist any violence inflicted upon them – this does not in any way disqualify or delimit the absolute right of the sovereign to inflict punishment or death with legal impunity: a sovereign who punishes or kills an innocent subject for any reason whatsoever explicitly does not commit a crime (Agamben, 1998: 106; Bradley, 2019; Hüning, 2007: 221). ³ In Hobbes’s theory of sovereign punishment, we find something like the origin of the radically asymmetrical and unilateral right to exercise violence upon the body of a citizen, who is effectively reduced to the status of an enemy who can be killed in combat. What gives the sovereign the right to lawfully demand the death of any subject in peace as in war?

To address this question, Hobbes proposes a number of possible sources for the sovereign right to punishment – including the obscure and much disputed claim that punishment has a natural ‘foundation’ in the state of nature itself (Hobbes, 1996: 214; see also Agamben, 1998: 106; Bradley, 2019) – but arguably the most secure basis for this right can be found in what is called Leviathan’s theory of authorization (Hüning, 2007; Norrie, 1984; Schrock, 1991). It is, in other words, with the subject’s original decision to authorize the sovereign to act on his behalf in the Commonwealth (expounded in Chapter 16, ‘Of Persons, Authors and Things Personated’) that the right to punish begins. For Hobbes, the subject’s decision to authorize the sovereign at the very birth of civil society necessarily also includes the authorization to punish and even kill that very subject if it should prove necessary to the preservation of the state. In Chapters 18, ‘Of the Rights of Soveraignes by Institution’, and 21, ‘Of the Liberty of Subjects’, Hobbes repeatedly insists that the subject him- or herself is the original author of the sovereign’s right to punish any subject: ‘every particular man is Author of all the Soveraigne doth; and consequently he that complaineth of injury from his Soveraigne, complaineth of that whereof he himselfe is Author’ (Hobbes, 1996: 124, 148).

For Hobbes, revealingly, this theory of the sovereign’s right to punish is again underwritten by something like a ‘sacrificial’ paradigm or economy: I give up my own physical life for the greater political life of the state (Bradley, 2017). It is revealing that he illustrates his theory with a peculiar Biblical example: Jephthah, the leader of the Israelites, pledges to God that, if victorious in battle against the Ammonites, he will offer up the first thing that comes to his door as a burnt offering (Judges 11: 31). After winning a great victory, Jephthah returns home to find that the first person to welcome him is his own daughter – and so he is faced with the choice of breaking his promise to God or killing his only child. Yet the daughter herself has the solution to her father’s dilemma: she willingly submits to being sacrificed, and so Jephthah kills her in fulfilment of his vow (Judges 11: 36). For Hobbes, Jephthah’s daughter thus becomes a paradigm of the subject’s authorship of every sovereign act, including her own guiltless death:

a Subject may be put to death, by the command of the Soveraign Power; and yet neither doe the other wrong: As when Jeptha caused his daughter to be sacrificed: In which, and the like cases, he that so dieth had Liberty to doe the action, for which he is neverthelesse, without Injury put to death. And the same holdeth also in a Soveraign Prince, that putteth to death an Innocent Subject. (Hobbes, 1996: 148)

If the right to punish has a foundation, it does not lie in the state of nature but in a gesture of civil self-sacrifice carried out in order that the community may survive: Jephthah’s daughter acquiesces in her own death so that the tribe of the Israelites themselves may live. In authorizing her own death at the hands of her father, Jephthah’s daughter transforms her death into a gesture of legitimate sovereign violence.

In Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign power to punish, the origin of the social contract is thus presented as something close to a kind of sacrificial cult or ritual: what appears to be a mutual exchange of rights between subject and sovereign is in fact the theatre for a unilateral and extrajudicial exercise of sovereign violence upon the subject (see Esposito, 2008: 61–63). It is ironically the subject itself who, preemptively and quasi-automatically, authorizes its own death at the hands of its sovereign. Accordingly, what appears to be a sovereign act of natural killing might be better described as an act of ‘artificial self-killing’ on the part of the subject: an act of suicide that is carried out through the persona of the sovereign. To put it in Chamayou’s terms, the Hobbesian civil subject thus owes a ‘vital debt’ (Chamayou, 2015: 179) to their sovereign which is the very price of their citizenship – and this debt can be recalled both in peace and in war. Yet Hobbes’s theory also exposes what I have called the blind spot in Chamayou’s genealogy of drone warfare, which leads him to occlude the violence inherent in the constitution of the civil order itself. If Chamayou (as we have seen) claims that social contract theory only really falls into contradiction when the state commands the citizen to risk his or her life for the state in war – because it can no longer offer protection of life in exchange for obedience to the death – Hobbes’s account of the sovereign right to punish clearly internalizes this contradiction within the ‘peace’ of the domestic Commonwealth itself. In the subject’s very decision to authorize the sovereign to act on their behalf – a decision which is the foundation of the Commonwealth itself – they expose themselves to the possibility of asymmetric violent death before they are ever compelled to fight in any war.

3

In recent years, Hobbes has curiously been cast as a kind of drone theorist avant la lettre: Ian Shaw (2016) sees military drones as the logical conclusion of Hobbes’s artificial theory of sovereignty in Leviathan, whereas Christopher Trigg (2018) replies that Hobbes’s demystification of the political theology of sovereignty actually provides the basis for a critique of drone warfare. It will be my own, more specific, contention that Hobbes’s account of the sovereign punishment of citizens represents a theoretical precursor for Chamayou’s account of drone warfare as a form of military violence waged unilaterally upon foreign enemies. To be sure, Hobbes always distinguishes between the legal status of the subject in the commonwealth and the enemy in warfare and between the rules of civil punishment and military conflict more widely: a civil subject always possesses some rights – the right to a public trial, proportionate punishment, and so on – whereas the military enemy is absolutely exposed to sovereign violence (Holmes, 2010). However, as Banu Bargu (2014) has powerfully demonstrated, the border between subject and enemy – civil and martial law – remains remarkably porous in Hobbes’s political theory. If Hobbes’s theory of authorization insists that every subject authorizes their own potential death at the hands of their sovereign – regardless of their own innocence or guilt – then the subject and the enemy, war and crime, lawful punishment and unlimited hostility begin to (quite literally) bleed into one another. What kind of sovereign ‘cut’ or decision turns someone from a citizen to be protected into an enemy who can be killed?

To decide who is a criminal and who is not, the Hobbesian sovereign deploys a strategic calculus that prefigures the logic of ‘preemptive anticipation’ deployed by Chamayou’s drone operator (see Chamayou, 2015: 43). It is Chamayou’s argument, recall, that drone warfare is not simply a question of identifying and neutralizing present threats but also of predicting, preventing and preemptively foreclosing upon future ones. Accordingly, drone theory is a kind of futurology that is constantly calculating and deciding between rival possible futures: who to kill and who not to kill, how many killings are enough, what will be the consequences if we do kill and if we do not. Yet, he concludes, this theory of preemption operates on such a fragile epistemology – because who can really predict future threats with 100% accuracy? – that it does not so much prevent indiscriminate violence as guarantee it. If Chamayou’s critique focuses largely on the contemporary technological context of preemptive anticipation – algorithms, data fusion, pattern recognition, and so on – Bargu shows how Hobbes’s theory of punishment itself preempts this logic of so-called preemptive violence. In Chapter 21, ‘Of the Liberty of Subjects’, for example, Hobbes gives another ancient example of the sovereign’s right to punish guilty and innocent subjects alike with impunity – Ancient Greek ostracism – which anticipates preemptive anticipation itself: ‘the people of Athens, when they banished the most potent of their Common-wealth for ten years, thought they committed no Injustice; and yet they never questioned what crime he had done, but what hurt he would doe’ (Hobbes, 1996: 148).

For Hobbes, Athenian ostracism – and the theory of sovereign punishment for which it stands as a historical example – is conceived as what we would today call an essentially preventative measure: ‘they never questioned what crime he had done’, he insists, ‘but what hurt he would doe’. It is ‘predicated on the calculation of potential, not actual, hurt’, Bargu (2014: 53) argues, which is directed not at the individual citizen but ‘at the commonwealth as a whole’. According to this future anterior logic, punishment ceases to be a retrospective act of retribution for an actual transgression of the law and becomes a kind of preemptive or preventative strike against a predicted future crime. If an innocent subject can be legally punished or killed for a ‘crime’ that they have not (yet) committed, then sovereign punishment clearly begins to resemble the preemptive, extrajudicial acts of absolute hostility waged that are permissible against a present or future enemy in modern warfare (Bargu, 2014: 53). In any event, Hobbes recognizes that the end result of both sovereign punishment and military killing is the same, namely, the normalization of totally indiscriminate violence: ‘nay, they commanded the banishment of they knew not whom’ (Hobbes, 1996: 148).

In many ways, Hobbes’s theory of punishment thus prefigures what Chamayou and others posit as the signature of drone warfare: the expansion of a well-defined legal category – whether the criminal or the enemy combatant – to the point where it becomes a kind of empty or virtual placeholder (Chamayou, 2015; Gregory, 2011; Kahn, 2013). It establishes a continuity – both in fact and by right – between the citizen and the enemy. As Bargu argues, what begins as the punishment of a subject who has committed a crime inexorably slides into war waged against an enemy: ‘The possibility of being subject to punishment is therefore ever present – certainly in the case that the subject disobeys or breaches the law, but also in the event that the sovereign considers the subject to present a potential harm to the commonwealth’ (Bargu, 2014: 53). To put it simply, Hobbes’s apology for the right to punish effectively installs a virtual or potential ‘enemy’ at the heart of every subject that – entirely willingly and voluntarily – exposes them to death at the hands of their sovereign at any point whatsoever in their lives. If this becoming-enemy of the subject or citizen obviously has many political, philosophical and military repercussions, it is also possible to see it as one of the theoretical paradigms of the state of exception between the domestic citizen and the foreign enemy – punishment and killing, crime and war – in which the drone operates today. In the figure of the civil drone victim – killed by deadly or lethal force – we arguably face the modern descendant of the Hobbesian ‘citizen enemy’ punished to the death.

4

In drawing this article to a close, I now return to the Micah Johnson killing by Dallas police in 2016. It is possible to place the Johnson case – and the phenomenon of civil drone strikes more generally – within the context of a wider debate about the convergence of civil and martial law in drone warfare. As we have already hinted, many political theorists now see a certain continuum, rather than a divisive break, between policiary and military logics at work in the drone (see Davis, 2019; Kahn, 2013; Mohn, 2013; Walzer, 2007). To put it in Chamayou’s (2015: 172) own words, drone theory is ‘a curious legal hybrid’ that occupies a grey zone between warfare and policing, counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism, the military-political attempt to ‘win hearts and minds’ and the policiary apprehension and elimination of criminals. Yet, it is again possible to see what we might call a ‘liberal’ residuum within Chamayou’s drone theory here, which leads him to occlude or cover over the violence inherent in the formation of the civil order itself. If Chamayou and many other contemporary security theorists tend to see the hybridization of the civil and the military in drone theory as an essentially new and illegitimate conflation of two different legal domains – which results in either the militarization of the domestic sphere (Balko, 2014) or, vice versa, the domestication of the battle space (Gregory, 2011) – what I am arguing here is that it is the effect of a much older politico-military aporia that (as we have seen) can be traced back to the origin of the modern civil state itself. In conclusion, then, I reread the Johnson case via the lens of Hobbes’s social contract theory and, more controversially, via the sacrificial paradigm that founds Hobbes’s theory of punishment. What if this civil drone strike is less a case of war without sacrifice (Chamayou, 2015: 181) than of something closer to sacrifice without war?

To be sure, Chamayou’s focus in Drone Theory is almost exclusively on drone warfare, and his study obviously predates the Johnson case, but his argument still provides enough grounds for speculating what his response to the rise of the civil drone strike might be. It is revealing, for instance, that he rejects the policiary rationale of drone warfare on the basis that the civil principle of deadly force is incompatible with drone use in battle. As legal theorist Laurie Blank (whose work is cited by Chamayou) argues, police can only use lethal force under exceptional conditions that do not pertain in warfare: a suspect must pose a threat that is ‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation’, and any killing that does not respect these conditions is an ‘extra-judicial execution’ (Blank, 2012: 1659, 1668). For Chamayou, any drone operator who seeks to justify a drone strike in warfare as an exercise of policiary deadly force would thus be committing a category error:

It is more or less as if a police officer who has unjustifiably killed someone tries to exonerate himself by pointing out that he was careful to conform with the principles of distinction and proportionality that apply to armed warfare. (Chamayou, 2015: 169)

If Chamayou’s analogy takes for granted the falsity of the equivalence between deadly force and drone warfare, it could be argued that this conclusion has very quickly been overtaken by events: what the Johnson case now proves is that the phenomenon of civil drone strikes carried out under the principle of deadly force exists not only in fact but arguably also by right. In Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s retrospective justification of the Johnson killing as an exercise of deadly force, for example, we can also begin to detect the shadow of the military justification of drone warfare as a risk-free or ‘humanitarian’ weapon: ‘We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot’, Brown argued; ‘other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger’ (Graham, 2016).

For my own purposes, the Johnson case is more productively read neither in strictly civil or martial terms, nor even as some illegitimate hybrid of the two, but as the logical outcome of the politico-military aporia that resides at the heart of Hobbes’s theory of punishment: every citizen is exposed to extrajudicial sovereign punishment and killing if the ‘good’ of the state demands it. It is not, of course, my intention here to imply that there was no contingency whatsoever at work in the Dallas police’s decision to kill Johnson in this way – on the contrary there was undoubtedly a large element of on-the-ground improvisation on their part – but rather to demarcate the larger juridico-political perimeters within which such contingent and improvisatory decisions become thinkable and actionable. As we have seen, Chamayou claims that drone warfare offers an apparently bloodless solution to the contradiction between protection of life and obedience to the death at the heart of the social contract – a form of killing without dying – but arguably the Johnson case might be read as constituting something closer to that contradiction’s bloody explosion, where protection and obedience, killing and dying, leak into one another. To fulfil their mission of protecting the populace from real and present threats, for instance, Seth W. Stoughton argues the police must recognize that, where possible, they have a duty to protect both victim and aggressor alike: ‘That core mission, as difficult as it is to explain sometimes, includes protecting some people who do some bad things. It includes not using lethal force when it’s possible to not’ (Graham, 2016). If Stoughton is obviously correct to remind us that the Dallas police had to weigh their right to kill Johnson as a threat to the populace against their duty to protect him as a member of that same populace before taking the decision to act, it is possible to argue that there is an even more disturbing excluded middle in this stark binary choice between protection and killing. What if an individual life can be physically destroyed in order to protect the political life of the population to which they simultaneously belong? In one and the same body, life and death, protection and killing, citizen and enemy, coincide: Johnson was killed to protect him from himself.

In many ways, then, the Micah Johnson killing by Dallas police in 2016 ironically returns us to what Chamayou calls the sacrificial paradigm at the heart of social contract theory that drone warfare (supposedly at least) renders technologically obsolete: I must promise to give up my own physical life if it proves necessary to the political life of the state. It is a constant of modern social contract theory, we have argued, that citizens are deemed to be authors of their own deaths at the hands of the state whether in peace or in war: ‘it is in order that we may not fall victims to an assassin that we consent to die if we ourselves turn assassins’ (Rousseau, 1997: 64). After all, it is the sovereign ‘People’ themselves – via their appointed representatives on the US Supreme Court in the 1985 case of Tennessee v. Garner – who ultimately authorized the state’s right to use deadly force against citizens like Johnson. To pursue this – quite literally fatal – logic to its conclusion, Micah Johnson and every other victim of state killing could even perversely be said to be their own killers: what we call sovereign punishment is not a real act of killing carried out by the state but, once again, an artificial act of self-killing or suicide carried out by the subject via the machine of the state. If every subject authorizes their sovereign to kill them at any point, then it perhaps becomes possible to speak of what legal theorist Paul W. Kahn has called a sacrificial or martyrological logic at the heart of modern liberalism itself even in the apparently sacrifice-free age of the drone: ‘anyone can be called upon to defend the state with his life’ (Kahn, 2011: 157). In his final hours, Micah Johnson allegedly sought to script his coming death as an act of political martyrdom (Howell, 2016), but, according to the logic unpacked in this article, we might wonder whether he was already a martyr from the moment of his birth: the social contract is a very literal kind of mortgage (mort-gage, a promise to the death) written in the blood of the citizen. ⁴

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In this article, I have sought to offer a genealogy of drone theory that grounds it in and returns it to what I am arguing to be the foundational violence of the modern liberal state itself. It is this bloody primal scene of liberalism that becomes the vantage point for a new deconstruction not only of the classical opposition between civil and martial power but also of the much-vaunted liberal myth of the drone itself – and arguably air power more widely – as the ultimate ‘humanitarian’ weapon. To trace the origins of drone theory back to Hobbes’s theory of sovereign punishment is, I think, to begin to answer Mark Neocleous’s (2013: 587) call for

a critical theory of state power that assumes that war and police are always already together; war and police as predicative on one another; war and police not as distinct institutions (‘the military’ and ‘the police’, which then raises rather pointless questions about how these institutions relate to each other, how they overlap, how they ape each other, how they are becoming blurred) but as processes working in conjunction as state power.

If Hobbes’s account of state power is something like the modern ‘origin’ of this violent politico-military nexus, then a ‘critical theory of state power’ would thus need to track the co-evolution or co-becoming of police and military power as deadly forces through a series of historical sites and figures that are in process long before the – allegedly decisive – invention of what Neocleous calls air power. What if the ‘meaningful concept of the “civilian”’ (Neocleous, 2013: 590) always already contained the juridico-political seeds of its own (auto)destruction long before air power came along to empirically annihilate it?

To pursue the implications of this genealogy, which I do not have the space to do here, I would want to unpack the prehistory of the deadly force that led to the Johnson killing. It is widely accepted that this ‘exceptional’ police power is now totally normalized in states like the USA, but what is less recognized is that such normalization proceeds from a fatal ambiguity in the legal concept itself. As Amnesty International observes, all 50 states in the USA fail to comply with international law on the use of lethal force, 13 do not comply with the lower standards set by US law, and 9 have no laws on it at all. For police in certain states, deadly force is permitted not only to neutralize an imminent threat to life but to ‘“suppress opposition to an arrest”; to arrest someone for a “suspected felony”; to “suppress a riot or mutiny”; or for certain crimes such as burglary’ (Amnesty International, 2015). If civil concepts like deadly force bleed into military concepts like extrajudicial killing or summary execution, it is arguably not because of some fatal exception to the norm but because of the originary exceptionality of the norm itself in which police and military, citizen and enemy, civil and martial space coincide. In its very recourse to arbitrary violence, police use of deadly force (re)produces the foundational violence of the modern state.

If all sovereign force is deadly force, if every citizen is originally and absolutely exposed to the threat of death at the hands of the sovereign, and if all sovereign violence carries within it the memory of its bloody extrajudicial origins, I nonetheless maintain that the modern phenomenon of the civil or police drone strike against a domestic citizen still occupies a privileged position in this long narrative because (as we have seen) of the special claim that this remote-controlled weapon, uniquely and definitively, cuts the umbilical cord that has always connected killing and dying. To expose this claim that drone violence is somehow ‘humanitarian’ as the liberal fiction that it is, I have argued that the drone never was and can never be a riskless or bloodless form of killing – not simply because of the (now very well-rehearsed) legal, military and ethical questions and problems set out at length in drone theory over the last couple of decades (Blank, 2012; Chamayou, 2015; Gregory, 2011; Kahn, 2002, 2013; Walzer, 2007), but, more precisely, because of what we have seen to be the sacrificial desideratum at the core of liberalism itself. In the Johnson case, the ‘citizen’ is always already both police and criminal, killer and victim, subject and object of deadly force at one and the same time before they are ever required to go to war.

In conclusion, though, I return to the question with which we began: what are the theoretical origins of the drone? To read drone theory through a Hobbesian optic, we can perhaps begin to offer a new answer to this question that challenges not only the liberal humanitarian fiction of the drone but also what we might call the liberal humanitarian fiction that is the modern concept of the citizen. It has been the hypothesis of this article that social contract theory locates the origin of sovereign violence in what it presents as the citizen’s own necessary act of sacrifice. Accordingly, what Chamayou’s drone theory presents as a sudden, extrajudicial act of killing that only befalls the enemy from without is revealed to be a – structural, automatic and artificial – act of self-killing allegedly authorized by citizens themselves and carried out through the medium of the state. If all sovereign killing is artificial self-killing according to this sacrificial paradigm, if the citizen automatically authorizes his or her own destruction, if this self-destruction is preprogrammed or hardwired into the modern theory of citizenship as such, then perhaps the relationship between the citizen and the drone is even more disturbingly intimate than we realize. For social contract theory from Hobbes to Rousseau, the modern citizen is itself a species of killing machine that can be remotely activated by the sovereign at any point in its life to use deadly force on itself or others (Bradley, 2011). In our late Hobbesian political imaginary, the first drone is the citizen itself.